After reading this book, business owners will understand how to plan, improve and grow a successful business faster by focusing on what’s important, and entrepreneurs will learn how to improve their business strategy. By working smarter and not harder, motivated individuals can increase their business revenue and free up their time to enjoy an easier life.
Successful networking business owner, Paul Arnold, wrote Business Strategy Success Principles: An Action Plan to Grow Your Business and Enjoy an Easier Life to teach entrepreneurs and small business owners how to operate focused, strategic, and efficient businesses by applying 20 essential principles. T
Improving your brand
Brand is everything. Revisit your marketing material, logo, and brand to see if it can be improved. Your brand should be unique and reflect the quality and strength of your business to your potential customers and clients. People cannot buy a product or service if they don’t know about it.
Review your SEO, i.e., search engine optimization. You want to improve the search results that direct traffic to your website. You may also consider creating a click funnel to create familiarity with your brand. Make your brand relevant and current. Check your social media presence for consistency and professionalism.
Know your numbers
Once you know where you are at now, then you need to know where you want to be next in one, five, ten, and twenty years. Forecasting your business revenue is important so that you can develop your operational and staffing plans to help make your business a success.
Including your budget and projections in your business plan will help you avoid expenses in the future. Incorporating aggressive projections can be inspiring as you see what that would do for the bottom line of your company.
Your brand is everything
One of the most important factors of marketing your business is the K-L-T factor of your product or service. Is your product or service something that your customers can know, like, and trust? If you cannot achieve all of these three fundamental pillars, you will have difficulty marketing your product or service.
It is critical that your product or service brand is tuned into the important frequency of WII-FM: What’s In It For Me! If nothing benefits me directly, I am not likely to spend my hard-earned money to purchase your product or service.
Make more money
Focus on that which is generating the most revenue for your business. On the flip side, stop wasting time on activities not generating revenue where you feel you are spinning your wheels. Take time to identify the three most important revenue-generating activities for your business and focus exclusively on them.
By thinking outside the box, you will differentiate yourself from your competition and have unlimited success opportunities. By identifying your niche target market and ideal client, you can focus your sales and marketing activities for your perfect client.
Six steps to pivot and remain profitable
What I would like to share with you next is how most successful Fortune 500 companies successfully deal with change and evolution—the six steps they use to stay profitable and maneuver in a new direction while minimizing risk:
- Plan the framework for execution
- Outreach and collaboration with key players
- Key elements and strategy matrix
- Current and future states and risk
- Monitor and take action
- Evaluate, assess, and explore
What is your purpose?
Your current and future state of being is manifested in your head and will be determined by your thoughts, feelings, and desires for your future life. Your mindset is critical to determine your success in life.
By seeking your passions, you tell the universe to attract them into your life. If you fall off the rails from your desired goal, change the direction of your life to get yourself back on track.
Living the dream!
Do the work that you enjoy. Activities you don’t like to do may be fun and enjoyable for someone else. We need to be honest with ourselves and understand our strengths and weaknesses.
You want to do that which you are good at and assign the other tasks to someone else, such as a virtual assistant. If you can get to where you are having fun in your dream business, then you are at the ideal place.
Why do this? Plan your destination
Your mission statement defines your business, your business goals, and strategies to achieve objectives. You want to define what the ultimate goal is that you want to achieve.
Your vision statement describes the desired future position of your company. Your vision is the ultimate goal of what your business will accomplish. It can be combined with a mission to state the business purpose, goals, and values.
Your business plan helps you stay focused in accordance with your mission. At least once a year, revisit your business plan and determine if your business has changed or if it is time to change and adapt to the market.
SWOT Analysis
What makes you different? What makes your business different? SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. If you can invest a lot of time and thought into a SWOT analysis before you market and grow your business, it will save you a lot of grief later.
Do you have a solid business?
The first step to improving your business is to understand why businesses fail and don’t fall into one of these five traps:
- No need in the market
- Not enough capital
- Not the right team
- Competition
- Price
Understanding the top reasons businesses fail can help you learn valuable lessons to position you and your business for a greater likelihood of success.
Raise the bar
If you can acquire larger customers, you can work smarter, not harder. Once you have identified the big fish, who will change your life and your business, you can develop a specific marketing strategy geared toward this potential client.
The more specific you can be with your target market, the better. If you can do business with a high-quality business owner, it opens the door to more opportunity. Improve your network to create the dream business you desire in life.
Say Yes to opportunity
Try something that feels uncomfortable to grow. The things you are uncomfortable with are the things that will take you and your business to the next level.
Trust your gut. If it is something that you feel may open a new door, make a new connection, or create a new opportunity, then why not say “yes.”
Your vision board
A vision board is a collection of images and words that inspire you; it is a tangible inspiration for where you are going. Illustrate your goals and dreams as a visual picture. It includes statements with the images as valuable affirmations of your goal.
Your objective is to manifest a tangible representation of where you are going in life.
Customer Communication
We can break the general population into four main distinct personality types. By understanding the four personality types, you can use the appropriate marketing strategy and communication to appeal to these individuals. By including elements that attract all four personality types, you increase your sales opportunities.
As a sole entrepreneur starting to market your own business, you should be able to demonstrate your value proposition in a short and concise manner. At this point, you should have the information you need to create your one-minute presentation (OMP.).
You not only want to communicate the essence of your business in solving a problem but you also need to build rapport and trust with your ideal prospective client by using some specific relationship-building techniques.
Be SMART
You need to scale your business by examining where you are today and understanding where you want to get to. Start by focusing on small, measurable goals.
Make sure your goals are SMART. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-specific. If you are not ready to scale your business, then wait longer until you can fulfill your orders.
While it is important to take advantage of opportunity, your brand and reputation will suffer if you are not positioned for success and don’t scale properly.
Know what you want
The first step for your value-adding business is to create or update your business plan. You need to examine and understand your ideal client. Create a picture of the person most likely to purchase your product or service.
The business plan is an exercise to clearly define your product and your target market. You want to define where you will market your product or service. The more specific you can be in identifying your target market, the more successful you will be.
Your dream team
One of the greatest challenges successful business owners face is time management. Once your business takes off, it becomes more difficult to manage all the sales, admin, marketing, and accounting.
By building the right team, you can delegate tasks to people better at doing certain things then you are who also provide great ideas to improve your business.
Improve your network
You are like the five people you spend the most time with. If you want to improve your business and make more money, why not hang out with people who are already achieving that? Try to find a business coach or accountability partner.
Find a millionaire mentor who has already achieved success in their business and is living a comfortable life. Choose your mentors wisely; evaluate the alignment of their skills with what you need to improve on to achieve greater success in your business.
Keep it simple
It is now time to apply decluttering to your business. Look at all the projects and organizations you are involved with and reevaluate the effectiveness they are having in your business.
Pick the three most profitable marketing and sales strategies you have in your business and focus on them.Start focusing your business on either those clients who are profitable to you or those clients who you want to spend your valuable time with.
Spend your time with those who are going to help your mindset and your business become better.
