Three Key Strategies to Building a Better Business
Every entrepreneur wants to improve his or her business in some way. Who wouldn’t want their business to make more money, or be valuable enough to sell off completely? Improving your business starts with a change of mind, articulated in the form of a business strategy. Here are three proven strategies to improve your business.
1) No more Cash Cows
It’s easy for a business to focus on one or two important clients in the early phases of its growth. The client is happy with the service that your business provides, and slowly hands over more and more of their business to you. Before you know it, you’ve assigned more and more of your resources to your contract with this client. They’ve become your cash cow. Unfortunately, the problem with a cash cow is that you find yourself in big trouble if the client ever stops doing business with you. You find yourself with a big company on your hands and no way to sustain it. What you want to do is spread your bandwidth and resources over a number of clients, so that each client is responsible for no more that 10% of your income. That way your business will survive in the event of a breakup.
2) Focus on your Core Products
Another problem with focusing too much on your early customers is that your business will often evolve to better cater to their needs, increasing the range of services that you offer to suit them. The problem with this tendency is that your business develops a wider range of services or products, but your brand becomes too generalized. Your business needs to be known for being great at doing one thing, not merely okay at doing several things. To turn this tendency around, reduce your offering to a few core products, backed up by a single set of services and customer policies.
3) Redefine your Business with Value
How others perceive your business starts with you. How you describe your business to others – through word of mouth, print, and the web – is ultimately how they perceive it, boiled down to a kernel of information. So you have to redefine your business in a way that’s not only sound bite-friendly, but also valuable. And it should be valuable to them. When you redefine your business to others, emphasize the thing that both makes your business stand out among your competitors, and also makes you valuable to your customers. Whether it is a lifetime guarantee, free estimates, or 24-hour customer support, emphasize your business’s special trait for a strong brand and maximum impact.
