"As a Man Thinketh in His Heart, So IS He." Proverbs 23:7
The best way to grow a business is to provide a product or service to the smallest possible audience. An audience who appreciates something unique, outstanding things.
Do something so remarkable that what you do gets people talking.
Find the Smallest Possible Audience and Create a product or service to fulfill a need they didn’t even know they had.
Attracting the right people when you own a small business is no doubt the most challenging task, so how is it possible to do it?
Get creative. Be different. Start with who you want or need to attract. What attributes should they have? Then take time and meet with people of that quality, people who have those abilities, maybe people who already have jobs for other companies who fit the description and ask, what would attract you to our company?
They may not be the ones you’re looking for, but the answers they give are vital to building an outstanding company by understanding their needs. These meetings may be something you have to do over lunch or more creative ways to have enough time to meet and discuss this subject well enough to find the answers. These answers are probably not something they have clearly in mind so it may take considerable discussion and even follow-ups to extract usable responses.
The next step is to clarify what you have or can offer that will attract beyond the answers outsiders could imagine. What part of daily work activities can be enhanced to entice people to come your way? Look around at the work you provide, is it attractive? Would you want to work for you?
If it’s fabrication, how impressive are your facilities? Can they be improved? If it’s construction, what projects and job-site conditions do you provide for your employees? If it’s a restaurant, what working atmosphere do you foster to attract the right people?
Whatever we do, we must ask ourselves, what changes can be made to attract the people we need to build our businesses. Except for those at the bottom, desperation to just work for pay no longer exists.
It’s time to stop filling a slot and start Building A Team!
Have you ever attempted to learn something new, a new language, to play guitar, learn a new trade, or get physically in shape? If so, you know how at first the progress feels incredibly slow. It’s easy to think what’s the use and give up but it’s essential to stay the course with whatever it is because quitting is not the habit you will want to learn. Repeating the pattern of not staying the course creates a bad habit.
The practice of staying to course is one of the most important lessons we can learn. Now I will say, it should be something that’s worth your time invested and if you started down a road that’s not something you want to pursue, of course, don’t go there but don’t quit. Get a good handle on why you don’t want to continue, make sure it’s not just giving up then pivot, change directions and use that time to do something else, something more meaningful and stay the course by putting in the effort and using your time more wisely.
Change is not easy. Change always has its price, but change is one of the most important and constant musts in life.
Stay the Course!
An opportunity now exists to have a living website. Never before has it been so easy to create and develop a website yourself.
It’s evident that the primary thing missing from most small business websites is high-quality content. If Content is King as stated by Bill Gates years ago and repeated by thousands of website gurus sense then, why is content so weak on most websites?
The answer is simple; you can not reach for answers from the outside to explain the inner workings of your business today. Think about it, let’s say you’re an expert fly fisherman, can you imagine reading an article about fly fishing from someone who’s never been fishing? That’s what most content today is, articles written by people who don’t know. They don’t visit your place of business; they don’t interview you or your staff by phone, not even an email is sent your way to help clarify your company story. Instead, old content is rehashed from various companies in your industry and “keywords” are taken, often out of context, put into vague paragraphs that rarely sound good and never sound right or like your business.
Many of you who are reading this know your website content is not very good. The wording is all wrong the pictures don’t match the words, and it reads like the script of a play that no one would sit through. But what can we do about it, we’re already so busy we can’t see straight. The thought comes forward; if I had an unlimited budget, I could hire a better service to do this for me. But that thought has been lingering for years, and you’re still stuck with that pathetic website.
Take action and start a Living Website. It’s so easy to learn to use WordPress, the number one website builder today, so get started and create a website to build your business, the business you know and the business you dreamed.
Imagine updating your website this week with a new product, service or project your team has just completed or made available. Your living website can lift your business above the average in a short time. For the first time, you and your customers can visit your website and they for the first time will see your store for what it is. A colorful place to pick the things they want, a place they tell others about and a place they revisit again and again.
A Living Website? Why Not?
One of the most powerful tools we have is our time, tick tock – tick tock. Using our time to do productive things may be the most powerful thing we ever possess. Formal education cannot compete with the well-planned use of our days. It is proven time and again, look at the people we all know who dropped out of school and became billionaires in our lifetime. Being a genius cannot, many smart people get left behind in the dust by those who better apply themselves.
Let’s suppose for a moment you agree with me; time is our most precious asset. How well do we use our time? Do we plan the use of our days a day in advance? Here’s an even tougher question, do we stick to the plan, following it through in every detail or do we let the frustration of minor pain, not enjoying the moment distract us to lighten the load? Things like drift into checking emails, watching a video, checking our updates on Pinterest, you know, busy but time-wasting things.
We have time limiting rules in our society. The eight-hour workday is a rule. If our work offers the potential for bringing more life fulfilling things to us, why limit a workday into a short eight-hour day? Everyone needs a break from their work, but why interrupt our workflow just because it’s break time?
There seems to be a new rule stating you must love what you do to pour yourself thoroughly into it. We’ve all seen this, a clerk at a store not focused on there work, a barista at Starbucks asks three times, what drink did you say? The list is long of the many examples of wasting time.
Wherever we are, whatever we do, the habit we create not using time wisely limits our rise to where we want to be. Today, I challenge myself to use the time I have today more wisely, join me!
Tick Tock – Tick Tock
To have an opinion is to know you will not please everyone. Is it better to please everyone or to have an original thought? If we focus on pleasing everyone, isn’t that like following the crowd? Following the masses often leads to disaster or mediocrity. Some easy access articles state 60% of US citizens spend more monthly than they earn. If you do math like I do the math, that doesn’t add up.
Having an opinion can lead to negative feedback or objections. This negative feedback can be painful or a least annoying. If you & I choose to have an idea about the way to do something or tastes in quality that differs from others, how do we share our thoughts and handle the negative feedback?
First, don’t try to change the world unless that’s your mission in life. Enjoy your independent thought process and be proud you have it. Then share those ideas or thoughts when it’s appropriate, and the feedback will be positive or inquisitive.
Second, remember old stories you heard as a kid, things like people used to believe the world was flat or that man can’t fly. Isn’t it wonderful that thought surpassed the shared beliefs and ideas of an era?
Lastly, enjoy knowing that having an original concept is key to real leadership. In business, doing it the way everyone else does leads to a must to be the cheapest otherwise, what do you have to sell?
Pleasing Everyone, it’s comfortable but rarely rewarding!
Occasionally the best way to find an answer to complete a project is to sleep on it. Take a serious look at the project, what’s needed, what have you tried, and what could you try again tomorrow just before going to bed.
Then like magic, the moment you approach the project the solution you were looking for comes to you. No matter how much you thought about it yesterday, the answer wouldn’t surface, but today here it is. So easy, so simple, how can this be?
The answer comes from deep in our mind, it was there all the time but filed away so well it was not easy to access in our current state of mind.
Sleep on it!
Brand. What is it? Is it essential for your company to have a brand?
It’s interesting; there is a lot of varied answers when you Google brand and see what people say. One article says brand starts with hustle and selling. Maybe that’s so; many companies use this approach. They advertise like crazy, chasing down every lead and pushing sales and doing it all over again. I don’t think this works very well, but if you do, I’d like to hear your story.
Build a brand around an exceptional product or service, and you’ll find branding an easier task. To see this method of branding for yourself answer this question. Where would Apple Computer be today without the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and the Apple TV? It doesn’t matter if these are your preferred products, you have to admit these products changed our world and the quality of the products built the brand.
Another example relates to service. Walmart, we all know Walmart for essential products at low price. They outperformed everyone in delivering products to people all around the country then around the globe through their ever-increasing available number of stores and purchasing power. Walmart provided a service that stood out from all the rest based on service, not any particular product.
With great products or service comes endorsements. Think Niki you may picture Michael Jordan. With Pepsi, the vision of Michael Jackson goes dancing in our minds. That begs the question, does Pepsi tastes better than Coke? My answer is maybe but, it didn’t matter. If it was so good that the answer is unclear, the flavor of Pepsi made Pepsi a world-class brand.
Brand sells products it’s a well known fact. Could it also be that great products builds brands?
A few years ago I met Roy Spence. An assistant of his handed us a book he had recently authored, and he autographed it for me. It’s one of my favorite books, the title, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For. Below the title is this statement, Why Every Extraordinary Business Is Driven By Purpose.
Roy is one of the founding principals at GSD&M an advertising firm in Austin. Their success has been incredible, and the client list is one that we all know the names well. GSD&M became outstanding in helping businesses, colleges, presidential candidates and states like Texas that had a passion for achieving a cause. You may have heard the slogan, Don’t Mess with Texas. This slogan alone impacted Texas dramatically cutting the cost of roadside clean up. It’s still in use today, nearly 40 years later.
What do you sell? What service or product does your company sell that makes a difference. To have a product or service that you are passionate about makes all the difference when you set down to plan your marketing. It’s why your product and services will be better than your competitions. It’s also what will give you a real competitive edge.
It’s incredible though; I find most companies we compete with work very hard to stay mediocre. They put enormous effort into doing so based on competitive cost. Sadly, their focus is on competitive price, not on a better product or ways to deliver a better product at a better value. It’s a vicious endeavor.
A dramatic turnover of sales staff then follows this the habit. Why? Because selling the average at a reasonable profit is difficult.
If you want a great business, an extraordinary company, make it a business of principals.
Stand for Something!
What is your “Small Business Advantage”? To reach your target goals with your small business, you must have something to sell, an offer the big guys miss or do not provide. It can be as simple as an artistic touch to your product or a level of excellence in your service beyond mass production capability.
Once you have that something, focus on marketing to the specific audience who appreciates your service or product’s advantage. This something is your niche and your “Small Business Advantage.”
Take advantage by showing it off, talking about it and by creating captivating content, sharing it with colorful pictures, this will separate your business from the crowd, large companies included and it will be content they cannot duplicate.
Here’s the real edge, you get to charge more, often a lot more because you have a product or service that’s unique, outstanding or incredible. Then when your product is beyond the imagination of others, it gets talked about in small circles of influence. Once this happens, you’ve leveraged your marketing and multiplied your “Small Business Advantage.”