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Entrepreneurs - Want To Grow Your Company?
Written by: Lee ListerArticle Overview: You’ve got your company set up and the first scramble to get everything working ok and your cash flow positive has paid off. Now you need to grow your company – so how do you do this? Well there are four activities that will pay dividends in the future.
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Free Download - What Type of Business Should I Start? By Lee Lister |
Entrepreneurs - Want To Grow Your Company?
You’ve got your company set up and the first scramble to get everything working ok and your cash flow positive has paid off. Now you need to grow your company – so how do you do this?
Well there are four activities that will pay dividends in the future.
1. Customer Base:
The Pareto’s Theory seems to work with customers, in that you will find that 20% of your customers are probably your high spending and loyal customers. Go through your customer list and do the following:
• Identify the high spending customers and offer them loyalty bonuses or better terms in order to maintain their custom.
• Identify the regular purchasers and incentivise them to buy more per transaction with activities such as up selling.
• Identify your poor customers and work on turning them into better or more often customers.
• Identify your bad customers or those that are more trouble than they are worth and work to remove them.
Keep in regular contact with your customers and work on increasing their spend and maintaining their loyalty.
2. Fine Tune Your Company:
Look at all your business processes such as customer handling, invoicing, debt collection and fulfilment and make the appropriate changes to make them more efficient. Talk to your staff who can often offer good ideas. Find tuning your company will make you more efficient, prepare you for your business expansion and often leads to a quicker turnover and more profit.
3. Exploit Your Market Position to Gain Market Share:
Review where your business stands in the market and use this knowledge to:
• Gain market share by encouraging your competitors’ customers to move to your company by being better quality/cheaper/better value/easier/friendlier etc.
• Exploit your market position in order to expand your customer base.
• Seek new markets by spotting new trends and opportunities.
• Invade adjacent markets by fine tuning your products, marketing and advertising.
4. Develop New Products and Markets:
Now you have fine tuned your company, understand your customers and your market, now is the time to review your product line as well. Decide as to whether you can add to your product line or tweek your existing products or services in order to meet other markets or increase your customer spend. Good Luck.
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Article Tags: business expansion, business processes, cash flow, customer base, debt collection, dividends, fine tune, fulfilment, invoicing, loyal customers, loyalty, market position, market share, marketing, new trends, pareto, poor customers, turnover
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About the Author: Lee Lister RSS for Lee's articles - Visit Lee's website  From an early age she began an unparalleled journey through business consulting that continues to span across the UK, USA, Europe and Asia. She has consulted for a considerable number of companies all over the world. Specialising in business change management, start up consultancy and trouble shooting. Lee's experience in marketing and internet marketing is also keenly sought after. She is a prolific published writer of books, ebooks and articles and can easily be found on major search engine and Amazon. Her books include: FastTrack Bid Management, Proposal Writing For Smaller Businesses, How Much Does It Cost To Start A Business, Entrepreneur's Apprentice and a series of Start My New Business books that do as they say in the title! Her major web sites are: Click here to visit Lee's website   Entrepreneurs What Should Be In Your Business Plan Good at Sewing and Want to Turn it into a Business Entrepreneurs What Goes Into A Business Plan AdSense is it all that the hype says it is Ezine Writing Easily Attract and Keep Buying Customers |
Related Forum Posts
How to valuate a business
- Hi Garth - here is how we did it at Northern Crown Capital when I was helping them raise venture capital for Toronto-based entrepreneurs. Assume the start date is 2003 so 2008 projections are 5 years out:
How Northern Crown Capital Valuates a Business
2008 Financial Projections
Earnings Before Tax
$5,865,000
Tax Rate
42%
Taxes
$2,463,300
Net Earnings
$3,401,700
Amount Seeking to Raise Today
$3,500,000
Discounted Value of Future Opportunity, 5 Years Out
2008 P/E Ratio
15
Value of Company in 2008
$51,025,500
Discount Rate Applied
30%
Year 2008
$51,025,500
Year 2007
$35,717,850
Year 2006
$25,002,495
Year 2005
$17,501,747
Year 2004
$12,251,223
Value of Company at Investment in 2003
$12,251,223
Less: Investment Amount
$3,500,000
Present Value
$8,751,223
Discount for Risk & Private Company
40%
Less: Discount for Risk & Private Company
$3,500,489
Private Company Value
$5,250,734
Present Value (What the Owner Keeps)
$5,250,734
60.00%
Financing (What the Investor Gets)
$3,500,000
40.00%
Total
$8,750,734
100.00%
I hope this helps!
Re: My 3 best business books
- 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin
Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl:
[i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom]
Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
Re: My 3 best business books
- It seems that Napoleon Hill works help a lot of business men. He had done a really good job. I bought Think and Grow Rich many times.
CEOs and Email - Slaves?
- I wonder if the emails they are responding to are filtered thru their assistants first 'cos they seem to spend a lot of their off hours responding to them.
True they are successful but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay that price.
I'd be interested to know what's the in the typical day planner of Entrepreneurs on the Forum.
Entrepreneurs are a different breed than Paid Employees- so it would be interesting to view the contrast.
Think and Grow Rich
- Hi Moira,
What a great post! I completely agree with it and it really is too easy to underestimate those 3 points but once we learn to use them the sky is the limit.
I am currently reading Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill. Have you read that book?
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