- Business Growth Strategy: How Do You Use Pareto Analysis To Focus Efforts On Your Clients' Benefits?
Using Pareto Analysis, a small business team can focus their efforts onto their best customers, prioritize their most profitable sales lines and manage the investment in significant cost activities. This approach enables a small business to out-compete bigger companies that are less disciplined and more over-worked. - Exhibitions Trade Shows Boost Business Visibility: How Do You Boost Your Business At An Exhibition?
Business exhibitions and trade shows are an excellent way to boost your business visibility. If you plan how you will attract attention, and how your trained staff will welcome and interest the show attendees, your marketing investment will yield excellent results. - Recruit Employees Effectively: How Do You Recruit Good Employees For Your Team?
Many small business leaders struggle with long hours rather than recruiting their first employees. With a team of staff, recruited properly, the SME will grow even though the owner works fewer hours. - Business Marketing Strategy Games: What Games are You Involved in?
Games happen throughout business although few business people seem to be aware of the roles they are playing. with some insight into your market conditions, you can see how to move onto the winning side of the games in which you are embedded. - Decision Taking, Making Effective hoices: How Do You Make Decisions?
Few business people are equipped to make big decisions in a satisfying way. This skill is not taught at school or college. Yet the principles are simple and the resulting decision process enables anyone to make a decision that satisfies them. - Small Business Growth: How Do You Grow Your Business?
Most big companies grow from being a small company and the first transition that an entrepreneur has to face occurs when the first couple of employees join the business. How the entrepreneur handles that transition can determine whether the company continues to grow or whether it stagnates. - Pricing Strategies, Revenues, Costs And Profits: How Does Profit Connect To Your Sales Price
To the naive business leader, Profit equals Revenue minus Costs. However, as you set your business goals, you need to be more sophisicated in deciding which pricing strategy will enable you to achieve your goals profitably. - After Sales Service, Complaints Process: How Do You Get Value From Angry, Complaining Clients
When customers complain about your products and services, the way you handle them is the key to meeting their complaint, recovering the situation and deepening your customer's loyalty. If you are effective and professional, complaints can increase and profit your business. - Competition, Customer Value, Success: How Can You Use The Theory Of Change
Some businesses stand out from the crowd and out-compete even though the products and services that they offer appear to be similar to their competitors. If you understand the difference that you make to the lives of your customers and clients, you will know the reasons for them to leave your competitors and to boost your business success. - Business Negotiation Using Power and Influence: How Do You Exercise Your Power in Negotiations?
Influence and power are basic elements in all negotiations. By simply exploring and understanding the power you have, or you can obtain, you can radically change the influence that you have and negotiate a potential failure into a successful outcome. - Seasonal Business Preparations: Are You Ready To Benefit From The Christmas And New Year Break?
Every year we have peak seasonal retail sales in December and January yet small business leaders suffer stress where they have not anticipated and planned properly. This simple action plan will help you to get ready for the season and enjoy your holiday break with your family. - Profitable Business Planning: How Do You Organise Your Small Business For Profit
Without a sound and robust business model, your small business will fail to scale as life and your market conditions change. Writing a simple and effective business plan will help you to design and organise your business to be profitable and successful. - Business Plan Organisation Management: How Do You Organise Your Business For Profit And Growth
Many banks and business advisors take an overly-complex approach to writing business plans. This causes owners of small business to be put off by the size of the document and their difficulty in understanding its value. The measure of a simple, effective Business Plan is that will earn you money as the business grows and your market changes. - Business Cashflow Auditing: How Do You Manage And Plan The Cash Flows In Your Business?
Unless you have a good grip on the cashflows in your business, you are certain to have nasty shocks on a regular basis. Monitoring your outflows and incomes is easy if you insist that it is self-documenting and you apply these four simple ideas. - Business Leader Development Information: Learn to Develop Yourself and Your Business
Have you have given up learning ideas or developing your skills? It is bad for your business if you have stopped learning. You could use at least 10 of these ideas to expose yourself to new ideas, fresh knowledge and opportunities to improve your skills. - Business Planning Strategy: How Can You Use Numbers To Aid Your Business Judgement And Marketing
Having an updated business plan is major factor in the success of a small business. Written simply and briefly, the business plan needs to answer seven key questions in a way that can be measured and reviewed. - Basic Marketing Strategy: Simply Promoting Your Small Business All The Ways You Can Afford
Small businesses need not spend a load of money to achieve effective marketing. With careful and enthusiastic self-promotion, your first marketing strategy will reach a profitable circle of clients. - Creative And Innovative Thinking In Business: When And How Do You Think Creative Ideas?
When you realise that your business has settled into a pattern of bland sameness, injecting new ideas into the business will lead to new ways to excel. Using a simple innovation process can produce ideas that solve your problems and help you to out-preform your competitors. - Holiday Breaks and Continuity Plans: How You Can Profit From Your Holiday Break
Entrepreneurs are not good at taking breaks from their business - they tend to eat, sleep and dream work. Recognising that the health of a small business depends on the health of the business owner, a vital part of running a profitable business is the planning you put into taking your summer break. - Business Change, Growth Strategy and Productivity: How Do You Destroy Your Business Creatively?
Sometimes when I am coaching the owner of a medium-sized company, I will remind them how Jack Welch of General Electric said “If we don’t systematically destroy our own business, our competitors will.” - Small Business Sales: Who Are Your Customers? Why Do They Buy?
Often the owners of small businesses are so busy running the company and making sales that they forget to figure out who they are selling to and why. It is only when there is a sales panic and the monthly figure dip that SMEs are forced to review their customer profiles, sales benefits and competitive advantages. - Competitive Strategy for Small Businesses: How do you Compete Against the Big Companies?
A client surprised me yesterday when he asked, "The business world is dominated by big corporations, so how can we survive, let alone compete against them?" - Sales Skills Using Emotions: How Do You Build Your Emotions Into Your Business?
At a management seminar the other day, I was asked to define why EQ is important in a small business context. I defined a high Emotional Quotient as indicating ease in perceiving what others..... - Time Management and Productivity: If You Are Too Busy to Have Time to Spare, You Need to Read This
Why is everyone so busy nowadays? When I negotiate a meeting time with a new client, we rarely find that gaps in our diaries overlap in the next two weeks and we usually have to find time more than 15 days away. In business, I think that time is more important than money because it appears that time is the only resource that is truly constrained. In fact, I believe that as your diary or calendar fills up, your business slows down. - Business Team Building and Employee Motivation: How Good is your Feedback
Often as I work with owners of small businesses, I find that an easy goal to achieve is the improvement their teamwork. At the base of motivating their team members, I find many business leaders make a common mistake when they think feedback is about behaviour correction rather than individual motivation. - Business Media Marketing: How Good is Your PR and Who Does it Reach?
One of my clients has decided to focus his marketing budget into fewer channels in order to get a larger response from this concentrated spend. So he asked me "Why should I continue to use my Public Relations agency? Why should I invest in PR next year?" - Business Continuity Management: How Do You React When Your Business Continuity is at Risk?
The biggest problem with owning a small business is that your life can be full of worry. I encourage my coaching clients to manage their potential risks. If you do the same, this will allow you:
* To identify which issues must be resolved to keep your business running smoothly and
* To ignore or forget your other worries. - Business Stress and Strain: How Can You Manage the Stress in Your High-powered Small Business?
As I coach owners of small businesses, I come across people paying a high cost for the stressed lives they lead and the toxic workplaces in which they struggle. - Business Debts Damage SME Cashflow: How Do You Manage Late Payers Effectively to Keep Solvent?
Somewhere in the first three months of running a small business, most people find that chasing late payments is a fact of their life. - Customer Communication by Email
Among the smaller businesses that I work with, I often come across people who have little idea how to contact their customers by email and some are even aware that they need help to learn the skills properly:
I love email - it is quick, low-cost, tangible, asynchronous and generates a record.
I also hate email if it is spam, pointless or poorly presented. - Creative Business Innovation: How Do You Innovate Your Way Out of Your Marketing Box
You must have seen the festive puzzle with nine dots (three dots in three rows) and your task is to trace through all the dots in four straight lines without lifting your pen from the page?... - Product Marketing Strategy: How Do You Use a Product Table to Focus Your Market Growth?
The other day, I held a seminar for a network of small businesses to help them define their strategies for market growth. Even though the businesses were very different, this approach was not only relevant to most of them, it also inspired them to re-write their marketing strategies. - Business Work-Life Balance: How Ready is your Small Business for the Festive Season Close Down?
As a business coach, December and January are months when I help lots of business people with their stress management. The festive season comes round every year without fail yet many small businesses seem to be surprised by it every year.
Following a particularly bad time when he not only under-stocked his inventory and lost sales but also failed to relax for Christmas Day, one of my clients created this festive checklist to ensure that he could enjoy all his future holiday breaks properly. - Business Improvement In Practice And Process: How Small Businesses Get Ahead Of Their Competitors
Recently I met some business coaches for a self-run seminar on business improvement. Our aim was to explore how we help SME clients to improve their businesses, contrasting and comparing our approaches. As we shared our client experiences, we noticed there were basic four approaches that we follow with variations to suit a specific small business: - Brainstorming for Small Businesses: How to Turn your Business inside out using Reversals and Humour
The other day I got one of my business clients to brainstorm how she and her staff could improve their small business. This is a process that I encourage my long term clients to do at least once a year. - Strategy For Small Businesses: What Is Your Business Strategy And How Will It Help You Grow?
Among my small business clients, I regularly notice that owners with a clear business strategy tend to run buoyant, growing companies. So if I was helping you develop your business strategy, we would start with two key questions:
* "What differences draw customers to you and away from your competitors?" and
* "What is your best route to selling more and winning more profit?" - Creating New Marketing Ideas: How Do You Think Creatively About Your Business And Your Customers?
In the last week I have met two coaching clients who both have 3 years old businesses yet their approaches to business are like chalk and cheese. - Adding Business Value: How do you Add Value in your Business?
When owners of small businesses want me to coach them to grow and expand their business, I often find that they are have reached a ceiling in selling their goods (products and services) and have run out of ideas for moving forward. - Marketing Communications: How Do You Get Your Message Across to Your Customers?
As you develop new ideas for how your customers could use your products and services, you need to learn to get your message across to your customers. - Product Leaflets Add Value To Your Sale: How Does Your Product Information Boost Your Sales Value?
A client of mine is a butcher who wants to increase the value that he gives his customers. In a recent coaching session, he waved a leaflet at me and wailed, "I put a lot of effort into that serving suggestion and nothing happened!" - Basic Sales skills: How Effective are you at Selling?
Selling is the major activity that all our businesses depend on, from the smallest one-person start-up to the largest conglomerate. There are three basic ways that goods (products and services) are sold at present: - Managing Cash Flow And Debtors In Small Businesses: How Do You Chase Customer Debts?
When I meet a business coaching client who has cash flow problems, it does not seem to matter if they are running a large or small businesses, I show them five daily business habits that make a big difference to the health of their bank account:
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