- Selection of Product or Service
Determine growth industries, segment these industries and find a gap in the market. Perform INDEPENDENT tests on these results, ensure consistency of product or raw material supply and make an unemotional decision as to which market gap you will address first.
Decide: What can you do? Who will you do it for? Where are they? How can you get to them?
- Your Personal Development
Determine the experiences and disciplines your business will need and any gaps you may have especially in the areas of Sales and Negotiating. Determine exactly your personal goals and your business goals, and check that they are in harmony! Have a personal health check and start your health regime.
- Your First Office
Choose a quiet, bright place to work. Quiet is extremely important. Make sure you have a desk and equipment that is used only for work. Develop a simple system to trigger customer call-back and follow-up.
- Choose Your Image
It is vital to choose a business name and colour scheme appropriate to your service and industry. A general rule is to call the business what you do, or have a strong strap line indication who you serve. Attend a franchise exhibition to see colour schemes, how they get sales etc. Pick & Mix the colours and ideas you like the best. Test the colours on your market. Always look professional with professionally designed and printed stationery. (Mine was designed in Madison Avenue NY).
- Start to turn cash immediately
Run your finances on a computer – back up daily. Start selling immediately to generate cash flow. Many people believe it takes months to make money. This is simply not true but the belief can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
- Develop your products and services
Make products and services customer driven. Ask them what they want and are not getting. Ask them what is the one thing we could do better? By offering to supply this, my sales have doubled.
Develop your sales machine and distribution networks. Write a marketing plan as part of your business plan.
- Develop your business plan – and start to follow it.
Develop your sales forecasting for the next three years, including projected sales budgets and cash flow. Find ways of reducing costs and borrowing cheap money. Set financial budgets. Make your money work very hard. We call this Leverage. Control your money with software. See an accountant early.
- Attract capital
Give professional, mouth-watering presentations. Conduct yourself professionally and dress appropriately during negotiations. PowerPoint makes it easy to do professional presentations.
- Set up sales networks
Get on a personal selling skills course. Most of the ones run through Business Links are OK but the really good ones are run by people specializing in sales training. When selling don’t rely on word of mouth alone because it will run out within 12 months! Make all employees sales oriented. Set targets, train and motivate. You must give incentives to your sales people, recognise the best at each level in the sales process and get them to train the rest of the team in their level and you will have the best sales team in the country! Feed their ego needs, get daily feedback information on each level in the sales process and modify training to fill the gaps. You can do most of this using the internet.
- Check your work-life balance.
Are you still in line with your personal requirements? Be honest with yourself! How many hours are you really at work each week? Develop an exit strategy to get you out of the business. Along with your business goals, an exit strategy will focus your efforts. Put first things first.
This is Tom Edge’s Exit Strategy;
“In three years I am going to build the business so it will operate without me. This will give me the option of selling it or getting a manager to run it while I’m touring the world on the profits”.
MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL: Ask for help. Get to the business support agencies. Get a Business Adviser. I have three business mentors – one for PR, one for Sales and one for General Business. They have made all of the mistakes for you so you don’t have to.
7 Tips for Growing a Business Even in RECESSION!
- Get better before getting bigger.
- Stop ‘Doing Work’ and start building a business.
- Work ON the business and IN the business.
- Build your business like building a money harvesting machine.
- Put Your next organisation chart on your office wall and build your business to this plan.
- A Production (or Service) Machine,,Marketing Machine, Sales Machine, Finance Machine and then work to budgets
- Use operating manuals for staff consistency.
- Be customer driven. Aim to delight customers.
- Get your prototype business right then duplicate it in other areas as many times as you wish, having added a business duplicating department.