Make Your Business Startup A Success By Doing Your Homework

When YOU start your new business startup, YOU want it to be a phenomenal success, but sadly 50% of new businesses fail in the first 3 years.

You don’t want this to be YOU – so START YOUR BUSINESS RIGHT.

There Is a Big Reason For Failure

ONE big reason is the lack of HOMEWORK that is done before a business startup proceeds.

What do I mean by HOMEWORK?

In short, I mean FOUR things:-

RESEARCH
UNDERSTAND
THINK
PLAN

You Must Research Everything

When YOU start a new business, YOU must RESEARCH heavily literally EVERYTHING to do with your new business. The most important parts are:-

Your TRADING MARKET & your COMPETITORS
Your CUSTOMERS
The PRODUCTS you will sell
The CUSTOMER SERVICE you should provide
The PRICES you will buy your PRODUCTS for and the PRICES you will sell them for
Your MARKETING
Your BUSINESS NUMBERS

With the RIGHT RESEARCH, YOU should sit down to UNDERSTAND what you have learned and have a good THINK about EVERYTHING. From all this, a good practical BUSINESS PLAN should be created – one that will deliver SUCCESS for your new business.

Understand Your Trading Market

It is important to know everything about the TRADING MARKET that YOU are about to enter – information such as what is the monetary value of the market, is it growing or shrinking and who are the competitors?

Your new business is more likely to be successful, if your trading market is growing and there are not too many competitors; a shrinking market and too many competitors could make it difficult.

Know Your Customers, Your Products & Your Customer Service

Then, YOU need to know who your likely customers are and understand them as fully as possible – such knowledge would allow YOU to understand their needs and wants and what products your business could supply them with.

Your Customer Service is just as important as your products and you need to know what customer service to provide in order to get your products to your customers.

Understand Your Competitors

A good way to learn about your target customers and the products that you should sell is from your likely competitors. If you are to compete effectively against your competitors, you will need to grab many of their customers and sell the same or similar products.

You should look at the target customers and understand who they are. You need to buy some of their products and analyse these closely and understand why these customers buy these products. Finally, you need to look at the customer service offered and look at customer reviews to see what their customers think.

If you are to compete successfully, you need to be much better than your competitors – your products and customer service both need to be excellent. You should look for your competitors’ strengths and try to be much better, but you should also look for their weakness and try to exploit these.

Know Your Prices

Prices are important and you need to learn about the selling prices for the products in the trading market; understand what prices your target customers will pay and whether quality is more important than price, for instance. If quality is more important, this gives you scope to charge higher prices.

Again, you can gather much information on pricing from your competitors but think that it does not always pay to be the cheapest in your market. Many new business startups have accrued a lot of customers and sales by being too cheap, but have failed because there was no profit.

Look At Your Marketing

By knowing your customers and how to reach them through your marketing, YOU can work out how you will market your business. Many new start-ups fall into the trap of spending a lot on advertising that does not work and this often drains their resources.

Try to do as much free marketing as you can – online social media marketing is a must along with a good website and try to get free PR marketing by telling the media about you and getting them to spread the news.

Know Your Numbers

Your numbers are really important & you must research and understand these – remember 50% of new start-ups fail because they don’t make enough money for a profit; their numbers go wrong – your numbers are important.

You must research what your likely sales, gross profit and costs will be. Then, YOU should create a realistic projected profit and loss projection for the first year or so and see what your profit is likely to be and when your startup will make money; ideally you want to make a profit within the first six months.

The quicker you can make a profit the better, so try to aim to become profitable almost immediately.

Create A Simple Business Plan

When your RESEARCH is complete and YOU feel you fully understand EVERYTHING, YOU should put a simple BUSINESS PLAN together and ideally get a business coach or mentor to review it for YOU; a critical review should highlight your strengths and weaknesses.

The better your plan, the better your chances of success.

Then Put Your Plan Into Action

When YOU are happy with your plan and when YOU are ready to start, YOU should LAUNCH your business – don’t just start it, however, but LAUNCH it under a blaze of publicity!

So many new start-ups start with a whimper & they never really get going and fail very quickly.

Summary

By RESEARCHING very heavily and very comprehensively EVERYTHING within your new business, YOU will be able to UNDERSTAND your business FULLY, before YOU actually START.

YOU should then use some quality THINKING on how your business will be moulded and how it will RUN and put this into a PLAN.

Once and, only once, YOU are READY TO START your business, YOU should ACT and get started BY LAUNCHING your new business.

Be A Success

Too often businesses START with only a fraction of the RESEARCH and UNDERSTANDING that is needed for success. WRONG THINKING and PATCHY PLANNING then follows and the business has a POOR START. These businesses then struggle for the early months or years before eventually FAILING.

If YOU are STARTING A NEW BUSINESS, YOU should take your time and only OPEN when YOU are READY.

HAVE SMART BUSINESS THINKING, SMART BUSINESS ACTIONS

If you would like to continue the conversation, please leave a comment below or email me at Robert@prestigebusinesscoaching.co.uk:

Use Customer Service To Gain Sales

What is your CUSTOMER SERVICE like?

Do your customers rave about your CUSTOMER SERVICE?

Or do your customers say your CUSTOMER SERVICE leaves much to be desired?

Surveys consistently show that consumers rate CUSTOMER SERVICE as highly as the products they buy. Customers will even avoid buying good products if the CUSTOMER SERVICE is poor.

If you can offer much better customer service than your competitors, then you will steal their customers.

Use customer service to gain sales.

Many Businesses Do Not See The Merits In Offering Good Customer Service

But so many business owners in the UK do not recognize how highly customers rate CUSTOMER SERVICE - and when they have this attitude, they are literally throwing sales away and losing customers.

Poor CUSTOMER SERVICE is evident everywhere, but as a business owner, you can literally ‘cash in’ on this - have BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE than your COMPETITORS and YOU should take their CUSTOMERS and GAIN SALES.

Offer Excellent Customer Service

In fact, make your CUSTOMER SERVICE as good as it is possible to make it - make your CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENT!!

Take a long hard look at it, pull it apart and analyse in detail the CUSTOMER SERVICE that you offer and ask yourself TWO BIG QUESTIONS:-

“HOW CAN I MAKE MY CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENT?”
“WHAT WOULD I WANT FROM MY COMPANY AS A CUSTOMER?”