Monthly Archives: December 2018

What will you buy your business this Christmas?

It hit me a few days ago, as I was eyeing some iPad Pros at a well-known shop: we should all buy our business a Christmas present even if it’s just another excuse to buy another present. Having thought about it a bit more I realised that whilst an iPad will be lovely, the top three things on my list of presents for my business in 2019 are:

  1. Growth
  2. Security
  3. Joy

I wonder if you have ever thought about it yourself.  Whether you are a business owner or senior manager in a larger organisation, there must be things you wish for your business in 2019. Self employed or not, we all spend so much time at work that we should wish to make it a nicer place for us to be.

If you are hoping for similar gifts to me, you might think that the concept of buying these for yourself a complete nonsense. How can you buy growth and where do they sell security not to talk about joy? All true but as it is nearly Christmas, I would like to remind you of a lovely quote from Eleanor Roosevelt:

‘The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams’

Before you accuse me of having too many sherries way too early, here are a few things you might consider which can affect these elements in your business:

Growth: It’s a big word so why not break it to its components,

  • Planning: There will be hundreds of free planning workshop to chose from in January, why don’t you book yourself on one of them or consider signing up with a good coach?
  • Skills: Are there any areas, professional, technical or general that could contribute to growth in your business? Consider some training courses for you and the team.
  • -Marketing/ lead generation: Creating a good campaign or re-designing your website can make a difference to new sales. To make sure you get results, put together a strategy for your business.

Security: This is a bit misleading because we actually have very little control over what happens around us. However, you can consider the little that you can affect, things like:

  • Forecasting: How good are you at analysing your sales pipeline? Many of us lose the will to live when it comes to detail analysis of Excel spreadsheets or CRM reports but getting better at it can do wonders for identifying potential problems in advance.
  • Sales Pipeline: There is nothing that affects sales more than a developed pipeline. You should always consider short term as well as long term opportunities to ensure that new sales are flowing

Joy: We all tend to underestimate joy as a real focus. It is often thought of as a by-product of living a full life, but it isn’t necessarily so. For me, the two most important elements of joy are:

  • Interest: is your work still interesting and challenging? If not, it might be time to alter what you do and shift things a little.
  • People: Are you surrounded by people you enjoy spending time with? Are they doing a good job helping you develop things? If not, it might be something to consider for the New Year

I hope this has given you some food for thought. Here at Your Business Development Team, we want to wish you a merry Christmas and offer you a little present from us: Click here to download a copy of our 13 creative lead generation ideas document.

See you in 2019…

Why you should re-invent yourself this winter and other thoughts about common sense

This week I was reminded of a great quote from Voltaire: ‘Common sense is not so common’. I like this quote because you can read it in two different ways,

  1. Most people lack common sense
  2. Finding agreement on the right sense is not common

I choose to read it as the latter and I feel that Brexit is a very good example of it. Talking to people about current events, as I do, I came to realise that there are many ways in which we read the situation. Whilst some believe the economic market will suffer a decline in the short-medium term, others think it will only affect companies trading with Europe. I even heard that some people feel that if we stay positive there is no reason why there will be a recession at all.  Go figure, as no one really knows any of these views could be right, so it becomes a matter of the not so common sense.

So, why do I think you should consider re-inventing yourself this winter?

Here are two good reasons:

  1. According to Harvard Business Review jumping from the maturity stage of one business to the growth stage of the next—is what separates high performers from those whose time at the top is all too brief.
  2. As Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever demonstrate in their book Stall Points, ,once a company runs up against a major stall in its growth, it has less than a 10% chance of ever fully recovering.

Both are good reasons because whether you would like to be a high performer business or ensure that your business does recover from an economic downturn in the New Year, you should consider re-inventing yourself this winter.

How do you go about re-inventing your business model?

There are numerous books and articles out there for you to explore but essentially you need to consider two things first:

  • Are you going to come up with a completely new product?
  • Are you going to consider taking your exiting products to new markets?

The answer is very much down to your current business model, your market and the make-up of your company. Whichever way you choose to go, you need to consider two important factors:

  1. Developing new business can take time to mature, anything between 6-12 months.
  2. The longer you leave it the more competition you will have

This is why I recommend that you look into this urgently to make sure that you can start widening your options and developing your sales pipeline. We have recently developed a new lead generation system which we believe can support this process well. In September we run a workshop to share our new system and got some great feedback. Click here to find out more.