First Profit Secret of Entrepreneurs
It’s been said that entrepreneurs are born, not made . While that may or may not be true, every entrepreneur can learn the secrets to creating businesses that delivers profits.
FIRST ENTREPRENEUR PROFIT SECRET:
Hope for the Best but Plan for the Worst
Entrepreneurs are a plucky bunch. As a rule, they tend to define the glass that is half full as “practically overflowing.” This enthusiasm is a necessary trait so that the entrepreneur can endure the long hard road to profitability. However, the time to “reign in” this trait is during the planning stage.
Things will inevitably go wrong on your journey. It’s going to be harder, take longer and cost more money than you think.
As you create your business plan, it has to be a plan based on the worst case scenario. Think of creating your business plan as creating a survival strategy for your business. Most business plans are put together with the assumption that everything will go according to the plan’s projections. If that’s the case with your business plan, here’s a wake up call. That’s not a business plan, it’s a work of fantasy fiction.
If your business plan will only succeed in the “best case” scenario, scrap it now. The plan that will only work if everything goes right is bound to fail because everything won’t go right.
Instead, assume that everything will cost more than you planned - that your time to market will be 2-3 times what you think it will be and that your market share will be half of what you project.
Is there any water left in the glass? If so, THEN you’re on your way to creating a profitable business.
The First Profit Secret of Entrepreneurs is : Plan for the worst but expect the best.
Achieving Small Business Profits
Achieving profits for your small business takes more than just great marketing or more than just great advertising. A great marketing or advertising campaign will not automatically deliver profits for your small business.
In over two decades of working with small business owners on their marketing, the most frequent misconception out there is that a great marketing campaign leads to great small business profits.
Achieving small business profits requires a sound business structure. That means providing a product or service that people are willing and able to pay money to acquire PLUS the ability to service customers/clients after the sale.
If you’ve established a sound business structure, then an effective advertising or marketing campaign will be the answer to your prayers. Your business will grow, your profits will escalate and all will be right with the world - assuming you’ve already got a sound business model in place.
If you’ve got a great BUSINESS MODEL in place, then an effective advertising or marketing campaign will ensure great profits for your small business. However, a great marketing campaign will definitely find any “leaks” you have in your current business model.
For example, an effective advertising campaign will act like the air pump pumping air into a pool toy. If the pool toy is “sound”, it will hold air and expand. However, if there’s a major tear in a seam, the pump won’t be able to inflate the toy at all.
That’s how an effective advertising campaign works with a business that isn’t operating with a sound business model.
In an article in Entrepreneur Magazine reported on a list created by serial entrepreneur John Osher of the 16 mistakes start up businesses make.
According to Osher, the number one reason for small business failure is not lack of funding, not lack of talent but rather that the initial concept isn’t sound.
Osher speculates that entrepreneurs want to be in business for themselves so badly that they fail to thoroughly investigate the plausibility of their business offering. They tend to view the business from their side of the equation instead of viewing the business from the prospective customer’s side of the equation.
Before you begin working on advertising your small business, first take a look at your business model.
- Do you already have customers?
- Are those customers coming back to do business with you again?
- Are existing customers referring other new customers to your business?
If you answered “no” to the first question, then you’re definitely not in any position to launch any kind of marketing or advertising campaign. Find a few “guinea pig” customers to experiment upon before you issue invitations to the general public.
If you answered “yes” to the first question, but “no” to the subsequent two questions, then you must first diagnose where the “leaks” are in your business model.
Once you can answer a resounding “yes” to all three questions above, THEN you are ready to embark upon a marketing/ advertising campaign.
In Search of Business Advertising Solutions
If you are in search of business advertising solutions that will deliver profits to your business, then you’re in the right place.
Most business owners have a love/hate relationship with advertising. You love the promise of what advertising offers (more business and therefore, more profits) but hate the learning curve to get to the point of creating successful advertising campaigns for their business.
What’s worse is that if your advertising budget isn’t fat enough, you won’t be able to hire an agency to handle this aspect of your business for you.
What you need is a step by step advertising solution and that is where Deliver Profits comes in.
We offer the most powerful marketing duo known to man. Quite simply, it’s combining radio advertising with the power of the web.
Radio advertising + effective website= outstanding business advertising solution.
Why am I willing to share this information with you here… for free? Quite simply because it’s not just ANY radio ads combined with ANY websites that produce the truly stellar results. Just as a rake won’t move leaves into a pile unless it’s properly used, radio advertising won’t product stellar results if it isn’t used correctly. Neither will your outstanding website.
That’s why Deliver Profits goes beyond providing you the tools and will actually teach you to use these tools effectively to grow your business.
Help! My Website Cannot be Found
“Help! My website cannot be found!”
It’s almost the universal cry of business owners and entrepreneurs on the web. If it’s your cry, take heart.
You may have spent hundreds, even thousands of dollars having a professionally designed website developed. However, you may not be horrified to discover that prospective customers who are looking for exactly what YOU have to offer are not finding your website. You type in the name of your business and discover that your website cannot be found.
Now THAT is a serious problem.
At the root of this problem is that most people, when they go to the web are not searching for your business by name. Chances are, unless you’ve been promoting your business off line using such traditional media as newspaper, radio and television; your best prospective customers/clients do not know your business exists.
Because your prospective customers don’t know who you are or what you can do for them, they will be searching for the solution your product or business provides to solve their problems, help them meet their goals or help them to satisfy their desires. In other words, when people search the web, they search the web with the GDP (Goals, Desires and Problems) in mind.
Keeping that in mind, if you want prospective customers to find you via the web, the first step to getting your website found on the web is to figure out WHY web visitors would want to buy goods or services from you. If you do not already have a good idea of WHY web visitors would want to buy from you, then pick up a copy of the book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results
Once you have figured out WHY visitors are looking for your business and what SOLUTIONS you can provide, then you need to find out what terms these potential customers/clients are using to find those solutions.
It is at this stage that most business people get horribly off track. Instead of searching for the terms used in the search engine queries, many people do their own search instead and see how many result are returned. If they see millions of pages returned, they figure this is a good search term, because there’s lots of competition on the term.
For example, if you perform a search query for the keywords “organizational development” you will get 4,360,000 different results returned. If you have never heard of Organizational Development or OD, you are not alone. Organizational Development is a broad term used to describe a field of work and study devoted to creating effective and healthy human systems within an organization. Few outside the field use the term, yet those within the field use it so freely and frequently that many are shocked to learn that it’s not part of the everyday business vernacular.
In our theoretical example, if you are an organizational development consultant doing your own research for your web site, you will find your search engine query on Google will tell you that there are 4,360,000 sites on the web devoted to organizational development. Naturally, you become either elated (there are MILLIONS of people searching for the solutions I offer) or deflated (I‘m the proverbial needle in a haystack!). What you do not see is the other side of the coin, which reveals that only 4368 searches were done in the previous month for those exact key words.
That is the twist.
There are over 4.3 million sites competing for less than 4400 searches. Note: One must also wonder how many of those searches were performed by organizational development consultants during the development of their own web site.
Meanwhile, a service offered by most organizational development consultants is the creation of systems that foster a sense of teamwork within a company. Not surprisingly, there were over 30,000 searches done during a 30-day period for the term “team building” according to just one source.
The key to being “found” on the web begins with focusing on the solutions you or your product provides. While this sounds like “Business 101”, it is amazingly easy to lose sight of as you develop your web site for your business.
Keeping the solution you offer in focus is the first step in creating a website that works as hard as you do at creating more business for your business. When you focus on the words your best customers might use to find the solutions your business offers, then you’re on your way to overcoming the “Help! My website cannot be found!” syndrome.
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Deliver Profits Techniques for Supersizing Your Small Business
