My Top Ten Business Tips

I’m regularly get asked what advice I would give to people who have started their own small business so I have put together my top 10 business tips. To be honest, I’ve struggled to keep it to 10 as there are so many things you need to know and get guidance on when you first start – particularly if you’re a one man or one woman band

After all we generally start our businesses because of a personal skill or a passion for one thing - whether it be mending pipework or mending dresses – but we don’t come as fully formed business packages with a set of skills that includes corporate strategy, accounting, marketing, IT or sales – and neither does our business suddenly have a business mentor or guide to help us.

So starting more or less from the top what are my top tips:

1. Number one has to be – are you serious! Really. Having a business of your own can be life changing, exhausting and certainly marriage threatening! So be absolutely sure this is what you want to do.
Research tells us that in 2016 80 people an hour do – so join the club! As long as you’re sure.

2. Decide what you want the business to be: is it a job for life for you or something bigger? If it’s just a job for you then you can happily bumble along doing your own sweet thing – but if you have aspirations that one day it will be bigger, will employ people or be sold to the highest bidder – start with that aim in mind! Even at the beginning think about what it WILL look like rather than what it DOES look like.

3. Get clarity. Decide who the business is: if it were a person would it be Ferne Britain, or Ferne Cotton: would it be Philip Schofield or Jeremy Paxman – or Ryland? You can hear that each of those people have different personas –which one represents your business idea the most?

If your business were a car would it be a Rolls Royce or a zippy little convertible?

Hopefully each image or person conjures up for you a different profile or market position – and this helps you get clarity on your own niche – and the clearer YOU are on what your business is and where it fits – the quicker the customer will get it too.

Think about if it were a supermarket would it be Lidl, Asda, Tescos, Sainsburys, Waitrose or even Fortnum and Masons?

If you know then that helps with your market position and pricing – because one end of that spectrum is clearly cheaper than the other.

So if you decide that you’re Ferne Cotton, a zippy convertible and Tescos for instance – go check them out, look at their websites and marketing material – check out how they position themselves, what they say, what hooks they use, what terminology, vocabulary – and even the fonts they use and the colours – and then mirror the important parts for you.

What you must do is to get CLEAR – and congruent. There is no point trying to cover the entire spectrum and try to be all things to all people – because you will fail!

It’s possible be to be expensive and also too cheap in your pricing – you will only sell consistently and repeatedly if your price and service is congruent and fits the profile or personality of the business – get that right first.

4. The majority of new businesses fail. So learn from that. Watch businesses fail and see if you can identify why. I love watching a high street change and seeing why businesses drop out. If you can go, and ask what went wrong. There are about 500,000 businesses failures each year – that’s a major resource of information. Go and get it.

5. Keep your feet on the ground and don’t get delusions of grandeur. And by that I mean focus on what’s important – and that’s getting the customer and the sales right – and it isn’t about the office space, the business cards, the waste paper baskets or printing thousands of leaflets. Do very small print runs until you’re absolutely sure you have your offering right. Don’t bother with anything high faluting until you’re sure. I’m convinced the local land fil is full of unused brochures and leaflets that went out of date before they were used up.

And that leads me on top tip number

6. Which is keep very tight control of the costs and the cash! Spend small whilst your business is small and let the business itself provide the cash for expansion or the higher costs and if the business isn’t generating that sort of money yet then don’t spend.
7. Is Get connected: to peers, to networks, and to the Sphere. The Sphere here is a great stepping stone for a new business as it enables you to take the first big step into a protected and safe – and cheap – business environment.
Here you can hold meetings, meet customers, have a proper desk, sit and think, have a coffee, chat to others, get advice from some, and most importantly feel part of – and like you belong to - a solid business community.
In the Sphere no-one is ever alone – and that’s invaluable at a time before your business is big enough to have your own workers or supporters around you.
8. Get involved in the local business community and the Chamber of commerce – go to events and meet people and chat – test your ideas there and you’ll save yourself a fortune. You can’t live long enough to make all the mistakes yourself so share the mistakes of others – so talk to them and find out what went wrong – or right for them.

9. Get Sales! And I mean genuine external independent sales – those to your mum or best friend don’t count. I’d rather have 1 external sales than 100 sales form connected parties - because they are doing you a favour and once they’ve bought one they’re done – and that’s not repeatable. 1 external proper sale is a repeatable exercise!

AND Discover the key indicators that drive the business and those sales. So for instance if you have a shop in the high street – you need to work out, say, that 100 customers over the threshold equates to one sale. The 100 customers are a KPI or a key performance indicator.

Once you know that then you can drive customers over the threshold until you get the level of sales you want and if you’re missing that target then you can immediately identify an action to correct it.

My FF financial education business has 4 KPIs – we need to generate 1,400 leads per month and get 47% of those to a workshop. We need to convert 17% of those to an introductory course and 35% of those to our full 2 year diploma. That’s it – and I can monitor the whole business at a distance using those.
And finally:

10. Enjoy it – live it, love it and cherish it – as that will show to any potential customer. If you don’t love it then get out of the way and put someone up front who does. Winston Churchill said that sales are purely the exchange of enthusiasm from one person to another.
So be enthusiastic! love it and live it but always remember you have another life outside of the business – and that will help with the perspective issue that we started with as tip number 1.

There we have it – 10 top tips – well actually it was 11 but who’s counting - and I think I can summarise them as get focus, get clarity, get sales and get connected!

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