5. Find Your Hungry Crowd – And Get Your Customers To Come To You

Every week new companies emerge selling their products and services, whatever the type of business. And there are also many successful companies out there looking to expand their businesses. Competition, both good and bad is rife!

So how can marketing help? Can you answer that one?

Simply stated the first rule of marketing is causing the market to desire your product. Peter Drucker puts it another way when he said that;

“… the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

In short both definitions add up to the same thing; marketing that attracts customers may be described as power marketing.

People have got tired of leaflets, flyers and sales letters. The reason why some product launches are successful is that the people managing them actually marketed them. Business owners that know about marketing try to find out the emotion that makes people want to buy – they realise that people just don’t buy products or services they buy solutions or benefits that will help them achieve a gain or reduce a problem.

So an early imperative is to find the market first by finding out what people want, and then…to let them buy what they’ve told you they want!

A ‘HUNGRY CROWD’ is an interesting and relevant concept in the context of finding a niche within a market…

At the end of the day a ‘HUNGRY CROWD’ – is a group of people, increasing in number, that really, really want what you have to offer – badly. It’s this that is going to guarantee the success of your business!

The point of all this is to urge you to start to concentrate on spotting your ‘HUNGRY CROWD’. Listen to what people ask for, dream or complain about. It’s not enough for you to sell to people who CAN benefit from what you sell; you need to market to people who WANT to benefit from the SOLUTION you offer. In fact you’ve got to find people who will CLAMOUR for your product, so that sales and marketing becomes a lot easier…

A related point is this. Once people have tried and accepted the benefit you offer, they will come back to you again and again seeking further products and services from you that meet and satisfy their emotionional needs – the fundamental reason for buying from you in the first place.

4. Isolate, Develop and Profit From Your Strengths

In Module 3 we examined the first of two really important tenets of successful strategy – creative insight and competence? Well it’s time to look at the second of these: what is it that you and your business are good at doing?

People tend to think that profit is purely to do with market opportunity. But this is to miss the truth. Great strategies are built on a clear appreciation of “what we’re good at doing” and converting this into competitive advantage. This core strength or competence is the driver for market penetration and development.

The importance of the question: ‘what are we good at doing?’ can not be overestimated. For what you – and your business – can do that’s of real value for your customers will help you differentiate your business. It then follows that if you concentrate on activities that leverage your strengths so that you can get the best output you are capable of, you can continually improve the strength until it becomes a world beater.

Producing ‘hearts and minds’ loyalty
You can also build on your business’ strength by turning it into a compelling vision that can often be more seductive than the product or service you offer. Most people in life haven’t really worked out their real purpose in life. This means that they’ll attach themselves to someone that has if given half the chance.

This is much bigger than finding a niche because if you want to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of your prospects you’ve got to go beyond the product to a cause – your business strength lends itself to being that cause. And this applies to the people that work for you too. After all they are your ‘internal customers’.

The issue then is to be absolutely clear about the one thing that you are really good at doing or put another way; what distinctive competence makes your business special. It might be something to do with safety, or durability, or size.

Points To Remember
• So remember don’t underestimate the value of having a strategy.
• Creative insight and key strengths should be the true focus of business success and achievement.
• Concentrating on what you’re good at can win the ‘hearts and minds’ of your most important stakeholders.

3. Setting Your ‘Stall’ On Your Big Objective – The Vital Importance of Strategy

Let’s start with a question: Do you have a strategy?

Trying to do a little better is not a business strategy. You see, when you think about it almost everybody’s strategy is invariably to do the same as everyone else but just to try to do it a little better.

And if you think about this a little more you’ll realise that this is not a strategy at all. How many business owners have fallen victim to this line of thinking, acting like an opportunist mistakenly believing that they are being strategic? Even though increasing revenue and profit they invariably work harder than ever before – often feeling frustrated, overwhelmed and exhausted in the process.

If this is you, then you have most likely been working harder than you need to for a fraction of the results you deserve.

What is a great strategy?
A great strategy beats the odds; because in the face of uncertainty, obstacles, and risk you decide what course of action leads to success. Indeed a great strategy is about knowing what path to take, what course to follow, what unique position to hold and what means will achieve the end result.

But where is the starting point? It is this; successful strategies are built on ‘creative insight’ and ‘doing what you do best’.

We will examine the subject of ‘doing what you do best’ in Module 4, below, but lets start with ‘creative insight’.

Before we do though, I want to begin with a caveat to emphasise the supremacy of creative insight. The issue concerns business planning. Many public and private institutions advocate business planning as a panacea for successful business; ‘sort the plan out and off you go’ is their cry! But it’s as well to remember that detailed business planning necessarily fails, due to frictions inevitably encountered in the planning process: chance events, imperfections in execution, and the independent will of customers and indeed competitors.

Instead, human elements: ambition, leadership, people, morale, and above all intuition, or ‘coup d’oeil’; (pronounced KOO-DOY) a quick recognition of truth — or opportunity, as the French say, are paramount.

The finest business owners and managers know that their biggest opportunity – and means of success – is rooted in a combination of creative insight and competence – not on today’s ‘rocket science’ or in technical advances that everyone is endorsing! They set only the broadest of objectives and develop profit producing activities to build up revenues based on the life-time value of their customers.

But the overwhelming majority of business owners are opportunity seekers! They have no insight and therefore no goal, no strategy, no business design, no management skills and no plan to carry the business forward to where it is intended.

2. The Primary Importance Of Raising Your Productivity

PRODUCTIVE TIME IS TIME DIRECTLY RELATED TO REVENUE AND PROFIT ACHIEVEMENT

So what percentage of your time are you productive?
Have you ever really thought about how you spend your time? If not why not try the TIMEPIECE TEST? Get your alarm clock and set it for 60 minutes and then just work on building profit during those 60 minutes – nothing else….This will show YOU just what productive time is all about all right!!

Productive time is time spent creating products, marketing products, improving your marketing process, managing money making projects, setting up joint ventures, and creating scale in your business.

But there is something even more profitable and strategic than productive time, we call ‘super-productive’ time, which you create when you build systems around any of your most important business development activities.

In other words super-productive time is characterised by systems that create and market products – nothing else!!

If this sounds simplistic please look out for Module 7; “Powerful Marketing Strategies That No One Talks About.” You will see just how crucial it is to find super-productive time to design and implement great sales and marketing strategies to win customers at the front end and ensure a full pipeline of products and services at the backend to bring in real revenue.

Boosting productivity
If you are serious about boosting your productivity you’ll find there are two ways of doing it:

The first is to build scale into your business. Efforts to increase scale lead to economies in internal factors and synergies between some activities and working practices. This in turn provides you, the business owner or manager, with the ability to achieve MORE with less – or to use the jargon; with the maximum amount of leverage possible – from key business activities.

The second is to concentrate on those activities you should personally be spending your time on and which activities you should be outsourcing. The trick is to consistently focus on those activities that will raise your hourly rate. Then start delegating and outsourcing what needs to be done (that you can’t do very well) and which costs you less than the hourly rate you need to generate.

The importance of your hourly rate
If you don’t know what your time is worth and what it needs to be worth, then you can not make effective decisions on what activities you should be spending your time on and what activities you should have others do for you.

So you need to know your hourly rate. But that’s for another time. And anyway you can find out how you can pin this down in our E-Book “Ultimate Recommendations for Real Business Success”.

The fundamental point here is to consistently focus on those activities that will build your business and raise your hourly rate. The importance of understanding your productivity or knowing your hourly rate is that it exposes you to thinking about – and making – the kind of business you’ve always tried to design and achieve.

But most of us don’t have a grasp of this and delude ourselves into thinking that if we worked a little harder or introduced a new product we’ll achieve our goals – if we have any.

Moreover most people never get close to making their hourly rate because they mistakenly believe that what’s preventing them from achieving higher revenue targets is missing knowledge.

And while there might be an element of truth in this, it’s really only relevant if you have very limited marketing and business development know-how. If you don’t fall into that category then knowledge is not your primary problem.

Points To Remember Are:

• Poor business design results in you doing all of the work within your business.
• Analyse your time and see how much of it is truly productive time.
• Allocate your time to super-productive time and recruit or outsource skills to help.

1. The Facts About Business Design That Most People Miss

Introduction

Most people mistakenly believe that all you need to excel in business is common sense and the will to succeed, MOST PEOPLE ARE WRONG.

It takes “Uncommon Sense” to make a business work but most people are never trained to do this.

This programme of 10 low-risk/high-return business building strategies, drawn from our E-Book “Ultimate Recommendations for Real Business Success”, shows business owners and managers that “Uncommon Sense”.

The Facts About Business Design That Most People Miss

Poor business design results in YOU doing all the work!

Most business owners and managers like doing the ‘practical’ work they do. Consequently they seek the latest idea or next opportunity to do what they want to better than they do now. The fact is all that happens is they simply add more and more tasks to their ‘to-do list’ that, at the end of the day, just aren’t going to get done!

Typically most businesses are run by ‘DO-IT-YOURSELFERS.’ This type of business owner doesn’t want to be dependent on other people for revenue and profit; they value their independence. They know things will be OK because ‘they are doing it.’ They take control of a situation because ‘they know it’s going to be OK’ whatever they do. However, they invariably end up doing the wrong work because they’ve just created another job for themselves to do!!

Is this you?
Or are you a business owner that lets the business do the work; in fact the direct opposite of the D-I-YER?

Effective business owners tend to direct the future of their companies and create the right structure and conditions for the technical work of the business to be carried out. The time they spend working out where they want to be, and how to organise and manage the way to this goal, is richly rewarded.

And here’s something else successful and effective business owners do. They surround themselves with bright and enterprising people that they can work with who will help them do the technical work of the business. The credo of this group is; ‘recruit people to do it for you’ – and then they make sure they don’t leave!

The ultimate issue
The final question to ask yourself is: “Do you run a business to create a job for yourself or to create a business?” because if you’re like most – you probably created a job.

If you are growing a business and still doing the work, you are not running a business you are doing the technical work of the business. If your business depends on you and you have no plans of changing that, then you don’t own – or run – a business. So you should be thinking of changing.

So what’s the point of all this? It’s this; don’t underestimate the importance of business design. Poor business design results in you doing all of the work within your business.

How Do You Decide What To Do Each Day

Have you ever started your day with this sort of question?

“What do I want to do today?”

If you have, then read on because this sort of question marks the start of an ineffective day.

Effective business owners don’t start out their day asking “what do I want to do?” They ask themselves a completely different set of questions.

They’ll begin with the question” What are the most important, highest leverage activities that need to get done?” and then they’ll produce a list of the most important activities that answer that question.

After that, they estimate the amount of time each activity should take.

Next, they examine the list of important activities that must be done and determine which activities they should do themselves and who they are going to ask to do the remaining activities.

Then when they start work they tackle the most important, highest leverage task or activity first. They do not ask the question of themselves “which one of these tasks do I want to do now?”

Remember no business owner is born effective. You have to cultivate effectiveness and you do that by practicing the habits of effectiveness. After all you wouldn’t want an employee who worked on what they thought they should work on. So you should respect your business at the very least as much as you want your team to.

The important thing here is to be conscious of the choices you make when deciding what to work on. The yardstick is to pick activities based on what your company needs from you?

If you pick the most important task to work on first you’ll be more effective, your company will be more profitable, and you’ll be able to work less so you can actually pick fun things to do outside of work instead of the poor substitutes you’ve been using to fill your work days.

So remember – it’s not what you want to do – it’s what your business needs done.

Andy

Managing Your Business’s Scarcest Resource

If you’ve tracked the way you spend your time you should have crystal clarity about how you are currently using it.

Any surprises?

Are you doing things that you shouldn’t be doing? If so, it’s costing you a lot more than you think, here’s why…

Your business is a system. When you study systems you learn that the maximum output of any process is set by its scarcest resource. And what are the key resources needed by your business? They are; Money; People and Time, aren’t they?

Let’s remind ourselves what’s involved, starting with the first of the trio.

Money – If you have the right business model and you are effectively progressing toward your business goals you should either have, or have access to enough money. And the ability to get more isn’t constrained; there are plenty of investors for the right businesses.

People – There is no limit usually to the people you can recruit or outsource to, especially when you have enough money.

Time – Of the 3 major resources time is scarcest. It’s also totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back.

Everything you do and your business does requires time. All work (whether useful or not) wears away your time. But, most business owners (at least the unsuccessful ones) take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, totally perishable, and necessary resource.

Competent business owners realise that time is the limiting factor. So, ask yourself the question:

1. What are some of the activities that I am currently doing that do not contribute to my effectiveness?

And once you come up with some answers the next question to think about is:

2. How can I eliminate these time thieves, automate them, or pass them off to someone else?

Then once you’ve done that ask yourself;

3. What are the productive activities that I should be working on?

If you are not sure what activities you should be doing, let me explain how you can arrive at the right answer.

Just imagine for a moment you were going to New Zealand for a year or so and you were going to recruit a manager to grow your business while you were away. Before you left, the new manager asked you – what were the activities that he had to concentrate on, on a daily basis if he was really serious about growing your business as quickly as possible?

What do you think your answer would be?

Surely it would be something like: “Where do you think you should be spending your time.” If you are running your business and if you want to be effective you should be able to answer these two questions.

strong>1. What am I getting paid to do?
2. What should I be paid to do if I am being paid for the right things to be done in my position?

Once you are clear about that – you can then begin to chop out activities that don’t make the list. In my upcoming notes to you I’ll show you how to do exactly that – and get rid of the wasteful activities that clog up your cash flow.

Dealing With Setbacks

As we’ve been talking about learning new habits of effectiveness it’s as well to bear in mind that when establishing a new routine that requires a behaviour change, quite often there are a number of setbacks along the way.

How you react to these setbacks will ultimately determine the degree to which you adopt effective time management habits.

There are three things to consider when dealing with setbacks and they are:

Lapse…….. Relapse …….. Collapse

A lapse is a slight error or slip; it’s the first instance of backsliding into your former habit. It’s a discreet event like not concentrating on the Top 3 or setting aside time to plan. A Relapse occurs when lapses string together for a continued period of time. A Collapse arises when a relapse becomes permanent, and all hope of getting back into the groove is given up altogether.

While some bounce back and use the slip as a signal to increase their commitment. It is all too often the case for a relapse to cause a negative reaction which festers until the desired behaviour is given-up completely.

There are two ways to manage this. The first is to realise the importance of consistency when establishing any habit and commit to avoid and prevent slips all together. The second is to respond to any slip by immediately returning to the desired behaviour.

For some people, a lapse might cause them to feel as if they have no reason to go on with the habit – or they can start again. But the truth is quite different. It’s important to appreciate this point because it will make habituation easier over the long term.

When you lapse, instead of thinking it’s really not worth going on with the habit because there are too many distractions, challenge yourself to try again, and immediately recommit yourself so your lapse doesn’t turn into a relapse or a collapse?

Obviously you should try …and of course you can.

The point is this – even when you’ve slipped, you are still in control. Only you can decide to get back on track, or, postpone your re-commitment and have your entire effort collapse. The choice is yours.

But try and you’ll be that much closer to becoming a competent business owner and entrepreneur.

Time Analysis

Profit Note: Install The Habit Of Time Management

The week has begun, there are lots to do today, and this is an important – albeit lengthy message, so lets start.

The heart of this post is the issue of effectiveness – and more to the point the HABIT OF EFFECTIVENESS, and so this being the case I would really like to show how habits are formed as well as a strategy you can use to bed in this – and new habits in general – not only faster but in such a way that they will be more likely to last..

It’s critical to remember that effectiveness is not inborn.

Just like each and every one of us had to learn to ride a bicycle, because no one is born knowing how – every competent business owner or manager had to learn to be effective and practice being effective until it became a habit.

Peter Drucker, a great writer on management competence tells us that:

“Effective managers do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out planning. THEY START BY FINDING OUT WHERE THEIR TIME ACTUALLY GOES. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back on unproductive usages of their time”

Now we need a simple way to ensure that what we learn about effective time keeping actually sticks.

Here is a great model on how learning a new skill takes place. Once you understand the model, you can leverage it to install new habits rapidly. Pay careful attention here,
first I’ll explain it, then give you examples to make it easier to understand, then I’ll show you how to use it for your own advantage.

Learning new skills is divided into four different stages of competence. The theory is that as you approach something to be learned you actually pass through four phases on the way to doing something without even thinking about how to do it.

Phase 1 – you don’t know how to do something and you don’t even know that you don’t know.

Phase 2 – you now know all the different things you don’t know and you begin to work on learning them.

Phase 3 – you now know what you need to know, you can do the skills necessary, but it takes all of your concentration.

Phase 4 – you can now carry out the skills necessary without thinking about it, in other words you have developed a habit.

OK, now let me give you two examples of how this work in your life.

How habits are formed in practice

Let’s look at this through a simple example, just to make sure you really get it, let’s take a look at learning to tide a bicycle.

Phase 1 – First there was a time when you knew nothing about riding a bicycle – you didn’t
know there were pedals, breaks, gears were and probably were oblivious of the all important issue of balance.

Phase 2 – Next you started to learn about riding a bike – your parents would have explained how to ride one, showing you how to change the gears, raise and lower the saddle and you would have started trying to ride one – with the help of parents – and you would have realised there was a lot to learn but you were basically still unable to ride.

Phase 3 – After a lot of practice and concentration on how to ride a bike – you were still not ready yet to signal left or right, talk to others and ride all at the same time (never mind cycle in a straight line with your arms folded) – even though you were capable of riding a bicycle you had still to focus and concentrate.

Phase 4 – then at last you rode enough so that riding a bicycle became automatic, you no longer needed to think about what you had to do, you just did it – you were now unconsciously competent at riding a bicycle.

So, to install habits in the quickest manner – its important to know which stage you are in and then concentrate on what you need to do to move to the next stage.

But here’s a question – are you able to ride a bike, arms folded, talk to a friend and go round a bend all at the same time?

In other words can you do several different – yet related things at the same time? Most people would find this difficult – if they hadn’t done them before they would have “to focus and concentrate” on what they were doing until they could do all these things in “tandem” –until then though they would go round the bend with their hands on the handle bars an stop talking!!

The point is significant because until you are able to accommodate all these various related activities any attempt to BE FULLY COMPETENT in time management won’t be accomplished. It means simply being effective from time to time won’t really help you in establishing the habit of effective time management.

Applying the framework to time management

If you are serious about managing time a la Drucker then its as well to realise that

1. there is still parts to being highly effective that you simply don’t know and

2. that your initial goal is to become aware of what really makes up effective behaviour
but even though you have the knowledge you don’t really know yet how to do it yourself

3. that you must consciously choose and then practice the behaviours and work on doing them without even thinking about it so that you achieve consistent time management and often (given the presence of related and unrelated activities).

4. that such practice of relevant activities makes you competent by habit, which should be your goal as a business owner and manager.

Incidentally if you want more on the behaviour and strategies required to achieve high status as an effective time manager – why not e.mail me at andrew@real-results.org and ask for The Vital Habits to Reclaim Time to Achieve More Results. Its yours for the asking.

Regards
Andrew

Watch Your Time and Pick Up the Trends

Being strategic and competent is all about getting the right things done. In order to become a competent strategic business owner and manager you will need to build the habit of effectiveness. No one is born effective so…if you never worked on developing effectiveness skills you are not as competent as you could be, or should be.

Therefore to build the habit of effectiveness you’ll need to practice (consistent practice leads to powerful habits) the 5 skill sets I laid out for you in my last post.

While each skill set is pretty easy to understand, they aren’t so easy to do well. In other words, you will have to build and develop them (they don’t appear like magic), as you’ve had to do with anything else that’s important in your life. You need to practice them over and over again until these 5 skill sets become an integral part of the way you go about doing your work.

Next time I’ll detail how learning and developing habits of effectiveness go hand in hand and the key distinctions you must understand to be successful. If you have applied some of the tasks I have outlined, you should have started to see how much time you’ve been spending on tasks and activities other than on your top priorities.

Just keep up the good work, make sure that you spend as little time (none would be best) multitasking as possible. Stay focused on one task at a time. It’ll be easier to record, and it’s the work process of highly competent business owners and managers.
Keep up the good work, stay focused and notice your patterns, make today a super-productive day.