Thought for the week
"The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.” - Charles Handy-
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Author Archives: Nick Cramp
Empowerment is a win / win for business owners
Most business owners will glibly trot out when asked that their staff are 
their biggest asset, but I would suggest that a high percentage of these same business owners struggle to take a proper holiday for 2 weeks without having to contact the office regularly either through choice (habit) or necessity. So how does that work if the staff are so great? Why the need for regular contact during a holiday?
Posted in Business Plans
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A Tailored Service is the Holy Grail
I buy my newspapers from my village shop. This is a simple transaction where I purchase a commodity at a pre-set price and they make a small profit and have a low profit margin. Something like this:
Purchase Price (£1.00) – Cost to Shop (£0.90) = £0.10 profit or margin of (0.1/0.9) 11%
So they need to sell a lot of papers with such a small margin if they are going to make any real money.
Posted in Business Plans, Business Strategy
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The importance of shipping
An inherent issue for most small business owners is their passion for the product or service they offer. There exists a paradox which unless recognised can prevent a business from sending or shipping their product. The paradox is thus “the individual is drawn to an industry which they feel passionate about and have an in-depth knowledge of, however the same passion and knowledge means that individuals are sometimes unwilling to send or ship their product until they are 100% happy with it, thus delaying the process and the service they provide and inevitably having a negative impact on their cash flow”
Luck…it’s over rated!!
I was speaking with one of my clients recently who mentioned how lucky he thought he was having a certain member of staff working for his company. My reply was the whilst the employee in question definitely was a valuable member of his staff, I was not sure why he was assigning this relationship to luck. He built his company from scratch, he created the work place, he designed the roles, he created a great working environment, he selected this employee from a large number that applied, so why put it down to luck??
And the winner is?
There seems a current preoccupation within both the media in particular and society at large in judging who or what constitutes a success. There is a need to categorise everything in terms of winners and losers with very little room given to those in between, or thought given to the criteria used to decide who falls into which category. Now I am not against measurement per se, I just think that we need to apply some context to those measurements.
The 4 generic sales strategies
When it comes down to it, there are only 4 ways a business can increase it’s sales turnover, so a good sales and marketing strategy only needs to ensure these 4 bases are covered.
These are:
- Get your existing customers to buy more service or products from you each time they purchase.
- Get your existing customers to buy from you more frequently
- Get more new customers
- Get you existing customers to refer their friends and colleagues to become customers
Posted in Business Plans, Key Performance Indicators, Sales & Marketing
Tagged entrepreneur, marketing, sales
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Who’s in your corner?
In the sporting world it is now well established that behind every great athlete or team there is always a range of coaches and advisers, helping that athlete or team achieve their optimal performance. Each coach is focused on a different area of the performance and is an “expert” in their field. It is very rare now for a individual or team to reach the pinnacle of their chosen field without this assistance. The sporting world has recognised that for one individual to have the required understanding of nutrition, bio-mechanics, tactics and fitness is not realistic, so why has the business world been so slow to learn from these example?
Bouncebackability
Now technically I know its not an actual word, but this is definitely one of my favourite “made-up” words and more importantly I think it is an essential and often overlooked trait for any business owner to possess, namely “bouncebackability”.
Now the one thing that we know about the growth of a business is that it is not going to follow a predictable course, however much we would like it to be. All businesses and entrepreneurs will have a period or day when things don’t go as planned - when deals they have been working on for weeks fall through, when technology doesn’t do as its designed to, or when key customers choose to take their business elsewhere. That element of business is predictable.
Posted in Business Strategy, Mentoring, Mind Set
Tagged bouncebackability, entrepreneur, mind-set, technology
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The Customer is NOT always right!
Perceived business wisdom suggests that rule #1 of service based industries dictates that “The Customer is always right”, which is often backed up by rule #2 which states “If in doubt refer to rule #1”. Now I am not so sure this rule any longer makes business sense (if it ever did).
The numbers show that most companies get 80% of their business from 20% of their customers (the well researched 80/20 rule), so by simple arithmetic the other 80% only generate 20% of the business. Logically any customers that are unhappy with your business will fall into this second group. So for instance if a company has 100 customers the first 20 will generate 80% of the sales, this second group of 80 will only generate 20% which equates to 0.25% per customer. So how much time should a business spend on each of these customers?
There always has to be a plan!!!
Ask any coach in any walk of life what are the essential ingredients of success and I guarantee that their reply will include the words “plan” and “goals”. It is no coincidence that the businesses and individual that succeed in life are those with specific goals they would like to achieve by a given date and even more importantly a detailed plan of how these are going to be achieved.
It’s common sense really; most of us would not set off on a car journey across the country without consulting a map or programming our destination into our sat nav, we would not just rely on instinct and random external feedback to get us to our desired destination, that would be crazy.
Posted in Business Plans, Business Strategy, Coaching
Tagged business plan, strategy
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