Change: How about…the Customers?
Organic Growth
A minority of you will say “No, Hookskys are not the answer to my question” as either you started from scratch or picked up an early-stage company and over many long years, through good times and not so good, have gently grown your business to what it is today. You aren’t into this disruptive game—there’s no Thomas Edison or Henry Ford in either yours’ or your corporate’s DNA. Instead your “x” is on Organic Beach.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach—it’s invariably how almost anyone in private health or professional practice as examples ply their trade and grow their business. With the amount of red tape out there and which is seemingly added to on a daily basis, we truly respect your achievement and persistence to date.
By our reckoning, a goodly portion of your growth potential has been syphoned off even before you got near to winning it. And we haven’t yet considered limitations placed on you. What if your business itself is the limitation? Say you have 500 arable acres and you simply can’t grow any more crops, so your turnover can’t increase and you certainly don’t want to hire any more staff. Or that you can’t extend the delivery range of your fast food service because there are no more dwelling units within range of keeping the food still warm whilst being delivered. Or perhaps your franchise only covers a limited geographical territory? These are all poor excuses. Here are some examples of more fresh perspectives we’ve been encouraging in this book:
• If you’re good at growing stuff, lease someone else’s land to add on to your estate or consider growing higher value crops.
• If your produce is used in further processes by others, why not start doing some of that extra processing too and make your product more valuable?
• If you are delivering fast food further away, how about selling it cold and raw and gain the advantages of, first, a lower price to make and, second, let your buyer do the freshly cooked bit in his own home.
• And if you have a franchise (ugh—we don’t like franchises) and it’s working well, acquire another concession area.
• If not a franchisee, offer other people a franchise of your business.
On that last point, we are often asked about franchises. There are some great ones. Who wouldn’t want a McDonald’s franchise—knowing that before you open the door there is an established customer base well aware of your offering. But why would McDonald’s or indeed any franchisor offer a third party—you—the opportunity to make money that they could earn for themselves? The answer for some of the smaller ones is they don’t have the money to expand. For the ones you’ve never heard of, it is because they want you to work long hours for below market wages to help build their brand. For McDonald’s and its ilk, clever people will have established how they, through both the franchise price and control of ingredients, marketing, and pricing, probably end up being equally profitable whether running the place themselves or letting you do it.
Website and App TLC
But suppose you’re not into burgers. Let’s ask you about your website instead. When did you last update it? If you are like most, you built it, or had someone build it for you, and that’s that. But a static website, at worst, is out of date, so that prices and specifications are wrong, future events have already occurred, and any news is old hat. Obviously if your site is like that, no potential customer browsing would ever have reason to come back and will instead devote current attention—and most likely their next order—to a more interesting shop window—someone else’s. Your website is your best shop window—one that works tirelessly for you. Surely shouldn’t you support it with a little TLC from time to time?
You must remember the time when a prospect called you and seconds into the conversation they said “Can I see it on your website?” and your answer was “Err” and the prospective sale was lost. Unless there are trade secrets, make everything available online. Even then, when referring to a secret, give a mechanism for finding out: for example, For details call sales on 1-800-XXX-XXXX. That way your tireless helper (i.e., the website) is being more informative to prospects out there than even you. You can’t remember every fact about everything, but it can. And unlike you, it does it without protest 24/7.
And another thing: We are now in a world where a website alone is no longer giving you the digital presence to match that of your competitors. There are plenty of tools available to enhance the chances of your website being found—generically called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You should go and find them and use them. How else do you think your competitors appear higher up on Google than your business?
Maybe you do it the same way they do. Buy keywords. That is pay Google (and the other search engines of this world) every time someone searches on words that lead to your site being located. When you explore this opportunity as a keyword buyer, you will find the same chaos as you do if you search yourself for something. Typing in widgets might bring hundreds of thousands of results. Who is first in the listings? Probably the industry leader who will have paid more than anyone else for that billing. More modestly, we could perhaps pay for the two keywords together of fluorescent widgets? Then if someone searches on those two words, your website might be the first they discover and we know that fluorescent is relevant to them in any subsequent transaction.
Clearly the more specialized the word(s), the fewer responses but also usually much cheaper and, as we have already said, relevant.
Even with all this, the website is just a beginning. These days, to reach people across the web there are other games to play. Do you have a Face-book site? Are you on Instagram? Do you Tweet? Beyond that, have you got an App? Can your customer find your app on their smartphone, and with a single click, reorder their previous purchase?
If any of these concepts are alien to you, go find someone of a younger generation to explain them to you. Possibly better and done by a number of folks we know, have that younger person within your family actually manage all your social media—as this branch of advertising is known—in return for their weekly allowance/pocket money. You should explain to them this is a win/win/win. Triple wins are rare animals, but here you get your business a shiny and changing media presence that can only help you move forward. The youngster gets (presumably) an increased allowance for simply playing on the computer. Finally, and again important in this day and age, the youngster also gets to put Social Media Manager on their first resume, which must boost their ultimate career prospects.
This is only a short comment, but we cannot stress how important the appropriate use of social media is—so make it happen for you and your widgets. If there is one certainty in life, it is that the Internet is not going away any time soon—but to make impact, you must use it wisely.
Pause: Did you make notes of things in the Action This Today section in the back of this book? If not, please take this opportunity to review the prior pages to identify again any thoughts and ideas you want to follow up on.