Small Businesses ‘Fail’ for many reasons (just like large businesses!), such as:-
- Bad idea to begin with
- Unrealistic expectations
- Not enough operating capital
- Poor location
- Bad timing
- Lack of entrepreneurial skills and foresight
- The wrong person operating the business
And while these are important, often businesses can survive one or more of these if the following reasons are well done – but unfortunately these are often the very reason that many businesses fail:-
- Lack effective customer Acquisition and Retention Systems
- Don’t attract enough qualified prospective clients
- Fail to convert prospective clients into profitable and repeat customers
- Let current customers slip away to do business with competitors
- Lack effective & efficient business management practices
So what can you do to minimise your chances of joining the majority?
- Realise you aren’t in the business of ‘doing’ the job, but are in the business of ‘marketing’. So, focus on what you have to do to ‘sell’ your service or product.
- Then, work out what your prospective clients wants, needs, fears, desires are, and how your product or service can address those needs. And, as a precursor to this, identify just who are your ideal clients – the perfect ones that you know will love what you can do for them, AND, who have the money to pay what you deserve for your quality service.
- And, stop marketing from your perspective (“I’ll complete your job in 24 hours” – which by the way sounds like you aren’t very busy so maybe not that good!) and speak in terms of the ‘benefits’ to the client (“To ensure you don’t waste time or money, we will work with you to determine exactly what you need and then deliver that on time and on budget”).
- Whatever your current sales process is, work on documenting the sales script used and improve it.
- Get someone external to your team to review and give an honest opinion on each step – the old problem of being too close to the job to see the alternatives is as true in business as it is in any part of life.
- And the big one, measure everything so you can see where your results are less than great – it may be you need more leads (so marketing/advertising is the solution); or it may be your conversion rate is so poor that you need to improve that (better sales processes/practice; better targeting of the initial leads within the marketing; better products?); or it may be that you need a wider range of products or services to sell to maximise the value from each client you do get.
If all else fails, check out what your closest competitors are doing, and do something (anything) different to make yourself stand out as not just ‘one of the crowd’ being selected on price alone.