We Need To Take Time To Prepare For Our Business

For Business owners, forming a business is a courageous step on the road to creating wealth and personal independence and freedom. In business, your day is always complete with many challenges. Dependent on the business and your daily role in it, the issues that you as an owner deal with, are of course many and varied. It's easy for the days, weeks and months to move by quickly without really taking a look at what is driving the business activity and direction. Almost everything that goes on in the business and the related business problems can appear to become almost automatic.

Many company founders, because of their emotional connection with the birth of the company, also act like a parent to their company. They think about the company subjectively, and not as they should, objectively. The company may have been formed out of a great idea and with the right intentions, but without any major objective planning. This means they don't always make appropriate judgements about the company direction, or action plans. They also may not have a defining purpose about the business, which effects the direction of company as well as personal activity. Also, they may not have an investor's view of it, and are not sufficiently market driven. Indeed, one of the main reasons that businesses fail is lack of appropriate action at the right time.

Allied to all this unfortunately, is the fact that a majority of businesses do not give appropriate returns on the initial investments of time, energy and funding. At Start-Up also, the owners and partners may fail to clarify the idea sufficiently, before they plough resources, time and money into pursuing the business idea.
Did You Plan This?

Examples of this are quite common in many businesses. They have a knock-on affect in all areas of the business. Most Business founders do not think and plan an Exit Strategy and how they will leverage sufficient financial returns from the business over time. They may not assess accurately, the feasibility of the ideas and assumptions about the business, prior to setting off on a course of action. They may not 'run the numbers' effectively enough to challenge their assumptions about the financial viability and cash flow potential of the business.

In assessing the likelihood of the product and service being successful, examples of factors that very often are not assessed sufficiently are, size of potential market, level of customer need for the service or product, the length of the sales cycle and the buying process, the Psychology behind the purchasing decision, profit margin, how often repeat sales will happen, route to market and possible exclusivity. There's a very competitive landscape out there, and only those who have designed an effective and 'practical' strategy and plan will survive and thrive.

In the Sales and Marketing function, an unclear strategy can mean we haven't defined our target market and client profile. Market and customer profiling is very important, but not always thorough. Awareness of competition, pricing, brand issues as well as the chosen communication and promotion channels to prospects and clients are also important. We may not have defined clearly enough, who we are going to market to, who we serve and what are their real needs. Additionally, what business problems does the target customer experience, that we could help them solve. In growing a business, if you are always thinking about "how you can get more sales at company 'X'", and not "How can I help Company 'X' get more business, or solve their business challenges and problems, you're possibly heading in the wrong direction. You must get to know all about your customer.

All of this of course will manifest in undeveloped prospecting and opportunity management processes. It can also result in poor motivation to close sales for your company or time spent chasing business that really doesn't fit with your target market strategy, or that you in reality won't or can't win.