small business expert Archives - Page 6 of 9

SBM #58 You Might Want to Check

Tagged as: Canada, entrepreneur, Facebook, Google, image, linkedIn, productivity, small business expert, Small Business Minute, social media, voicemail auto responder, website, yellow pages

We all spend time, money and other resources making sure we put forth the right professional imagine. Many people limit their definition of image to how we look, dress and speak and for the most part that would have been acceptable once upon a time. But not anymore.

In our connected digital world, the tools we use to do business number in the many. What was once a Yellow Pages ad has been replaced by a website and a variety of social media business pages. Where a human being answered the phone, auto attendants and voicemail now do the job. All in all, these are wonderful tools that have increased awareness and productivity and reduced operating costs in the average business.

We need to check

Unfortunately, because they do their jobs so efficiently and require little maintenance we often forget to check in on them to see how they’re doing. Because of this neglect, these tools may not be projecting your company, staff or yourself in the best light.

How often have you called someone and got their voicemail that states that they are away from the office between two specific dates? A common experience that we’ve all come across. Sadly, though the dates of their absence are months old. Similarly, you receive an email out of office notice, generated by an auto responder, that is weeks old! Lastly, you go to a website that clearly has not been updated in years. What message do these oversights send to their customers or business partners? That details aren’t important?

We already know

Why does this happen? There’s a pretty simple explanation. We don’t phone or email ourselves. Nor do we ever go to our own website. Why would we? We already know what we do. We already know which products or service we sell. We know where we are located and our phone number. So, we have no reason to check any of these things. But that’s exactly why they need to be checked regularly, because no one is.

So, here’s 7 things that need to be checked regularly:

Call your office main line and listen to the message. Does the message project the company imagine? Remember it was probably recorded a long time ago and possibly by an employee that is no longer there. This is one of your first point of contact with potential customers. Does it convey a welcoming and professional tone? If you cringe a little or think it can be better, then fix it now.
Next call each person’s extension. What does their personal message sound like? Is it clear? Is it what you’d like your customers to hear? Remember not everyone is comfortable recording a voicemail message. If it’s not to your liking, help them change it by writing a script for them and getting them to relax and smile while recording it.
Call everyone’s cell phone and listen to their messages. If you’re paying for the phones and include these numbers on business cards, then you have a right to check and enhance.
Send everyone in your company an email, including yourself. Don’t forget to include your company’s generic address such as info@ and sales@. Do you get an auto-attendant response? If not should you? If so, is it valid? Is it current?
Visit your website. First check to see if the contact information is current and accurate. Then move on to content. Is the information still current? Does it look cluttered? A very high percentage of prospective customers, will check your website prior to initiating contact so it behooves you to make sure the information isn’t dated. Does the site have to be an award winner? No, but it must at least contain current information.
Have you got a Google Business page? Is the information valid or current? Have you moved locations? Is your business hours and contact information accurate?
Are your social media pages such as Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ and so on contain the right data? Also consider that if you haven’t posted anything in months on these pages you may want to reengage or otherwise suspend them. Customers want to see timely information on these sites. That’s why they’re called Social Media not Static Media.

So, take a moment right now and put your customer hat on check your own voicemails, emails and the website. Do they sound, look and feel right? If not, fix it now because it’s probably costing you money.

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Greg Weatherdon has been there, done that. As an entrepreneur, he learned not only how to get a business to the point of running smoothly, but also how to reduce the number of hours he worked, delegate more responsibility to his employees, and take longer vacations while his business chugged along like a well-oiled machine. And now he is providing the secret to success.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM #57 Recognition

Tagged as: appreciation, employee, entrepreneur, job satisfaction, leadership, motivation, professional speaker, small business expert, Small Business Minute, staff, success, trickle down

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Recognition is the easiest and most effective way to motivate employees, yet remarkably, one of the least used.¬ Entrepreneurs spend endless hours trying to figure out how to motivate their teams, yet ignore this basic human need.

A little research will show that there are an untold number of studies that rank recognition, or appreciation for their work, in the top 10 qualities that lead to job satisfaction, often placing it as the number one item.

The funny thing is, this is not revolutionary. I remember being a young manager in the pre-digital age and regularly coming across articles stating the exact same thing. A different time, a different generation, yet the very same piece of advice for managers. Tom Peters, in his seminal book, In Search of Excellence, stated that “we need to catch people doing something right”!

What about all the good?

All too often we’re quick to notice when something goes awry, we lose no time in bringing the misstep to the guilty party’s attention. Yet, how often have we ignored the many good things that same individual does? Is it because we take the position that it’s their job to do it right and that’s what I’m paying them for?

Catching people doing something right requires very little effort and only entails you to be on the lookout for those moments. Recognition of a job well done can have a significant impact on morale, on profitability as well as innovation.

Build confidence

Think about it for second. You catch someone doing something really well or took the initiative to try something new. At this point you thank them and let them know you’re pleased. So, what do think happens next? Well, it’s been my experience that a smile usually breaks across the individual face. Even the most grizzled employee will probably soften for a moment. That small action on your part signals that what they do, matters. It builds their confidence, all because someone noticed.

Let’s face it, we all like to be recognized. We all enjoy the occasional pat on the back. Don’t you beam just a little when a customer says, you did a great job? Well your employees are no different. Seriously, how much effort does it take to acknowledge a job well done? Very little!

Just a little effort

If you train yourself to be on the outlook, you’ll find plenty of moments to praise. Just be sure to be sincere. The following are just a couple of examples to prime your thinking

You overhear an employee on the phone with a customer and you’re impressed at how they handled the situation. So as soon as the call is completed, let them know that you were impressed and thank them for caring. You can’t wait until later. It must be done immediately after the call is completed to maximize it’s impact.

You task someone to query your customer database for a list of customers that either bought a specific product or service. Not only does the individual provide you what you asked for, but took it a step farther and provided a list of potential targets of that service or product.

Another employee, shares with you something a co-worker did to go the extra mile or how they helped another employee. You first thank the employee for bringing to your attention and then immediately let the other employee know that you appreciate what they did. That’s a double in my books.

It really does matter

These types of situations happen everyday in thousand of business, without the owners ever acknowledging the individuals for going the extra distance. Too be fair, many entrepreneurs do recognize the effort, but fail to let the employee know because they get busy and forget or they don’t think it matters. Let me be very clear on this point, it does matter!

By regularly acknowledging peoples good work, you set the stage for people to give a little more or try a little harder. By letting them know their efforts are appreciated, they will go the extra mile and the impact will have a trickle down effect throughout the organization that will be noticeable.

The beauty of catching people doing good is that it doesn’t cost anything. The reward is the recognition and knowing they are appreciated. So, I challenge you to spend the next week catching people doing good, and see if there is even the slightest change in morale. What have you got to lose?

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM #55 – Are You Ready?

Tagged as: benchmark, depression, economic downturn, entrepreneur, expenses, overtime, ready, recession, small business expert, success, walkaround

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The economy is humming along and your sales are doing just fine. As a matter of fact, things are actually pretty good. That’s why this is exactly the time you should heed that famous Boy Scout motto to “Always be Prepared”. Great advice, but be prepared for what?

Every seven years

On average, there is an economic downturn of some sorts every seven years. Sometimes a little longer, sometimes a little sooner, but seven years on average. Yet when they do happen, most owners seem to get caught totally off guard.

A slowdown, a recession, a depression, each one a little more serious than the other and each one can hurt your business. The trick to minimizing it’s impact, is to do a quick walkaround of your business. Much like every pilot does before takeoff. Why? Because when business is reasonably good, we tend to get a little too comfortable and take our eye off the some of the details.

We stop paying attention to the regular everyday expenses like the wireless phone bills, the internet or the various insurances policies. Or maybe we’ve let our receivables stretch out a little longer than we used to. What about overtime? Is anybody paying attention to it? Is it justified?

What would you cut?

What would happen if your revenue dropped by 20% -30% tomorrow? What expenses would you need to cut? How quickly could you do so? Most individuals can’t answer these questions because they just don’t know.

Making time now to review all your expenses is time well spent. It allows to rationally think things through, instead of being in crisis mode. Doing so now gives you time to explore all the alternatives available to you. For instance, can you use the postal service instead or a courier service? Does that package really need to get there the next day? Can you email invoices instead of mailing them?

If you have delivery or company vehicles, are you getting discounts on fuel by using a corporate fuel card? These cards give you a discount on every litre or gallon of fuel purchased. Over the course of the year this can really add up. If you haven’t been using them, now is the time to get them. Just remember, it’s easier to get credit when things are good?

No one noticed

One of the things I did when I first started out and continued with each startup, was to avoid lunch meetings. By scheduling client meetings before or after lunch, I avoided having to buy a prospective client lunch that I could ill afford. Later on, I would enforce this practice with my staff every time the economy took a downturn. It was easy to do and no one ever noticed. When things got better, we would selectively reinstate lunches.

Are you ready?

Using this kind of benchmark helps you focus on those extraneous expenses that have quietly crept into your business over the past few years. When, not if, a downturn comes, the last thing you want to be doing is trying to generate new business and cut expenses at the same. Doing it now, let’s you answer the question of – Are You Ready?, with a resounding yes!

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM #53 – Focus

Tagged as: business, entrepreneur, focus, mistake, narrow, outlier, profitable, raging, small business expert, sunlight, unprofitable

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Many entrepreneurs’ struggles can be traced to their inability to bring focus to their business. It is said that if you try to be great at everything, you’ll end up being good at nothing. I like to use the example of sunlight to explain the power of focus.

The Power of Focus

Most day our world is full of sunlight and even on the hottest of days there’s little risk of it setting anything on fire. But take that same sunlight and let it pass through a magnifying glass held at just the right angle and within seconds you can create a flame. Then, if properly stoked, it can become a raging inferno. That’s the power of focus and by applying the principles of focus to your business can take a mediocre enterprise and turn it into one that is highly profitable and sustainable.

Not That Popular

Bringing focus is easier than most realize and can applied to many areas of your business but none are more important than sales and marketing. The first step is to identify your most profitable products and services and then rank them. You’ll most likely discover that upwards of 80% of your revenue is coming from approximately 20% of your services or products. This is key. Far too often we waste time and energy on our slow moving products. One of the reasons we do this is that they offer higher margins but also because we hate admitting we made a mistake. However, in many instances these more profitable products are just not that popular.

Now, do the same with your customers. You need to determine, their purchase frequency and order size. Chances are that you’ll find an interesting overlap of your most profitable products and type of customers.

Now here comes the hard part. Ideally you should look to lose or reduce your activity opposite these low volume or unprofitable products. Next, stop chasing those non-profitable customers and focus all your attention on those products, services and customers that are making you money.

For example, if you discover that the most profitable customers are those with 10-20 employees, then that size of company becomes your focus. Clearly, you have something they want, otherwise they wouldn’t be your biggest market. Can you have a secondary target market? Of course, but in most cases, you’ll never exhaust the primary list.

Outliers

Meanwhile, if non-targeted customers want to avail themselves of your business, that’s okay and you should gladly accept their business. But point is you shouldn’t be chasing them, let them come to you, they are outliers. Focus on those individuals or companies where you’ve already experienced a higher level of success and spend all your sales and marketing efforts accordingly.

Narrowing your focus helps you to become an industry specialist or even an expert. The deeper you go in your target market the higher your reputation will soar and the more in demand you become.

Light a fire under your business by narrowing your focus.

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What if, you could start your business all over again? What would you do differently? What do you like or dislike about your current business? What would you change?

Why Mess With A Good Thing?

These sound like simple questions and that’s because they are. As entrepreneurs, we seem to get ourselves trapped into doing things one way. And why wouldn’t we, if it’s brought us some success? Why mess with a good thing, right? Not necessarily.

One of the problems is that the longer we’re in business, the harder it is to make changes. We’ve managed to survive and maybe even consider ourselves successful or resigned ourselves to the fact that this is as good as it gets, even if deep down inside we know it could be better. But aren’t entrepreneurs supposed to work hard and overcome challenges? Of course, but not everyday!

It’s Not A Fair Trade

Didn’t you go into business to have a better life? I don’t believe anybody goes into business to sacrifice their life or their family for the cause. But so many do and all the long they know it’s not right. It’s not a fair trade, but they do it anyways, and many lose more than they gain.

So, what if you could do a “do over”? How would organize and operate your business differently than it is now? Should you have grown bigger or stayed smaller? Would you have a larger staff or less? Should you have targeted different customers? Should you have narrowed your product offerings? Wish you could have more automation or electronic processes?

Don’t Let Fear Stop You

The point is we all make mistakes and head down rabbit holes that take our businesses to places we wish we weren’t. Then, for some reason we lose sight that we absolute control over our destiny. We forget that we can change whatever we want and all it takes is a little courage and faith in our abilities. Don’t let fear stop you from something better.

Transitioning a business to where you’d really like it to be, is not a revolution, but more an evolution. The reality is we have existing commitments to clients, staff and suppliers. Refocusing our business should be done gradually, unless of course there is a crisis. Doing so, gives you the chance to monitor each change you make to ensure they are impactful and taking you where you want the business and your life to go.

Don’t Overwhelm Your Organization

Alternatively, the revolutionary approach risks alienating employees and customers and potentially overwhelming your organization with changes that can’t be managed. Doing too much too fast can leave you worse off than before.

So, what if you could do it all over again? What do you wish your ideal business would look like? Write it down. Don’t let the fact that you don’t know how to do something stop you. You can learn how or find someone who does know and get the help you need.

The objective is to get started down the road to reinventing the business you really want and it all starts with the simple question – What if?

You may also enjoy Define Your Own Success

An interesting read Shoe Dog

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM #50- Confidence

Tagged as: assurance, Canada, confidence, deep work, entrepreneur, Future, journey, self, small business, small business expert

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

When we first hang out our Small Business shingle, we outwardly exude confidence in our idea and our abilities that we will succeed. But if truth be told, we have absolutely no idea how the story will end. Will it be a fairy tale or a horror story?

Mouse in a maze

Throughout the planning stages, we have spent hours upon hours dreaming of the future we will create. We hope that this future will take us on an amazing and positive journey. Realistically though, this journey will not be in a straight line from A to B. It will not be simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another. Often, the entrepreneurial journey is more akin to mouse in a maze where it keeps running into dead ends in search of that elusive piece of cheese.

Of the many challenges we face is that success and failure can exist in the same day and frequently collide creating an emotional roller coaster. But true believers have the confidence that no matter what obstacles come their way, they’ll have the wherewithal either go through it, around it or over it to be successful.

Self-assurance

This confidence is not based on wishful thinking but is a feeling that resides deep within them. It’s a belief in themselves. A self-assurance, if you will, that lets them focus on the end goal that allows them to continuously move forward even if they don’t have all the answers. They know they’ll eventually figure it out.

Having that inner confidence is what sets the successful entrepreneur apart from the rest of the pack.

Recent book read Deep Work by Cal Newport

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM #49- Clustering For Profits

Tagged as: critical mass, customer service, efficiency, gains, marketing, pricing, profit, repeat sales, small business, small business expert

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Profit, that elusive goal that frustrates many a business owners. To be sure, many businesses are just bad ideas that never should have been started in the first place. However, there are plenty of others that are well run with decent revenues but for some reason they aren’t as profitable as they should be.

When helping business owners, one of the first places I look is their pricing model. Other than suggesting some adjustments, their pricing doesn’t appear to be the issue. Take a minute and checkout episode #47 Pricing For Profit for more insight into pricing.

A little probing into customers and marketing initiatives often uncovers a flaw in their sales and marketing activities – namely geography! The problem is rooted in the fact that these businesses are casting their nets too wide. As a result, they fail to generate critical mass for their services in a single geographic area. This is where the concept of clustering can help increase awareness for certain businesses and profits for most.

What is Clustering?

Clustering, is nothing more than grouping your service deliverables or offerings around key geographic areas. Clustering can be applied to many types of businesses and services.

Most major sales organizations have been using clustering for decades. Sales forces use clustering as a way of making the maximum sales calls with minimal travel time between each location. Most delivery companies do the same to generate the necessary efficiencies needed to stay competitive.

Although you would think the concept of clustering is common sense, it has been my experience that it’s not.

To better illustrate, the following are a couple of examples:

Clustering for Service Businesses

Consider the example of a service company. This could be anything from a landscaping business, to equipment repair or a roofing company. It’s not uncommon for many of these companies to be running all over the city, performing their services throughout the day.

For many this comes about because of their marketing and promotion activities. Countless businesses owners wrongly assume that they need to advertise to the widest possible group of customers in the largest geographic area. Often, they have been convinced that, for just a few dollars more, they can blanket the whole city or region instead of focusing on a tighter geographic area.

Appealing as that sounds, this shotgun approach can lead to huge inefficiencies as they now run around the city burning fuel and man hours going between jobs. When you consider that many service company use lawn signs to promote their companies, having many signs in a tight geographic area drives higher customer awareness of your company. As an added bonus, this may help your business development initiatives because people are familiar with your company name.

Granted, every city and business is different and focusing on just one area may not be feasible. However, clustering can still be effective in these situations by limiting your service to certain areas on specific days of the week. For instance, we work in the East end on Monday, South end on Tuesday and so on.
Clustering in this case, ultimately allows you to service more customers during a single day with a greater number of billable hours at reduced costs.

Clustering for Retail Businesses

Retail businesses can also benefit from clustering and save significant money in their advertising and promotions costs. The first thing you need to do is to understand where most of your customers are coming from. By simply collecting their postal or zip code, you’ll quickly see a pattern emerge from key geographic areas. One thing that may surprise you is that most of your customers aren’t coming from as far as you think.

A survey by Brightlocal found that the average time that people will spend in a car to travel to a business, ranges from 12-23 minutes. They have a wonderful infographic that depicts various types of businesses and the time people are willing to travel to them.

Graphic courtesy of www.brightlocal.com

In todays highly competitive environment, finding efficiencies in every part of your business is mandatory and can’t be left to chance.

So, if you want to increase your profits and the effectiveness of your promotions, you should consider the concept of clustering.

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Every entrepreneur goes into business with a list of dreams, hopes and desires for their business and their life. Unfortunately, dreams require more than just hoping and praying for a successful outcome.

What we need to realize is that dreams are just the starting point of the entrepreneurial adventure. Dreams get us in the game, but to be successful in business requires being able to put all the pieces together in order to create a prosperous enterprise.

Those elements consist of:

Sales
Marketing
Operations
Administration
The thing is, most of us are only really good in one or, if we’re lucky, two of those areas.

Self Assessment

Each of those areas require a wide ranging set of skills, yet many entrepreneurs have no ideas what real strengths or weaknesses they possess. Putting our dreams aside for a few moments, we need to ask ourselves some questions. A little self evaluation, if you will.

• What skills do we really need for our business?
• Are our strengths aligned with the skills required for our type of business?
• Do we have the temperament to even be in business?

Find Your Strengths

Relying solely on our own answers, only gets us part of the way. We need to get a little more scientific, because we all think we’re exceptionally talented. However, if we can leverage our true strengths, our path to success becomes just a little bit easier.

Once we’ve done a self-evaluation, we need to follow it up with a formal personality profile to see if our reality aligns with our perceptions. There exists a number of profiling tools available at little or know cost such as Myers-Briggs or Disc. These are readily available on the internet. If you’ve never complete one, I encourage you to do so as soon as possible. They are insightful. Once completed, compare it to your self evaluation.

By knowing our strengths and weaknesses that get uncovered by these profiling questionnaires, provide you with a framework for your personal development. To thy own self be true.

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM #47 – Pricing For Profit

Tagged as: first mover, formula, margin, one third, pricing, profit, reduce cost, small business, small business expert, Small Business Minute

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I’m frequently asked how one goes about pricing their goods and services for profit. It sounds like a simple enough question, but in reality, it can very complex. Get it right and all should be well. Get it wrong and you’ll be constantly chasing revenue, if only to pay the bills.

Now if your product is a “me too”, you don’t have a lot of flexibility, as the existing products have already established the pricing parameters and therefore you must compete accordingly. Raising your price becomes almost impossible. The only way to improve your profitability is either to reduce costs or add real value for which your customers are willing to pay a premium.

First Mover Advantage

Moving to higher quality or higher value allows you to break free of the commodity pricing, but with potential trade-offs. Chances are you’ll reduce the number of customers but add much higher profits on every sale.

Conversely, if you have a unique product or service, you can leverage the “first mover advantage” and command higher prices. This is because there is no opportunity for your customers to do any comparison pricing, because you’re the only one.

I leveraged this “first mover advantage” when I started the Marketing Resource Group. I expected to maintain my higher margins until such time as competitors caught on to what I was doing. Once that happened, I fully expected to reduce my margins, but that never happened and I maintained my premium pricing and margins.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of businesses, especially new businesses, are not sufficiently unique to enjoy unlimited pricing power. So how do you establish an initial price formula for that new product or service?

A Formula

What I have found to be an effective jumping off point is to use the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 formula. This formula simply breaks down your costs into fixed and variable and then add the profit element. In practice, it would look something like this:

Fixed Costs $1 (33%)
Variable Costs $1 (33%)
Profit Margin $1 (33%)
_____________________
Selling Price $3

Is this a definitive formula? Absolutely not! But it does give you a wonderful starting point to establish your initial pricing target. In reality, many businesses have higher fixed or variable costs, in those cases, the fixed and variable costs shouldn’t exceed 2/3rd in order to protect your profit margin.

I’m sure there are many more complex pricing theorem out there, but this has worked me and my clients in helping to establish some pricing parameters. It forces you to identify all the actual costs that go into your product or service. Once these costs are identified, you can then layer on your expected profit margin starting with a 1/3.

Adjust Your Profits

By using this simple formula, you will actually be able to see how much profit you expect to make. This is of particular value when you end up in a competitive situation and need to be a little more aggressive in your pricing. Chances are you can’t adjust your cost base, but you can adjust your profit. Seeing how much or how little profit you’ll make on a given proposal, let’s you decide whether it’s worth doing as you’ll no longer be guessing at how much, if any profit you’ll make.

Over time, you will build up enough information on this new product or service to be able to refine or develop your own formula. In the meantime, this Pricing For Profit formula takes out some of the guesswork.

You may also like Revenue Without Profit Is Pointless

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

SBM#46- Make It Better Later

Tagged as: entrepreneurs, launch, minimal acceptable, problems, product, service, small business, small business expert, Small Business Minute, solutions, tweaking, wasting resources

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Far too often I come across entrepreneurs who can’t seem to launch their new business, product, service or even a new strategy. They are constantly tweaking it, in an attempt to make it better or even perfect the final offering.

What they fail to realize is that they’re wasting valuable learning time by not being in the market. Regardless of when they finally do launch, chances are they are going to need to make adjustments anyways once they receive customer feedback, so why wait?

“Far too often I come across smart people who create wonderful solutions for problems that don’t really exist.”

If you have a working prototype or framework for your service, my advice is get to market as soon as you can. By waiting you could be wasting valuable resources on developing features or benefits that no one cares about. Far too often I come across smart people who create wonderful solutions for problems that don’t really exist. It’s better to find that out sooner rather than later.

Going to market as soon as possible with the minimum acceptable product or service will get you that all important feedback from the initial clients or presentations That way you can now focus your efforts on things that really do matter to the customer and not what you think matters.

So, if you’re wondering when to launch, do it now, because you can always make it better later.

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

You shouldn’t be the hardest working person in your company.

Many small business owners find that even after the struggling start-up years, they’re working too many hours and still managing every aspect of their businesses.

Do you suffer from any of the following?

1. Business ownership isn’t living up to the dream.
2. Endless workdays.
3. You can’t find good people.
4. Profits are less than expected.
5. You can never take a vacation.

You’re not alone. But there is a solution. As Greg demonstrates, with some time and effort, you really can Get More Life Out Of Your Business.

ORDER HERE

« 1 … 4 5 6 7 8 9 »

Tag: small business expert

We need to check

We already know

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

What about all the good?

Build confidence

Just a little effort

It really does matter

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

Every seven years

What would you cut?

No one noticed

Are you ready?

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

The Power of Focus

Not That Popular

Outliers

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

Why Mess With A Good Thing?

It’s Not A Fair Trade

Don’t Let Fear Stop You

Don’t Overwhelm Your Organization

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

Mouse in a maze

Self-assurance

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

What is Clustering?

Clustering for Service Businesses

Clustering for Retail Businesses

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

Self Assessment

Find Your Strengths

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

First Mover Advantage

A Formula

Adjust Your Profits

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

“Far too often I come across smart people who create wonderful solutions for problems that don’t really exist.”

Get More LIFE Out of Your Business

Search

Recent Posts

Categories