Learning to Fail Fast
It’s been around 7 months since I started this blog, and much has changed during that time. I have started new projects and completed other ones. This Business on Purpose blog was started with a number of goals, and a number of targets with regard to traffic and content. It seems my focus has moved a little away from those goals and the targets have not been met, so in the spirit of the new internet I have chosen to fail fast rather than struggling on.
Instead of updating this blog with content which is kind of different to the content I have posted so far, I will be editing content on http://blog.juggl.com which is the centre of a new project I am committing to. This web project is focussed on improving productivity and managing your commitments in a whole new way. Content on the blog will revolve around this and also what is happening as I develop the juggl site.
As far as business content goes then there is a project I hope to start soon called profitseekers, and I will let you know about that as and when it starts proper.
Thankyou for reading and keep in touch.
Customer Delight
What is customer delight? Have you ever been ‘delighted’ with the service you receive from a company? I can’t ever really remember being delighted. In my youth I listened to heavy rock music, and I do remember purchasing the new Iron Maiden album which was at the time Powerslave. The cover was really cool with an Egyptian theme. If you looked at the cover closely there were all sorts of jokes and different characters hidden in the background. After getting home I played that album non stop for at least a few weeks. I was absolutely delighted with that album, but I can’t remember the shop I bought it from, the person who served me, or anything about the service at all.
Perhaps providing delightful service is actually providing ‘invisible’ service. Let the customers enjoy the product they are purchasing and don’t let service get in the way. There is the old adage that a person does not by a drill because they want a drill. They actually want a hole.
If you are running a restaurant, how can you ensure that your diners enjoy the meal without being interrupted by service? If you run a auto repair shop, how can you let your customers get from A to B without being disturbed by your repair activity?
Thinking about it, the only time customers mention the quality of service is when something isn’t quite right with the product. When the product is perfect, they don’t even notice. Do customers notice your service? How can we service providers become invisible?
Saying Thankyou
People liked to be thanked. No-one likes to feel that they are being taken for granted or that their efforts have been disregarded. Of course, it is easy to say thankyou to customers, we do that all the time, but how often do we say thankyou to those people who keep helping us and our business.
Do you say thankyou to your employees, and not just when they do something to stand out. How often do you say thankyou to those people who refer prospects to you, who go out of their way specifically to help you or your business.
I bet we don’t say thankyou as often as we think we do.
Thankyou for reading.
Profiling Your Customers to Improve Marketing
As part of my small project to improve my business’s marketing, I started to profile my customers, which has proven very useful. I thought I’d share what I have been doing and why.
Like any other business I have a wide range of customers. Marketing books and advice will usually centre around finding ‘perfect’ customers, and when I ask business owners about this, the perfect customer is usually measured by turnover per year (theirs or yours) and very little else. For this project I decided to be a little more specific.
Firstly I started grouping customers up, using things like number of employees, the level of need for my products and services, private or public owned, industry type, etc. I created about five groups. Once I had my groups I looked at how much I turn over from each group and also how much gross profit I made from each group. This resulted in some very interesting figures. The group I thought would be my perfect customers actually weren’t, as although they provided more turnover, the gross profit was lower than a different group. My next step will be to look at why these customers buy from me, how they heard about me, and then I can expand that marketing activity to gain more customers which belong to that more profitable group.
Every business is different, and so there is no set way to profile your customers, you just need to pick some measurements that you can easily get hold of and then build on that foundation.
Controlling the Incidental Costs
After a few years of running a business it is easy to abdicate some of the responsibilities to someone else. After all, you are so busy finding new customers and looking after existing customers, that you are grateful for any help you can get.
Continually looking at your costs is one of those things that tends to get overlooked. The post tends to start to be processed by someone else. Suppliers invoices are received, thrown in a tray, and then processed by the accountant. When was the last time you renegotiated these deals? Have you looked at other suppliers in the marketplace recently, not the suppliers that you deal with to fulfill orders, but those suppliers of utilities, stationery, or uniforms and the like?
As much as you want more cash coming into the business, you can have still have a big effect on cashflow by reducing the cash that goes out of the business. Last year I started monitoring these ‘incidentals’, and have already reduced these costs by 10%.