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100 Famous Quotes For Business Owners 23 May 2022 5:55 AM (3 years ago)

Trial and error is a very slow way to learn.

So take inspiration from these 101 famous quotes by entrepreneurs and famous people to learn in the fastest way possible – from somebody else’s life, without wasting your own.

People like Steve Jobs, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos all have a unique way of looking at the world.

1. “Don’t try to blame the rest of the world. The blame only lies with you. Recognise that immediately.”

Alan Sugar

The mindset of success will help you to live a more fulfilling, successful and happy life where the only limit is your own imagination.

Entrepreneurs who push the human race forward. In the last 100 or so years the human race went from riding around on horseback to driving cars and dreaming of riding a rocket ship to Mars. When you need a pick me up, look for ideas from other successful people who have made things happen already.

What can you learn from them? The mindset to adopt for a more successful future.

It starts with accepting that all successful people experience the same frustrations, the same failures, the same disappointments and the same darkest moments in everyday life as everybody else. It is their mindset – their ability and willingness to get back up when they fall down – that sets them apart from ordinary business people.

I see the same qualities in my most successful clients. Mindset comes from the mental habits you develop – never lose sight of this. You can nurture a better mindset by deliberately practicing the right habits for success.

Inspirational Quotes About Productivity

2. “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence and honest purpose, as well as perspiration.” – Thomas Edison

3. “There are many ways to avoid success in life, but the most sure-fire just might be procrastination.” – Hara Estroff Marano

4. “​If you want to be more productive, then start at the start: get there on time. Whether it is a meeting, a flight, an appointment or a date, it’s important to ensure you are there when you say you will be there. This may feel like an old-fashioned tip to give, but it has served me well for five decades in business.” – Richard Branson

5. “Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.”- Henry David Thoreau

6. “Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individual’s contribution far more than the individual himself.” – W. Edwards Deming

7. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein

8. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” – Steve Jobs

9. “Simplicity takes effort – genius, even.” – Paul Graham

10. “There may be people who have more talent than you, but there’s no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.”

Derek Jeter

11. “We generate fears while we sit. We overcome them by action.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

12. “The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” – Michael Altshuler

Inspirational Quotes About Success

13. “The best revenge is massive success.” Frank Sinatra

14. “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t as all. You can be discouraged by failure – or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.” – Thomas J. Watson

15. “A good leader is not necessarily the most popular person in their business, but the best ones are liked because they are respected for their clarity and vision.” – Alan Sugar

16. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

Winston Churchill

17. “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!” – Richard Branson

18. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison

19. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – Steve Jobs

20. “It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn.” – Thomas Fuller

21. “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light”

Aristotle Onassis

22. “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain

23. “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory” – W. Edwards Deming

24. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau

25. “Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.” – Mary Kay Ash

Inspirational Quotes About Commitment & Resilience

26. “When I have finally decided that a result is worth getting, I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes.”- Thomas Edison

27. “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

Henry Ford

28. “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” – Richard Branson

29. “A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.” – David Brinkley

30. “The boring side of business is what makes it work.”- Alan Sugar

31. “Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” – Steve Jobs

32. “Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” – Jim Rohn

33. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone.” – Johnny Cash

34. “26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

35. “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

36. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas A. Edison

37. “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent Van Gogh

Inspirational Quotes About Knowledge

38. “It’s obvious that we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.” – Thomas Edison

39. “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”

Richard Branson

40. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”- Mahatma Gandhi

41. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” – Steve Jobs

42. “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.” – Galileo Galilei

43. If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of ‘Roll Out The Barrel,’ but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.” – Alan Sugar

44. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” – Alexander Pope

Inspirational Quotes on Leadership

45. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs

46. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin

47. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

Michael Jordan

48. “The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” – Chinese Proverb

49. “Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.” – Martin Luther King jr

50. “Dream big and dare to fail.: – Norman Vaughan

51. “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” – Tony Robbins

52. “You define your own life. Don’t let other people write your script” – Oprah Winfrey

53. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” -Helen Keller

Inspirational Quotes About Marketing and Sales

When Apple launched the original iMac in the late 1990’s, they did it with a fabulous marketing campaign dedicated to ‘the crazy ones’. The people who don’t follow convention, but step outside the lines and create their own reality.

Working with so many successful business owners has taught me this one thing. The crazy ones work the hardest. They are driven by an inner fire that never goes out. When the world punches them in the nose, they don’t flinch from the fight. They set the highest of standards and work damned hard to live up to them.

54. “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” – Thomas Edison

55. “Market leaders inevitably slip into decline when they tell the people what they want instead of giving the people what they want.”

Alan Sugar

56. “Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them” – W. Edwards Deming

57. “I have always believed that the only way to cope with a cash crisis is not to contract but to try to expand out of it.” – Richard Branson

58. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Steve Jobs

Famous Quotes from Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)

59. “I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.” – Elon Musk

60. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”

Elon Musk

61. “You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.” – Elon Musk

62. “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.” – Elon Musk

63. “If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.” – Elon Musk

Inspirational Quotes by Jeff Bezos (Amazon)

64. “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos

65. “What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.” – Jeff Bezos

66. “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail” – Jeff Bezos

67. “One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” – Jeff Bezos

68. “We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn’t be in this business.” – Jeff Bezos

69. “It’s hard to remember for you guys, but for me it’s like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, and hoping one day we could afford a forklift.” – Jeff Bezos

70. “If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.”

Jeff Bezos

71. ““I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” – Jeff Bezos

72. “The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.” – Jeff Bezos

73. “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.” – Jeff Bezos

Quotes From Sport

Sport is the big equaliser. Every player has the same tools, faces the same challenges, and has to dig deep to become a great in their own right.

When I read through these quotes, what really strikes me is the number of them that talk about doing the hard work.

Famous American Football coach Vince Lombardi talks about getting up when you’ve been knocked down. Sir Alex Ferguson talks about the sheer hard work that David Beckham put into his game in order to become such a formidable player. Striker Michael Owen talks about the importance of training at 100% in order to give 100% when you’re playing.

Top performers in every endeavour, from business to sport, commit themselves to playing at the top of their game. Don’t compare yourself to other performers. Just know that you are giving 100% effort to your own game. Compare your performance today with your performance a month ago. Your performance last week. Or your performance yesterday. How have you improved? How much better can you be tomorrow?

It is through self-development and improvement that we reach the top of our own game. The great results, the rewards for your efforts, come after the effort is expended. Success will remain a closed door for all those who fail to put do the work.

74. The downfall of any leader in a sport’s team is when he gets carried away with his own ego.”

Toto Wolff, Mercedes F1 Team Principal

75. “if you feel in control you’re not going fast enough.” Mario Andretti, former F1 world champion

76. “It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.”

Vince Lombardi

77. “I’ve never played for a draw in my life.” – Alex Ferguson

78. “David Beckham is Britain’s finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practises with a relentless application that the vast majority of less gifted players wouldn’t contemplate.” – Alex Ferguson

79. “Our success has not been a continual series of victories. We have had a number of devastating setbacks; how these are handled is the making of a great team… winning does not happen in straight lines.” – Clive Woodward

80. “And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further.” – Ayrton Senna

81. “If you can’t outplay them, outwork them.”

Ben Hogan

82. “Will beats skill.” – Kevin Constantine

83. “Age is no barrier. It’s a limitation you put on your mind.” – Jackie Joyner-Kersee

84. “If you don’t have the balls to brake late, that’s your problem.” – Lewis Hamilton

85. “Champions keep playing until they get it right.” – Billie Jean King

86. “Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.” – Matt Biondi

87. “The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

88. “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” – Gary Player (this one’s for you, Dad)

89. “I start early and I stay late, day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.” – Lionel Messi

90. “You can always become better.” – Tiger Woods

91. “To uncover your true potential you must first find your own limits and then you have to have the courage to blow past them.” – Picabo Street

92. “As long as we persevere and endure, we can get anything we want.”

Mike Tyson

93. “A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.” – Jack Dempsey

94. “You’re never a loser until you quit trying.” – Mike Ditka

95. “Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can’t.” – Jerry Rice

96. “Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you do repeatedly.”

Shaquille O’Neal

97. “You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.” – Jerry West

98. “Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way.” – Satchel Paige

99. “Make sure your worst enemy doesn’t live between your own two ears.” – Laird Hamilton

100. “If you only ever give 90% in training then you will only ever give 90% when it matters.”

Michael Owen

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5 Ingenious Unique Selling Point Ideas For Your Business 11 Apr 2022 2:00 AM (3 years ago)

This article shows you how to come up with unique selling point ideas so that your business can stand out from the crowd. You will learn how to identify what customers really want, brainstorm 5 ways to become different, and get a checklist of where to use your USP to make your business stronger.

Without a unique selling point – commonly known as a USP – your business or product will be seen as a commodity. Commodities compete on price or convenience – customers will buy the cheapest or the easiest for them to get.

Introduction

Unique selling point illustration
An effective USP is more than dressing up your product to be noticed. A goat in a red sweater might be a nice brand statement, but your unique selling point must be important to your customers, not just a bit of quirk.

Any decent USP begins with the idea of empathy with your customer.

So we will take this idea of customer empathy and explore some examples. To keep it interesting, we’ll start with the most famous of all USPs and break it down so you understand why it’s so powerful. Then we’ll explore some products in a market where anybody could be forgiven for thinking that a real USP would be impossible.

You will see examples of unique selling points to provoke your thinking.

These examples are not the obvious USPs that you might see elsewhere. They are hand-selected from businesses competing in extraordinarily competitive markets.

Then we’ll move onto a few more examples to fire your imagination before summarising with a process to make a unique selling point for your own products and services. Crafting an effective unique selling point means that you can charge more, sell more and build a stronger business.

Use these ideas for inspiration to make your business better than your competitors.

Why Bother with a Unique Selling Point?

Your USP gives you an edge. 

A good USP allows you to charge a premium price – people who appreciate the difference you bring will pay more because you’re special.

The perfect strong unique selling proposition should be your hard-to-copy weapon, that you brandish when prospective customers are considering where to shop, that will also protect your existing customer base from competitors sniffing around to try and steal them away from you.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? So what’s involved in creating a USP that will attract more customers and make a difference for you?

What Customers Really Want: The Empathy Method To Better Unique Selling Point Ideas

In practice, lots of businesses get stuck trying to think of a good USP.

There’s that whole game of “we’re not really very different at all. But we are super-friendly”. But the trouble is that every business thinks they’re super-friendly. And the customers will assume that you’ll be friendly before they buy, too. It’s not going to be enough to persuade new customers to select you instead of your competitors.

So a good starting point to come up with a better USP for your own business is to study perhaps the best example of all, the Dominos USP. It is powerful because it speaks so directly to several customer needs, and then wraps it with a money-back guarantee to really drive it home…

Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed”

The original Dominos Pizza guarantee – allegedly dropped due to problems caused by drivers speeding to deliver on time.

This unique selling proposition is so good because it really does cover every angle of what the customer wants to buy…

  • Fresh – made to order, rather than something that’s been reheated or sitting for hours going soggy
  • Hot – really important when you’re ordering food to be delivered – we’ve all been disappointed by lukewarm food
  • Fast delivery – I’ve waited over an hour for food delivery – the idea of a pizza in 30 minutes is super attractive
  • Money-back guarantee – means that I can trust them to deliver to their word

As you can see, this USP has a combination of multiple ‘hot-button’ based key selling points that together really hit the spot for the fast-food pizza-loving customer.

This empathy for the customer’s needs is essential to create a good USP. To create your own USP, you need to try to empathise with what the customer really wants. Dominos did it brilliantly. They were not the only pizza delivery service in town when they came up with this, yet they have become the biggest global pizza outfit by building their business to deliver against these core customer needs.

It’s worth just reiterating that point – the idea of speaking to a direct customer need..

Your USP has to matter to your customer. It’s not fluff and it’s not a slogan. It’s not a logo or hollow words. It’s not a promise of ‘great service’. It’s something important to your customer, because only something important will sway their thinking to make them buy from you.

To do this I thought a great way would be to look at a really tough industry and find some USP ideas from businesses that have managed to make themselves unique in a difficult market. That way, you don’t have any excuses for not finding a way to make your business unique…

Marketing that works well is like a machine for getting new customers. If you are looking for ideas to grow your business, download my free book with 101 ideas to get more customers, sales and profit. Get 101 Ways To Get More Customers, Sales and Profit by clicking here.

Is It Possible to Create a USP in a Price-Driven Commodity Market?

Your unique-selling-proposition becomes even more important when you’re competing in really tough markets.

It’s easy to get stuck on the idea that “there’s nothing I can do that’s different to my competitors”. But that’s plain wrong. There is always a way to make your business or product unique. For example, imagine selling a commodity product – something that’s been around for hundreds of years; something where nobody pays much attention to the manufacturer – cheese.

Yes, cheese is the next example. This is not about the type of cheese, but a business that wanted a unique selling point for its cheese.

How would you stand out if you just made cheese? Crazy difficult, you might think, and you’d be right. Unfortunately, there’s no USP store you can visit to just pick something special off the shelf. Creating your own USP isn’t super-easy, but winning at business never is super-easy.

A lot of people complain about how difficult it is to create a USP. They are right. This is tough work, with deep thinking that’s unlikely to be a 5-minute job. But the reward for doing it is that you will position your business to be special, different and a reason for your customers to pay you a premium price. So while it may take an hour or two to produce a good USP, it will make your business thousands more in sales over time. In terms of pay-per-hour, it’s one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself.

In fact, when planning this article, I deliberately chose the cut-throat and commodity-price dominated dairy industry.

The dairy industry is a very mature market. This makes it far harder to come up with new ideas. The competition is super-tough. So many similar businesses are trying to sell the same products to the same customers. If they can do it, anybody can do it, including you.

It’s the perfect demonstration of the power of good unique selling proposition ideas that make your ordinary product stand out from the crowd.

Cheddar cheese. Pasteurised milk. Salted and unsalted butter. This does not seem like the territory to learn about uniqueness, does it? Yet this is precisely why it offers to best opportunities to learn.

For the most part, products in this market tend to compete on price alone. A few manage to build brand names that people trust and are willing to pay more money to buy. But others played a different game – they differentiated their product with an effective unique selling point. So how could you create a decent unique selling point if you sell milk or cheese? And what can you learn to apply to your own situation?

The idea here isn’t to turn you into a cheesemaker (even though “blessed are the cheesemakers” according to Monty Python’s Life Of Brian), but to encourage you to find a better way to stand out from the crowd in your sector.

Idea #1. Product Innovation Creates a Powerful USP

The secret to a great USP is empathy, as we’ve already covered. Empathy simply means to consider things from your customer’s perspective. Once you understand the customer better, you can innovate your products to better serve them.

Understand that unique selling propositions are not just a marketing strategy, but a decision to genuinely make your product or service better in some important way for your target audience.

There can be few more challenging businesses than milk production.  The supermarkets hold the keys to the customer and negotiate to buy from you at pretty much cost price.  You only make money because of the huge volume sold.  Could a USP help you in this situation?

To start down this path, you’ve got to become very clear about who you want as a customer for your product. Then put yourself in their shoes and figure out how to provide a better product or service for them, by solving a problem or fulfilling an unmet need that they have.

Here are a few things that companies have done to set their milk apart from the crowd…

  • Flavoured milk and milkshakes
  • Lactose-free Milk for people who are intolerant
  • Filtered milk so the milk lasts longer because the microbes that cause it to go off quickly are removed.

The secret is to innovate your service or product so that you have something that satisfies one of your customers’ unmet needs.

When Cravendale innovated the production process to filter their milk, it gave them access to people prepared to pay extra for milk that lasts longer.

My family became instant fans because the milk no longer went sour so quickly. We could buy extra bottles, knowing it wouldn’t go off before using it.

This was a real benefit that was easily worth it for us. That doesn’t mean it was worth it for everybody – there are lots of price-shopping customers who would rather pay less. But Cravendale don’t targt price-shoppers – they want the premium customers.

Of course, your unique selling point won’t appeal to everybody, but if enough people have the same unmet need, you’re onto a winner.

It’s a brilliant unique selling point idea for such an ordinary product.

If you watch the video, you’ll see they use the idea of the filtered milk being purer. I don’t know about you, but if I can get “purer”, that suggests that what I was drinking before wasn’t so good after all. That idea sticks in your mind after enough repetition and gradually starts to become the normal milk you buy.

But what’s really exciting is that with a strong unique selling point, your price is no longer directly compared to ordinary milk, the commodity stuff. 

So Cravendale carved out a whole new niche within a vast new market of “pure milk”. In the video of the Cravendale ad, they make the point about their differentiation – on the fridge door, they tell you it’s filtered so it lasts longer.  And they’re all fighting for the last glass.  How many times do we throw away the last glass of milk because it’s going off?

Clever, witty, engaging.  And yes, perhaps a little irritating.  But they’re selling a lot of filtered milk now, to an audience that had never seen it just a few years before.

Idea #2. Creative Packaging Provides Helpful USP

Packaging is a great way to make your product unique, but try to remember the empathy thing – it needs to solve a problem or satisfy a need that your customer has.

Mini Babybel cheese is a great example from the dairy industry of how to use packaging to create a little market of your own that appreciates a different approach. They make little rounds of cheese that are wrapped in wax, in complete contrast to the large blocks of cheese they compete with. These are super-convenient as part of a packed lunch or picnic and make an ordinary cheese into something special.

The packaging does it very nicely for Mini Babybel, who put a twist in their adverts by showing tiny cheesemakers putting it together…

As you start to get into the differentiation groove, you’ll find lots of interesting options.

Cheesestrings are another variation of cheese packaging, becoming another option for kids’ lunchboxes. It’s weird stuff – cheese that separates out into stringy lengths rather than being a solid chunk. But the kids love it.

It’s another great usp that came from developing something a little bit different.

Idea #3. Find Your Existing Uniqueness for Your USP

The most common advice you hear for creating a USP is to ‘find what’s different’.

It’s tough to see what’s different about your own business, though. You become snow-blind to what makes you different, because you are either over-exposed to it, or you haven’t quite figured out what’s really important to your customers. But a little introspection can produce usp ideas that you’d never think of in a million years.

A massive player in the butter segment of dairy found uniqueness in the cows milked for their butter… Anchor Butter came up with a clever angle based around the free-range idea. Whoever heard of free-range cows?

I haven’t – never thought of cows being anything but free-range, wandering in the fields eating grass.  But Anchor brilliantly captured the eco-mood and transferred the free-range idea from chickens…

I’ll bet there is something a little different about your business.

It might be something about the materials you use, the packaging you buy, the way you customise and tailor your service to each client. Somewhere, in your business, there is something you do different that’s worth shouting about. It might just be the idea you need to make a unique selling point come to life. To find it, look at your business through fresh eyes and figure out what’s a little bit different about the way you work or the service you provide.

Idea #4. A Proper Guarantee Could be Your Unique Selling Point

Sometimes people don’t buy because they’re scared they’re wasting their money. The fear of being conned out of our money is a big disincentive to buy anything new, and this fear is exactly what a guarantee is designed to overcome.

It’s important to understand what is needed for an effective guarantee. A guarantee isn’t a woolly statement that says “quality is guaranteed”, or “service is guaranteed”. A guarantee is the reversal of risk – the knowledge that if the customer isn’t happy, they will get their money back.

Surprisingly, it turns out that money-back guarantees exist in the world of dairy uniqueness. Searching for other butter advertising, I found adverts for Country Life that offered money-back guarantees if you don’t agree that their better tastes the best. This was a few years ago, but the point still stands. As a way to persuade people to try their butter, they printed 5 million packs with the offer on it.  The idea is that you’ll try the butter out because if you don’t like it, you can get your money back.

What’s the chance of you not liking a quality pat of butter?  It seems like a pretty low-risk strategy as a way to get more people to try Country Life.

One of the most powerful USPs I’ve ever come across is for a b2b pest control business in the USA.

Called “Bugs” Burger Bug Killers, they work with restaurants and hotels to prevent pest infestations from things like cockroaches and rodents. The 3-part guarantee that you see here is incredibly powerful, despite the fact that it’s got no dairy connection! Initially a very small business, it grew on the back of their guarantee allowing them to charge higher prices and still win business.

The last time I looked, they were doing over $30m per annum, driven in large part through the confidence that people get from this excellent guarantee.

What makes the guarantee so effective is that it deals with the hidden fears in people’s minds. “Will you get rid of all the bugs for good?”. “What if a customer sees a pest and freaks out?”. These are dealt with powerfully and with confidence.

You can find the original here

Idea #5. Provide A Niche Service

In Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow, he talks about the value of being different.

In one example, he writes about a petrol station where an attendant comes out, fills your car with fuel and cleans your windscreen with a cloth. You sit in the comfort of your car while all of this is done for you. Another example is of a supermarket where your goods are packed and taken to your car for you. You don’t have to put the trolley back or deal with the carrying. Of course, these will both charge a premium and will appeal to a specific type of customer, not to the mass-market.

While I might be tempted by the fuel station, I’m quite happy packing and carrying my own groceries.

But this whole idea of appealing to a segment of the market rather than to the whole market is important as a concept. It’s the idea of serving a niche, rather than trying to sell to everybody. Your unique selling point ideas don’t need to appeal to everybody, just to enough to make a decent growth business out of it.

This is exactly how milkmen have survived the massive changes to shopping habits over the past 50 years.

Milk delivery is the perfect example from the dairy sector of providing higher levels of service to look after a particular type of customer. Rather old-fashioned in these days of supermarket deliveries, the milkman is a bit of a blast from the past for most of us. But for some people, the idea of having fresh milk, bread and a few essentials delivered on a daily basis, building a relationship with the person who brings it, is a valuable service. Which is why there are plenty of milkmen still delivering across the UK.

How could you change your service to look after a particular group of customers, providing them with a level of service that goes beyond the ordinary? This is a great way to come up with another unique selling point idea for your business.

Here’s A Process To Make Your USP

You may be wondering just how you can use these rather cheesy examples in your own business…

The trick is to come up with something of your own. Don’t be one of those people with their own business who say they can’t, because you can, once you decide to give it the attention it deserves. Here’s the process in outline…

  1. Empathy – know what your customer wants. Figure out what’s in your ideal customer mind. Ask them questions. Spend time chatting to them. What would make their lives easier in relation to the products and services you sell?
  2. Solve their problem – find a way to innovate or explain how your product solves their problem better than your competitors.
  3. State your USP repeatedly so that people know how you’re different.

Let’s quickly go through these ideas…

1. Empathy for your customer

2. Solve A Real Problem

In this article we’ve looked at 5 specific unique selling point ideas…

  1. Product innovation (filtering the milk)
  2. Packaging innovation (little wax jackets on your cheese)
  3. Use existing uniqueness (“The Free-Range Butter Company”)
  4. Guarantee to reverse the risk of buying (Best tasting butter or your money back)
  5. More personalised service (the good ol’ milkman)

3. Checklist of Where To Use Your USP

Your USP provides a strong reason for new customers to buy from you in the first place. You can use unique selling propositions in all kinds of places to reinforce your message…

  • Use your USP in all of your advertising to make sure people understand how you’re different
  • Mention it during sales calls and meetings – so that customers understand why you’re better for them
  • Demonstrate it with diagrams, case studies and testimonials
  • Give it prominence on your website and in printed materials
  • Show off your USP on social media

Marketing that works well is like a machine for getting new customers. If you are looking for ideas to grow your business, download my free book with 101 ideas to get more customers, sales and profit. Get 101 Ways To Get More Customers, Sales and Profit by clicking here.

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How To Double Your Sales – 7 Powerful Secrets of Hypergrowth 11 Oct 2021 10:09 PM (4 years ago)

It takes the average business 21 years to double sales in the UK, after adjusting for inflation. For the average business, growth is painfully slow. This article explains how to double your sales in a year or two.

3.6% was the average growth rate for a UK small to medium-sized business between 2012 and 2020 (from data on this chart from Statista).

This tells you that if your business is underperforming, you cannot just keep doing the same things and expect different results.

But we have all heard about people who achieve a step change in business, producing extraordinary growth in far less time.

There’s even a word for this rapid growth – hyper-growth – and it’s defined as 40% or more growth for more than a year.

It takes two years or less of hypergrowth to double your sales.

It’s like a 19-year shortcut to doubling your business.

So if performance is pretty average right now and you want to grow faster, it’s exactly the kind of growth you need to produce a step change in business.

In this article, I’m going to explain how you can trigger trigger a step-change in business by installing the 7 common traits shared by hyper-growth businesses.

But just before I do that, let’s start with a reality check about business ownership…

The Average Income of Business Owners…

The average income of UK business owners is just £30,000 a year.

In the USA it’s $70,000.

It’s a sobering figure, that clearly shows that most business owners are not exactly living the dream.

It’s a similar story all over the world.

Which means there’s not a lot for you to put away for your future.

And not a lot to spend today, either, at those kinds of rates.

But some businesses do way, way better than this.

The top businesses manage to grow by 40% a year – and more.

Which means they double their sales in just 2 years – a dramatic step change in business performance.

Which creates a massive leap in their profits. And of course a huge step-up in income for the owner.

Allowing you to save more for your future.

As well as a nicer lifestyle while you’re working, too.

I Wrote The Book On How To Double Your Sales…

Book explaining how to double your sales.
Lee’s award-winning book

I’ve been working with small and medium-sized businesses to help them grow since 2004. I wrote a book which was published by Financial Times, called Double Your Business. The book explains how to double your sales with examples of many clients who’ve achieved a step-change in business results, doubling their sales within a couple of years or less.

It turns out that doubling your business within 2 years is also known as hypergrowth. While I didn’t know this back then, I’ve been fortunate to work with many clients who have grown incredibly quickly, achieving hypergrowth.

Some have added around £1m or more within a year. Here are some of my clients who have added 7 figures or more to their sales…

What this all means is that I’ve been very close to a lot of businesses, helping them to make very fast growth happen.

And the fastest-growing businesses, including those listed above, have some very specific things in common with one another.

By comparing these hyper-growers with more average businesses, it’s easy to see what’s missing.

And of course, if you know what’s missing, you can do something about it.

The 7 Factors That Kick-Start A Step Change in Business

All of these factors are critical for profitable and robust growth. If you’re missing any of them, your business will get stuck or bogged down at some point. They are like a road map, explaining how to double your sales within a year or two.

Stoic Leadership

Stoic Leadership is not about the Stoic movement of the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.

It’s about creating the conditions for your team to deliver to the highest standards, to outperform your competitors, and to produce growth that will leave your accountant speechless.

I first noticed the phenomenon of Stoic Leadership in businesses that were clearly making massive strides forward in sales and profit growth.

The big thing I realised is that while a lot of businesses have various personality clashes and team crises happening, I noticed that the fastest-growing businesses were drama-free.

Drama is argument and pushback, under-performance and bad attitude, amongst other things. It drags you down and kills your mojo. It sucks the motivation out of everybody.

If you have people in your business that are getting in the way of progress, it’s like being in a boat, dragging an anchor through the sand while you’re trying to go at full speed.

It’s frustrating. It makes you angry and irritable. Everybody on board feels unsettled and unhappy.

There’s a saying that if you’re not with me, you’re against me. In business, you need your people with you.

Your job as their leader is to inspire them to follow you. Leaders are only leaders because they have followers.

Stoic Leadership recognises all of this. It starts with you believing that your goal of creating a step change in business is possible.

You then move on to creating the conditions in your business for high performance and high standards.

You operate in a way that motivates your team. You eliminate drama and maintain enthusiasm. This is your job as the stoic leader of your business.

The traits of Stoic Leadership are not something you’re born with. They’re an integral part of the Hyper-Growth Method. You can learn them if you’re willing to stretch yourself and are ready for the next level of business success.

A Scalable Business Model

Your business model describes the way your business makes money. It’s a combination of your customers, products and services, pricing and delivery.

For many businesses, though, it’s a bit haphazard. It has never been designed for high profit growth.

When you grow your business, you almost inevitably have to add further costs like offices, staff, insurances, equipment, vehicles and so on.

These all need to be factored into your approach so that you still make a great profit as you expand your business.

Of course, the other factor is the sector or niche you serve. If you provide services locally, there’s also a limited size to your market. Once you dominate in that area, how will your business grow further? Can you expand regionally, nationally, internationally?

All of this bigger thinking is your business model. It must be designed for growth if you are to successfully make a step change in business, rather than just muddling along like the average business.

Weapons-Grade Sales Machine

This phrase was inspired by a conversation with a client, after testing a new lead generation campaign. You can’t create hyper-growth without generating more leads, winning more customers, making more sales.

Most businesses dabble with marketing rather than being strategic and serious about it.

If you don’t have an effective method to produce new sales opportunities, then you’re dabbling.

With a little bit of deep thought and planning, it’s possible to create a strategy with the confidence that it will lead to the sales you need.

You can look at similar industries and see how the market leaders get their sales. You can emulate their strategies. As you build experience and capability, you can develop more of your own strategies with confidence, too.

For some businesses, the Internet is a fast-track method of producing a lot of new enquiries on a regular basis.

My first hyper-growth client, The Mortgage Broker Ltd, was able to generate hundreds of mortgage enquiries per month. While typical mortgage advisers handled 10 to 15 leads per month, my client’s advisers were handling at least 80 each. It’s no wonder they grew into the millions quickly.

For other businesses, the secret is more old-school.

For example, Grosvenor Credit Management wanted to reach people like Mercedes Car Finance and other similar businesses. Using a combination of direct mail and salesmanship, we employed various outreach methods to connect with difficult to reach target customers. With this strategy, we opened a lot of doors that created massive opportunities.

The same is true of all the clients listed above who grew by millions. You cannot learn how to double your sales without a strategic approach to marketing and sales.

A Powerful and Compelling Proposition

The most popular gladiators in the days of Rome could amass a fortune and win their freedom because the audience loved them. The crowd’s enthusiasm would be the cue for the Emperor to decide who to free. Some gladiators were more popular than others.

Your job is to be the most popular gladiator in your arena of battle – your own business sector.

Your business right now is probably not so different to any of your competitors. This means when customers are choosing where to buy, they have no idea why they should pick you. It’s often difficult to pick out the real differences between suppliers. As a result, customers may as well make their choice by price alone.

You’ve almost certainly heard about the value of having a unique selling point for your business. You’ve probably also found it incredibly difficult to come up with something – right?

This is the challenge for the hyper-growth business. In order to win the lion’s share of the sales, you’ve got to give your business an edge. While a USP is one edge, it’s not the only one. You can also create a dominant position through overwhelmingly better marketing than your competitors. It’s not as hard as you may think, as most of your competitors aren’t thinking about making that step change in business that’s got your attention.

It takes a bit of work. But it can be done. Every ambitious business can find something unique to offer that will be attractive to a specific sector of the market.

Frictionless Operations

As your business switches into faster growth, productivity problems will start to appear. It really is inevitable. This is because you’ll be dealing with far more work than ever on your journey to a step change in business results.

The way you organise your work, manage capacity and resolve problems will all come into the spotlight as you grow. Without frictionless operations, you’ll quickly be dragged into the weeds to solve day-to-day problems that should never occur in the first place.

Frictionless Operations is what you get when everything is done in the same way, regardless of who is doing it. This means that no matter who goes on holiday, everything still runs like clockwork. It’s often described as systematisation or systemisation. Frictionless Operations is how you get your business to work without you.

Exceptional Service

In every sector, there are a small number of businesses that customers really love because of the service they provide. It’s not about expensive or fancy service, but about delivering something that’s better in some way than your competition.

A great way to think about this is to find one or two words that really matter to your customers, then focus on doing those one or two things better than anybody else.

For a really well-known example, McDonald’s focuses on speed and consistency. You get exactly the same food everywhere you go, without waiting more than a few minutes. They are not trying to make the best food. They are not trying to offer the widest or most innovative menu. It’s fast food.

One of my clients who achieved a massive step-change in business, The Mortgage Broker Ltd, focused on communication. Buying a house is stressful. Waiting for a decision on a mortgage. Waiting for the cash to come through. Most mortgage communication is poor, adding to the stress. The Mortgage Broker set a new standard for regular, quality communication that showed clients they were in safer hands.

Creating a service that’s the exception in an ordinary sector is about understanding what your ideal customers would really love, then delivering it.

A Driven Team

In the popular business book, From Good To Great, Jim Collins explains that having the right people on the bus is a critical first step towards building long-term success.

Having the right people is the starting point, the building blocks, to a driven team.

But your employees become a driven team only when they are put into the right environment that helps them to perform at their best.

For a step-change in business, your people must be performing at their best. Which means you have to provide this environment for them.

The environment starts with the quality and direction of your leadership. You set the standards and have to hold your people accountable to this standard.

But great people don’t become great on their own. We all stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before us. Your people are no different. They must be developed and grown to become the driven team that you need.

Every hyper-growth entrepreneur recognises that people need to be stretched and supported in order to grow and contribute at a higher level.

Your driven team comes from a combination of choosing the right people, developing them, and holding them to a high standard. They pay this back with dedication and performance that leaves competitors wondering what you’re feeding them.

Summary – How To Double Your Business Using The 7 Key Traits of Hyper-Growth Businesses

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What Critical Metrics Are You Tracking? 10 Tools To Build Your Business Dashboard 26 May 2021 1:31 AM (4 years ago)

“How on earth did we run out of blue widgets???”, screamed Freddy, the agitated fictional boss of Widgets-R-Us.

Ah, I hear you say. Freddy’s firm needs a dashboard tracking all of the critical numbers to keep his business healthy. This blog post is just in the nick of time, then…

To be in control of your business, you need visibility of what’s going on. Too often, as the owner you’re the last person to know when a problem is quietly festering away in the dark recesses of the backrooms.

In this article you’ll learn about dashboards, including 10 tools to build your business dashboard. This will give you more visibility, more control.

The whole point of building a business dashboard is to avoid being caught out by nasty surprises. Over time you can develop it further, adding new measures to give even greater insights into every aspect of your business performance.

In this article, you will see the benefits of using tools to build your business dashboard and gain some insights into where to start, including some which tools might suit you best.

1. What are you trying to measure with your metrics?

Before even thinking about the tools to build your business dashboard, you need to choose what exactly you are going to measure and report on it.

This can be a difficult question, as it is likely that the answer will change over time. One option is to start by gathering everything that could potentially influence performance and then eliminating what isn’t important.

Another useful place to start is to focus on areas where you are already collecting data. For example, if your website is generating revenue or leads and you’re gathering data on this, it’s a good place to start.

Asking your team can also be helpful as people in different parts of your business will have insights into the kind of information they monitor personally to keep things running smoothly.

As a business coach, I believe it’s important to focus on 3 major areas in your business. I call these Cash, Customers and Capacity. They’re the three big ‘wheels’ that have to keep turning well in your business for it to produce the best results.

In this video, business analytics firm Sisense.com explain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how to focus on the right data for your business.

2. What data do you need in order to track them?

Try to resist overloading your dashboard with all the information you can possibly add to it. The idea is to be able to quickly identify that it’s all working well, or that there may be a problem.

Your dashboard is not just for you, but for your team as well. Of course, there will be more data in the background, but this is like the dashboard in your car. You need enough information to drive safely and comfortably to your destination, but not every underlying detail of your vehicle’s performance.

When something goes wrong, or is not working quite as it should, your dashboard should indicate there’s a problem so that it can be investigated in more detail.

Include only the most useful information detail that could affect performance on your dashboard.

For example, if you generate a lot of business online, you might track the leads coming in from your website, along with numbers of visitors and conversion rates. If the numbers drop below a target figure, you can investigate by going to the source data. You don’t need the fine details on the dashboard.

3. Why is this important for my business?

Knowing how to measure your metrics will help you make better decisions. It helps with long-term strategy and short term tactics, as well as making it easier to validate results from one decision against the next. By knowing what data you need and when, it becomes much easier to automate reporting so you can focus on your business.

The metrics you track keep you in touch with what’s happening in your business. It’s a bit like tracking the vital signs of a patient in a hospital. You need to be alerted if anything goes wrong.

In the most extreme cases, your dashboard can be the difference between your business surviving and thriving. Knowing that you’ve got a problem building with customers paying late, for example, can alert you to the risk of a future cash flow problem before it becomes a reality.

4. Why You Should Include Both Lead Metrics and Lag Metrics

A metric that alerts you to potential future problems, and allows you to correct the problem before it happens, is a lead metric

A metric that reports the result of something that’s already done is a lag metric. You cannot change the result, it’s just a fact being reported by the measure.

As an example, a surgeon uses pulse and blood pressure to monitor how his patient is doing during an operation. Whether or not the patient is alive at the end of the operation is the result – or the lag metric. Clearly the surgeon must monitor the ‘life-signs’ and react immediately if they are not normal.

Businesses can set up lead and lag metrics, too. Sales activity (number of leads, value of business quoted, number of follow-up calls, etc) would be lead metrics. Sales performance (number of sales, value of sales) are a lag metric.

5. How often should they be collected and analyzed 

Lead metrics should be set up for each critical part of the business, to give you time to react and change course if necessary.

Lag metrics should be collected at sensible intervals to report how the business has performed. Weekly or monthly are typical reporting periods for lag metrics.

Using automation to collect your data and present it will effortlessly maintain the dashboard. Automation is your friend in business – you don’t want to do repetitive work manually if you can get systems to do it for you.

Deciding how much data to collect may depend on what you hope to learn from it – but generally collecting the minimum information you need to run efficiently will keep your life simpler

6. Who will have access to the information 

There will be some data you want to share with everybody in your business, while other information will be strictly limited based on roles and responsibilities.

Publishing sales performance data for every salesperson can be a powerful technique to create a sense of competition between salespeople. Just remember that this will have an impact upon the culture of your business.

In fact, the cultural impact of measuring and publishing data is important. They say that what you measure gets managed. So if you measure the wrong things, you may find your team start to pay attention to aspects of the business that really don’t warrant the effort. You have been warned!

If you’re not comfortable with sharing all metrics within your company, consider segmenting access so that only the people who need to see them get their hands on it.

Some tools may offer a way for you to have different dashboards and give different groups of users access – this can be really helpful if there are certain data points required by specific people/functions in your business that are not for public knowledge.

7. A List of 10 Brilliant Tools to Build Your Business Dashboard 

The tools can be divided into three main groups. These would be tools for…

We won’t be going through your data sources – I don’t know what they are! You may have information in Google Analytics, accounts software like Sage, Quickbooks or Xero, an email marketing system like Active Campaign, a sales management system like PipeDrive, a Point of Sale system, a manufacturing systems, stock control system and so on. These are the sources for the information you want to summarise and use on your dashboard.

So we’ll focus on the other two – tools to build a dashboard and tools to gather data from your sources. This isn’t a technical guide on how to actually put it together, but an entrepreneur’s high-level view of what’s involved.

Tip: hire people to do this kind of thing for you, unless you’re deeply technical and not focused on business growth.

Options for Your Business Dashboard – From Simple Pens to Tricky Tech

Integration Software – How To Get Data Into Your Business Dashboard

There number of options for gathering data for your dashboard is growing rapidly…

Just beware the complexity of choosing overly complicated tools to build your business dashboard. If you can run your business with just 4 or 5 key numbers/indicators, that’s the way to go. Simplicity always beats complexity, as long as you don’t omit critical information.

8. Why is this important for your business?

Business dashboards can help you monitor the health of your business in one place. You get the peace of mind of seeing everything important at a glance. And by developing metrics to track areas of concern, it is easy to spot trends, obtain shared commitment to changing things, and improve the business in a more collaborative way.

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How To Increase Profit – The 8 Fastest Strategies 29 Jul 2020 12:20 AM (5 years ago)

This article has 8 powerful tips to increase profit margins for small business. In fact, they will increase profit for any business, from the many solopreneur businesses through to larger enterprises.

I have been coaching businesses for the past 18 years and have helped hundreds of businesses to double their sales and profits. This article contains my simple checklist for how to increase profits in a company when sales are OK, but there’s not enough net profit coming out the other side.

So let’s start with a quick overview of the 8 tips and then dig into the details for each one.

Strategy #1. Increase Prices

how to increase profit
Sometimes you need to increase profit just to make sure you get paid what you’re worth.

I know, it sounds ridiculously easy.

In fact, it’s so easy that most people in business dismiss a price rise, thinking that, “my customers would all leave if I did that”, or even “it’s just not fair to increase the prices, I couldn’t possibly do that!”.

Yet whenever my clients have done this (and over 80% have used it as a strategy) their profit margins and bottom line profits have substantially risen, without losing any good clients.

Do the maths and work out what an extra 5-10% on your price would do to increase your profit margins. Because it’s all going straight into the profit of the sale, it makes every one of your products and services more profitable and this extra income goes directly to your bottom line.

You will be surprised at just how easily you can increase profits for your business.

On of the simplest ways to think about this is to price based on your value to the customer, rather than simply charging a fixed markup. For example, if you’re an accountant providing tax advice, you could charge based on the savings your advice is making for your clients. This is known as a value-based pricing strategy.

This is one of many tips to increase profit in my book, Double Your Business.

Strategy #2. Make Sure The Work Is Done Right First Time

Many companies that do projects provide a fixed-price quote for the job. But the projects often take longer than expected. As a result, the profit margin gets eaten away.

Problems like this can often stay invisible for years, because your quotes anticipate the work getting done on time. So what should you do if you find that your business is nowhere near as profitable as you expected it to be?

To get in control of this problem, you can use job sheets to track how well each job performs against your quotes. It might look something like this…

ItemQuotedActualUnplanned Costs
Gas Boiler£1,200£1250£50
Additional parts£200£275£75
Consumables£50£95£45
Labour£320£480£160
Total£1770£2100£330
Job sheets help you track real-world costs.

In the table, you can see a simple list of items for a new gas boiler installation. But this could just as easily be a house refit, a CCTV installation, or anything else where you quote the job before doing it. In this case, every item was under-quoted and the job took longer, so the labour was 50% higher than quoted. As a result, the job cost £330 less than planned and this hits the profit for the job.

If you’re not in control of your costs, you’re not in control of your profit.

It’s the first place to look if your business is not making the profit you are expecting, especially if you’re quite busy doing a lot of work. There is almost always a gap. Sometimes the gap is so big, you can be losing money instead of making it on every job. Sometimes it’s enough to pay for a nice extra holiday every year.

It can even be the difference between just surviving versus earning a really great income. This is even more true when your business faces tough times, like a recession or downturn in the economy.

Strategy #3. Renegotiate Your Major Overheads

While not commonly considered, most landlords would prefer a tenant on a lower rent than an empty unit.  Get into a constructive negotiation with your landlord and see if you can reign in the monthly rent.

If you can’t cut your rent, have you considered buying your own business premises? This is a great way to create a new long-term asset for your business. While it’s an initial big outlay, it means that you can extract more money from your business because instead of wasting money on rent, you’ll be paying off a mortgage to buy your own commercial premises.

This is a very cool way to increase the real, bottom-line profit from your business. Even though it may not be listed as a bottom line profit increase, it’s actually money going into your own bank, rather than somebody else’s profits.

Marketing that works well is like a machine for getting new customers. If you are looking for ideas to grow your business, download my free book with 101 ideas to get more customers, sales and profit. Get 101 Ways To Get More Customers, Sales and Profit by clicking here.

Strategy #4. Change Suppliers and Eliminate Unnecessary Expenses

While this is a single strategy, there are really 3 ways to increase profit margins within this section.

  • Find cheaper suppliers, or negotiate better discounts
  • Comb through monthly spending and renegotiate, cut back or stop altogether whatever you can
  • Stop spending on memberships, software and other items that you’re not using

Profit gets battered when your costs increase without reviewing the price you pay for products and supplies.

A hidden secret in many industries is the idea of volume discounts. If your business has grown substantially, you’ll find that suppliers will be willing to give you better prices because you buy in greater volume. The more you buy, the bigger the discounts you can expect. Greater spend gives you greater negotiating power.

To start reducing your regular outgoings, look through your typical monthly spend and identify the biggest bills. Who are the suppliers with whom you spend the most money? You may find that you can standardise more of your spending through single suppliers, to give you more leverage with them. You may also find that you can switch suppliers to find a better deal.

If you have a growing business, this is especially important.

The bigger you are, the more you’ll be spending with some of your suppliers. A good target to set for saving money on suppliers is to cut 10-20%. This comes from doing some research and shopping around a little, too.

The other thing to do is eliminate spending wherever possible.

For example, many business owners have software subscriptions for lots of different Software as a Service (SaaS) products for things like team communication, HR, project management, planning, social media management, online marketing tools and so on. If you’re not using this ‘software stack’ in your business, it can quickly add up to a lot of wasted costs.

Even if you are using them, unless you’re making the most of them, it can be smarter to stop if you need to improve your profits.

Of course, it’s not limited to just software costs. Do you have phone contracts that are no longer needed? Maintenance contracts for items you no longer have? Are you over-insured (many businesses are!). Do you belong to lots of membership clubs that you don’t really use, or from which you don’t extract a great deal of value?

The list is huge, so get to work.

Take a fine-tooth comb through your regular costs. Simplify your spending and save money wherever you can. Every penny that you save is instantly a penny more profit going directly to your bottom line. While this may be detailed work, it is exactly how to increase profit from your business without having to increase sales at all.

This trick of doing a cost review can save hundreds, even thousands of pounds every month, making a real difference to many small businesses.

Strategy #5. Sack Expensive Customers

You know the kind of customer that calls 3 times a week, spends half an hour moaning about your prices, fights every invoice, pays late and expects special favours?  They’re costing you money.

Look at the profit per hour of your worst customers. If there are some that really not profitable at all for you, have a discussion with them to explain that you need to change the way you work with them.

You can either ask them to pay more, if you sell services. Or you can reduce the level of service you provide to them.

Another thought is to offer them different services via cross-selling, up-selling or down-selling into something that’s more profitable for you. How you increase profit from any given customer can be flexible – just make sure you’re not working for free.

Ultimately, if you’re selling products and services without any profit, you’ll rapidly get into trouble. To protect your gross margin, you must take action. Even if that action is drastic – and let these unprofitable customers go.

While this may seem difficult, it is even more difficult to explain to your staff that the business is losing money and that you will have to let somebody go. It’s an awful position to get into, so make sure you don’t suffer in silence. If you need to make more money from certain customers, deal with them one way – or the other!

Strategy #6. Use Processes To Eliminate Costly Mistakes

If you waste a lot of your time fire-fighting and dealing with issues, you are wasting a lot of time and energy.

Growing your business means being efficient and smart with your time.

Investing the time to systemise your business will mean that people know what to do, even when you’re not around to answer questions.

Systems eliminate mistakes before they happen, make life simpler for your staff and take the drama out of the day to day business.

They’re also a great way to increase profits; when you make no mistakes, expensive waste is eliminated, making you more efficient and profitable.

Strategy #7. Increase Sales Overall

Sometimes a business is not very profitable because the fixed costs are just too high for the volume of sales. Once you’ve trimmed your expenses as far as you can go, the next item on your “how to increase profit” to-do list is to make more sales.

There are hundreds of ways that you can increase turnover, grow your customer base, produce more sales and add to your profit margins. If making sales is a weakness for your business, developing a more commercial approach may be exactly what you need to do. Perhaps consider working with a business coach to help you develop strategies to increase sales and profits would be a smart move.

Strategy #8. Introduce A Higher-End, Luxury Product or Service

A clever way to increase profit margins in your business is to offer a luxury or specialist product that’s attractive to the top 20% of your customers. 

Offering the best service and product in your business is a great unique selling point when it’s done well.

It’s what Apple do – selling just 10% of the global smartphones by volume, but picking up some 70% of the available profit. Less work, more profit, on a massive scale.

In terms of an everyday example, just think about car manufacturers.

They offer variants of their vehicles – a basic model and also luxury and sports variants. Even washing machines come in basic and top of the range models, with the differences being minor to their cost-base, while giving a massive lift to profit margins of the final products.

This allows them to increase prices further than usual, giving them better margins for the same basic product.

In fact, many businesses focus on the highest value customers completely and become highly profitable as a result.

How To Increase Profit Margins – Use A Simple Dashboard…

After following the tips for how to increase profits for small business, it’s essential to keep a close eye on your profitability. The best way to do this is with some kind of regular reporting. A business dashboard is exactly this.

You can use a dashboard to track important headline figures like sales revenues, gross margins, running expenses and so on with graphics.

The beauty of graphics is their ability to simplify the numbers, showing you quickly and easily what’s really going on inside your business. In this video, an Excel spreadsheet expert explains how to create a simple visual dashboard for your business.

If it’s a bit complicated for you, you could possibly hire an expert from somewhere like PeoplePerHour.com to help you. They’d probably be able to do a tailored version of this for no more than £75-£200.

Above all, to increase profit you have to do some work with your numbers. Your business can definitely increase profits, when you take just a little bit of action.

Marketing that works well is like a machine for getting new customers. If you are looking for ideas to grow your business, download my free book with 101 ideas to get more customers, sales and profit. Get 101 Ways To Get More Customers, Sales and Profit by clicking here.

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Cash Flow Forecast – Crazy £60K Case Study & Guide 12 Jun 2020 8:27 AM (5 years ago)

One fear above all others makes business owners lose sleep. It’s the same fear your cash flow forecast can fix…

The fear of running out of money.

The cash flow forecast helps you to sleep in peace by giving you confidence in how much money your business will have in the bank within the next few weeks or months.

In this article you’ll find cash flow forecasting videos with examples.

It’s just a plan, of course, so it’s not going to be 100% accurate. Nevertheless, it’s a key tool to get control over your finances.

Often called a cash flow projection, it is your best tool to keep your bank account in the black.

A cash flow forecast is a plan that shows you how much money you expect your business to have during a given period.

Cash flow forecast diagram - showing money flowing in and out of the business
It’s easy to take cashflow for granted, right until you’ve got no money left. Make sure people pay you on time and in full. Put enough away for taxes. And don’t spend more than you make.

In practice, most business owners suffer a lot of sleepless nights because they don’t use cash flow forecasting to help them plan and manage the money in their business.

This article will help you take control, accurately predict cash flow, and sleep better at night.

What Is Cash Flow Forecasting?

Cash flow is the movement of money in and out of your business. Often people get confused and want to increase profit when their focus needs to be on cash flow.

It’s easy to get confused by accountant-speak, that special language that some accountants seem to talk.

The easy way to think about cash flow is that it’s only about moving money in and out of your business. It’s about receiving and spending cash, via cards, bank transfers, cash payments and any other method that results in a movement of money.

For example, if your business borrows £20,000 as a loan from the bank, cash flows into your business when the bank transfers the cash to you.

As you spend money and make repayments to the loan over the following months, that cash flows out of your business.

This cycle of cash flowing in and out is repeated across your business as money from sales flows in and all the costs of your business flow out.

Your cash flow projection is a simple way to predict how much your business will have in the bank at any moment in time.

You can use a cash flow forecast to help you manage the business.

If your business allows people to pay 30 days after invoice, this creates a delay in the cash flow. You make the sale, but get paid later.

It’s only when your customer settles the account by paying the amount on the invoice that the money ‘flows’ into your business.

During this time, your business will have to cover any costs associated with making the sale and staying open. The money your business needs to keep running is called your working capital.

So it’s really simple – cash flow describes the inflows and outflows of the actual money.

The Questions Your Cash Flow Forecast Answers…

Cash flow forecasting is a way of answering the questions that might otherwise keep you awake at night.

“Will I have enough money at the end of the month to pay myself after I’ve paid my staff?”

“Will the sales we are making be enough to cover the tax bills?”

These are typical questions that cause a great deal of stress and anxiety.

By planning and predicting the movements of money, your cash flow forecast takes away uncertainty.

You will become more confident in your financial position and that goes a long way to eliminating uncertainty, fear and anxiety.

Life is hard enough for business owners. A cash flow forecast will reduce stress and make it a little easier. It’s well worth your time to learn how to do this.

Why Is A Cash-Flow Forecast Important?

The great value of cash flow projections is to give you a ‘financial crystal ball’ for your bank account.

Imagine that you are estimating cash flows and realise that you’re going to run into overdraft at the end of the month.

Armed with this information, you have the chance to look at ways to avoid running out of money.

From the above list of actions, you can appreciate the benefit that cash flow forecasts deliver to you.

They provide a virtual safety net with more time to act to protect your business when income does not come in as quickly as expenditure goes out.

Every year, banks produce reports that examine the reasons for business failures.

The number one cause of business failures every time is problems with cash flow – i.e. running out of money. There is no need for so many of these failures when you could have projected cash flow accurately and taken action to improve things.

Case-Study: From Overdraft To £60K In The Black

Here’s a real-world example of how cash flow projections improved the financial strength of a small manufacturing business within a matter of a couple of months.

Manufacturing business X sold an average of £1,000 per customer to around 600 independent retailers.

On the surface, the business was very successful. Sales were at their highest ever level and the products were all profitable. Their balance sheet showed healthy sales, but that payments were slow to come in.

The simple truth? Too many customers were very slow to pay their invoices.

Sound familiar?

The business was running in overdraft, effectively subsidising these late-payers. Every quarter and at the end of the tax year, there was a real battle to find the money to pay their tax bills.

Behind the scenes, the two directors were suffering a lot of stress and getting fed up with it all.

Despite doing great work and growing a happy, large customer base, there never seemed to be any money in the bank.

For one of the directors, the financial strain was causing enormous tension in her shoulders.

Painful muscle spasms disrupted her sleep every night.

Her neck muscles were so stiff that her head tilted involuntarily towards her shoulder; she couldn’t straighten up even if she tried.

She was getting short-tempered and grumpy. Proof positive that running a small business can be bad for your health!

Yet business should not be this hard!

Forecasting cash flow highlighted the problem very clearly. 40% of their customers were paying late, and 25% were paying very late indeed, often 3 months or more after receiving the goods.

Meanwhile, when the business bought raw materials, they had to pay promptly for them, or suppliers would put their account on hold.

Over time, this disparity between income and expenditure had grown into a major issue.

Despite a profitable and healthy annual turnover of £600,000, they were owed £125,000 by customers who had received their orders but not yet paid the bills.

Once we got their cashflow forecasting setup, it clearly illustrated the massive scale of the problem.

If everybody had paid on time, there would be some £80,000 in the bank.

Instead, the business was running continually into overdraft.

When it was time to pay taxes, they had to go deeper into the red.

It was painful, quite literally with the stress it was causing.

Once we could see what was happening thanks to proper cash flow forecasting, we could easily fix it.

The biggest change happened when we introduced a way to classify customers according to their past payment history.

Those customers who always paid on time were allowed to continue with 30-day credit terms.

They were great customers and there was no reason to penalise them for the bad behaviour of others.

But the cash flow forecast showed just how much of a problem the persistent late-paying customers had become.

My clients hired in a financial controller who chased these overdue invoices relentlessly until the customers settled their accounts.

From this point forwards, habitual late-payers were made to pay via card at the point of ordering.

While they all protested about this change, the manufacturing business stuck to their guns.

After a few weeks of grumbling about the changes, it all settled back to normal.

No customers lost, just far better cash-flow.

The business continues to be in a strong financial position because they are still projecting cash flow to help them manage their finances over 10 years later.

How To Do A Cash Flow Forecast For Your Business

This video shows a bookkeeper explaining how to build a cash flow forecast using Microsoft Excel. I think you’ll find it very helpful – it shows simple ‘Money In’ and ‘Money Out’ sections, and allows you to plan for all the types of income and outgoings in your business.

Creating it for yourself in this way is far better than grabbing a standard template.

Why? Because you can built it suit your business exactly. When you start with an existing cash flow forecast template, it’s easy to mess it up by adding new lines that don’t get included in the formulas.

Cash Flow Forecast Template

Using the instructions in this video above, create your own cash flow template that’s completely tailored to your business. Remember to factor in late-payers and people who are likely to never pay if you want to get an accurate picture of what money is coming in.

It’s also wise to remember the tax bills – the old saying that only two things in life are certain – death and taxes – is as true for humans as it is for a business with poor cash flow!

It’s really common for businesses to forget about the tax bill until it’s due. Many people fall foul of this and your cash flow forecast is a great way to prepare yourself for the inevitable!

Cash flow problems can be a real barrier to growth in business, starving the business of the cash it needs to survive and preventing investment in improvements and innovation.

Use your own cash flow projection template to get more control over your business finances.

So now you have an idea how to project your cash flow, here is a diagram showing some of the problems of drawing up a cash flow forecast:

Common Causes of Cash Flow Problems

cash flow problems
When cash flow runs tight, it’s important to fix the root cause.

Lots of things can contribute to problems with cash flow. While you can identify problems when you use the projected cash flow template, you can also use this list to help you quickly find and plug holes in your cash flow management…

Cash Flow Projection For Business Plan

Putting together an estimated projection of cash flow to go into your business plan will give you insights into how the business is likely to work.

Just remember that if you’re working on a startup that most businesses tend to project cash flow optimistically, and so never achieve what is written down.

This is probably the hardest thing to do – estimating how much cash you’ll have left as a startup.

While it is an important exercise, there’s a useful golden rule or two that can help when you’re running a business for the first time.

Always have 3 months running costs on hand. 6 months if you want to be really secure. It buys you breathing space should something unexpectedly difficult happen.

This provides you with funds if the economy is in trouble and buys you breathing space to turn things around if it all goes a bit sour at some point.

Do You Need To Do Frequent Cash Flow Re-Forecasting?

Your cash flow forecast is an estimate for how your bank balance will move over the coming days, weeks or months. The frequency with which you update it should reflect the money cycle within your own business.

Think in terms of how quickly money moves through your business. The faster the money moves, the more frequently you should update your cash flow forecast. Let’s just explore that a little more with some examples.

Essentially the freqyuency with which you re-forecast your cash flow should reflect the speed with which money moves through your business. The faster the movement, the more frequently you should forecast. Money going out and not coming is the simple cause of all cash flow problems. Tracking this regularly keeps you in control.

Summary Thoughts

Forecasting of cash flow is a critical exercise that gives you more control of your business.

If you create your cash flow charts in a spreadsheet, like in the video above, it’s a straightforward task to add a cash flow chart to the page as well.

When you have project cash flow statements for the weeks ahead, you can keep track of performance vs expectations.

When there is a gap between the two, you can identify the specific discrepancies and take action to ensure that your bank balance matches the figures in your cash flow forecasting template.

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Business Growth In Recession – 5 Brilliantly Simple Ideas… 2 Apr 2020 5:23 AM (5 years ago)

It starts in the mind…

Business growth in recession starts in your mind, not the numbers, strategies or economy.

There’s a motivational postcard I once saw with a soaring eagle. The caption below it read “your attitude determines your altitude”. There is truth in this statement, no matter how twee it may sound.

business growth in recession
Business performance is down to you.

I recently met a man with a manufacturing business.

He was really fed up with business – he makes great quality product and even supplies the trade, who label it up with their own name. 

But he’s seen falling sales and from his body language is feeling pretty depressed and fed up with his lot in life.

He told me, and he really believed this, that it’s all the government’s fault. 

In fact he said, “until the government changes things, manufacturing will continue to die out in this country”.

The truth is that there are strategies to recession-proof your business.

But before we look at them, let’s take a step back from this, and look at the pattern of the economy for the past 30 years.

Was There Any Business Growth In Recessions We’ve Already Been Through?

  • We had a big recession in the early 80’s
  • There was a recession in the early 90’s
  • Things were slow around 2000
  • There was the huge financial crisis of 2007
  • Now we’ve got another one on the way from the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

This cycle repeats itself every ten to twenty years.  So surprise surprise, we’ve got another one! 

These things are part of a cycle we continually go through. 

And of course, some businesses do well, some do badly and most ust go on more or less as normal in recessions.

But manufacturing has special challenges because of labour costs – so the cheapest place to make things is normally where the cheap labour is. 

No real surprise then that so many companies have moved production to China. 

But these things have been a long time coming – there are forecasts of this happening from over 25 years ago. 

Download a helpful free guide with 21 powerful strategies to increase sales in 30 days for business growth in recession. If you run a business and need some ideas to get things moving quicker, it’s exactly what you need. Just click here to get it.

But what has this guy done since then? 

He ignored the forecasts. Preferring to blame the government for the lack of business growth in recession, instead of making it happen.

Carried on with his own way regardless, hoping the world will stick with him.  

He could have outsourced his manufacture, or moved his factory overseas, or heavily automated to reduce labour costs. 

Lots of companies own factories abroad, in China, Latvia, Lithuania and so on. 

With lower costs and high quality education, it’s not difficult to set up a great office or factory overseas.  That would be a pretty good strategy for business growth in recession.

You can even make overseas production a feature of selling – one of my clients did this for engineering goods and got an incredible response from a direct mail letter.

Smart Vs Slow-Moving (A.K.A. Winners vs Losers)

Smart businesses keep themselves lean and fit and are able to react quickly and positively to market conditions. 

Slow-moving businesses get caught in the belief that it’s easy to succeed – just keep turning the handle, never doing anything different or special.

Then when business goes downhill, you blame the government or the state of the economy, and you’re off the hook. 

What a cop-out! 

“Oh, business is going down the pan, the economy is to blame.  There was nothing I could do.” 

Can you imagine that spirit in the Second World War? 

The event does not define the result – your reaction does.

“They’ve bombed my house, I’m making a white flag now, the Germans have won, Churchill should have saved my town, but he’s useless!”. 

What a load of twaddle!

It’s great to blame somebody or something else for all your problems, because it absolves you of responsibility for it personally. 

But how does it help you? 

You spend your energy on bitterness and moaning, rather than taking responsibility for your situation and doing something about it. 

You’re far better off investing your time figuring out what you CAN do to change things for the better, not moaning about what’s happened outside your control.

How did a company like Phones 4 U, John Caudwell’s old company, achieve business growth in recession, doubling its sales every year, even through the awfully slow early 90’s? 

He worked twice as hard, that’s how.  And not just harder, but smarter.

Then he sold for a cool £1.24 billion while it was still a strong sector, avoiding the collapse in mobile phone businesses that came later.

It wasn’t his business when it folded in 2014 at the back end of the financial crisis.

Strategies To Use – Instead Of Feeling Like A Victim

In fact, whenever you hear somebody saying, “business is horrible, it’s the economy”, ask them what they’re doing different to make their business more competitive. 

And don’t let them tell you there’s nothing that can be done, that they are a victim of circumstance, because there’s a whole load of things you can do differently…

That’s just five specific items – there is so much more that can be done. 

I’ve got clients who are still recruiting and growing at the moment, despite the awful general conditions. 

In this economy, how on earth can they do it? 

Because they took actions fast and early, while keeping a focus on their numbers.

Yes, business is tougher at the moment, but just doing the same things and hoping for different results is crazy. 

Business has been pretty easy for the past 5 years, so if you were only doing OK before, you need to step up now. 

It’s imperative that you improve what you’re doing, quickly, because it won’t be good enough in a recession.

If your business keeps doing the same it’s always done, you’ll almost certainly see a drop in sales and you might end up going bust. 

On the other hand, if you act now and make changes for the better, you will give yourself a better than average chance of pulling away from the pack. 

You might even double your sales like Caudwell did through the 90’s recession.

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Two Types of Small Business Marketing – Right and Wrong… 22 Jun 2019 3:33 AM (6 years ago)

what marketing strategy for your business?

There are two broad types of marketing and in this article you’ll learn what they are, and why you should always focus on the second type – direct-response marketing – if you run your own business.

Don’t Copy Big-Brand Advertising…

Small businesses often copy tactics they see being used in ads by big businesses. That’s a great pity, because the vast majority of large corporate advertising is about building a brand which will be attractive to people in an almost imperceptible emotional way.

Branding is effective and works great if you’ve got a huge budget to blow – or if you’re very clever with constructing your brand. If not, you’re better off doing direct-response marketing.

Of course it’s interesting to look at what the big corporations do, but you have keep in mind the reason that it works for them and why it’s not a good general approach for your marketing.

Marketing Owes a Lot to a Scientist Feeding Dogs

In the 1890’s. Ivan Pavlov, a Hungarian physiologist, was investigating salivation in dogs when they were being fed. He noticed that they would begin to salivate when he entered the room before feeding them.

They were connecting his presence in the room with food. The saliva was produced in anticipation of being fed. It was the emotion causing the reaction, not the food itself. The thought of having food made the dogs react as if there was food right in front of them.

And Humans Have Similar Reactions…

And it turns out that we humans are the same. You get excited and can react in anticipation of things, from food, to politics, religion, the next episode of your favourite TV show or film series, and so on.

You experience emotions associated with something before it happens – desire, anger or whatever.

Our kids get excited by the thought of Christmas or birthday presents.

It’s All Down To Dopamine, One of our Happy Hormones…

They may have absolutely no idea what they’re getting, but the Dopamine in their brain, an important hormone, is triggered by the expectation. Marketers for large corporations started using this connection to associate pleasurable feelings with their products.

These big companies know the power of reminding you of their brand and the pleasures associated with it.

The Mug & Chocolate Easter Egg Is Programming Your Brain…

It’s why I hate having mugs with chocolate brands on them. The bright logos and colours associated with sweets become linked to the body’s sugar cravings. So when you drink a cup of tea from that mug a few months later, your brain is going to start the craving cycle.

These big corporations are very smart and this mechanism is very powerful. Why do you think so many make Easter eggs with branded mugs? They get you to buy a piece of advertising from them that then sits in your cupboard and makes you crave more of their product. Brilliant. Or is it manipulative? Interesting, nevertheless.

That, then, is what the big brands do to create a strong emotional desire in their customers to keep buying their brand.

Small Businesses Cannot Afford to Copy McDonalds or Coca-Cola’s Marketing Approach

Coca-Cola spends something like $2 billion every year on marketing. They do this to keep their brand colours, the happy smiley images and sounds of Coca-Cola in front of their customers all year round.

It’s the repetition that makes it work – lots and lots of people seeing the brand over and over again makes for a huge market of customers.

Small businesses cannot afford to do such broad-brush advertising and – let’s be honest – don’t normally have the sophistication or organisation to maintain the brand image and create such a powerful response as the big corporations.

For Starters, Don’t Use Your Business Name As A Headline…

But without any real knowledge of marketing strategy, small business owners blow thousands they can ill-afford on similar ads.

They use their business name as the headline for an advert and wonder why they don’t hear the ching-ching of new sales flooding through.

As a result the ads are turned off after a few weeks and the business owner decides that kind of advertising is rubbish for them.

The Best Marketing For Small Businesses Sells Directly…

A definition that’s often used to describe good marketing is that it is ‘salesmanship in print’.

This quote dates back to around 1911 and has stood the test of time.

Of course, print has now changed to all kinds of media – still including print but now we also have the radio, TV and of course the Internet across a whole slew of devices like computers, smart phones and tablets.

When you approach your marketing with the view that it is salesmanship rather than simply ‘getting your name out there’, it starts to alter your approach.

Great Salespeople Produce 10 times the Customers of Average Salespeople.

And while great salespeople are also hard to find, the same is true of great advertising. It takes real knowledge and skill to apply direct response techniques in order to get results.

But when you get it right – wow – it delivers incredible results, supporting the growth of businesses from nothing into the millions within a few short years (like Airworld Tours, who added almost 2 million pounds during a year on my Double Your Business Programme).

A little earlier in this article, I mentioned that an advert should never use your business name as a title.

How Does Direct Response Advertising Look Different?

The most effective ads for producing a sale or enquiry for your business will feature a number of elements, often described with the acronym AIDA…

Grab Attention

To get eyeballs on your advert. Most people will ignore your advert altogether – the job of your headline is to draw them in. It’s worth spending time to get this right – because otherwise nobody will read your ads at all.

Hold their Interest

People read a newspaper in a matter of 15-30 minutes. Obviously they skip through, concentraing on the parts that interest them. You had better make your adverts interesting and engaging or people won’t bother finishing them.

Build Desire

People only buy what they want, so your advert has to make the reader want what you’re selling. If it fails at this stage, the ad won’t work.

Call to Action

Clear communication is essential when you’re selling – you want to leave nothing to chance. At the end of your advert you need to tell people what to do next. Do they visit a website? Click a link to put something into a basket? How do they go to checkout? This is your Call to Action.

The buying process must be easy and transparent so that people can flow from the headline of your advert to passing over money or making an enquiry without falling out halfway through.

The Secret is that Your Whole Marketing Strategy Must be Designed to Sell, Sell, Sell.

If you take the time to learn and apply this type of marketing in your own business, your results will be transformed.

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The Essential Traits for Business Success – 2 Can Be Developed… 12 Aug 2018 5:24 AM (7 years ago)

Are you cruising or performing at your true potential?

Do you sometimes feel like you are not performing to your true potential?

But can’t quite figure out what’s wrong or not quite working for you?

If so, you’re definitely not alone, and this post will explain the essential traits for business success and show that you can increase your performance and grow your business faster.

I’ve been fascinated by psychology and trying to understand how my own mind works for the last 30 years, maybe longer.

I’ve read self-help books, done a bunch of personality profiles, attended several intensive training courses and even got a couple of certificates along the way.

But I was always left with a feeling that the training or books missed the point.

An awful lot of self-help training is opinion.  It’s not science.  And it doesn’t work.  It sells books, courses and makes people famous.  But it’s not science, it has not been proven and it’s not repeatable.

Somebody achieves something and tells you that’s the way you should do it to.

But I’m not those other people.  Neither are you.

I wanted a formula that would be more universal. Something that would work for anybody – me, you, my clients.

A method to allow you to perform to your own maximum levels.

And despite years of interest in the psychology of performance, I was frustrated that there was nothing quite hitting the spot for me.

Then around the start of the year I was chatting with a client who told me about a Canadian psychology professor called Jordan Peterson (I talk about some really cool stuff with clients).

There’s a ton of material on YouTube with Peterson giving lectures on various aspects of performance.

I watched hour upon hour of it.  One particular teaching struck me as being the key to performance.

In it, he talked about personality and how there are only five traits that all psychologists can agree upon.

The Five Big Traits of Personality

His teaching is based upon what can be clearly demonstrated through tests on groups of real people.

He ignores theories that have not been proven through substantial testing.

And it turns out there’s only 1 set of personality traits that can be identified in almost every study into personality.

They’re known in the psychology community as The Big 5 Traits…

Openness – a scale that ranges from cautious and consistent through and open to new experiences, it describes how likely you are to be adventurous in your choices.

Conscientiousness – a scale covering carelessness/easygoing to organised and efficient, it describes the tendency or drive to develop positive and productive habits.

Extraversion – a scale that goes from shy and retiring to gregarious and outgoing, it describes how likely you are to strike up conversation with complete strangers.

Agreeableness – a scale from friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached, this trait describes how argumentative you tend to be.

Neuroticism – a scale that describes how sensitive and emotionally stable you are, it helps to describe how cool and level-headed you tend to be in your daily work and life.

One Personal Trait You Cannot (Easily) Change…

During one of Peterson’s videos he said something that really struck me as the key to performing at your best.

He said that 3 factors above all else will determine your success in life.

One of these is sadly something we get given or not – intelligence.

Intelligent people as a general rule, tend to be the best performers.

No real surprise there.  And while intelligence is not fixed, it’s not a fast or simple process to get smarter either.

But lots of people have already figured out how to grow businesses like yours to become bigger anyway.  You don’t need to double your IQ, you just need to follow proven methods to get the results (like you get in the Double Your Business coaching programme, for example)

But intelligence is not the whole story.

It’s not just knowing what to do.  It’s doing it.

You are not condemned if you’re not the smartest person.  And you’re not guaranteed success if you are smart.  It’s more nuanced and complicated than that.

Because the chances are that you are not performing to the extent of your full capability –  there’s a lot more to your true potential.

Two Traits You Can Change to Unlock Peak Performance

It turns out that two traits from the Big 5 are massively important to your own performance.

First comes Neuroticism.

The more of an emotional roller-coaster you regularly ride, the less predictable your day to day performance will be.

To be more productive, you need a way to calm that inner turmoil and become more grounded every day.

More grounded means you think more clearly. Get more done. Behave better with other people. Less moody means more productive. And you’ll be happier with yourself, too.

The second trait that matters for achievement is Conscientiousness.

Getting stuff done, turning up in your own life, your business, your friendships, consistently, has massive importance.

Think positive habits and you are well on your way to understanding this trait.

Think being organised and ticking off items from your to-do list every single day and again, you are close to the mark.

But topping the charts in either of these traits is not the goal – the goal is to be more productive.

So we just need to get each to a point that supports your productivity and allows you to thrive.

Because frankly we get one life to live and if we’re not thriving but bumbling our way through, it’s hardly doing justice to our potential, is it?

If you think that you may be your own worst enemy in business, that your own psychology may be playing against you, then perhaps we should have a chat about working together to grow your business.

As a bonus, I’ll tell you how you can increase these two essential traits and improve your productivity.

And if we’re a fit for working together, we can talk about how that might look, too.

Just fill out the form here and you can book into my diary for a chat.

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How to Avoid The 3 Flats of Business 16 Jun 2018 12:00 AM (7 years ago)

Your business goes slower when it’s got a flat.

When you work hard to build and grow your business, it’s a bitter pill to swallow when your business just gets stuck and won’t go any faster.

It’s like a car with a flat wheel – you spend all your time and energy just trying to go in a straight line.

There’s no way you’re going any faster until the flat is fixed.

My coaching programme looks at the 3 C’s that make up the DNA of your business.

Cash, Customers and Capacity.

Get these in balance and set for growth and the magic happens.

But when one gets out of kilter, it’s like your business has a flat.

If that’s happening to you – business stuck or growing slower than you want, read on to learn how you can outfox the 3 flats of business.

The Flat-Out Business (Not Enough Capacity)

Jon’s property management business was running him ragged.

He joined my coaching programme to help with growth, but was already working long days and too many weekends just to keep up.

There were too many things being forgotten, ignored or missed.

Too many excuses from his staff, too many mistakes being made.

And because of all this, too many complaints from his customers – tenants and landlords.

He was tired and yet still wanting growth.

It was not going to happen unless he dealt with his biggest problem – being Flat-Out.

There’s no way a business that’s running you and your staff ragged can grow any further until you sort that out.

This, then, is the first challenge when your business is flat-out.

And it’s what the Capacity circle of my coaching programme addresses.

Increasing your efficiency and reducing your stress.

Introducing more effective methods of work, establishing you as a more effective leader and manager to get your team to perform, and getting the work done more efficiently so it’s more profitable, too.

It’s no surprise his business grew 4 times over in the next couple of years, really. We just needed to create headroom for that growth.

The Flat-Broke Business (Not Enough Cash)

Jim’s delivery business was very busy, but there was never much profit left at the end of the month.

Despite the great reputation of his business, lots of loyal customers and a reliable team he’d built to handle deliveries, he was struggling to make ends meet properly.

When your business makes you work hard, but you make no money regardless, it grinds you down. Eventually you start wishing you had a job instead.

Energy and enthusiasm wane and die.

Phew, it’s a good job that Jim didn’t reach that point – because once you’re over the edge, you may as well shut up shop and go get a job.

When Jim joined the coaching programme, it was clear that his business was Flat-Broke.

It was busy, but making no money.

His Economic Engine had stalled, as author Jim Collin’s book, Good To Great, might say.

So we reconfigured things.

Looked at his cost base, his services, his pricing and the customers he was attracting.

We had talked about mindset and the idea that sometimes people resist earning money (yes, you read that right – sometimes people resist making more money because they’ve got some crap going on inside their heads that stops it).

And we stepped things up a little, re-engineered Jim’s business to make decent money, instead of just getting by.

A few months later his profits were massively up.

He was smiling a lot more, too.

Now I hear he has a sports car and even helps other people in business to grow, too.

Nice.

If your business is Flat-Broke, the root cause may not be a lack of customers. It may be that your Economic Engine needs tuning.

The Flat-Line Business (Not Enough Customers)

Tom’s business was stuck.

He’d tried all the internet marketing advice, spent a load of time, energy and a fair bit of money creating landing pages, emails, offers and paying for traffic.

He sent out a leaflet to thousands of houses.

Got a few takers, but once he took the costs into account, it was just not financially viable to repeat it.

No dice.

Not enough sales.

His business was Flat-Lined…  Not growing…  And he really wanted more customers.

You get the picture…

So we had a look at his target audience.

Started thinking about what he was offering in his leaflet.

And decided both the offer and the target were great.

But his leaflet was pretty awful.

So we replaced it – with a letter.

Yep, it was a two page letter too. So long and boring that nobody’s going to read that, are they?

We sharpened it, made every word work harder.

Kept it at two pages, though.

Then delivered a couple of thousand, as if they were leaflets, but in an envelope with clever text typed on the front.

Measuring the return from that campaign, we had a winner.

He was not going to stay Flat-Lined for long.

Tens of thousands of leaflets later, his business has more than doubled.

Adding almost a million to his sales.

Pushing him into the top 2% of all companies in the UK.

Did you know that?

Official government stats show only 2% of businesses operate at £1m or above. Fact.

I’ve helped a bunch of them get there.

Perhaps you’ll be next, if that’s what floats your boat.

What’s the cost of struggling on with the flats in your business?

Missing out on opportunities and sales you could be making.

Isn’t it time you decided to grow, once and for all?

Get in touch here for a 15-minute Double Your Business Audit.

Let’s figure out your Flat.

And put in place a strategy to change the DNA of your business, to fix it and make it whole.

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