1) Having an Online Presence
Look at it this way. We have two worlds nowadays, a physical and a digital world. Every time someone is on their cellphone or on a PC, they’re on the digital world; just like you are right now, reading this content that will benefit your company. It is very important to have presence on both physical and digital worlds, how? By creating a website, social media and directing traffic to it, which will then become conversions (contacts, sells) and that will lead you to the client’s physical world to start a business relationship. In average your future clients spend about 9 hours online but sleep for 8 hours, so they’re 56% of their awake-time online, more than half! See the importance of your business having an online presence?
I’ve heard a couple of business owners saying: “I don’t need advertising for my business because I already have clients”. What worries me about that phrase is a one client dependency, no growing mind set, and the fact of him not understanding the importance of advertising. Huge companies like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Burger King, and Pepsi have millions if not billions of clients all over the world and yet spend tons of money on advertising, you mean to tell me that advertising is good enough for them…but not for you? Advertising creates awareness, retention, sales, comparisons, promotion, credibility and trust; 7 aspects that ANY COMPANY COULD USE.
Database is an important tool that stores and keeps information of your business’s clients. Data is information and information is knowledge; to have knowledge of your clients is a step closer to success. You can do different things with your company’s database, from email blasts to customer service routine calls that will help you re-sell in the future. This is the client-financial history of your company, if you haven’t created yet… you ought to start ASAP for your business’s success.
4) Book Keeping
There are small businesses who don’t do book keeping, and this is one of the reasons why small businesses have financial trouble. When you book keep, you are mapping out the financial history of your business, you save time when you file taxes, you keep profit and loss accounts, and it can forecast the financial future of your business. There’s an interesting fact about book keeping, Al Capone was not convicted for the crimes he did, he was convicted for income tax evasion and this was proven thanks to book keeping.
This is very important for your company to be successful. How are the prices in comparison to yours? Why are their prices lower? Why are yours lower? Do they advertise? Where do they advertise? Gather as much information as you can from your competitors and compare it to yours.
6) Have a growing mind set
Some business owners don’t want to grow their business, but if a business is good; this is inevitable. Some business owners are afraid that they will not be able to handle that much pressure or clients by growing their business and this might lead them to bankruptcy, which in some ways might be true if you are not organized as a company. Many times when a business grows things start to go wrong because they don’t have the proper business procedures or management and they realize that the reason of why they were successful is because they were small. When managing a business you need to have a growing mind set and be ready to apply changes whenever it is needed, if your managing skills grow when your company grows, your business will be successful. In this scenario, it’s all about management.
