1. Take total responsibility for the success of your business. Whether you make the money you desire or not is 100% down to your actions. The quicker you start to appreciate this the quicker you’ll reach your goals. Get really clear on what you want to achieve, build a plan to achieve it, and take action!
2. Know your market place. Do your competitor analysis and understand their pricing, marketing, strengths & weaknesses as much as you possibly can. Be as specific as you can about who your ideal clients are. This can be tricky at first but the more you work with new clients the more clarity you will gain. As you gain that clarity you’ll need to evolve your marketing to better target your ideal clients.
3. Know the value you deliver. You must talk to your ideal clients in their language not yours. Put yourself in their shoes and think carefully about how your product or service fixes the problem they have.
4. Take continual action. When you start your business your main focus has to be on your marketing and getting your message “out there” as consistently and continually as possible. Too many businesses do a bit of marketing and stop because “it didn’t work”. Research has shown that people need to see your message multiple times before they will make a buying decision so short lived marketing campaigns rarely work. There are a lot of very cost effective forms of marketing so you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money to do this well.
5. Make the most of the time. Things will be slow at the start but don’t convince yourself that this is a good reason to put your feet up. In fact do the exact opposite. Once your business starts to gather momentum you will quickly find that it’s difficult to carve out the time to work on growing your business, so use the quiet early months to do as much research and marketing as possible.
6. Your time is only valuable when your diary is full! This means you can’t afford to be too set with your pricing strategy when you start out as you don’t have the testimonial evidence to back up how good you/your products are. Your main focus should be on gathering great testimonials so be prepared to be a bit more creative with your pricing to gain some juicy case studies and testimonials as these will be a huge help as you continue to grow.
7. Know your strengths & weaknesses and use them to your advantage. Importantly find ways to plug the areas you aren’t so strong in, ideally by outsourcing them, but if money is tight find ways to manage yourself to ensure your weaknesses don’t hold you back.
8. Be realistic with your finances. Make sure you are realistic about how much money you will need to finance your first year. Invariably your ramp up period will be longer than you have estimated.
9. Implement systems for your key processes. This should be everything from when an enquiry comes in through to getting the cash in the bank. At the beginning when you have time on your hands it’s easy to make do without processes in place, but as you get busier you will start to make mistakes, overlook key requirements and spend significant amounts of time doing mundane activities like your bookkeeping. By putting simple processes in place at the beginning (when it’s easy!) you will save yourself loads of hassle later down the line.
10. The actions you take will govern the success of your business. Don’t put yourself in a position of regretting your lack of focused proactive effort 12 months down the line.
Good luck!
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