January is an especially good time to work ON your business. For many companies, business tends to slow down in January. Whether or not your business is seasonally slow in the winter time, there is usually a lull right after the holidays. Many consumers of your goods and services may have spent a lot of money during the holidays and now are a bit more dormant than usual.

This is your opportunity! Remember in your busy season when you have all kinds of great ideas about making your business better, but you don’t have time to put them into effect? This is the time to do some strategic planning and put into place some of those missing procedures and systems that will make your business run better next busy season.

It’s also a good time to put together your profit plan and budget for the year and lay out your marketing plan. Remember the all important action plan that will help you detail specific tasks, assign responsibility and set due dates for accomplishment.

Take the time now, and you will reap the rewards all year!
For more ideas, read my 10 Tips for a Successful 2012.

Every business owner should be able to answer with an unqualified “Yes” to the following questions which address the fundamental need for businesses to identify and understand their competition. If you answer “No” to any of these questions, you are probably missing some valuable information that would provide you with a competitive advantage.

• Do you know who your competitors are? Do you know where they are and how big they are? Would you be aware if any new competitors entered your market?
• Do you regularly monitor your competitors’ advertising and promotions by looking for their advertisements, visiting their premises and looking at their websites?
• Do you talk to your suppliers about your competitors and gather information about what they’re buying and what quantities they purchase?
• Do you encourage your employees to keep an eye on marketing activity by your competitors and pass any good ideas on to you?
• Do you keep up to date with technological developments in your field and will you know if your competitors adopt new technology into their business?
• Do you know the statistics of your marketplace – what your share of market is and what market share is held by each of your major competitors?
• Have you conducted a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis on your business? Are you prepared to deal with any competitive threats that might be identified?
• Do you know what opportunities exist for you to grow your business – either by taking business away from your competitors or by expanding into new market areas?
• Do you know what is happening in the legislative environment that might affect your operations such as new laws relating to workplace safety or product standards that could pose a threat to you or mean that you will have to change the way you conduct your business?
• Do you regularly research your products or service offerings against those of your competitors? Are you able to respond quickly if you find your product/service offers fewer features and benefits or needs improvement?

There can be a lot of work involved in finding the answers to these questions and using them to improve your products or the way you deliver your services. But you also have advocates in your team, whose eyes and ears can also be alert to monitor your marketplace. If you work together with your team you’ll be in a much better position to answer the questions and to create strategies to outclass your competitors. Businesses that know and understand their rivals have a much better chance of being able to withstand competitive onslaughts and to formulate strategies that will win more business than others in its industry.

Information in this article is sourced from RAN ONE © 2010 Bullseye

It is great news that emerging technologies are making possible a return to earlier times when business owners and their customers knew each other and had personal relationships that extended beyond the tight boundaries of buying and selling goods and services.

Personalization
The public face of a business has moved from the corporate to the personal. People like dealing with people. They want to know specific names and faces. Customers want their business dealings to be with other humans. The upside is that they are more likely to be loyal because they like and trust you. The downside is that they might not buy a perfectly good product because they had a bad experience with you.

This concept may seem counter-intuitive to those who are trying to avoid tying their business too closely to their personal brand. Will it become harder to remove yourself from the business when you want to sell it? Not necessarily. You still need to make it a priority for your business to have the systems and processes in place to run without relying solely on you.

It may be that the backlash against automated phone answering services, with robotic voices offering so-called “customer service” and other impersonal ways that companies use to create efficiencies have led us back to wanting a more personal experience. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s become essential to personalize your business.

You may want to consider using your personal profile with your own name on social media platforms as the face of your business as well as a company profile. If you are the person with the vision behind your business, be proud of it and use yourself and your relationships to promote it. Read More→