Is your business leaking profit?

It is our experience over many years that a great majority of small to medium sized businesses are leaking at least $100 per day in Net Profit (and some considerably more).

What about your business?

The weekend end before last, my business partner, Ross Hancock, was a speaker at the Rich Business Summit in Sydney. There were around 160 people in the room.  As part of Ross’ presentation, and given it was the start of the new financial year, Ross asked, “Who has prepared and finalised their marketing plan for the next 12 months?”

Predictably yet SHOCKINGLY only 2 people in the room were able to raise their hands.

What about you? Where do you sit with this?

If, like 99 per cent of that room, you have not prepared your marketing plan for the next 12 months, then why not?

Are you wanting to succeed or fail in business?

We’ve all heard the saying “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance” or “Fail To Plan and You Plan to Fail”. This is certainly true at this time in the economic cycle. You need to critically analyse what you are doing and why you are doing it.
The environment in which you and I trade is constantly changing and you need to be able to adjust quickly to capitalise on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that you identify.

This is more than just an academic exercise … one God given and anointed idea can turn your situation “right way up”. And yes, it can happen quite quickly, although as I have mentioned many times before, often this is the outworking of the principle of the “Slight Edge” which is either working for you or against you.

The Slight Edge is the progressive effect of decisions that you make over time that contribute to your journey of success or failure. Which track are you on?
The “success track” or the “failure track”?

Now be honest with yourself.

Reality check. If you are one of the many business people that do not have their marketing plan completed for the next 12 months then, respectfully, notwithstanding your desires or your words – your actions (or lack thereof) are speaking so loudly I cannot hear you.

Now would your business benefit from gaining more customers?

It’s certainly likely that it would, but before we go and get you more customers we’d better make sure that your business is well prepared for the influx and has appropriate systems in place in production, scheduling and sufficient numbers of trained staff so you can cope with the additional customers.

That said, how do you treat your existing customers?

Are you nurturing those relationships? How?

In our experience most businesses are using a limited number of strategies to increase the average dollar spend of their customers. While this is a whole other topic – which does tie into your preparation of your marketing plan – those of you who are serious about kicking some good goals over the next 12 months are invited to write to me at paul@rightteam.com.au and I will send you a document that outlines 43 Strategies to Increase Your Average Sale Value. Please make sure you include your name, primary email address and contact number.

Well that’s it for this week …

Next week’s readers will have the option of getting another document that outlines 100 Strategies to Increase the Number of Your Prospects. But you’ll have to wait til next week for more on that.

Finally, I was speaking with a Melbourne business recently, (no names and no court martials), and they are about to invest some $10,000+ dollars in revamping their website, and then there was going to be the ongoing costs of keeping it up to date, search engine optimization, and perhaps Google AdWords PPC advertising. Clearly this all adds up and can be a considerable expense to small to medium sized businesses.

Many of you know this already since you have gone down this route. Of course, there is a place for all of that as long as you are getting a ROI. However, many are not.

And they are looking for low cost alternatives to get an effective internet presence that drives traffic to their business and pushes their ads out to potential customers who are within the geographic area that their business services.

Let’s say you own a golf shop (insert your business type here) and people in your area are surfing the net and looking at some golf tournament sites… wouldn’t it be great if your ad could appear in front of their eyeballs. The likelihood of them clicking through to your ad would be pretty high since you know they are interested in the subject matter (because they are reading the content on that site), and they are in your locality because of the high tech geo-targeting technology available such as SMARTPAGES PPK. WOW, that would be great, particularly if it was all available at an affordable investment.

Interested in knowing more …

Drop me a line to paul@rightteam.com.au  and I’ll be in touch with more info.