The Big “F” of doing business 1
In this series I have take a number of ‘F’ words and unpacked some lessons we can all learn from how to do business more effectively and efficiently.
The first set of ‘F’ words are Fail Fast. The ability for any business to fail is often frowned upon, especially by your accountant and bank manger. Failure is just not why we went into business in the first place so we try to hide it and deny it and ignore the very fact it happened at all.
But a true Entrepreneur has to learn to embrace failure and more importantly to fail fast. Learn to recognise the signs of a failure, embrace it and get it over with as soon as possible. Put it up as school fees fix the cause and resolve any outstanding issues that may require your focus.
Failing fast reduces costs of denial and dragging it out in some blame game with suppliers or customers. People, being customers, will better sympathise with you if you admit up front where you screwed up or went wrong than if you try to hide the truth and then it all comes out later.
Fail Fast, learn and get back on the horse to ride another day.
What do your Customers Demand?
Customers demand Faster, Better, Cheaper from retailers all the time. This triangle of demand drives businesses into the quadrant of red water competitiveness and the price wars start. Margins are cut, service is compromised and quality fails. Major retailers are good at this because they will never supper themselves, they just pass the pressure ball back to their suppliers and squeeze them into reducing costs without allowing them any room to move at the same time pushing prices up for the consumer. It is always the small guys who suffer and end up circling the drain.
So what is the answer? Escape the commodity trap and get out of this rat race to hell and bankruptcy. Blue Water Marketing, the art of creating a clean slate of client-centric service based on the experiential market. When you make a customer feel so good through how you offer them your service or product, price fades into the foggy distance.
What would be the top two most craved commodities in the world today? Some would say oil and food. Others would say safety and health. But actually what people crave most is Convenience and Experience above all else. Offer these to your customer first and your business will move swiftly out of the red water into the clear blue water of business growth.
For more details on these strategies join us for our webinars here
Do you know what you are paying for from your ISP?
Learn to test what you are getting. ISP or Internet Service providers will market you all sorts of products with varying line speeds, download rates and monthly packages to get you hooked. Their first prize is to get you tied into a 24 month contract that secures their income for the next 2 years. So often we just follow like sheep and do as they say.
But if you actually analyzed what they offer and then tested their delivery, you will be very surprised as to what you actually get. For most uncapped DSL offerings there is a term called ‘strangling’ that is never used in the marketing brochure but that seems to just creep in whenever you make full use of their service. This allows the ISP to slow down your line to stop the excessive use of their ‘uncapped’ offering. Then there is the unscheduled down time and the blame game that seems to happen. Have you ever noticed how easily people who you pay for a service point fingers at other services to avoid accountability. It never seems to be their fault and we the consumer just have to bear the brunt of the problem. One company we chatted to spent 3 days with no internet, listening to all the excuses only to find that the Telkom technician had actually unplugged the cable by mistake. They were all ready to charge the callout fee to come back to the office again to prove that the equipment was faulty not their lines.
But we can test our service and rate it against what the contract says. Use this tool: www.speedtest.net or www.pingtest.net to check for upload and download speeds of your current service provider. Then confront them if you are not getting what you paid for.
Reducing business to simple words
Reducing what business is all about is what we are all about. It is a total waste of time expecting busy business owners to have to attend long tedious lectures, complete home work assignments, read case studies and then still expect them to find time to apply learnings back in to their own organisation.
So here is a short video of the top most important words in business. You may be surprised to not find words such as Profit, Customers and Marketing. Enjoy
Webinars: are they the future of coaching?
This week at the Entrepreneur Incubator office we have been testing and running a number of sessions using various online applications to present our business coaching tools. It has been a long learning curve but I think we have found a good solution to the problems we faced.
This week we have spoken to many different business owners from both South Africa and abroad on the following topics:
Introduction to Webinars
10 things to do to get a business off the ground
Feasibility Assessment Tool
It has been a whole bunch of fun for us and from the positive feedback we have had, for our participants too. So could webinars be the coaching tool of the future? We thinks so, but online relationships through webinars and FB are not as real as we would like them to be, so we will still run the occasional live venue based workshop and our coaches will still see clients face to face and chat about real issues. But this has opened up doors for us to be able to reach far a wide across the world to entrepreneurs who are not fortunate enough to live in the beautiful Cape Town.
So, onward and upward. We have scheduled 3 new topics for next week:
Introduction to Entrepreneurship
Developing a 1 page business plan
The Business Opportunity Filter Tool
All not to be missed topics for the budding entrepreneur and business owner. Click here for more details and to register.