As a result of his business coaching programme, he's learnt about direct response marketing.  That's marketing where you go out to generate sales directly from your advertising, rather than just trying to build your brand.

The first stage of the process is to identify your target market.  It's a topic I frequently write about because over 90% of companies simply don't do this at all and it is critical to your results.

You've probably heard the saying that birds of a feather flock together and this is true for your customers too.  A month or so ago we started collecting names and addresses of existing customers to build a customer database.

The beauty of building a customer database is that you can keep in touch with people who have already bought from you. But, you can also find out who their neighbours are and promote to them too.

If Bertie promotes his coffee shop to the streets and areas that his existing clients come from, he'll be talking to a far more receptive audience than than just blasting out a general advert to the whole town or city.

This is one incredibly simple way to identify your target market. Once you've done this it becomes a simple matter of tailoring a message to suit your audience.

If you try this out, make sure to include some kind of offer in your advertising so you can measure how effectively your advertising campaign works.

They had allowed their biggest customer to get away with late or missed payments for so long that they were owed over £30,000.  They had not paid the rent for months either.

When their invoice factoring company pulled the plug on them, they went bust from lack of cashflow.  It was a slow and lingering death that caused a great deal of distress for all involved. 

Sometimes the quickest way to improve things in your business is to look for the symptoms of what's wrong.  Sloppy practice around invoicing is a serious illness for a business during a tough economy.  Collect your cash while you can – don't be the last one to ask for money!

Here's a quick check-list of some symptoms to check if your business is suffering from invoice-itus…

1. You often forget to send out an invoice, so you allow your customers to pay late, even when you've delivered your service or products.
    
2. You make lots of mistakes on invoices, which lets customers argue with you for a while, keeping cash that should be in your bank.
    
3. You feel embarrassed when chasing payments, so you are always the last person your customer pays.
    
4. You are constantly running with low cashflow, even though sales are OK, but you don't know how to change things.
    
5. You stick your head in the sand and hope it'll all be OK, too embarrassed to ask for help, you'll let it get worse before shouting "Help!".

The worst thing that you can do is wait for it to get worse before you ask for help.  No matter how bad it feels right now, it won't get any better until you start to do something different.

If you recognise any of these symptoms in your business, a free consultation with your business coach, the "profits doctor", might be the smartest move you can make…

Please download it and see if there's anything in there that can help you.  I'm not going to force you to use it, of course.  But do remember that I've used these exact same tactics to make a lot of people a lot richer.  Of course, you could decide they won't work for you and that's fine too.  On the other hand, you could have a go at one of them and surprise yourself with the results

On the same topic, a client today decided to send out a direct mail letter to local businesses (one of my favourite strategies) followed up with a phone call (the follow-up call is another favourite strategy, because it can double or more your response to a letter).  I'm looking forward to hearing about the results in a couple of weeks.

While reviewing a sample letter she gave me, I spotted a couple of improvements that can easily be made to it that will increase the response.  The first is to have some kind of compelling headline that relates to the client's situation.  There was also no P.S. on the letter, a neat trick that you can use in every sales letter to catch those people who like to skip to the end and find out who the letter is from!

Finally, the offer in the letter was really weak and so we brainstormed a few better ideas and came up with a couple of options she's gone away to consider.  All in all, a good coaching session about marketing.

In the meantime, remember to check out the free business resources page where I've posted the top 10 marketing tips along with a couple of other useful things for you.

If you'd like a no obligation, confidential chat about growing your business, contact me by filling in this form…

Sadly it didn't work.  No amount of brilliant thinking can forecast a terribly cold winter, an explosion in a factory or the bringing down of the Berlin Wall.  There were constant stories of food shortages and queues hundreds of people long outside empty bakers' stores, while there were enough new boots manufactured for half the world. 

Their strategic plan couldn't keep up with the demands of an ever changing world throwing its random events in the way of imperfect planning.  As a business coach, the Soviet Bloc would have driven me insane – so many wasted resources and opportunities.

This is precisely the problem for you in business.  How can you write a business plan that gets you going in the right direction without tying your hands together when the unexpected happens?

Over the past month I've written a free guide to writing a business plan that you can download from my site.  It's not just any old business plan you will create, it's specifically designed to help you get more done in less time and deliver faster growth than you've previously experienced.  You'll just need to put in your email address to get it sent straight to you.  Let me know what you think.

There's also a new section on the site called Free Stuff where you will find things useful to you and your business, including the fast growth business plan template and a link to the free accounting software.

You might even scoff at the thought of there being a magic bullet that can solve all of your business challenges, and you would be right.  There is no magic bullet – you need to do lots of small things that all add up to big results.

This week, one of my clients added around 10% to his weekly profits from a single strategy we introduced to his business.  The change was something that took just an hour to make – a carefully organised price increase to maximise his margins without killing his sales.

Business Coaching Gives You A Clear Plan

We also created a clear plan with 5 additional strategies for his business that he will introduce over the next three months.  By the time we get to November, his goal is to increase sales by around 25%.

Working with a three month plan, with clear goals and an action plan could make the same kinds of improvements to your business.  Over the course of a year, these small changes add together to give you big results. 

This is the secret of business coaching – it's about lots of small changes, not about a magic bullet that suddenly solves everything.

As your business coach, I meet with you regularly to plan your strategies with you, to review your results and to help you put in place the right things to get your business to the next level.  While doing this, it's not unusual for you to sweat a little about changes -  imagine my client in this story as he worried whether or not people would complain about the price change!  Having me there to help him through it, to help him find a way to test the idea out and to give him the confidence that it will work, makes all the difference.

Coaching Overcomes Uncertainty

So coaching, as well as giving you strategies for growth, is about helping you overcome uncertainty and personal constraints to change the things that are holding you back. 

Nina, another client, once said "While we're working a lot on the business, a lot of what we do is actually about changing me, isn't it?".  She was right.  She was able to cut her working hours from 100 a week to 48, fix a load of stressful problems and make around 25% more at the same time.  Nina had to change in order to make the changes successful, and she did.

Working with a business coach gives you an outside perspective on your business and helps you to focus on the elements of your business that need to change to get the results you want.  While this is normally more sales and profits, it can also be less hassle with your team and more balance in your life, with fewer hours at work and more time with your family and friends.

Would you like a confidential free chat about how business coaching could help your business?  Contacting me through this form could be your first step to a better business…

Monty Python understood the raw feelings that co-owning a business can cause…

Hopefully your business isn't quite at the stage of directors jumping out of windows, but if you have business partners I'll bet there are times when you don't feel you're running off the same plan. 

Last week I helped 50/50 partners in a business to agree a new plan that motivates them both.  Their business is strong but they need different types of goals to keep them energised and positive, especially in a tough market.  One needs a long term, visionary goal while the other needs to know what the business will give him in a much shorter period.

Both of them are committed to the long term of the business, but they are motivated in very different ways.  Without them understanding this, they were getting annoyed with each other and not pulling in the same direction.

At the end of our meeting, they had clarity on how the business will deliver both long and short term goals and were buzzing with excitement to get on with it.

If it feels like you're not working well together, you might want to consider your business planning process.  I've noticed a few bad ways to do this while coaching small businesses on their business plans…

Three Common Approaches To Business Planning…

As a business coach it's easy to look from the outside and see the things you don't realise when you're in the thick of it.  Here are three great ways to sabotage your long term business success…

1 – Business Plan?  We Just Plan To Survive!

You'll hear this a fair bit when you talk to people running small businesses.  The trouble is, if all you ever set out to do is just survive, you'll barely manage even to do that.

The most common reason for this is that you don't have effective business controls in place – you'll have late paying customers, late invoicing, poor cashflow etc.  It's no wonder survival is the first thing on your mind!

Perhaps it's also easier to say that you just want to survive than admitting that you don't want to change, learn new ways of doing things and make your small business really successful.  This is the complete opposite to the next one…

2 – This TIme Next Year, We'll Be Millionaires…

Made famous by Delboy Trotter from Only Fools & Horses fame, this is the vague hope that carrying on doing the same things you've always done will suddenly produce different results. 

No hope!  If you want to reach a far-off business destination, you'd better choose precisely where you're going and have a very clear idea of at least the first few steps to get you there. 

The good thing is you are a positive thinker, though, so if you can just get some strategies in place to lift your business performance and get it heading in the right direction, you can easily grow a lot more than you did last year.

3 – The Headless Chicken 

If you're the headless chicken, you're so busy running around doing stuff that you never stand back to think about where you're going.  This is like setting sale for America without a compass – you'll never get there.  Instead you'll just keep going around in circles, claiming that "all this vision stuff is a load of bullsh*t".

The headless chicken is always too busy to plan, to improve, to grow.  The headless chicken gets worn out eventually and gives up, switching to the "just surviving would be nice" strategy.

Was Your Last Business Plan Written In A Coffee Break?

For a typical small business, plans are what you talk about over coffee when there's time.  Nothing gets written down and the partner who shouts loudest, or who has been there longest, rules the roost by dominating the conversation.  Other partners feel surpressed and unable to share their point of view.

One of my clients has a business inherited from family.  Through the generations though, it's been handed down a bit like a family heirloom and kept more or less the same as the day it opened over a century ago. 

It took a tough session at a round table to sort out the differences – deciding who was really in control of the business and then some rules to let them run the business successfully, instead of suffering constant interference.  Up until then, the previous generation had been meddling in the changes and keeping the business in a time-warp. 

Freeing up the current generation's MD to get on with the job had a huge impact on sales, reduced stock costs and improved morale and motivation with the staff.

A Parting Shot…

If your business has two or more partners, have you got a written, agreed exit plan to get out of the business at a specific time in the future, or will you struggle to deal with that the day it happens?  You need to consider what would happen if it was forced upon you early.

When my father died unexpectedly, my mother had to deal with the consequences of no clear exit plan for the business at the same time as she was coming to terms with her loss.  It wasn't easy for her or the business.  The business has now gone altogether and I now know that a bit of exit planning could have made the whole thing a lot easier at a difficult time. 

Will you business be an asset to your family and business partners if you weren't around anymore, or will they feel like jumping out of the window too?

Some Bloggers' Thoughts on Exit Plans

Mercer & Horne's SME Blog talking about exit planning ready for selling your business

Self made minds' post about the importance of creating your exit plan well in advance for getting out of an Internet business

And finally, SmallBizPod is a podcasting site with some interesting interviews you can download for listening on your iPod or MP3 player.  You do have an MP3 player don't you?  In the show in the linked post, Martin Webb, the presenter of Channel 4's "Risking It All" business startup programme is interviewed.  Later in the programme various thoughts are aired about the value of creating an exit plan well in advance.  The show is SmallBizPod #50

Here’s a list of 7 of the most common issues I see – read through and try to spot familiar signs in your own business…

1. You Are The Key Employee – if everything in your business revolves around you being there, at a certain point you will become the bottleneck that everybody has to go to for answers and to get things done. When your business is small, this is fine. When you get bigger, it will hold you back dramatically.
    
2. No Unique Selling Proposition – your business needs to stand out from the crowd, but most businesses just offer the same services as everybody else and compete solely on price. What makes your business special? How do you make sure people know about it?

3. Over-Rating Your Own Service – when your customers think about you, what do they say when you’re not listening? Ask yourself this question honestly and think about filling the gaps so that you create something special.

4. Lack of Leadership – Your team will respond to the way you lead them. If they turn up late and go home bang on time, look in the mirror for the reasons! Your job is to motivate and inspire them by creating a business that gives them a buzz.

5. Poor Marketing – there is a technique you can learn and apply to make sure that you get new leads every month. A great book to read on this is Tested Advertising Methods – a book I get all my clients to read as their starting point to learn how this works

6. Lack of Financial Control – most businesses don’t run using management accounts and as a consequence they are out of financial control. Having a good book-keeper is a brilliant start and reviewing your cashflow forecast and Profit & Loss on a monthly basis are fundamentals. Don’t know how to do this? You’re in good company, since most accountants never explain it in a way that makes clear sense. You can learn though, and it’s not complicated or difficult to understand – just takes a bit of effort.

7. No Clear Goals or Focus – where is your business going? Imagine jumping into a taxi and saying “take me anywhere”. The driver would be confused and probably just throw you out! If you don’t have a clear vision or big goal for your business, you’re doing the same thing and you’ll just go around in circles. Give yourself a direction.

Now, make a quick To-Do entry for today to start fixing your own top issue this week.

Need some help? Give me a call for a quick free telephone consultation to help you off to a flying start on 01480 370142

At Google, the biggest search engine on the Internet, their vision is to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

So when the guys and gals at Google decide how they will sort the results of searches, they put a real priority on making results relevent and readable, so that the information is accessible and useful to them, even translating pages into your language if you want.  How accessible and useful is that?  Simply brilliant and all stemming from that one simple vision statement.

It's a really simple and powerful vision and I love it because of that.  It leaves you in no doubt what they set out to do every single day and it also hints at how they may evolve over time.

One of my favourite examples of a vision, although not from business, comes from Martin Luther King Jr.  In his "I Have A Dream" speech he describes his vision with details that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  How many people has he inspired with just this speech, I wonder?

 Watch the video of him delivering this speech here and listen carefully for the details of his vision.

 WIthin 12 months of him making this speech, an amendment to the American constitution was made that legally introduced equality for the black people of America.  His speech moves me deeply every time I hear it because of the depth of thought he has put into crafting every word of it, as well as his passionate delivery.

This beats hands-down the corporate visions and mission statements that seem to be created by a committee of tired old grey suits, trying to please everybody in the meeting.  The result is an obscure statement that uses lots of hollow words without real meanings all strung together to say nothing but sound impressive.  Something like "To facilitate the delivery of optimal solutions to suit our customers' every needs" is just like a bar of slippery soap.  There is no way you could identify what industry or business this came from and so you get nowhere.

Depending on the scale of the vision you have and how different it is to how things are at the moment, you may need to take the time to sit down and work out precisely what you want your business to become.  Most people have not spent the time to do  this and as a consequence they do not have that laser-directed sense of purpose that gives the most successful people their focus every day.

A well developed vision will be something that you can talk through and explain how it gives a great customer experience, how it ensures your market share for years to come and how it makes your business a great place to work.

To create your business vision, start by thinking about what it is you choose to be.  Then work through and put down all the things that your business will have to do in order to achieve this.  Don't just stop at words like "great customer service", think about what it will really mean you will do as a business.  Make it come alive so that you create on paper an inspiring future for your business.