10 Changes You Can Make to Improve Your Business Dramatically

Business Growth Hacks, Mindset, Productivity

Every business owner wants their business to thrive. But to Improve your business, you can’t just rely on sheer luck. There are certain fundamentals of running a business that simply can’t be skipped. Here are a few changes you can make to running your business to dramatically improve performance and push you to the top of the pack.

1. Giving Back to Improve Your Business

While this may sound a little counterintuitive, one thing you can do to improve your business is to give back. Ensure you have a life mission reflecting your need to make a difference in the lives of others. Money should not be the main motivation because it’s usually a non-monetary purpose that will help you keep going during challenging times and bring you the self-satisfaction, and happiness that you are looking for. Giving back to your local community will also increase support for your business. What are some ways in which you can give back? Can you contribute to a good cause? Donate products or services? Provide guidance to other local businesses?

2. Practice Physical Activity

This may not seem business-related, however, engaging in physical activity is one of the best ways to improve your quality of sleep, boost brain chemistry, become more creative, and clear your mind. It also helps to boost your longevity, happiness, and health. This will have a direct effect on how you think and operate your business, so you can be more productive in growing your business.

3. Self-coaching

When we think of coaching, we usually think of being coached by someone else. But becoming your own coach and maintaining a positive inner dialogue can be one of the most significant changes you’ll ever make in your life. It’s easy to slip into negative self-talk and go down the slippery slope of self-blame and self-pity. But if we want our business to be successful, then we need to develop a positive outlook on things, become our own best friend and coach ourselves through the tough times.

4. Be Willing to Do What It Takes

True success rarely comes without sacrifices. So, make it a habit to show up every day. Commit to the long haul and be willing to devote your energy and time to work toward your goals. Identify time-consuming distractions that take your focus away from your business and life. Do at least one thing every day to move you closer to your goals. Of course, in order to do so, we need to first get clear on what our goals are. Click here to learn how to write a business vision to gain clarity and motivation.

5. Love What You Do

I’ve found that the most successful business owners I work with have dedicated their lives and businesses to what they do best and love most. As a result, they create wonderful businesses that bring joy and add value to their customers. Are you creating a business that you truly love or are you merely focused on making an income? The good news is, it’s possible to do both!

6. Start a Journal

Another thing you can do to improve your business is to start journaling. Regularly write down your thoughts and ideas, so you can translate them into tangible form. Writing offers us a different perspective on our desires, our current state, our goals and helps us reflect on our mistakes. Don’t just get busy going down the wrong path. Make time to reflect and redirect your efforts to ensure you arrive at a place you actually love.

7. Improve your Business by Making Lists

Lists are amazing. They help us capture goals we want to accomplish and stay on track when we feel a little lost. Learn to work with different lists for the upcoming day, week, month, and year. Be sure to prioritise the items on your lists, so you can allocate your time and effort to what’s most important to you at any given time. When we write down our dreams and desires we turn them into goals, which significantly increases our chances of actually achieving them.

8. Learn to Listen

Listening is an important skill in business. Whether it’s our customers, partners or the people we work with, actively listening will offer us a deeper understanding to ultimately make better decisions. Regularly collect honest customer feedback to truly understand their needs and tweak your business accordingly. Learn to use their language, rather than jargon. No one wants to buy from someone they don’t understand.

9. Practice Clearing Your Mind

As business owners, we often have to wear multiple hats, which can become quite overwhelming at times. It’s important to make time to clear our minds every now and then to stay focused. Learn to make quick decisions that are conclusive to avoid cluttering your mind with unfinished business. The habit of constantly delaying our decision-making can have a huge impact on our well-being. While it may not always possible, try to make it a habit to never leave work without a clear mind. Lots of small unfinished decisions can quickly build up and prevent us from focusing our energy and headspace on the truly important ones.

10. Find Ways to Leverage Your Time

Lastly, find ways to make better use of your own time. Just because you do something better than anyone else, it doesn’t mean that it’s the best use of your time. Today, many business and marketing processes can be completely automated. In his book ‘The Four Hour Work Week‘, Tim Ferris suggests we delegate any tasks we can to free up our own time and headspace. But before delegating any tasks, we should see if it’s possible to automate them instead. Automation allows us to save vast amounts of time and significantly reduce operating costs. Automation not only helps us simplify running our business but also be more profitable.

As a marketing consultant, I help business owners to automate all of their marketing activities, so they can focus on running their business without worrying about where new customers are going to come from. If you would like to have a chat about how you can grow your business faster and more effectively, book a free strategy call with me here.

Seven Marketing Assumptions That Can Hurt Your Business

Business Growth Hacks, Marketing, Mindset

In order for your business to succeed, you need a clever marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most companies hold some marketing assumptions that can restrict their ability to promote their services and products in a cutthroat marketplace. The idea of marketing is quite obscure because marketing is the base for various methods of business promotion. Therefore, it is easy to confuse the real purpose of marketing with the concept of it. There are many reasons why companies seem to think marketing is not the right move for them. If you do not work in the profession, marketing can seem expensive and exotic, with creatives whose aim seems to be to throw money at different projects. Marketing is actually crucial to a number of strategic initiatives. If you have growth goals for your business, be it for market expansion, an extension of your product line, or diversification, then you need to have a proper understanding of what marketing can do for you.

7 Common Marketing Assumptions:

Listed below are the assumptions that can restrict the efficiency of your market plan causing you to miss out on sales opportunities.

1. Small Businesses Do Not Require a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan gives you a master plan for how you will introduce your business to the market. It helps you outline your target audience, budget, offers, tactics, channels, and messages. If you do not have a cohesive, integrated plan, you may be wasting your prospects money if not confusing them. Any business, no matter how big or small, should plan its marketing to ensure the best return on investment.

2. Running Ads is the Only Marketing Plan You Need

Even though an advertising campaign can be relevant as a marketing tactic, it is only but a tactic. Ads are just one of the various ways you can convey your message to your target audience. You should have an integrated plan spelling out different tactics and how they will work harmoniously to help you achieve, sales, lead generation, and awareness.

3. You Already Know What Your Customers Think

People similar to your current customers are your ideal prospects so you need to understand the customer completely. You can gain insight on your customers by conducting customer research courtesy of a professional, independent resource.

4. There is No Need to Market to Your Customers

You should never assume that just because you have customers they are yours for the keeping. Your customers need to be reminded constantly of why they should keep buying from you and not your competitors. Promote to your customers and your prospects too.

5. That Marketing Channel is Too Costly for You

Marketers usually make wrong assumptions about the cost of marketing avenues like direct mail or advertising. You should not cross out a channel because you assume it is too costly. Explore all your options intensively and you might discover that you can access channels that you thought were unaffordable.

6. You Do Not Need Social Media

Regardless of what you sell, the one thing you can be sure of is that your competitors, prospects, and customers are using social media actively. If you do not participate, you will be left out of conversations that could be shaping your marketplace.

7. You Need to Cut Your Marketing Budget because Sales are Down

This is one of the marketing assumptions business owners usually do. They say tough times call for tough decisions but cutting your marketing budget should not be one of these tough decisions. Effective marketing may actually help you come out of a slump with your sales so if you do not continue engaging with prospects and customers, one of your competitors will be ready to take your place.

6 Common Misconceptions about Digital Marketing

Business Growth Hacks, Marketing, Mindset

Digital marketing has helped entrepreneurs and business owners to take their business to the next level. It offers more advantages than other forms of marketing. Digital marketing doesn’t remain dormant for any length of time. It constantly changes and evolves. Along with that rapid change come a number of misconceptions about digital marketing that many believe to be true.

Not enough business owners have a broad enough understanding of what digital marketing can and cannot do and how to harness its true power.

Here are six of the most common misconceptions about digital marketing that I often here when talking to business owners in Australia.

6 Misconceptions about Digital Marketing

1. Digital marketing is for small businesses only

Digital marketing enables all businesses – whether small or large – to identify ways of communicating and engaging with their ideal customers or clients. It offers businesses several benefits, including faster turnaround time when testing campaigns, low cost and much more targeted advertising. It works for small and large businesses alike. No matter your budget or size of your company.

2. Digital marketing doesn’t contribute significantly to any company’s business strategy

This represents yet another misconception that mostly emanates from marketers who believe in traditional forms of marketing alone. Today’s customers are more likely to search for whatever they need on the Internet first thus making digital marketing essential to them.

Modern businesses and companies need websites.

3. It only succeeds with extremely large website traffic

The effectiveness of digital marketing is tied down to quality rather than quantity. For this reason, heavy or tiny traffic doesn’t matter! In our experience, quality will always attract and bring in the numbers that any business needs.

4. A website is all that a business needs for digital marketing

A website plays a crucial part in any successful digital marketing campaign. However, by no means is it the only requirement or ingredient! The website needs fresh content. The content has to be a mix of texts and videos.

Static content will not help the website.

Forbes offers a few ideas on what to do when content grows static and stale.

Static content harms digital marketing even if it’s posted on the most beautiful website.

5. Only worthwhile if my competition use it

Businesses need all the advantages they can get to stay ahead. In my line of work, I’ve realized that I don’t have to embrace digital marketing only because my competition uses it. If I take that path, I will always be behind and that would probably kill my business.

6. It’s not the answer for my industry

One of the misconceptions of digital marketing is that it doesn’t work well in all industries. The truth is it basically works well for all types of industries. It is not limited to a few industries. Any business that applies the principles of digital marketing will reap its fruits the industry notwithstanding. Digital marketing works for all industries whose clients search for products and services online.

Lastly, remember that SEO isn’t dead.

Embrace digital marketing as its results benefit all businesses in all industries.

References

Grow Your Business Twice As Fast By Doing Half The Work – The Principle Of Leverage

Business Growth Hacks, Mindset, Productivity

Let’s face it. We are all too busy.

Ask any friend or colleague how they are and chances are you’ll hear “I’m just so busy…”.

To cope with our never ending to-do lists, at work and in our personal lives, we look for ways, apps and tools to get even more done and in less time. We attend time management seminars to learn how to be more productive and take our smart phones and laptops to bed, so we can squeeze every minute out of our day. Despite the fact that we’re getting so much done, we aren’t feeling any happier. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

It’s a vicious cycle and for many of us there seems to be no way out.

I must confess, this is pretty much a description of the life that I was living for quite some time.

Until I learned about a simple principle. The principle of leverage.

The Principle of Leverage

By applying the principle of leverage, or the law of the lever, we are able to move heavy objects with a lot less effort. This simple technique has been known for thousands of years. The earliest remaining writings regarding levers and the principle of leverage date from the 3rd century BC and were provided by my old friend Archimedes (kidding, we never actually met).

So, since growing a business has little to do with lifting large rocks, how can we apply this to our everyday life and our to-do list?

Simple. The key is not to get more done, but to focus on getting the right things done.

We all have tasks that we need to perform on a regular basis.

Let’s say you have a particular task that takes you an hour to finish and you had to do it three times per week. This task then would take you three hours every week, or 156 hours per year.

To make better use of your time you could instead take one hour to write a system for this task. A step-by-step guide that you can pass on to someone else to perform the task for you.

What would you do with an extra 156 hours per year?

Now you might think, hang on David, that would mean I have to pay someone to do it? That money is coming out of my bank account!

Correct. But let’s assume you paid someone $20 an hour to perform this task. That would cost you $3,120 for 156 hours.

Wouldn’t you agree that, with 156 extra hours per year, you could easily recoup this expense and so much more?

Exactly. I’m glad you agree.

Do this for all repetitive tasks (unless you REALLY love doing them) and you will literally transform your life – and your business.

If you have employees or work with a team, you might even want to take it one step further.

Instead of writing a system for each task, write a system on how to write a system and let your team help you with developing your systems.

Having systems in place will not only help you and your team to be more productive, but will also add a significant amount of value to your business, should you ever consider selling it.

Good systems are the reason why large companies pay millions of dollars to buy out smaller businesses. They understand the value of having these systems in place and how much time and money it will save them.

I have got my systems ready. Now, where do I put them?

A while ago, Tracey, whom I’ve been working with over the past two years, shared one of her biggest frustrations with me.

“David, my staff keep asking me the same questions, over and over again. It’s driving me crazy, having to answer those exact same questions EVERY day! I wish I could have my own ‘Google’, where my staff could simply enter a question and receive an answer instantly, without me having to be there!”

Two weeks later I got back to her with a system I had designed for her. We simply called it ASK. She now has all her systems in one place, stored securely in the cloud, which can be easily accessed by all her staff. Every system outlines exactly how to follow a procedure and where to find things. After a little over a year, she now has over 200 of her business systems documented. Even checklists now reside in that same system to ensure processes are followed correctly.

Staff members can simply grab one of the iPads provided and find anything they would ever need to help Tracey keep her business running, even when she’s away for a week or two, without having to call or email her.

I have since helped a number of business owners implement that same system, which saves them not only time and money, but more importantly, there sanity.

What’s your approach to increased productivity? Do you have systems in place that help you make the best use of your time? Or do you still do most of your tasks on your own? Leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts, what your challenges are and any tips you’d like to share.

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