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Setting a Course for Business Success
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The mindset required for successful business building is one that most small to medium business owners tend to shy away from.
Build it like your going to sell it! Whether you sell it or not.
If you view your business from the perspective of a potential buyer you can often see areas of improvement that you may miss when viewing it from the view of the proud, workaholic owner who started with a vision of your business and are still working toward it.
In order for the initial dream to pay off you must plan your business with the final pay day in mind. There are specific steps that you can start to implement immediately that will have an effect on your businesses value.
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These include:
- Train your staff to be the best they can be in their appointed role...or move them to a role that is more suitable. Remember it's far cheaper to train up an employee or move them sideways than replace them.
- Create and document systems that reduce the "red tape" that each area of your operation faces each day. This will increase productivity and give both your employees and customers a smoother experience.
- Look for products and services that add value to your offering the in eyes of your customers. Most businesses could improve their revenue by 10% just by considering what additional products or services your customer may require. If you're not sure, ask your customers, they'll tell you what's missing from your offering.
- "Sack" customers who are low profit, high maintenance. The fact is you will spend 80% of your time on 20% of your customers due to their being unnecessarily demanding or problematic.
- Seek out benchmarks from both your own industry and outside of it. Find a successful company that you may have as a customer or supplier and ask them questions about areas of their business that are working successfully and how they achieved that.
- Negotiate better prices and terms with your suppliers. Cash flow is king, better deals and terms will work towards an improved cash flow situation and make an outsiders view of your company look far more appealling.
- Write a complete and clear operations manual. Most importantly for any business is its intellectual property which, in the main, resides in the minds of the owners and employees. If you can extract the IP so that it is available to everyone, including existing and future employees, then you will have a business that can run without any one key person, including you. This is an incredible comfort for a prospective purchaser.
(This last step is where TKO Business Modeller software will enable you to quickly and efficiently complete your operations manual so that it is available for all stake holders. Any other way that you attempt to undertake this task will be costly in both time internally and lack of a workable outcome.)
Once you take on this view of your business you will notice that your focus will start to move towards the bigger picture and manoeuvring the operation to be set on a course of success without you. You will then be making your business more flexible and ready to grow, become more profitable and ready for anything that your market presents in the future.
So get going and set a course for growth and success.
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Congratulations to Dr. Greg Chapman for the launch of his new book The 5 Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success. Greg, who is a TKO reseller located in Melbourne, has produced a quality publication that is refreshing and to the point. It's fantastic to have a quality business book available from an Australian source that is both an excellent resource and an entertaining read.
You will learn why small businesses stay small and discover how you can make YOUR business a success. It contains step by step instructions on how you can achieve your business' vision and goals. There are also four bonus tools that you will receive with the book.
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What can you achieve by Christmas in YOUR business?
| I hate to be the one to bring this up but there is only about 8 weeks of available time to make a difference in your business until you are faced with once again negotiating your way through the Christmas upheaval. But don't despair. You could actually start and finish your business operations manuals by then! How would that be?
We have three streams of the TKO Leaders Program starting and finishing before Christmas. This program is limited to six participants in each and there are only five of the 18 spaces left! So contact us immediately if you want to be the one who can look back at Christmas satisfied that you made the most of the whole year and really achieved an outcome that right now looks impossible.
More information can be found at the TKO Training Sessions page.
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Marketing for the 21st Century
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No matter how large or small a business you have the return to a flat world makes it possible for you to compete in any market place. The key to this is your electronic face to the world. This starts with a web site and extends through such amazingly named things like blogs, vlogs and wikis. At the very least if your business does not have a web site you are not able to compete in this environment that has become almost fully dependant upon the internet to supply every convenience.
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So where to start? A web site can be something that you build yourself using free downloadable software but for most of us that is getting a long way from what we're good at. The next thing to consider is a reasonable budget for this site so that any quotes you may get can be dealt with quickly. Web sites can be created and managed for you now for less than $1000 per year but typically a budget of between $3000-$5000 is reasonable. This will get you a site that is able to be content managed by yourself easily and can also manage your online form contacts. Try http://www.bso.net.au for a great system with excellent support. Remember support is the key!
Build it & they will come! WRONG. Now that you have the site, that doesn't mean you have visitors...except maybe you, your friends and your mum! The next part of this is to become familiar with search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click marketing (PPC). Don't panic, there a lots of competent providers of this service. Again a budget for this will be essential! Don't be a scrooge you will probably end up banking $10 to every $1 you spend once the campaign is up & running and starting to work correctly which can take several months.
So now that you're thinking this is all to costly, consider the last time you spent money on the local paper, or a leaflet drop, or a telemarketing cold call campaign. What was the cost? What was the return? Most businesses can answer the first question but get a little vague about the second. Some even start to mention that it was a branding or PR campaign. Don't kid yourself...it was a waste of money in the new world of three year old kids who can surf the internet.
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AAPM Conference Report
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What an amazing experience we had recently to attend & exhibit at the Australian Association of Practice Managers 2007 conference recently. It was astounding to meet some incredibly dynamic people who are the brains behind all of the medical practices we each visit around the country with our ailments. We were extremely pleased with the reception we received as we struck a vital chord with Practice Managers who like any business are struggling with creating, maintaining and publishing policy and procedure manuals.
Thanks go to the many supporters who are members of the AAPM board. Many thanks to Colleen Sullivan for her support, Marilyn Bitomsky for her amazing writing job, Jan Chaffey, Jenny Roberts, Desley Fricke and many others who we met in Hobart during the conference.
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For those practice managers who want more information on the conference special promotion please got to www.transformmybusiness.com.au/aapm
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When is a back up a back up?
When you can restore it!
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A small word of caution to those who go to sleep at night with the comfort of "knowing" that their server data is backed up & safe should the worst (inevitable) happen. We incurred a total server failure this month which involved requiring a new mother board, hard disks, UPS and new back up external drives. The ironic thing is that we thought we had this handled and so did our technical advisors. However, a back up is only as good as its ability to restore to a brand new server. This is where for us the problem started! Once we had a server up & running it was not exactly the configuration of the one that had instigated the back ups so we could not restore. $6000 and nearly 3 weeks later and we are almost back to where we were.
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Please test your back ups as if your server was stolen. That in effect is what a total loss means. We now have four completely mirrored operating systems, two internal & two removeable to rotate and remove from the premises. Businesses now rely totally on their IT systems and once they are not there you might as well all go home. No server, no phone, no business! Be prepared!
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