Cash is King

For your business to survive, cash flow is the single most important financial factor. Your business could have fantastic revenue, reasonable expenses, and significant income, but if its financial operations are not designed efficiently, it could still have negative cash flow.

Without positive cash flow, your business, no matter how promising the business model, will go bankrupt. Of course, if your business has just been launched, it may be able to endure negative cash flow in the short-term in hopes of achieving long-term success. But eventually, your business must focus on creating positive cash flow. Without it, it will not even be able to accomplish the simplest of tasks: paying its monthly expenses.

Remember: bill and collect now, pay later.  Don't let your debtors get to 90 days outstanding; credit is a privilege not a right so think carefully who you extend credit to before you do.  Try to utilize trade finance as much as possible by paying your bills by their due date not before.  When first dealing with a new customer, set their payments terms to you not the other way around.

The Power of Testimonials

What are testimonials? Testimonials give your customers:

• a 3rd party opinion
• makes your marketing more believable
• diminishes buying criticism
• assist customers to relate better to what you do
• gives real life examples

Testimonials are positive comments about your business, your staff and what you do. You gather testimonials over the phone, face to face, through feedback forms or via Client Advisory Boards.  Once you've gathered testimonials about your business, include them in every form of marketing you issue.

Right Choice means Right Strategy

When developing a strategy, businesses too often find themselves focused on the problem only.  In order to compete a business must make choices about what will and won't work, whom it will best suit and who it won't, where are the best use of resources and where it isn't.  If any strategy process has come to a halt, stop looking at the problem and identify the choices you need to make. 

Include Leaders in Your Strategy Sessions

Don't wait for your strategic plan to completed before you present it to a leader within your business for review because by the time you do it'll be practically useless.  Seek real input not a sycophant response.  As your leader early on in the compilation process whether they have a different way they would frame the strategy problem.  Then go back with possible solutions asking whether you've overlooked anything - reverse engineering!

The goal is to collaborate and to come up with different scenarios to test your strategy.  In doing this helps you to avoid tunnel vision, gets the leader to buy in and support the strategy and results in a more productive process and outcome.

Team Process Goals

Working together in team is a lot harder than it may seem.  Each team member will have their own style or way to work.  In order for you to define your team's culture, you need to establish process goals (how you will work) in addition to task goals (what you will work on).

Address what it will feel like to work within the team.  Will everyone share responsibilities or will someone assign tasks?  Then think about what the relationships will look like, and what you want from them.  Will they be social and personal or all business in nature?  Will they divide and conquer, or work side-by-side?

Finally, concentrate on what you value: do you care about speed or accuracy?  Risk taking or compliance? Innovation or building on core strengths?  Its always good to spell out what you're aiming for so the team's culture doesn't evolve by itself in a different direction (Shapiro, M).

Headlines

Really, who cares about your business name? 

When advertising your business, use headlines that get a result; that have your potential customer rushing to respond to your ad or letter or headlines that return to you a return on your advertising and marketing investment.

What is a headline?

1. Its an ad for your ad,
2. Makes your customers think there's something of interest in your ad or marketing piece,
3. Draws your potential customers in reading your ad or marketing letter, and
4. Studies have shown that 5 times the people read your headline as read the rest of the text.

Finally, when using a headline to address a customer, try and refer to them using "you" and direct your message directly to them.

The Curse of Assumption

Most businesses make the assumption that their potential customers know:

1. who they are,
2. what they do,
3. why they are better than the others, and
4. what they can do for customers.

You must educate your customers!  Tell every current or potential new customer in a benefit-orientated way what your business does AND they way your business does it.

4 Ways to Grow Your Business

In my experience there a just 4 ways to grow your business.  By growth I mean to make more valuable.  These are:

1. Increase the number of the customers of the type you want,
2. Increase the amount of times your customers come back,
3. Increase the average value of each sale, and
4. Increase the effectiveness of each process within your business

These 4 ways work best when used together in an overall strategy.  Think about the concept of synergy—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The mistake many businesses make is to focus on just one of these 4 ways, and thus miss out on significant growth opportunities.

 

 

Basic Brand Building

Building a Brand doesn't need to be complicated but there are many challenges, pressures and distractions to take into consideration.  If you are in pursuit of Brand excellence these are the critical components that shouldn't be overlooked:

1. Focus
2. Differentiation
3. Relevance
4. Values
5. Consistency

A strong Brand is built with the intention of making it recognizable and familiar to your target customers showing off a personality and providing an expectation.

10 Steps to Boost your Business Enthisiasm

1. Recognize the symptoms
2. Step back
3. Remember why you went into it
4. Revisit moments of inspiration
5. Surround yourself with the right people
6. Involve your Team
7. Put a new plan together
8. Conduct a rah-rah session
9. Empower your Team
10. Celebrate success

3 Rules for More Productive Meetings

How often have had you attended a meeting with a short, sharp and focused approach by all in attendance, would have shaved half the time it eventually took to complete?  For a lot of business people one meeting then spawns another and on it goes.  To prevent what a I call the "meeting train", you can:

1. Keep the amount of attendees to 7. The Rule of 7 states that every attendee over 7 reduces the likelihood of making a good, quick and executable decision by 10%. Do the math and once you've hit 16 to 17 attendees your decision effectiveness is essentially zero (Mankins)!
2. Limit the time for most meetings to an hour.  Every additional minute generates costs in the form of unproductive time.  Try keep your meetings to between 30 or 45 minutes instead.
3. Use longer meetings sparingly. Create a new rule: any meetings scheduled to be 90 minutes or longer need senior approval