Monday, April 27, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
How to Take Effective Action to Generate New Business in 3 Easy Steps
Over the years I have heard tales of woe and success from around the country concerning business owners and their efforts to generate new business. Their solutions have been many and varied but in their mantra of reasons “why” they are not increasing the volume of their business is a common thread which winds throughout all inaction in that area.
Why wouldn’t someone take effective action to generate new business? Is it that some of us feel we just can’t squeeze another free minute out of our already jammed days? Or is it that over our years in business we have achieved a level of success large or small, which we have settled into and from that vantage point we cannot recognize that there may be solutions, which work that we haven’t tried?
Some business owners are amazingly creative in their efforts. But they may also have stacked up failures or their successes have been hit or miss because they lack a basic understanding of what it is that actually produces a result in the Public relations and marketing arena. Their mantra then becomes “I’ve tried it all, what else is there to do? There is no real solution.”
How many of us have gone out on marketing calls, have had what seemed like a great “meeting” only to never hear from them again? How many of us have experienced the up and down roller coaster of generating new business and then, from the increase in business which winds us up with us directly on the day-to-day production lines, seen our new business again wane? We can sometimes feel like we’re riding a wave, a wave over which we have no control.
There is a solution, which works. A simple solution that involves taking the time to put together a realistic plan for the future that encompasses not just the actions needed to drive in new business but also the actions needed to ensure that you can deliver what has been promised.
The steps, roughly, can be said to be:
1. Determine what needs to be produced in each area of your company over the next six months in order to meet the goals you set for your business this year.
2. Starting with the areas that handle the actions necessary to drive business into your company, work out a plan that meet the target.
3. Now you need to work out how this much new business will be serviced. This may include the addition of new personnel, more space, and more equipment.
Once the above is done, ensure that all of the plans align with each other and that based on the data to hand they will result in meeting the targets you have set. Now as the owner all you need to do is simply ensure that each step of the plans are executed completely and on time.
Why wouldn’t someone take effective action to generate new business? Is it that some of us feel we just can’t squeeze another free minute out of our already jammed days? Or is it that over our years in business we have achieved a level of success large or small, which we have settled into and from that vantage point we cannot recognize that there may be solutions, which work that we haven’t tried?
Some business owners are amazingly creative in their efforts. But they may also have stacked up failures or their successes have been hit or miss because they lack a basic understanding of what it is that actually produces a result in the Public relations and marketing arena. Their mantra then becomes “I’ve tried it all, what else is there to do? There is no real solution.”
How many of us have gone out on marketing calls, have had what seemed like a great “meeting” only to never hear from them again? How many of us have experienced the up and down roller coaster of generating new business and then, from the increase in business which winds us up with us directly on the day-to-day production lines, seen our new business again wane? We can sometimes feel like we’re riding a wave, a wave over which we have no control.
There is a solution, which works. A simple solution that involves taking the time to put together a realistic plan for the future that encompasses not just the actions needed to drive in new business but also the actions needed to ensure that you can deliver what has been promised.
The steps, roughly, can be said to be:
1. Determine what needs to be produced in each area of your company over the next six months in order to meet the goals you set for your business this year.
2. Starting with the areas that handle the actions necessary to drive business into your company, work out a plan that meet the target.
3. Now you need to work out how this much new business will be serviced. This may include the addition of new personnel, more space, and more equipment.
Once the above is done, ensure that all of the plans align with each other and that based on the data to hand they will result in meeting the targets you have set. Now as the owner all you need to do is simply ensure that each step of the plans are executed completely and on time.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
How To Increase Productivity
Do you keep a “to-do list” on what you wish to accomplish each day? There may have been a point in time where you did this quite routinely, and perhaps it has dropped out. Most people will make a list of things they wish to accomplish in the morning and by the end of the day they didn’t get one thing off the list done. Sometimes this becomes so bad that many business owners decide not to even keep a daily to-do list anymore and just walk into the office and wait till the first employee gives them an order of what they need, and the owner does it for them. This is a backwards way of thinking.
The simplicity of placing a couple of targets on a to-do list and making that your known goal and overcoming whatever those not unknowable obstacles are in order to achieve that end, would make you more happy. Simply speaking, if you got your to-do list done each day, how would you feel at the end of the day? Would you feel good or bad? Likely good. Accomplishing any target or any goal that you set out to do will make you happy.
Too often there are a variety of different barriers that get in the way of achieving one’s goal. The unfortunate thing is we tend to put attention on the things that stop us, and not attention on things that allow us to win. Look at today. What are the problems that you are trying to handle outside of the basic production for the day? It’s likely that these problems do not have any impact on your expansion even if you never handled them at all.
Sometimes it is important to recognize the barriers that are in front of you that keep you from achieving your goal and just ignore them. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is nothing while carrying forward towards reaching your known goal. Let’s take a look at how simple this can be accomplished. Let’s say you walk into your office on Monday morning, and you look at how production occurred the prior week, and you have an immediate staff meeting, for say 30 minutes, and you say, with confidence that “we are going to get our production up by 10% before the end of the week.” And then you pose the question to the group: “what can each of you do?” Insist they actually give you an answer to this problem. And then write it down on your to-do list -- those steps that your staff said they could do to get your statistics up by 10% that week. And those would be your known sub-goals toward the overall goal of a rise of production by 10%. And then you overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of achieving those goals until you accomplish the end result you are searching for. Certainly you do this fairly routinely. Most business owners do this or if they don’t, they should be.
This inability or difficulty in getting things done transcends from the owner to the staff. If you give your staff random orders without any recognition of what is important and what’s not, the staff member will take the unimportant to be equal to the vital task. So it is key for you to delegate towards expansion.
By simply delegating toward expansion, putting together a real list of actions to take each day that will result in expansion and completing what is on the list you will increase the productivity of your business. It is that simple.
The simplicity of placing a couple of targets on a to-do list and making that your known goal and overcoming whatever those not unknowable obstacles are in order to achieve that end, would make you more happy. Simply speaking, if you got your to-do list done each day, how would you feel at the end of the day? Would you feel good or bad? Likely good. Accomplishing any target or any goal that you set out to do will make you happy.
Too often there are a variety of different barriers that get in the way of achieving one’s goal. The unfortunate thing is we tend to put attention on the things that stop us, and not attention on things that allow us to win. Look at today. What are the problems that you are trying to handle outside of the basic production for the day? It’s likely that these problems do not have any impact on your expansion even if you never handled them at all.
Sometimes it is important to recognize the barriers that are in front of you that keep you from achieving your goal and just ignore them. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is nothing while carrying forward towards reaching your known goal. Let’s take a look at how simple this can be accomplished. Let’s say you walk into your office on Monday morning, and you look at how production occurred the prior week, and you have an immediate staff meeting, for say 30 minutes, and you say, with confidence that “we are going to get our production up by 10% before the end of the week.” And then you pose the question to the group: “what can each of you do?” Insist they actually give you an answer to this problem. And then write it down on your to-do list -- those steps that your staff said they could do to get your statistics up by 10% that week. And those would be your known sub-goals toward the overall goal of a rise of production by 10%. And then you overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of achieving those goals until you accomplish the end result you are searching for. Certainly you do this fairly routinely. Most business owners do this or if they don’t, they should be.
This inability or difficulty in getting things done transcends from the owner to the staff. If you give your staff random orders without any recognition of what is important and what’s not, the staff member will take the unimportant to be equal to the vital task. So it is key for you to delegate towards expansion.
By simply delegating toward expansion, putting together a real list of actions to take each day that will result in expansion and completing what is on the list you will increase the productivity of your business. It is that simple.
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