Will you play your game, or the economy’s game?

Today the head of the IMF and the Conference Board both declared the next decade the lost decade for economic growth. And the decade only just started!

Remember, economists deal in global statistics which are the AVERAGE of every country’s economic potential. You, the business owner, do not have to be an AVERAGE statistic in the next decade. Want more in your future than doom and gloom? Then change the game you’re playing in your business. Take back your future. Get your team together and brainstorm how you can deliver more value to your customers to earn their business and their loyalty.

Here are our top three tips for delivering top line value:

1. Reinvent your customers’ experience buying from you. Get their feedback. Search out their pet peeves. What works and what doesn’t. Choose to listen by being curious, rather than defensive. Every pet peeve has a golden opportunity in it for your business, but only if you choose to see it that way. Then analyze based on the complaints where the problems are in your customer experience system. Put together a team made up of someone from each part of the business, including those departments not part of the ‘problem’. Mandate? Reinvent how the process works to deliver what the customer really wants. Set a deadline and give this team carte blanche to come up with a game plan, budget and implementation plan you will approve.

2. Deliver value in surprising ways. How can you and your team go the extra mile for your customers? Can you teach them something that will help their business? Make introductions that will help generate more traffic? Show them how to get more mileage from your product or service. It’s like those Apple iPhone commercials that show you how to use their product. Or the webinars that Nevada State Bank put on featuring Darren Hardy from Success Magazine for how to build a successful mindset to deal with the economy. Or the supply salesperson who designed a supply cart for a hospital and filled it with her products so that the nurses didn’t have to take valuable time away from nursing to stock the shelves with new product deliveries.

3. What are you talking about? Are you adding to the doom and gloom mentality when you talk to your staff, suppliers and customers? Are you dwelling on the headlines or spending your creative energy with your team dreaming up how you are going to outshine the economy. Your mindset powers your business. What fuel are using?

As business owners, we can be part of the problem or part of the solution. We don’t have to succumb to the headlines. What will you choose to do?

 

 

 

Is it your time to sell your business?

According to John Warrilow of the Globe and Mail there are seven reasons you should sell out now because we are at the fork in the road in the economy. Warrilow makes some good pitches that all business owners should consider in evaluating whether this is the right time to sell the business. However he misses one mega problem. John suggests that an owner should consider selling his or her business if any of his seven reasons hit close to home. But most business owners who may want to sell, won’t be able to even if they resonate with Warrilow’s suggestions for selling. Why? The owners didn’t take the time to make their companies saleable, attractive to buyers. It takes two to four years to make a business saleable. That’s little secret is not broadcast to owners in any meaningful way. Now that would be something that the Globe and Mail should write about to educate the 3.2 million business owners looking at grey hair in the mirror and the ticking economy affecting their future. Find out not only what to do but how to make your business saleable by ordering an advanced copy of “Fast Track Secrets for Making Your Business Saleable” from Amazon.