As well as working with startups and growing operations, I work with business owners who have been established for years, even decades. Often, these are family-owned organisations with grass-roots beginnings. They have been serving the same customers, providing the same products and making roughly the same income, year-in, year-out.
Having a solid business is great. But… what if?
I ask established business owners:
- What if you could gain 15 per cent more customers?
- What if you could sell 30 per cent more product?
- What if you could halve your advertising budget?
- What if you could take every Friday off work?
- What if you could go on holidays whenever you felt like it, and still make money?
The way they are doing things may be working just fine. But what if it could be better?
Established businesses with decent profits can sometimes make a mistake of that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality. They are running fine without an intranet (internal website), without proper systems and processes, and without the many incredible apps and online tools that other businesses are using to fast-track their results.
But by keeping paper records and by failing to look for the tools which can save time and money, you are not only limiting your profits, you are limiting the overall value of your business. When it comes time to look into selling, you may not have something a modern buyer would want.
Evolution is the word
Every business that has been in operation since before the dot com boom would have started out with paper record keeping and the telephone as an essential way of keeping in touch.
Think of the major companies which have continued to exist across the decades; automotive brands, household cleaning products, lawn mowing franchises and huge retailers like Amazon. These businesses have remained part of our lives because they have changed with the times.
You can guarantee longstanding, successful companies have transitioned from fax to email, from pager to mobile and from shelves of files to cloud-based information storage. What’s more, they are leveraging modern technology by gathering and analysing data, by sending automated communication to their customers and by establishing and maintaining a dynamic social media presence.
The truly amazing benefit of the modern business landscape is that your business, no matter how small or how local its customer base, has the exact same opportunities to reduce costs and reach more customers as the Hyundais, Pine-o-Cleans and Jim’s Mowings of the world.
No matter how small your business, you can start advertising on Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms. The ads you create can be set up to be shown to people in a specific location, people or a certain age, even people who have a specific hobby.
For a negligible subscription fee, you can use the same platform as major retailers to create and send emails to your entire customer-base in one hit. Then you can send a follow up email, depending on how they respond to the first one. These platforms are priced to be affordable for businesses of all sizes and can be accessed by anyone on the planet.
Business owners who say “This is how we have always done things”, are also the ones who believe that the only way to make more money is to work much harder. These days, this simply isn’t true.
By taking just a few days a year to step out of your business, look at how you can implement systems, create better processes and introduce technology as a way of improving efficiency, you can potentially be buying yourself years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits.
Want to know more? Take just ONE DAY to attend 52 Ways, the most-informative FREE workshop for small business. Book your ticket now.
