There are a number of common denominators in a successful business.

So it would make sense to have a checklist of a few of the known common denominators to success to see how many you have covered in your business.

One of the first common traits with a successful business owner is, “speed of implementation”. What this simply means is when the business owner is given a great idea, in particular a proven idea, it is the speed of implementation that determines the level of success. Instead of asking all of your friends and relatives about what they think of the idea (and by the way, most of the people business owners asked their opinion, are not, and never will be a customer of the business therefore rendering their opinion useless) what font to use, what colour paper should we use and the rest of the minute details, just get on with it and “do it ugly”. In particular with marketing ideas and marketing strategies, a big percentage of them won’t work anyway, so it is a smarter approach just to get it done and tested, before you waste a whole lot of time, energy and effort and perhaps money on something that isn’t going to work anyway.

Another success trait is being prepared to do what most others aren’t. And specifically I am talking about putting time aside as a priority to continuously learn and grow your skills and your philosophy. Recently I have been teaching our members the idea of creating a personal success ritual. This entails getting out of bed 7 days a week at 5 AM or earlier to begin a series of personal and professional growth activities. Every single person that has done it has given extremely positive feedback about the level of productivity and results have been able to achieve in a very short amount of time. And surprise, surprise, the people who come up with the best excuses as to why they can’t do it, get very little to no change in the productivity and the results, but they do improve their ability to make excuses, I guess practice make perfect. I have been very fortunate over the years to have great mentors, and I remember one of them asking me very early on, “there are excuses and there are results, which one are you?”

Another success trait is having the ability to stick to a task until it is complete. Many people fall for the misapprehension that being able to multitask is efficient. In my observations, most of the time people tend to use this explanation of multitasking being efficient, as a way of covering up their lack of discipline to be able to stick to a task until it is complete. I guarantee you, if you did a time log and tracked your effectiveness and productivity every 15 min for 7 days, using the multitasking approach and then repeated the exercise for an additional 7 days disciplining yourself to stick to each planned task until it is complete the results would shock you. But just don’t take my word for it, why don’t you go ahead and prove me wrong.

You know where to find me

It is essential that every business have a focus on niche. It has been proven time and time again that businesses that specialise succeed and businesses that generalise struggle and often fail, but always under perform.

The challenge in the business owners mindset seems always to be “but everyone is a possible customer”. So I would like to clear up this thinking so you too can move forward and create a far more profitable business by identifying your niche.

Selecting a niche doesn’t mean that you exclude people outside of that niche from doing business with you, it simply means that your marketing messages are targeted to the exact type of people that are the best people to build your business upon. When you continue to refine your niche, and refine the characteristics that you are looking for in the best person for your business, the quality of the customer you will tend to attract will continue to go up, therefore making your business more profitable and less stressful.

A simple way of doing this is creating a “customer avatar”. This is a process of identifying exactly the perfect customer and capturing that customers fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations, as well as their interests and problems. The secret to this exercise is to drill down and get as specific as possible. Then find a picture that would represent this person and when ever you are writing a marketing message, have that picture in front of you and write the message as if you are writing personally to that person.

Does this seem like a lot of work? The answer is yes, because it is work, but it is worthwhile work. There is no quick fix, there is no magic bullet, this will evolve over time. And it will give you and your business a very definite focus which will move you into a space where you will be the 1st and foremost business thought of in your perfect customers mind.

Sometimes I get asked, what’s the one thing I can do to make the business more profitable quickly? Without a thought I reply “raise your prices”. Nearly every time it is met with a shrug of the shoulders and roll of the eyes. The person who asked the question just doesn’t take the answer seriously.

In every case, the one thing that prevents the person from implementing this sage advice is, their own thought processes and beliefs. The big mistake the business owner makes is thinking that their customer wont pay this price, and then never testing at. The only true way to find out what your true price point is, is to continue to raise prices until you experience price resistance, by the customer either saying “I’m not paying that” or just not buying. But not just one customer, you must notice a pattern. Then you can simply lower your prices slightly below the level you experienced the resistance.

In almost every case the price resistance begins in the business owners mind long before it actually exists in the market.

A few years ago we released a new program, and over a period of 9 months the price increased by multiple of 10 and it was just as easy to sell at the highest price as it was at the lowest price. Because it all comes down to perceived value from the customer’s perspective not yours.

The secret with this is to simply put your prices up, not have a discussion with your customer about how much he or she would be prepared to pay. What are they going to say? Of course they’re going to say that’s too much, when asked. But when presented with your value proposition and asked to buy, their behaviour is the real answer.

If you have trouble putting your prices up, it is time for you to work on your own self confidence and sense of value, so you can get out of the way of a more profitable business.

Talk to anybody in business and ask them what is the best form of advertising, and 95% of the replies will be “word-of-mouth”.

There is no denying that word-of-mouth or “referrals” is by far the best and cheapest way to generate additional business. So my question is why do hardly any businesses at all put any effort, time, thought or money into creating a systemised, measurable process to generate additional business through referral.

It turns out less than 1% of businesses have implemented a formal referral gathering process. Is that nuts or what? If you knew the best way to get new business was also the cheapest way to get new business, and not only that, referral business is the easiest business to convert into sales because of the trust and connections already established via the referrer, why wouldn’t you put major effort, focus and money into that strategy?

There are tons of simple ways you can start tapping into this virtually untapped goldmine.You can start off by simply giving every customer that comes through your business a handful of vouchers that gives the bearer some “special deal”. And perhaps just simply write the name of the person you give the vouchers to, on the back of the voucher, so when someone comes in and presents that voucher you can jump on the phone and thank the person that referred the new customer to you. People don’t need to be paid to give referrals, a simple “thank you” will go a long long way to getting that person to continue to refer business in your direction.

If you give the referred person a great experience and then asked them to refer business to you by handing them a fistful of vouchers to give out as well, you start to tap into a basic human trait that compels us to want to share a great experience with our friends, family and colleagues. It’s a little like when you see a great movie, hear a great song or a fantastic joke, you just want to tell as many people as you run into about your experience. So all you need to do is give your customer a great experience and then ask them to share that experience with their circle of influence.

You could virtually slash your marketing budget by 90% and increase the volume and quality of Leeds coming into your business by many times over using this incredibly inexpensive, easy and simple strategy. So what’s stopping you?

Just about everything associated with business success is not obvious and counterintuitive.

It is intuitive to take advantage have every opportunity that presents itself, it’s counterintuitive to ignore those opportunities and not get distracted from our main goal.

It’s intuitive to multitask, it’s counterintuitive to stick with one thing and fully complete it.

It is intuitive to think because the idea I have is a great idea, that everybody else will think it is a great idea. It is counterintuitive to even consider testing ideas that I don’t think are good ideas.

It’s intuitive to get stuck in and do everything that needs to be done and fix all of the problems that present themselves daily, it’s counterintuitive to stop, write all of these things down, put them in order of priority based on the consequences of not doing them, and then acting on that plan.

It’s intuitive to present yourself as important and knowledgeable in a conversation with others, it is counterintuitive to make sure the other person in the conversation feels that they are important and knowledgeable.

It is intuitive to get all of the details right and perfect with your product or service before you release it, it is counterintuitive to just release it in an ugly form, to test its validity and popularity and then pretty it up if the market wants it.

Benjamin Franklin was quoted to have said “if you don’t have any success models then look around and see what everybody else is doing and do the exact opposite. Your chances of success will be extremely high”

If the most common and costly misconception that plagues small business and in my view causes more than its fair share of small business failure, is the belief that marketing is something that you do for your business. In other words it’s something that you “bolt on” to your business. In fact a smart business is built on top of a foundation of marketing strategy.

If you were to use the analogy of building a house, the marketing is all of the planning activity that goes into the building design and then pouring the foundations. The day-to-day business is represented by the framework, the roof, the internal fitting out and furnishings. So in most businesses focus tends to be on everything that sits on top of that foundation, but without the foundation existing. You never see the structure being put up (at least on a solid one) directly on the dirt, or the sand. Because as we all know, if the earth moves the structure can crack and collapse. (To continue the analogy, the earth represents the market, and we know that market moves and shifts all of the time)

So it is essential for you to have the best insurance possible to protect your business from being pushed around by changes in the market, you must build a solid foundation. That foundation is built from proven direct marketing principles.

So please pay particular attention to this next suggestion as it may well be the best business advice you’ve ever received. The business owner should never, ever delegate responsibility for the marketing for the business This doesn’t mean that they have to put the adds in the paper, headlines together, write the copy, produce the graphics and so on, but they need to know all of the principles that work and don’t work behind every part of the marketing strategy. They need to be the marketing expert. No exceptions!

When you put your pencil to it, there aren’t very many areas of the business that actually make money. The majority of tasks and actions in a business are actually costs. In reality the only 2 areas of the business that bring in the money are marketing and sales activity.

I’m sure you would have heard of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, that basically states that 20% of the value comes from 80% of the activity, and 80% of the value comes from 20% of the activity. So how this applies to your customers for instance, is that if you invested the time to work about, you would find that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.

It would make sense then, to be able to identify the characteristics, fears, frustrations, wants and desires of the type of customer that sits in 20% group for your business. So you could then direct your marketing and customer experience activities towards attracting and satisfying this type of person.

Well of course it makes sense, but the reality of the situation in far too many businesses is, that little to no effort goes into this sort of activity.

Going back to the original Pareto principle, it should stand to reason that if the sales and marketing activities in a business are the only ones that make the money, and I assume that’s why you’re in business, that 80% of your time and effort should be directed at just the sales and marketing activity.

It is amazing how much time and profitability is lost because the small business owner is sucked into doing busy work that doesn’t make them a sale or get them a new customer.

Beginning today to plan and schedule purpose directed sales and marketing activity and begin to develop the discipline to do this as a priority before all other activities on a daily basis.

The amount of money that is lost or wasted by using shotgun marketing tactics is incomprehensible, particularly for small business. In my view spending money on branding if you’re a small business is a complete waste! I understand there will be plenty of people will want to argue the point, as they have been brainwashed by all of the media outlets that you “have to get your name out there”. You must remember that their motivation is their own sales not yours, which is why none of their campaigns can’t be measured.

Branding is relevant for larger businesses that have multimillion dollar budgets, and through well thought out “direct response marketing strategies”, small business will generate valuable branding, but this will come from the customer interaction with the small business rather than through costly un-measurable advertising.

A very inexpensive yet effective approach to getting your message out to your market, is to ask yourself this question “who has my client before me?” As an example, our target market is the small business owner, and one place a small business owners are grouped together is the database or client base of an accountant.

Once you identify another place, business, Association, magazine or club that would have your target market customer in larger numbers, the next challenge is to work out the “what’s in it for me” for the owner of the list of your target customer is. If you can then pull together a win-win joint-venture arrangement the cost of your marketing will be very minimal yet very well targeted.

You may think this seems like a lot of work, and it is, I don’t to want sugar coat it. But I think the work involved in directing your marketing in this fashion, pales into insignificance compared to the amount of work that you need to do to generate the profit that goes to pay for ineffective shot gun advertising strategies.

A number of years ago, whilst doing some consulting for tennis Australia, I would be visiting most of the state coaching facilities around the country. I would run workshops, and had conversations with the players (these were junior players between the ages of 11 and 15) their parents and of course the state coaches.

I would ask them all “when you are competing, does your physical abilities, or your abilities to manage your mental and emotional state, have the biggest determining factor as to whether you do well or not on the day”. Of course without exception everyone would respond with “your ability to manage yourself mentally and emotionally”.

I would then ask them to break it down into percentages, how important is the physical versus the mental. In most cases the answers would be 80% mental and 20% physical. In some cases various people would choose different figures, but always without exception the mental scored far higher than the physical.

So then I would ask if the mental skills are significantly more important than the physical skills, and you practice your physical skills from minimum of 2 to 4 hours every day, it stands to reason that you would be practising mental skills for at least twice as long. But of course the real answer was, they didn’t practice the mental skills at all.

Now the parallel to that in small business is your marketing skills. It is the single most valuable area for small business success no exceptions. No customers equals no business.

Michael Masterton, the author of the highly acclaimed book “Ready, Fire, Aim” who is one of the highest-paid and successful business consultants in the world, suggests “there are hundreds of ways of business can go bad, but only one sure way to make it better: identify the optimum selling strategy for the stage of growth that you are in and then focus 80% of your resources on applying it”

Jim Rohn, in my opinion, one of the best business mentors ever, always said that “the thing that will make the biggest difference to your health, relationships and your bank account in the next 12 months, is your philosophy”

Mindset is super important for the success of small business. Having been running our own small businesses for over 20 years, and having made more mistakes than I care to remember, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a priority in small business that needs to be paid attention to, that by and large is not.

In my experience the area of marketing is the most important and least understood and least focused on area of small a business. Small business owners tend to focus on pretty much from most other areas of the business (the ones they find comfortable) except for the marketing.

You could have a business where you are lousy at people management, customer service, administration and even sales, but were outstanding at marketing, you could still survive. Granted it would be an ugly stress filled business, but surviving.

Marketing is much more than sticking an ad in the paper or Yellow Pages. You need to understand psychology and to be able to implement a measurable, evolving strategy.

An outstanding marketer knows that most of their ideas will fail, but also knows if they continue to implement, measure and test, they will find a marketing strategy that will blow the competition out of the water. That’s the great thing about becoming committed to marketing, is that if you are prepared to fail enough, and keep going, you are guaranteed success!

The biggest mistake I see, is far too many small business owners making delegate responsibility for their marketing strategy to which ever sales representative walks through the door from the Yellow Pages or local radio or TV station. You need to understand that their motivation is to make their business successful, it is your responsibility to make your business successful.