Numbers Are Life

Batching
This is a very important but often underutilized concept.  Batching can literally save you time and money.  Batching involves putting similar tasks or location based tasks together to make more efficient use of your time.  This could be back to back phone call meetings (thus the location is at home on [...]

So, you’re in business and wondering how to expand by reaching more customers.  How about coming up with another channel through which you can reach your end consumer?  Here are some examples of distribution channels that may apply to you:
Wholesale to retailers
Perhaps you currently sell direct to the consumer online.  [...]

If you’re a service professional, the industry norm is probably to charge an hourly rate. However, this tends to make clients overly focused on your hourly rate, making them too price-conscious. It would be better to focus them on the value of the services you’re providing, rather than what you are charging per hour.

It is much easier to sell products and/or services to those that are already buying and or have bought from you, rather than trying to get business from new clients. This is where the concepts of up-selling and cross-selling come into play.

Let’s look at a few examples of how you can increase your prices (without losing business!)

You meet people at an event, you swap details. You get back to your office and the ‘busy’ work takes over. Most of us don’t have assistants to delegate work to and even if we do, our client work always comes first (as it should).

But what about filling that marketing pipeline? Isn’t that just as important? Here are some questions that you need to consider:

Are you wasting the opportunity of turning a prospect into a paying customer or client? For example, say in you’re in the service industry. What systems do you have in place to make sure you’re following up on leads that come your way? You can get so busy in the “doing” that this important step is left to chance. It’s like leaving money on the table for someone else to find. Put systems in place to make sure you are following up each lead in some way.

There’s no point spending time creating plans for these areas of your business if you’re not going to review their status. This is your reminder to review, but where to start?

Start with your goals. What were your goals? How are they tracking? Perhaps you wanted to attract four new clients per month, launch a new product line or increase your average daily sale by $X amount. Whatever the goal, it must be tracked so that you can see its impact on the financials.

There are certain tasks that as a business owner, you should delegate. Bookwork is one of them – I highly recommend that you have a bookkeeper to take care of your bookwork. This could include:
• Processing of invoices for both suppliers and customers
• Processing of payments for both suppliers [...]