I am often asked to help business’ transform their fortunes, from loss-making to profitable going concerns.
In this article I’ll share with you one of the many tried and trusted ways that have helped businesses working across multiple industries, worldwide. This has the potential to generate huge profits for you and does not necessarily require huge capital investment.
Most businesses appear to be stuck in a rut. They continue trading without any real direction. As a result, they are always susceptible to rapid changes in the market. Their ability to adapt is questionable and therefore they are playing a high-risk game of business. One of the biggest reasons for this is the lack of direction provided by the management/owners of the business. They can be so busy working in the business that they are not taking a step away and looking at the business, its direction, its strengths and weaknesses etc.
The first step to transform your business is to literally lock yourself away from distraction for at least half a day. Switch off your mobile phone and for once allow yourself the luxury of time to think. This is known as working ON the business rather than working IN the business. For some this could be the first time you have worked strategically in your business since it was established.
If you can, do this with a few of your staff so that you have a good meeting of minds. This allows the freedom to generate ideas good or bad, which can lead to changes in the way you deliver. Ultimately, these sessions can generate so many ideas that you find the business has moved from stagnation into a forward-thinking, profit-generating pioneer. But, let’s take a step back rather than get ahead of ourselves.
Step 1 – Evaluation
You need to ask the toughest questions if you are to achieve breakthroughs. Evaluate your markets, your product/services offered, your customer base, your team. Be ruthless but in a fair way. Your need to be clear what data you are gathering and why. You may find you know very little about your business when you do this. Perhaps one or two obvious mistakes will become apparent, and from this decisions can be made to create change.
Step 2 – The Market
Now you have data on your current performance, you need to look at the market. What are the trends? What information do have right now that can possibly impact your business either this year or within the next three years? Will these changes be opportunities for growth or signal disaster? Regardless of the answer, changes need to be made to ensure the impact is minimal.
Step 3 – Time For Change?
Again, you are gathering data. Now it’s time to ask more of yourself and your team. How are you going to re-define your business, its offering, its markets to ensure you have a future? What benefits, results, advantage are your current customer base wanting, and do you really give them the highest and best return for their patronage? Are you, as a business, really focused on achieving what your customers want and need or are you so internally driven that you are failing to see it?
This is your time to make the biggest changes, so be tough! What would like customers to be saying about your business? What would you like competitors to be saying about your business? What would you want your staff to be saying about your business? These are BIG questions because they help refine or transform what you may or may not become in the future. My goal for you is to get really excited about your future! I want you to wake up excited, ready to begin your quest for a better, more prosperous, more enriching, engaging future where you change the game of business to be on your terms. If you’re not excited about this then you have to question whether you should either be in business or whether you have undertaken this process correctly.
How are you going to deliver these changes? How many obvious, or off the wall business partners do you need to be able to deliver your new vision? How are you going to market this to attract more customers, or the right customers? Where must you be visible to spread the word? In fact, let’s change the phrase to gospel? Why? Because this word signifies there is passion and energy behind the message that is unstoppable. Can you say, hand on heart that your current marketing messages deliver this?
Step 4 – Plan & Action
OK, you now have a huge amount of data. You now need to plan your year to deliver all of this. You should be incredibly impatient to get started. You should also be thinking how on earth you are going to make the changes and fit the time into your current day so that you are doing something EVERY day to make these changes happen. Recruit key people into your team and devise plans together so that they are also working towards achieving your new goals.
Step 5 – Monitor
You need to monitor your team’s performance to make the changes you set in the agreed timescales. You also need to monitor and constantly question what impact these changes are having on your business every week and month. This way, if you see any negative impact, you can react quickly. Additionally, any positive changes can be fed back to your team and this may act as a catalyst to speeding up the rate of change.
With any business, it is important that somebody leads with passion, excitement, drive, enthusiasm. You have to lead by example. Do this and you will be on the path to success. Enjoy the journey and why not contact me and let me know how successful you’ve become!
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