Jumpstart Your Business

I listened to a young executive assistant complain every morning about the size of her to-do-list. The best advice I ever gave her was “just pick one of the items and do it and get it off the list”. Sometimes doing is more productive than making a list and worrying about how long it is becoming. Start getting items off the list.

Surviving a year or two or even ten does not indicate that you’re doing it right. Annually, over 25% of failing businesses are more than ten (10) years old.

If you don’t have a business plan in place, perhaps you ought to start thinking about putting one together right now.

Whenever I went in to consult with a failing company, before the word got out as to who I was, one of the first things I did was talk to the front office to see how a typical customer or prospect was treated.

Too many executives never call their main telephone number so they never hear what their customers or prospects do, nor do they ever walk through the front door where the lowly customers have to deal with their receptionist and other front office personnel. (Even if they do, they’d get the special treatment).

If you can’t get a feel for what is going on, hire someone to do it and give you detailed feedback. You’ll be surprised……

Planning is good and financial analysis will tell you whether the numbers will work.  Nevertheless, you need to know if your customers will buy your product.  You must have a prototype, whether it is a restaurant menu item, or a new line of clothes or the latest widget, you must try it out on potential customers.  There is always someone geographically close to you who will try it out and give you feedback, you just have to go looking for them.

It is not enough to be very good at only one aspect of running your business. For example, your excellent selling skills will not help you keep up with the accounting needs and you most likely will be losing money without realizing it.

A good leader either has a balance of business skills (marketing, sales, personnel, accounting, operations) or else he/she hires competent people to compensate in those areas where there is a skills deficiency.

Some products just go out of style. Sometimes technological advances, new governmental regulations, or health related discoveries can cause products to become unpopular . You should look very carefully at unloading products like these. Forget keeping certain items to please a good customer unless the customer is willing to pay you for the losses you’re incurring.

Read also: 10 Essential Elements of A Business Plan

The plan is your roadmap to taking your business from concept to reality and it shows that you understand all of the segments of your roadtrip to becoming a successfull entrepreneur. The plan is for you and only after you can defend everything in it should you take it to the bank or to an investor to raise capital. For it to be real, you need to write it yourself or at a minimum you have to actively participate in the writing of it.

Someone I know recently paid big money to get a web site designed and built before they had written a business plan and before they even understood what role the web site would play in the business. This was a major error in business judgement.

Please don’t repeat this mistake. The title for your pages and the keywords that go on each page are very important. Search engines electronically look at these pages and use the title and these keywords to find your site. These are typically the words that your customers will use when they search for a business like yours.

Get some advice from someones who specializes in critiquing web sites. Also get a designer who not only knows how to put together something spectacular but who understands the technical requirements.

The owner of a facility that you are contemplating for your start-up coffee shop want to lower the rent by 15%-20% and the place looks great. Ask yourself why it has been vacant for so long and why the businesses that rented the place left.

It is time to do more market research. Perhaps there is not enough foot traffic to support your venture. What about on and off street parking? Will the college kids who are 20 blocks away come to your place. What will be the attraction?

Perhaps this is not such a good deal.