George – Top Ten Tips
George is also responsible for the on-going development of the on-line coaching tool that is available for Startup4ten® policyholders.
1. Getting Customers
‘Getting Customers’ is something you need to spend time on every day!
It’s the most important thing in growing your business and profit and it should be number one on your daily priority list.
(I’m not including calls or visits responding to customer enquiries – that’s about selling.)
‘Getting Customers’ is all about generating actions to attract more customers to your business – in other words ‘Marketing’
‘You can have the best product or service in the world but if your target customers don’t know about it then you don’t have a business!’
‘You can be the best salesman in the world but if you don’t have any leads or prospective customers then you have no-one to sell to!’
BUT
Imagine how your business might look in 3 or 4 months if:
- you spent 1 hour every morning working on your marketing
- you made use of the tools and techniques that can make your marketing productive and efficient
2. Keeping ‘Customers for Life’
Now that you’ve decided to put a real effort behind ‘Getting Customers’ you need to maximise their value by ‘Keeping them For Life’
It costs MUCH LESS to sell to existing customers than it does to find and sell to new customers
The ‘Lifetime Value’ of a customer is almost always overlooked – take a moment to work out how much you might sell to a customer if you kept them for 5, 10 or 15 years, and you’ll see what I mean!
There are 2 Vital Things you need to excel at if you want to keep your customers for life:
- Communicate with them (Marketing)
- Deliver Outstanding Customer Service (and products)
3. Know why you are in Business
This is something that so many business owners lose sight of!
A Business Owner should be in Business to achieve Wealth!
True Wealth is having enough money to be able to choose how to spend your time!
Most small/medium size businesses don’t perform well enough to deliver this for their owners!
4. Time is Money!
“you can always get more money but you can’t get more time”
Time is the one thing in life where we are all equal!
SO
The only way you can gain an advantage is in how you use your time.
AND
how you can leverage the time of others.
5. Be Organised!
If you want to improve your business performance you need to be prepared to get organised and manage yourself and others to achieve more by working just a bit smarter.
Diary System
You need a diary system to manage your workload otherwise you will continue to fight fires and achieve much less than is possible.
Action Plan
A key part of ‘Managing Yourself’ is having an on-going Action Plan otherwise you will be driven by the day to day issues of the business and effectively lose control of your business direction.
6. Understand How to make a Profit
There are 7 Profit Drivers in your business – understand how these work, and how you can manage them and you will dramatically improve your profitability.
If you are not already familiar with these 7 profit drivers then this is covered in the Startup4ten “Business Basics” coaching.
7. Know the difference between profit and cash and how to have a positive cash flow.
Step 1 – Implement ‘Customer Credit Management’
This is where you sort the good customers from the bad before you give them your hard-earned goods or services. Your sales guys will hate this system but your accountant will love it!
- It will also improve your profit because it weeds out the customers that will lose you money.
- Remember a sale is only a good sale when you collect the cash – this is something you need to get clear with your sales people – I would strongly suggest that they should only earn commission when the customer pays!
Step 2 – Implement ‘Customer Credit Control’
Day to day cash collection is a key part of any business. You can’t afford to finance customers any longer than necessary – a simple and effective collections system, puts your money into your bank account.
Remember – Customers have a habit of paying suppliers who shout the loudest!
8. Be a Specialist in Your Market Niche
Understand your “clearly defined target market(s)” or your “niche(s)”.
Tailor your customer communications (marketing) to focus on the needs of this market segment.
This form of targeted communication will position your business as a specialist in the eyes of your potential customer as you are addressing their specific needs.
Customers are much more likely to buy from a specialist than a ‘jack of all trades’
9. Know Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
The point of this is to “own” some benefit or product that your customers want.
And to find it, you need to identify the gap in the market — something no one offers but you.
10. Get a System
Every business has stuff that needs to get done every day, every week, or every month.
But guess what?
Each time that job needs done we start from scratch- we invent that wheel every day, every week, or every month!
And every time we re-invent that wheel we do it just that little bit differently – and bit by bit the outcome changes and mistakes creep in and then it costs us money!
Your business can’t afford these mistakes and the time wasted fixing them.
So, get yourself organised and get a system (actually, a number of systems) that create consistency and efficiency in your business.