How is Your Business?
Every Small Business Owner is faced with the same task every day….what do I need to be doing to increase my business and reduce my stress. While this can entail many areas, the most common are: Leadership, Marketing, Sales, Work/Life Balance, Customer Service, Human Resources and Financial Matters.
In order to get a better handle on the situation, let’s clarify each small business success a bit.
Leadership: What’s Your Leadership Style?
Leadership, while being the most encompassing aspect of business, starts with your company’s Mission & Vision statement, communicated to the appropriate people. You must ensure that there is a mechanism for congruency throughout the business from the top management right down to the rank and file. To deliver the message, it may be helpful to understand your own leadership style.
Marketing: Are you paying too much to reach your target market?
To help keep marketing cost down, the first step is your marketing message consistent across all media that you are currently using or perhaps considering?
Sales: Are enough of your suspects being converted to prospects and are they being converted to actual sales?
You must create and implement (if necessary) a system to track sales to determine trends, strengths, market share, etc.
Personal and Life/Work Balance: Are you working more and enjoying it less?
You should seek to establish a benchmark for a good balance of work, play and rest. Everything works better when you work hard and balance it with the proper rest and rejuvenation.
Customer Service: Isn’t that what happens before, during and after the sale?
You should review the “little things” that make your customer’s experience unique, and we are always looking for new ways to enhance their experience with your product or service .
Human Resources: Who’s working for you right now, who would you like to have working for you and how do you get them?
You need to take a look at who or what you’re hiring (or maybe who you should be firing) and how that methodology operates. You also need to put in systems to help determine the proper candidates. This may include certain personality evaluations tools.
Financial Management: What do all those numbers mean?
Do you know how to analyze your financial report card? Do you know what your numbers for your business should be? You need to identify your business’s benchmarks as well as identifying what areas of your business are working efficiently and which ones are not.
Your Business Systems: Is your system “in your head?”
Every task in the business that you are currently handling routinely and also the ones that could be improved by better systems should be identified and systemized
Profit Margins: What’s the bottom line…Are we making any money?
This may seem like a simple concept but the truth is most businesses worry about being busy, not profitable. As much emphasis should be placed on having a profitable business, as well as a busy one.
By carefully reviewing and analyzing these 9 key areas, you will learn how to effectively start running your business rather than having it run YOU.
To help in this endeavor, we have provided access to a simple, but specific self-graded Business Effectiveness Evaluation to begin your process. Just click the image below.
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