Archive for category: Business Building

This is the third blog in the series of ways in which you can find and attract people around you – customers, staff, suppliers, referrers and collaborators.

Understand the difference between business and social settings

Networking must become second nature to you.  When you are in business you are always looking.  You may not be actively seeking but you are never clocked off either.  You must tailor your networking responses to suit the occasion.  Whilst you are always alert, there are occasions where you need to develop a light touch.  You don’t need to be shoving your business cards in people’s faces at every opportunity.  For example, I went to a wedding recently and when the people at my table found out that I was a financial planner, I was bombarded me with questions about income protection and insurance in superannuation.  I wasn’t overtly selling but I didn’t miss an opportunity to educate them.  So I answered their questions and then two days later a couple of them contacted me via Facebook, tagged some wedding photos and invited me to coffee to talk further.  Others will find me by asking the bride and groom when they need me but the point is – I know who they are, where they live and what they do for a living and the names and ages of their children.  That’s what a friendly and lively lunch conversation can achieve. 

If you seek employees, develop a careers page

Growing companies offer the best opportunities.  Good employees are always looking for new challenges.  They know that in a developing and growing company, new ground will be broken often and many career opportunities will be created.  That’s a good reason for them to go to work every day.  If your business exudes excitement and has a solid foundation, then to many prospective employees, you are a preferred employer.  They will not want to do boring work for a well established ‘plateau company’ and wait 5 years for a promotion.  So do a makeover on your internet presence and add an attractive careers page.  This means more than just advertising jobs.  Share your vision and tell people the mission of your business.  Give them 10 irresistible reasons why they should be working for you.  For example, talk about the company, the direction, the working conditions, the growth, your innovative products, the challenges and so on.  If you create the magnet, people will be attracted and their details will stick with you – whether you are currently hiring or not.

Until next time!

Gary

Even if you are not looking to hire people, you are always looking to attract customers and build a team of referrers and collaborators around you.  When you are in business, regardless of what you do, you should always be looking out for good business and good people.

Start by building your business into a ‘magnet’ that will attract good people – customers, staff, suppliers, referrers, and collaborators.  People need to know you exist and you need to create some excitement about your business.  This is unlikely to happen all by itself.  You will need to become assertive and develop strategies to make the magnet big enough to create perpetual motion.

Get a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Get set up and organised from the start if you intend to attract a lot of people.  There are many CRM programs around.  Read online articles and reviews to find something that suits you.  If you don’t want to spend any money, then keep your contact details on an Excel spreadsheet.

Be available and follow up

If you are going to attract people, then you must make yourself available and follow up and interact with them.  Don’t hide away.  This is the important part of networking and business building.  If you ignore new contacts they will lose interest and go elsewhere.  You need people.  It’s only a matter of who and when!

Use online social networking sites

For example, follow people on Twitter and check to see if they follow you back.  Also start sending out daily messages from your own Twitter site.  People who are interested in what you have to say will follow you. Use a service like MutualTweeps.com to see who you know in common.  I have also found that it is essential to have a Facebook site so people can find you easily.  It is slower than Twitter but it is much more personal.  I find that many people find me by Google-ing my name.  They are presented with a choice of web and blog sites or Facebook.

Until next time!

Gary

So how do you pull together a social proof marketing campaign?  OK here are some common strategies:

• Convince potential buyers that there are hundreds of people lined up to buy your product.  This influences them to make a choice to purchase your product because everybody around them seems to like it too.

• Build trust by letting your potential customer know of what others think of your product.  Testimonials, comments and feedback from happy customers are commonly used.  However, people have become used to them and tend to skip past them on sales pages, not quite knowing whether they are real or fake.

• Independent reviews, case studies and endorsements by non-related experts, independent opinion makers.  It is important to have a credible source for any of these strategies.  It is common to give free samples in return for a favourable case study or review, which is then posted with the product.

• Leaking information about an upcoming product.  Politicians have been ‘accidentally on purpose’ doing this since politics began.  Leaking favourable news builds the anticipation and excitement, whereas leaking unfavourable news early helps make it more palatable and easier to accept.

• Creating a sense of urgency for a product before and after the launch.  Product run-outs, end of year sales, limited time offers and many other strategies create urgency in the mind of the target audience.

• Customers want what they can’t have (even more), so by limiting the supply of a product and promoting messages of value and scarcity, the effect is to increase demand and price.

The more people who are engaged to believe in a particular product then the more acceptable the product becomes.  Of course the downside is that sooner or later, but probably sooner, the target audience will move onto something else.  So unless you are the supplier of the ‘something else’, you could be become cold and poor.

Until next time!

Gary

Your most important priority in business is you.  You may have a thousand customers but without you, there is no business.

“Put yourself first, pay yourself first and take care of yourself first, physically and emotionally!”

An instant calm button is an immediate fix when you upset, frustrated or flustered, and you need to calm your mind.  Four of the best calming buttons I have found are:

a)   Deep slow breathing and eyes shut visualization.  There are many options for visualization – imagine a serene place, your favourite activity or imagine that with every breath you are inhaling and exhaling the entire Universe.  That’s my favourite.  It is so empowering.

b)   Exercise! This also results in deeper breathing.  It doesn’t need to be highly aerobic though.  A 30-minute walk will do it.  Make sure you keep your head up and say hello to everyone as you walk past.

c)   Water – drink plenty of it.  I find water calming as opposed to coffee which stimulates but may not necessarily calm me.

d)   Chocolate, which does nothing for my breathing but I focus on its antioxidant health benefits (yeah right!).  Be careful of the amount you eat.  Eat too much and you will replace one problem with a more serious health problem.

It is always the case that when I feel at my worst, doing any of the things I have listed above are the very last things I want to do, except eat chocolate of course.  But a little elbowing myself usually brings the need for a calming button into conscious focus.

Exercise is not always possible but deep slow breathing (we call it KI breathing in Aikido) and plenty of water always does the trick for me.  In our busy lives, air and water are the two ingredients that we don’t intake enough.

Until next time!

Gary

At its most basic level, being in business requires only a few customers and an ability to sell at a higher price than you buy.  Even if you have nothing more than these fundamental money making skills, there is still a wealth of other skills required to build a business.

Starting out, it helps to know your industry well and the rules and regulations that govern it.  In many industries, failure to comply with the myriad of government rules could get you banned from the industry, heavily fined or serving a prison sentence.

Even before you make your first sale, the Australian Government also imposes a compulsory administrative and taxation reporting regime on all businesses, large and small.  This makes bookkeepers and accountants very valuable resources from the outset.

Although bookkeeping and accounting concepts are tricky to grasp, a rudimentary knowledge makes a conversation with your financial advisers a lot easier.

As your business grows, you need more people because you can’t do everything yourself.  People need training, supervision and guidance.  When your business evolves to something more than you only, a degree of organisation and few systems become necessary.  Employing people also introduces a new layer of administration and compliance.

At some point, you will need to exercise some leadership to imprint your own culture and do some planning from time to time.  An expanding business also needs financial control and management. There have been many examples of businesses going broke because of their inability to fund rapid expansion.

Whilst you may not do the financial tasks personally, it helps a lot to understand the basic concepts. For example, the ability to read an ‘Income Statement’ and a ‘Balance Sheet’ opens up a new world of understanding and opportunity.

Developing a basic understanding of cost control concepts like product costing, budgeting, cash flow, and break even point will also make management of your business a lot easier.

Until next time!

Gary