Management

There are two ways that work should be done inside your business: by SYSTEMS and PROCESSES.

Earlier we said that if your business depends on YOU, you don’t have a business you have a job! Well the solution is to be found in setting up systems and processes.

(1) Systems take the form of manuals, written scripts, standard forms, checklists, and standard letters and so on. For instance do you have systems for such things as identifying prospects, persistently chasing every prospect in a way that they are made to feel welcome, generating a continuous stream of referrals, recording and following up every single sales lead and much, much more?

Systems are so vitally important because…..anyone can …
• Operate them – so you can step away from working IN the business and concentrate more of your time working ON the business, and the other things that are important to you too.
• Run the system so the business is less dependent on any individual or group which means that you’ll never need to fear staff illnesses, retirements, defections and industrial disputes again.
• Replicate past success using the system.

The great thing about systems is that what you do, how you do it and the results you get all become more consistent and predictable – and you can achieve more – in less time!

Let’s move on…

(2) Processes One of the keys to making business more successful is to identify your most important processes, decide how they work and what they deliver and do everything possible to make improvements where necessary.

Processes are so vitally important because…they help to…
• Optimise the way you do things inside your business.
• Pin down the activities and responsibilities of your team, the links between team members and you, as well as the deliverables and timescales involved.
• Appreciate and understand the flow, the interactions, and the sub-processes and sub-activities that are constraining your performance.

It’s impossible to achieve optimum performance in your business with flawed processes. Most problems in business are due to faulty processes, not human problems, nor anything else. That’s why having a tool as powerful as a process is crucial to streamlining your business operation.

Points To Remember Are:

Concentrate on what you do best and outsource the rest so that you can get on and grow your business.

• Consider what your business does best, stick with it and recruit and outsource skills to help you achieve your goals!

• Many businesses deliver mediocre levels of performance because they fail to operate effective systems and processes.

A Valedictory Recommendation

I would like to wind up with a single deep-seated RECOMMENDATION, one that speaks of the character of the business owner. It is to be found in the tale of a great business leader, Andrew Cook, an individual that applied the skills we have covered in this Business Growth Series, but who in addition characterises what is best in human endeavour in the business world.

This factor we would suggest is the Ultimate Recommendation for Real Business Success!

But judge for yourself!

In the 1980s Andrew Cook, on taking over William Cook, a well established family owned engineering company, immediately invested in increased efficiency, quality and capacity in the industry’s least value segment – at a time when capacity was double the amount of industry sales– and industry output had been falling for a number of years.

Cook’s didn’t have the image of a Mercedes or an IBM amongst its customers. Neither was it a technological leader, nor did it possess secret processes to guarantee extra income. Conventional thinking would have suggested that Cook milks the business and leaves the industry, or goes into a higher value and differentiated niche. But no, Cook invested in capacity, capability and quality improvements.

Rivals thought he was mad… All seemed against him.

But his insight and efforts yielded results quickly. Within a few years sales had risen 10% against industry losses. He was the first to invest in BS5750. Within a couple of years he had acquired two of his major competitors and by the ‘90s he had become the market leader.

The recommendation we advocate here is concerned with one of the most admired human attributes of all – that of FORTITUDE.

William Cook’s own summing up of this ideology is to be found on the company’s web site;

“Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is
more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is
almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

A Final Point To Remember Is:

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city. Proverbs 16:32

Let’s say that you have good email marketing skills but few in personal selling. What would be a better use of your time – to get on with product selling and spend less time on email marketing or recruiting selling skills into the business to help you out?

The subjects of recruitment and outsourcing concerns choices between CORE and NON CORE work.

Ultimately CORE work boils down into two principle activities:
1.) Getting more customers with great sales and marketing tactics
2.) Giving customers more value with a pipeline full of products and services

NON CORE work, as we have said in Module 2, is concerned with ‘technical’ work.

What you have to do is decide what type of work you should concentrate on. I think by now you should have begun to think about concentrating on the CORE work of the business.

This means that you should clarify what you – and your business – can really do that’s of real value for your customers and then focus on capabilities to build and sustain this positioning.

Peter Drucker, a favourite business writer of mine, goes one step further. He says;

“Do what you do best and outsource the rest.”

Which question are you asking yourself when you consider outsourcing or recruiting someone?
When you take the outsourcing route your focus is on getting an activity done – one which might be done better by someone else. You are forced to continually go through the selection process each and every time you need the job done but you should never ask the question “where or how can this be done the cheapest?” because you’ll always end up with what you deserve.

Outsourcing and recruitment is about finding and then developing long term relationships with people who have expertise outside your own. The better question to ask is “how can I maintain access to a talented person who can do – or help me do – XXXXXX on a long term basis, so I can get ON with the business, seize on new opportunities as they present themselves and be assured of a quality job?”

Do you measure the results of your business building tactics?

When you tot up your expenses, including sales costs, your marketing probably accounts for around 10% of your operating budget – if not more. But many business owners and managers don’t have much idea as to where all this money is going to, let alone the results that are being achieved. In other words they spend money on brochures, advertisements, web sites and so forth with no real way to link specific results to specific actions.

Knowing which marketing tactics pay dividends will save you time, money and effort by allowing you to focus your marketing budget on activities that work. This means that you should learn how to measure the effect of your marketing efforts to increase revenue and profit.

Create your dashboard
Think of it like this. You are flying your personal Learjet to the Caribbean for a well earned break. You’re flying at night at 30,000 feet and your only help are the instruments on the dashboard. Similarly, can a business guide its flight towards its objectives without a set of dashboard dials? Of course not!

Every business needs a set of dials or controls – or metrics as they are now called. We can have the best of plans but metrics are the things that drive them. The most important of course is profit. But what if I asked you to name a couple metrics that are fundamental to business success? Could you name them?

Two of the most important metrics for growing business are;

1. Cost Per Acquisition
2. Lifetime customer Value

These metrics are so robust that just knowing their values will give you a pretty clear idea of how well your business is doing – and what’s more how to make it even more successful. Just to make sure we are really clear about this let me explain what these metrics will do for you:

Metrics will allow you to measure your marketing and business results, eliminate unproductive marketing tactics and they will help you save money and make more money, by showing you which marketing tactics you should reinvest in.

Points To Remember Are:

• Marketing planning should concentrate on tactics to attract customers and tactics to keep, reward and make the most of your customers’ loyalty.

• Optimise the way you measure your business activities and results in order to grow your business.

If your attempts to grow your business have met with sluggish results even though you have got the other result areas that are presented in this Business Growth Series in place – it’s almost certainly your MARKETING TACTICS that are holding you back and restricting you to lackluster results.

Let’s look at some of these tactics now.

Quite simply we can separate marketing tactics into two camps; “Front-End“ and “Back-End”.

You can think of “Front-End” as the first sale; the pipeline that brings new customers into the business. The “Back-End” is the product (or hopefully the series of products and services) that you sell to your customers after they have purchased your initial offering.

The question to ask now is what tactics you should use in each area? And here they are:

Clearly front-end marketing is vital for your long term business success. This is why it’s so important to inject the power of marketing into your business so that you can increase the number of customers that come to your business as a continuous flow…

I said previously that people buy for emotional needs and those emotional needs are never fulfilled. Your role as a marketer or as the business owner is to continue to exploit those needs because it’s the emotional void that creates the desire to buy that never gets fulfilled by the purchase of the product or service. Therefore, in order to do your job right, you need to have multiple products and premium offers on offer throughout the length of your pipeline – or at the back-end.

You’ll always make more money from back-end offers than from front-end ones. They offer a much higher conversion rate, they usually sell for more money and you can make a bigger percentage on the profits on them too. And it’s always easier to sell to a customer than a prospect.

But remember the long term; you must have customers coming into the business. You can’t just rely on your loyal customers. By the way, if you have competition then you can bet that most are competing at the front-end and trying to attack your front-end offers with their own so as to eventually weaken and erode the strength of your own USPs and offers.

The question I have for you is this; are you doing any type of marketing whatsoever, and if you are where is the focus of your efforts?

So once you have found your HUNGRY CROWD …WHAT next?

The trick is to find a distinguishing benefit that conveys the problem you will solve or the “want” you’re trying to satisfy that sets you apart from your competitors. This benefit – or unique selling point (usp) is the foundation for your business for it defines what you do or say. In short it helps you:

• Attract and keep customers
• Accelerate market diffusion
• Create a point of difference
• Fill a perceived gap in the market place
• Motivate prospects and customers to act

There are many examples of this type of ‘selling point.’ Only the other day I overheard a major financial institution marketing its high interest bearing ISAs with the message; ‘finding ideas for your money!”

How to come up with a winning offer
The challenge is to explain or to present in conversation and in literature, COMPELLINGLY, what you do to provide a major advantage to your customers that your competitors don’t, or can’t offer and turn this into a few words that offer the means to GRAB your prospects’ attention.

Here’s one way – a 5 step USP generator …

1. Find the problem people have most trouble with …
2. Identify the implications of the problem … ’which means …’
3. Define your solution … ’well, what we do is …’
4. Describe the benefit of your solution …
5. Distil the results down and find the few compelling words that make the difference.

So use the USP generator, it will help you find in a WORD; the solution customers want most and it will help you to stand your business head and shoulders above its rivals.

Points To Remember Are:

• Build a business around a HUNGRY CROWD for whom you offer value with a pipeline of products.

• Prospects and customers have got to see and understand why they should buy from you and how you are different from your competitors, so find the COMPELLING WORDS that will do this for you.

Every week new companies emerge selling their products and services, whatever the type of business. And there are also many successful companies out there looking to expand their businesses. Competition, both good and bad is rife!

So how can marketing help? Can you answer that one?

Simply stated the first rule of marketing is causing the market to desire your product. Peter Drucker puts it another way when he said that;

“… the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

In short both definitions add up to the same thing; marketing that attracts customers may be described as power marketing.

People have got tired of leaflets, flyers and sales letters. The reason why some product launches are successful is that the people managing them actually marketed them. Business owners that know about marketing try to find out the emotion that makes people want to buy – they realise that people just don’t buy products or services they buy solutions or benefits that will help them achieve a gain or reduce a problem.

So an early imperative is to find the market first by finding out what people want, and then…to let them buy what they’ve told you they want!

A ‘HUNGRY CROWD’ is an interesting and relevant concept in the context of finding a niche within a market…

At the end of the day a ‘HUNGRY CROWD’ – is a group of people, increasing in number, that really, really want what you have to offer – badly. It’s this that is going to guarantee the success of your business!

The point of all this is to urge you to start to concentrate on spotting your ‘HUNGRY CROWD’. Listen to what people ask for, dream or complain about. It’s not enough for you to sell to people who CAN benefit from what you sell; you need to market to people who WANT to benefit from the SOLUTION you offer. In fact you’ve got to find people who will CLAMOUR for your product, so that sales and marketing becomes a lot easier…

A related point is this. Once people have tried and accepted the benefit you offer, they will come back to you again and again seeking further products and services from you that meet and satisfy their emotionional needs – the fundamental reason for buying from you in the first place.

We examined the first of two really important tenets of successful strategy – creative insight and competence? Well it’s time to look at the second of these: what is it that you and your business are good at doing?

People tend to think that profit is purely to do with market opportunity. But this is to miss the truth. Great strategies are built on a clear appreciation of “what we’re good at doing” and converting this into competitive advantage. This core strength or competence is the driver for market penetration and development.

The importance of the question: ‘what are we good at doing?’ can not be overestimated. For what you – and your business – can do that’s of real value for your customers will help you differentiate your business. It then follows that if you concentrate on activities that leverage your strengths so that you can get the best output you are capable of, you can continually improve the strength until it becomes a world beater.

Producing ‘hearts and minds’ loyalty
You can also build on your business’ strength by turning it into a compelling vision that can often be more seductive than the product or service you offer. Most people in life haven’t really worked out their real purpose in life. This means that they’ll attach themselves to someone that has if given half the chance.

This is much bigger than finding a niche because if you want to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of your prospects you’ve got to go beyond the product to a cause – your business strength lends itself to being that cause. And this applies to the people that work for you too. After all they are your ‘internal customers’.

The issue then is to be absolutely clear about the one thing that you are really good at doing or put another way; what distinctive competence makes your business special. It might be something to do with safety, or durability, or size.

Points To Remember
• So remember don’t underestimate the value of having a strategy.
• Creative insight and key strengths should be the true focus of business success and achievement.
• Concentrating on what you’re good at can win the ‘hearts and minds’ of your most important stakeholders.

Let’s start with a question: Do you have a strategy?

Trying to do a little better is not a business strategy. You see, when you think about it almost everybody’s strategy is invariably to do the same as everyone else but just to try to do it a little better.

And if you think about this a little more you’ll realise that this is not a strategy at all. How many business owners have fallen victim to this line of thinking, acting like an opportunist mistakenly believing that they are being strategic? Even though increasing revenue and profit they invariably work harder than ever before – often feeling frustrated, overwhelmed and exhausted in the process.

If this is you, then you have most likely been working harder than you need to for a fraction of the results you deserve.

What is a great strategy?
A great strategy beats the odds; because in the face of uncertainty, obstacles, and risk you decide what course of action leads to success. Indeed a great strategy is about knowing what path to take, what course to follow, what unique position to hold and what means will achieve the end result.

But where is the starting point? It is this; successful strategies are built on ‘creative insight’ and ‘doing what you do best’.

We will examine the subject of ‘doing what you do best’ in Module 4, below, but lets start with ‘creative insight’.

Before we do though, I want to begin with a caveat to emphasise the supremacy of creative insight. The issue concerns business planning. Many public and private institutions advocate business planning as a panacea for successful business; ‘sort the plan out and off you go’ is their cry! But it’s as well to remember that detailed business planning necessarily fails, due to frictions inevitably encountered in the planning process: chance events, imperfections in execution, and the independent will of customers and indeed competitors.

Instead, human elements: ambition, leadership, people, morale, and above all intuition, or ‘coup d’oeil’; (pronounced KOO-DOY) a quick recognition of truth — or opportunity, as the French say, are paramount.

The finest business owners and managers know that their biggest opportunity – and means of success – is rooted in a combination of creative insight and competence – not on today’s ‘rocket science’ or in technical advances that everyone is endorsing! They set only the broadest of objectives and develop profit producing activities to build up revenues based on the life-time value of their customers.

But the overwhelming majority of business owners are opportunity seekers! They have no insight and therefore no goal, no strategy, no business design, no management skills and no plan to carry the business forward to where it is intended.

PRODUCTIVE TIME IS TIME DIRECTLY RELATED TO REVENUE AND PROFIT ACHIEVEMENT

So what percentage of your time are you productive?
Have you ever really thought about how you spend your time? If not why not try the TIMEPIECE TEST? Get your alarm clock and set it for 60 minutes and then just work on building profit during those 60 minutes – nothing else….This will show YOU just what productive time is all about all right!!

Productive time is time spent creating products, marketing products, improving your marketing process, managing money making projects, setting up joint ventures, and creating scale in your business.

But there is something even more profitable and strategic than productive time, we call ‘super-productive’ time, which you create when you build systems around any of your most important business development activities.

In other words super-productive time is characterised by systems that create and market products – nothing else!!

If this sounds simplistic please look out for Module 7; “Powerful Marketing Strategies That No One Talks About.” You will see just how crucial it is to find super-productive time to design and implement great sales and marketing strategies to win customers at the front end and ensure a full pipeline of products and services at the backend to bring in real revenue.

Boosting productivity
If you are serious about boosting your productivity you’ll find there are two ways of doing it:

The first is to build scale into your business. Efforts to increase scale lead to economies in internal factors and synergies between some activities and working practices. This in turn provides you, the business owner or manager, with the ability to achieve MORE with less – or to use the jargon; with the maximum amount of leverage possible – from key business activities.

The second is to concentrate on those activities you should personally be spending your time on and which activities you should be outsourcing. The trick is to consistently focus on those activities that will raise your hourly rate. Then start delegating and outsourcing what needs to be done (that you can’t do very well) and which costs you less than the hourly rate you need to generate.

The importance of your hourly rate
If you don’t know what your time is worth and what it needs to be worth, then you can not make effective decisions on what activities you should be spending your time on and what activities you should have others do for you.

So you need to know your hourly rate. But that’s for another time. And anyway you can find out how you can pin this down in our E-Book “Ultimate Recommendations for Real Business Success”.

The fundamental point here is to consistently focus on those activities that will build your business and raise your hourly rate. The importance of understanding your productivity or knowing your hourly rate is that it exposes you to thinking about – and making – the kind of business you’ve always tried to design and achieve.

But most of us don’t have a grasp of this and delude ourselves into thinking that if we worked a little harder or introduced a new product we’ll achieve our goals – if we have any.

Moreover most people never get close to making their hourly rate because they mistakenly believe that what’s preventing them from achieving higher revenue targets is missing knowledge.

And while there might be an element of truth in this, it’s really only relevant if you have very limited marketing and business development know-how. If you don’t fall into that category then knowledge is not your primary problem.

Points To Remember Are:

• Poor business design results in you doing all of the work within your business.
• Analyse your time and see how much of it is truly productive time.
• Allocate your time to super-productive time and recruit or outsource skills to help.

Introduction

Most people mistakenly believe that all you need to excel in business is common sense and the will to succeed, MOST PEOPLE ARE WRONG.

It takes “Uncommon Sense” to make a business work but most people are never trained to do this.

This programme of 10 low-risk/high-return business building strategies, drawn from our E-Book “Ultimate Recommendations for Real Business Success”, shows business owners and managers that “Uncommon Sense”.

The Facts About Business Design That Most People Miss

Poor business design results in YOU doing all the work!

Most business owners and managers like doing the ‘practical’ work they do. Consequently they seek the latest idea or next opportunity to do what they want to better than they do now. The fact is all that happens is they simply add more and more tasks to their ‘to-do list’ that, at the end of the day, just aren’t going to get done!

Typically most businesses are run by ‘DO-IT-YOURSELFERS.’ This type of business owner doesn’t want to be dependent on other people for revenue and profit; they value their independence. They know things will be OK because ‘they are doing it.’ They take control of a situation because ‘they know it’s going to be OK’ whatever they do. However, they invariably end up doing the wrong work because they’ve just created another job for themselves to do!!

Is this you?
Or are you a business owner that lets the business do the work; in fact the direct opposite of the D-I-YER?

Effective business owners tend to direct the future of their companies and create the right structure and conditions for the technical work of the business to be carried out. The time they spend working out where they want to be, and how to organise and manage the way to this goal, is richly rewarded.

And here’s something else successful and effective business owners do. They surround themselves with bright and enterprising people that they can work with who will help them do the technical work of the business. The credo of this group is; ‘recruit people to do it for you’ – and then they make sure they don’t leave!

The ultimate issue
The final question to ask yourself is: “Do you run a business to create a job for yourself or to create a business?” because if you’re like most – you probably created a job.

If you are growing a business and still doing the work, you are not running a business you are doing the technical work of the business. If your business depends on you and you have no plans of changing that, then you don’t own – or run – a business. So you should be thinking of changing.

So what’s the point of all this? It’s this; don’t underestimate the importance of business design. Poor business design results in you doing all of the work within your business.