NEW – The Small Business Strategic Toolbox

It’s here! Yes, The Small Business Strategic Toolbox was launched and went live on Friday!

This programme has been written for all the small business owners out there that know they need to re-invent themselves and start looking at their entire business differently.

If you are finding “business as usual” no longer gives you the returns you’re looking for, or needing, then you need to go through this strategic programme to evaluate the opportunities and niches where you can carve yourself a sustainable place in the minds of your consumers, against increasingly stiff competition.

This vital addition to The Small Business Toolbox stable covers the key areas of:

Vision & Values: Where do you want to take your business? Before embarking on any change process you need to have a clear picture of the new destination. You wouldn’t jump in your car and decide to go on a three week holiday without knowing where you are heading to, so why do that in business? By giving careful thought to where you want your business to take you the remainder of the strategy suddenly has purpose and direction.

Stop, Start, Continue: In order to change course what needs to be cut out, begun or continued? There is no doubt that every human only has 24 hours a day to make things happen ( well, 10-12 if you are a business owner who knows that recharging your own batteries is critical! ) In order to change what you get, you have to change what you do. This Stop, Start, Continue exercise is a fantastic tool for you to use to refocus your entire team on what must be done to change the results you get.

Critical Success Factors (CSF): A dive into the key business areas to assess effectiveness. Have you ever looked at the key pillars of your business? The modules in the CSF series cover all the key elements that need to work together for you to really be effective. These are: Finance; HR; Marketing; Sales; Internal Systems and Processes. Without alignment and clear objectives in each of these key areas your business will not be balanced correctly to achieve effective results.

Prioritisation and Action Plans: Putting the strategy into action. No plan can be effective if it is not implemented and monitored against pre-determined outcomes. However, this is the part where most businesses fall down. The strategies are brilliant, in theory, but in practice everyone keeps doing the same thing they did before, which means you, the business owner, keeps getting the same results! You don’t want that so you need a structure for driving change within your company. The modules in these sections will assist you to commit to action plans that will take you places.

There is no doubt that a sound business strategy is critical. If you are working the same now as you did 12 months ago you’re playing a dangerous game!

You need to re-strategise how you do what you do if you have any hope of coming out of these times in a position to capitalise on the upturn, when it comes.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Go to www.thesmallbusinessstrategictoolbox.com now and start putting the plans in place to ensure sustainability in the future.

Bridging The Generation Gap

Working with a local manufacturing business this week suddenly brought about what some may call “an epiphanous moment”. Maybe we were just getting so close to the trees that we could not see the wood any more. But what emerged from our session was to us a message from which we believe many businesses can learn.

We had been exploring the whole area of client communication in its broadest sense – from packaging through advertising through service delivery through to what the sales people actually say about the company when they are ”at the sharp end” in the customers offices.

And what became abundantly clear was that the rules of the game had changed. To a limited extent this applied to the product range although that was not where we felt the greatest change had taken place. What had changed dramatically was the nature of many of the buyers.

Let us go back a bit – research confirms regularly that buyers do not just purchase a product. They buy the package of benefits that surrounds that product and that they enjoy from the purchase. And this is where we discovered the huge mindshift that had been eluding us – our buyers are increasingly from the “Now” generation. This has little or nothing to do with the transformational change happening in the country but it has everything to do with the way that younger buyers interact – they are looking for instant gratification. They want it but they want it now!!! It is much more a psychographic issue than a demographic one.

They live in an environment which places huge pressure on their time and with media like cell phones, SMS, Mixit, Face Book and the Internet devices  things happen and happen quickly if not instantly. So this naturally affects their mindset in any and every buying situation – they want their needs met NOW!

And we would be missing a trick if we thought that it applied only to younger buyers – almost everybody is faced with the same increasing demands on our time and the need to “make things happen at pace”.

So what does that mean for us in small businesses? It means that we have to find new ways to make the links to customers – we need to make sure that our brand becomes a brand with which this new breed of buyer can easily associate.

We need to know exactly what our “new age” buyers are looking for and we have to find ways to deliver that. We have to re-examine the way we do business – starting from the bottom up and find ways to ensure that our “brand offering” in the broadest sense is relevant to buyers in the current generation.

We have to ‘connect’ in the way that our buyers understand and enjoy – we have to figure out what it is in our businesses that can truly resonate with our customers and will “connect” us to them in a way that will maximise their experience dealing with us. And if we don’t have it, we need to find it quickly if we are going to survive.

Financial Scams – Beware!

It seems that there is no end to the number of people who are able to set up supposedly legitimate businesses and proceed to use them to relieve the unsuspecting public of their hard-earned cash and increasingly much of their retirement funding.

It appears that we have learnt little from Masterbond, Supreme Bond,Fidentia, Bernie Madoff et al. Now we have another alleged scam in the Frankel Chemical crisis. It also seems that the South African public are as gullible if not more so than our overseas counterparts.

There is one very simple rule in investing money – if it seems too good to be true, then it almost certainly is. When the market is paying around 10-12% and someone tells you that he can give you returns of 15-20%, that is the time to look very deeply into the package you are being offered. It is alleged that the latest debacle of the Frankel Chemical Corporation is yet another elaborate “Ponzi” scam and that it could run into billions of rands.

Recently in KZN, an investment business taking funds from investors for ostensibly investment into private companies also appears to have hit the wall – and hundreds of investors – mainly private individuals as it appears is the case with Frankel – will in all probability lose their money. And all this despite the fact that the Financial Services authorities have apparently been bolstered and certainly legislation has been tightened up.

So what are the lessons for us in small businesses? Well, whilst you will come across the odd brilliant entrepreneur who has spotted a gap in the market and is charging through it making an undivided fortune, for the rest of us, making money equals hard work, long hours, persistence and endurance mixed with the odd stroke of good fortune and a great deal of vigilance!!

So when someone approaches you with one of these “too-good-to-be-true” offers or schemes, your first reaction figuratively should be to button the pocket in which you keep your wallet. And when you do look at opportunities, leave no stone unturned. And when someone resists your efforts to check every detail and every supposed “fact”, then run a mile and carry on protecting your hard earned cash.

The more successful you are in making money, the more you are likely to attract those who may have schemes and ideas which may be less than honest. If it looks too good to be true, then think again!!

It is difficult if not impossible to flout the laws of the market – to consistently produce returns that are 5-10% ahead of what the market is paying is just not a realistic proposition.

Time will tell how much the investors in Frankel will lose – but one thing is certain, they ain’t getting all their money back! And this should set the warning bells ringing in the heads of any local investor with a grain of common sense.

Exciting Developments for South African Business Owners

iTrust Strategic Partners

There are exciting developments afoot for South African business owners. iTrust, an Australian company, is launching in South Africa and judging by their success in that country (over 918,000 subscribers in under 3 years!) the market space in Africa is about to become a whole lot more interesting for all.

iTrust was started in Australia by a team of Zimbabweans and South Africans who have decided it’s time to bring home their success and help the local entrepreneurial and business community in a similar way. And, because of the growing emphasis here on business skills development they’ve partnered with a few value added service providers who can deliver not only practical development of business skills and networking opportunities but also access cost effective services that can assist them to grow their businesses into sustainable success stories.

The Small Business Toolbox is proud to have been selected to partner with the team above (from left) Johann Terblanche (Accretio); Theunis de Beer (MultiTel); Dianne Perrett (The Small Business Toolbox); Stuart MacGregor (LabourMate); Colin Armour (iTrust) and Hugo Slabbert (The Business Navigator).

This team is working hard to put together an exciting range of value added products and services to assist business owners to drive leads through the internet based business networking website www.iTrustsa.co.za.

And, from our perspective, if you register as an iTrust subscriber you not only get one TSBT programme absolutely FREE but you also get access to the NEW TSBT Business Forum for FREE too! That’s a saving of over R2,500 in your first year alone! Which, by the way, covers your first year’s subscription to iTrust without even taking into account the other benefits like:

A full HR department at your fingertips with FREE online LabourMate access giving you current labour regulations, acts and bargaining council agreements for your industry in your area, updated weekly.
A full Credit Bureau to reduce your debt risk through Accretio and the Business Navigator. Giving you the ability to check client’s credit ratings before extending credit, thereby managing your business exposure closely in these tight economic times.

So visit the iTrust website now to see how you can make use of incredible savings while driving leads to your door or contact us and find out how you can sign up today for less than R3.50 a day. With iTrust and The Small Business Toolbox you can increase sales, differentiate your business and get real time customer feedback, it’s the cheapest marketing you’ll ever need to do.