Gain Business through Promoting your Expertise

One of the toughest tasks for a SME business owner is generating new business. This may be necessary to either replace lost business, or to grow the business itself on the back of consistently increasing the volume of new business, whilst simultaneously minimising the loss of current business.

A common reason why many business owners find the going tough when it comes to new business acquisition, is because they are doing the all of chasing to find the new business, rather than new business seeking them out, to provide the products or services, required to satisfy their needs.

We all know that the cost of acquiring new business via promotions, advertising, direct selling or indirect sales activity can be quite high. We also know that often the budgets available to SME business owners, are not as extensive as usually required, to fund the costs of acquiring a constant flow of new business from such activities.

An alternative way of acquiring new business, is to get the new business to come to you as a consequence of the recognition of your expertise, and the reputation you have established in providing that expertise, to the market.

Unfortunately, as good as your expertise and reputation may be, unless the wider market that you wish to serve, is made aware of how good your expertise is, and you then continually reinforce this message at every opportunity, you will forever be chasing new business to maintain momentum in your business enterprise.

There are many cost effective ways to raise your market’s awareness of your particular expertise in producing something for sale or providing a particular service. The important thing is to develop a specific strategy for increasing your profile in your designated market, and then work this strategy until you see your expertise acknowledged via the avenue of business coming directly to you, without you having to be the hunter all of the time.

Steps you can take to promote your expertise in a cost effective way include;

• Write and publish articles, that demonstrate your expertise, at your own blog site or submit articles to other blogs which cater to your target market,
• Write and submit articles relevant to your industry to your local paper, relevant industry publications, regular newsletters that circulate in your business community, and as many relevant online forums that seek such content,
• Volunteer to provide some of your expertise to local community groups or major charities,
• Volunteer to be a speaker on subjects within your area of expertise at as many local business and local networking groups as you can find,
• Register your business and detail the expertise you offer on as many of the free online business registers that will help people find you in your customer/client catchment area,
• Get well structured testimonials that highlight the key elements of your expertise as well as the quality of your products/services and make these as prominent as possible on your website,
• Ensure that your e-mail signature block highlights your expertise as well as your contact details, and where possible includes a link to the testimonials on your website, and
• Where you have a telephone system that has the capability of putting callers on hold utilise a message on hold system to ensure they are listening to a message about your expertise whilst they are on hold.

The more ways that you can find to promote your expertise in a cost effective way, the more business you will see by way of direct engagement, and the less hunting you will need to do, to ensure that your business consistently generates new customers/clients.

Are you doing as much as you should be doing to promote your expertise?

What is it currently costing you to acquire a new customer/client?

How much more profitable would your business be if you could reduce this cost yet continue to acquire new customers at a satisfactory rate to continue to grow your business?

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If your business is based in Melbourne Australia, and you need assistance to develop and grow it in order to provide you with a certain level of future prosperity, check out our website http://www.rhodan.com.au and, if you think we can help you, please don't hesitate to contact us.

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The Lone Ranger had support; do YOU have enough?

We all know that life as a Business Owner can be tough going. This recognised reality actually works in your favour, as it lessens the competition you face in the market, for your product or service. It also provides you with the opportunity to do well financially, if you are able to surmount the hurdles that you will inevitably face, as you develop and grow your own business.

One of the critical elements, that will determine whether or not you will be successful as a business owner, is the degree of support you can engender from others as you travel along the path to eventual success.

This external support is absolutely necessary to keep you buoyant and focussed on your objectives, despite the difficulties you will encounter on a daily basis. The various types of support you will need from others include;

a) Someone to act as a sounding board for you to bounce ideas off and to assist you to evaluate the validity of your ideas before you act on them impetuously, or erroneously,

b) Someone to help you with brainstorming ideas for problem resolution, promoting and marketing your business, development of new products or services, and effectively managing your available resources,

c) Someone who will provide you with continual encouragement to continue to persevere with facing the daily challenges that need to be met to make your business a success,

d) Someone in the same boat as yourself as a business owner to share information, share leads, share celebrations of the small wins you make each week, share the emotional ups and downs that only a fellow business owner will understand, and share the pain when everything doesn’t go as well as planned.

e) Someone who can introduce you into appropriate networks that you need to be part of to gain the required level of exposure in your market, in order to be highly visible to your customers or clients,

f) Someone who is willing to allow you access to their similar business so that you can benchmark your operations against theirs to determine areas for improvement in your own, and

g) Someone who can act as your businesses financial guardian angel to point you in the right direction and to ensure that you don’t make any terminal mistakes in the management of the cash flow of your business.

It is likely that you will need support from a number of different people to ensure you have the support that you require.

If you are very lucky, you will find two or three people, who between them, can give you the level of support you need to get your business to the stage where it can then afford to engage professional firms or individual professionals, to provide the support systems that every successful business needs, to enable it to continue to thrive and prosper.

So where do you find the people you need to provide the support to you that can make your difficult role a little easier and provide a greater chance for you to become a successful business owner?

The following list highlights great places to look for the people you can turn to for the necessary levels of support for yourself, as you grow your business;

a) Members of your immediate and extended family,

b) Members of clubs, associations and groups that you belong to or have had previous associations with,

c) Programs for business owners established by your Local Council, State Government Instrumentalities and National Government Departments,

d) Networking Groups specifically set up to support SME business owners,

e) Informal networks of non-competing local business owners in your immediate vicinity, and

f) Social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter that have a business focus.

To garnish the support you need you must be passionate about your business and the outcomes you are trying to achieve, and use the right approach when sounding others out for the level of support you require.

You will usually find that if you approach the right people in the right way, even if you have not had a really strong previous relationship with them, most will, within the bounds of reasonableness, go out of the way to help others, especially if there is any form of reciprocity involved.

Are you acting a little like a modern day Robinson Crusoe?

Do you understand the benefits that the types of support outlined above can deliver to your business?

Will you now develop a plan to ensure you get the level of support you deserve and need?

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Is your Business a Nest Egg or a Future Millstone?

If you are a business owner not planning to sell up in the next five years and you wish to avoid future unpleasant financial surprises, especially when the time comes to retire from your business, then this article is for you.

If however, you are one of many business owners who are planning to retire solely on the proceeds of the sale of your businesses during the next 5 years or so, you may already be too late to avoid an unpleasant surprise, but you may still be able to mitigate the extent of the unpleasantness, so I have also included a few suggestions in this article for achieving this outcome.

The unpleasant surprise referred to above, which has its roots in the large bulge of baby boomer business owners all planning to exit their businesses around the same time and the likelihood of far fewer prospective purchasers being in the market at that time, will most likely take the form of significantly lower selling prices, usually well below expectations, being achieved for the sale of these businesses.

A more extreme, unpleasant surprise which is likely to be experienced by sellers for many of the last century style of businesses still owned by many baby boomers, will be little or no demand at all, from potential buyers for these businesses.

For baby boomer business owners, your key challenges in the period between now and your planned retirement date will be to; reinvent or revitalise your business, systemise it so that it can operate independently of your direct involvement, enhance its saleability by any other means available to you including quickly increasing profitability, introduce succession planning or plan for an internal buyout at a specific future date, and perhaps to consider introducing new shareholders now, rather than at the time you choose to retire.

For all business owners of later generations, the situation unfolding now for many of the baby boomer business owners is one you should seek to avoid, at all costs.

You definitely need to utilise your business to provide the substantial nest egg that you will need to have in order to afford a comfortable retirement, but this should be achieved by ensuring that you are always an employee of your own business, and that the business makes regular contributions of an adequate amount on your behalf, to the employee superannuation fund run by the business on behalf of its employees.

To achieve this outcome, you need to ensure that the prime objective of your businesses today is to operate profitably at all times, and at a level which allows the owners to draw a living wage, and make adequate superannuation contributions on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly basis for as long as the business operates.

If this can be achieved, any risk of the business not being able to be sold at the time it needs to be sold, or selling for a price far less than the amount needed for retirement, is completely mitigated. The bonus of course being that, if the business is able to be sold when desired, all proceeds are simply icing on the cake, and the price obtained is immaterial.

The difficulty in reaching this outcome is that few SME business owners have the achievement of a minimum level of profit as their prime and ongoing business objective.

It may sound easy enough, but it takes both foresight and discipline, as well as dogged determination on behalf of the business owner to implement, enforce and continually reinforce everything required to keep all endeavours of the business focuses on achieving the level of profit which allows the consistent payment of wages to the owners, and the making of the required level of superannuation contributions on a regular basis.

Is your business paying you a wage and making regular contributions to a superannuation fund on your behalf?

Is the making of a required minimum level of profit the prime business objective of your business?

Is your business culture capable of being reshaped to allow such an objective to be successfully implemented?

Posted via web from Unique Insights