Business Management

While some people find business management comes naturally, they are definitely in the minority. For most small business owners it’s one of the most frustrating and challenging parts of owning their own business.

Most small business owners have specialist skills in their area of expertise. Whether it’s retail, plumbing, hairdressing or any of the other myriad of small business product or service delivery areas, the specialist skills tend to be strong. However the business management side is the bit that stops them growing sustainable and profitable enterprises.

The soft and hard skills of business management are not difficult to learn but do require one to change a mindset in order to choose to do things differently. As the saying going, to keep doing the same things the same way will ensure you keep getting the same result!

The Small Business Strategy Toolbox offers a comprehensive, user friendly, layman’s terms, step-by-step programme that will enable any small business owner to re-evaluate where they’re at, what they need to do to change their outcomes and how to build a financially secure future.
By learning a few tips and tricks around business management you could leverage your potential earnings and the resale value of your business exponentially.

Without doubt logic prevails in business management and while there is a copious number of books on the subject they all pretty much say the same thing.

Know what you want, develop a plan to get you there and then, most important of all, start implementing the action plan and monitor results.

Within this simple 3 point process there are a number of nuances depending on whether you are working on HR, Finance, Process or Marketing issues, but the basics still remain the same whether you read a 25 page book or a 2500 page book!

Business Management is not hard, it just takes a bit of focus away from your core business so it falls into that Important but not Urgent category that often gets pushed to the side. So, what are you going to do to get started today?

Marketing under Pressure

The marketing discipline is taking a huge knock. What does that mean for you and how can you use it to your advantage?

As we all know the first thing that gets cut in a downturned economy is the marketing budget and many companies are finding out that they’ve been paying way too much for too little delivery.

Many charlatans posing as marketing professionals have been gaily having fun spending their client’s money without tracking and reporting back on the effectiveness of the activities employed against predetermined benchmarks. It’s given marketing a poor name and brought into questions the professionalism of industry.
If you’re not working with a team that provides regular feedback on their marketing effectiveness it’s time to look around for alternatives.

A few things to look for when selecting a marketing professional:
• Marketers that take the time to understand your business
• Marketers that don’t earn their livelihoods from the commissions they receive when spending your money
• Marketers that look for ways to connect with your target market cost effectively, yet creatively
• Marketers that care more about your bottom line sustainability than their creative awards
• Marketers that can talk business, not clichéd jargon

The recession is going to be great for the marketing profession. Hopefully it’ll show everyone’s true colours and there will be a shake-up of those that know what they’re doing vs. those that just love to spend your hard earned cash.

Perhaps think about joining our growing Business Forum, where you can share your highs and lows and get input and advice from other small business owners so you don’t repeat their mistakes but shortcut the learning curve in ways where you reach your goals faster.

Big 5 Business Tips

There was an interesting article in the Sunday Times this weekend about how Old Mutual base their financial education programme around the Big 5 animals and it struck me that their analogy is perfectly aligned also to what skills are required to grow a sustainable business.

In identifying particular traits of the Big 5 animals they say:

The lion eats first, before his pride. In other words you should pay yourself (in the form of investments) before starting to spend. This is certainly true in business, particularly in small businesses. If you don’t put away money every month for the rainy day, when it arrives, and without doubt it will, you won’t have the cash reserves to see you through. 10% of turnover every month needs to go into an interest bearing account so that you can sleep at night in good times and bad!

The leopard has realistic goals; while young he stalks catchable prey, graduating to bigger animals later. So set realistic and achievable goals. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else, try to keep up with the Joneses or waste precious turnover on non-essential expenditure. And, constantly go for stretch within all aspects of the business so that your goals stretch as the team’s skill base grows.

The elephant’s power is its perfect memory. Knowledge is power and networking is your trump card. You can’t grow your business if you stay behind the counter. Remember people, keep in touch and help them so that when you need help they’re willing to assist.

The rhino’s approach to a threat is to charge at it. Face up to your challenges, find out the facts and don’t play games with yourself. Sit down and develop a plan of attack and charge it with all your energy so that every day sees small, incremental improvements.

The buffalo is deliberate and steady, growing the herd over time. Be patient and harness the power of compounding, not only in financial compounding but the compounding effect of consistently driving improvement, customer service and flexibility within your business.

By focusing on these Big 5 analogies you have a simple process for building sustainability in your small business. Remember, it’s not about dramatic changes, but constantly striving for 1% improvement in key areas every day. By doing this your future is secure.

Making Sense of Pricing

I have just sent off e-mails to both the manufacturer and the retailer of a well-known brand of dish washing tablets for automatic dish washing machines. My question to them was how they could explain the differences in the pricing of the various sized packs in which they supply their product. I am not often moved to go as far as taking up cudgels with retailers and/or manufacturers (although I know that I should become a more active consumer particularly when I see something that smacks of ripping off the consumer!)

Let me start from the beginning – I went into a leading national chain store to buy tablets for my automatic dishwasher. Thinking that it is something that I would like to have to remember to purchase as infrequently as possible and that commonsense dictates that the larger the quantity you purchase, the lower the price should be, I automatically grabbed the 60 tablet box and put it into my trolley. Happily, as I did so, I ran my eye over the prices of the other smaller packs and an alarm bell went off in my head. I then started to do something that I seldom have done in the past but will most certainly make a habit of in future – I did the maths to see whether I was getting a good deal.

To my shock and horror, I discovered that I was being ripped off!! The largest pack of 60 tablets worked out at R2,08 per tablet – the next size of 45 worked out at R2,22 per tablet and the smaller size pack containing only 30 tablets cost only R1,99 each!! Go figure? My immediate reaction was to question my own mathematics – but established that I was actually correct. I then checked to see whether the smaller pack was on special and that was not the case. So why the difference? I wish that I knew. My reaction was therefore to look at other brands to find one where there appeared to be some logic in the pricing and, having done so, I changed my brand from a product that I have been using for years to one that is, at least for me now, untested. But I certainly felt better for it.

I am looking forward to receiving the explanations from the retailer and the manufacturer but the bottom line is that they will have to be pretty convincing to persuade me to go back to my original brand of choice.

So what is the Marketing lesson? Well, the first one seems to be that in these tough times, consumers are becoming more discerning – if I extrapolate from a sample of one! But research has suggested that this has been a trend for some years. The second one is that if you are a supplier, you had better be able to explain yourself if you are guilty of this sort of practise. And the third very clear marketing lesson for me is that you need to ensure that whatever you do (to the consumer) you know exactly what the impact is going to be. For my part, I am going to follow this one through and “name and shame” if I have to – I would be guilty of dereliction of my duty as a marketer to let it lie. I am also going to look very much more closely at the relationship between pricing and quantity when I buy in future and I am going to be finding more and better ways to find out from my customers whether they are convinced that they are getting value for money.

What I am also going to do is take a while to get over my sense of being ripped off – and if that applies to other purchasers of the same product, then perhaps the fact that I will no longer support them will be irrelevant as they will find themselves going out of business.

PS:  If you have a story to share please register for our Business Forum and look for the Pricing Issues thread, you can have your say there and learn lessons from others.

Business Plan in a Box?

I read with interest an ad recently from a leading IT retailer offering a R200 discount on a Business Plan Maker bringing it down to R500. And it got me thinking.

Why would anyone walk into a retailer and purchase software that less than 1% of them will actually load and use (if the statistics are anything to go by) rather than spend less and purchase an online product that will be tailored for their own business and supported by real people with real world experience?

It just doesn’t make sense, but then a lot of marketing doesn’t. Perhaps that’s why they now have to discount it by R200!

The Small Business Toolbox’s suite of programmes aren’t plug and play, kitset, one size fits all programmes that have been developed to hoodwink the unsuspecting impulse purchasers. The programmes have been developed by experts in their field in a user friendly, layman’s terms, step-by-step process that you can use in your own space and at your own pace.

It’s about time practical tools were developed to assist the small business owner to move from what Robert Kiyosaki calls the Self Employed Quadrant and into the Business Owner Quadrant. That’s when your business earns money and is sustainable whether you are there or not.

Personally I’ve been striving for this for a number of years, in fact since I first read Robert’s first book. I realized that the only way to achieve my goals was to share the knowledge with more people quickly, cost effectively and efficiently, while imparting key small business skills, was to find another delivery mechanism other that one on one meetings and strategy sessions.

So I really do shake my head when people say you can find solutions in a box. My experience with small business owners is that they are incredibly talented in their chosen field/discipline/industry but that they have usually got little or no business management skills … and a box can’t supply that!

Small business owners need valuable, practical and cost effective advice if they are going to move from the self employed to the business owner quadrants and it is certainly our primary objective to supply these skills in bit sized chunks that you can easily chew, digest and transfer into renewed energy within your business.