If you want to turn on the profit making potential of your business you need to put your focus back on the market.Market First, Product SecondAsk yourself this simple question. Who is my target market? Now stop for a minute and write down your answer so you can't deny it in two seconds when I ask the next question.Now put your answer in the middle of this sentence. "I think I'll phone _________ and see what they are doing." When you put your...more
Early in my career I believed that hard work was the key to success. Most of my first jobs were doing manual labor, and I was often complemented for how hard I worked on a consistent basis. The harder I worked, the faster we got things done, and so I believe that hard work was the key to success. After graduating with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering my first corporate job was testing and developing software that required me to be...more
Let's take a look at a financial perspective of business and examine where the money goes. A favorite saying of one of my mentors is "follow the piles of cash". Although this is not all there is to business, it is definitely something you can never lose sight of as a manager or business leader. Cash flow is in a business goes something like this.Our sales team is tasked with finding new customers, and helping them find the best solutions to their problems. They hit the road, they call, they advertise, they attend trade shows and conferences. They succeed in their objective. They find new customers. They help those customers reach a decision to purchase from our business. We pay the sales people's base salaries. The customer doesn't pay anything yet. Our bank account goes down.Our orders team is tasked with helping these new customers place their orders correctly to get what they really want. They take the order. They arrange payment. They tell the factory or service team to start work. We pay the orders teams' salaries. The customer doesn't pay anything yet. Our bank account goes down.Our delivery team is tasked with providing the product or service to the customer. They buy...more
How do you measure success? After years of trial, error, training and research I have a management tip for you: the four top level measurements that I recommend everyone have in place across their business or team. They should be built into everyone's goals and objectives each year. Every department head should have improvements to one of them as a...more
At a high level there are only two ways to grow a business: increase sales and decrease costs. Here's a simple management tip that will save you a lot of wasted effort. Before you start looking at the details of each method, you should understand the layout of a simple profit and loss statement and some basic terms your senior management team is...more
Sales is all about helping customers shop for and get what they need or want. It places focus on finding leads, converting leads, and closing the deal. Once those three things are done, all you need to do is deliver the product. So if sales minded people are focused on these 3 things, why separate the sales and orders functions within a business?The fact is many businesses, big and small, combine the sales and orders functions under one organization (usually called sales). Well this can work in some situations; there is an important case to be made for separating getting sales from taking orders.Management Tips for Creating a WIN-WIN ScenarioA widely recognized key to long term business success is building long term relationships with your customers. The simple fact is that it takes longer and costs more to get a new customer than it does to repeatedly satisfy the needs of an existing customer who already trusts you.It is very important to give your customers what they want to encourage them to come back to you again. It is equally important to give your business what it needs to survive, or you won't be around long enough to help your new customers a second time. You need to...more
The more efficiently you can fill orders the more money you get to keep from each sale. If you sell an extra $10 product you may only get to keep $1 or $2 after you finish paying for the product, warehouses, salaries, etc. But if you can find a way...more
A "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure" is when a lender accepts a deed to the homeowner's property in foreclosure instead of continuing the foreclosure process and incurring more expenses to get the deed anyway. However, this does not mean the homeowner is...more
A secured loan is a loan that is available to homeowners, and this is because these loans are secured against the home. With equity levels rising steeply over recent years, secured loans have become a popular, affordable, and effective way for many...more
According to officials from the Office of Fair Trading many people may be paying way over the odds for their credit card borrowing, and the lenders that provide these cards could be raking in around £400 million every year simply because of the...more
It is important that you do your homework before you make an application for a loan, as this will not only help to ensure affordability for you, but could also help to speed up the whole process, enabling you to get the loan you need without any...more
Many of us take our bank accounts for granted these days but it is important to remember that bank accounts are not available to everyone, and these accounts are vital in helping most of us to run our day to day finances. There are a number of...more