Do Business Well

A term that is used increasingly in connection with sales is customer service. What is customer service? In a nutshell, it is providing the customer with products and services that match up to or exceed her expectations. It means offering products of a high standard of quality. It means caring about the customer, treating her well and going the extra mile in one’s efforts to provide complete satisfaction.

There is a good reason for placing emphasis on service. Leading companies worldwide are service providers. The fastest growing companies provide their customers with the greatest satisfaction and pleasure from their purchase. Not only from the product, but from the way in which the negotiations leading up to a sale are conducted. Continue Reading »

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It’s quite amazing how some people say: ‘I can’t do it.’ Why downgrade your potential? What’s more, as Henry Ford once observed, ‘Whether you believe you can do a thing or believe you can’t, you will prove yourself right.’ We may not have the quote exactly right, but the gist is that we tend to become what we believe we will become. You can achieve practically anything if you have the will to do so. And what is will-power? Simply, building up a great love for accomplishment.

Here are four inspirational stories of people who achieved greatness because they believed in themselves and acted on their beliefs. Continue Reading »

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If you envy others who are taking a boat trip to Hawaii, look wistfully at their Ferrari, wish you could send your son or daughter on a holiday overseas and would love to own a better home, you need to ask yourself what’s stopping you. The answer is probably money. Or rather, a lack of it.

The real reason is that you are not taking the correct actions to make money. Just remember that nothing happens without intelligent action. You have to make it happen by doing something. Continue Reading »

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The People Express business plan is notable for its lack ofemphasis on marketing issues. After all, in early 1980 the ideaof a discount airline was new and little tried. Who could besure that consumers would flock to a new airline that offeredcut-rate fares?

But according to Burr, the founders had little concern about that issue. “We felt that a $23 price would blow the market open,” he says. He points out that at Texas International, he had been involved in pioneering off-peak fares and, “When we cut prices to the bone, we were full.”

Where to locate.Other issues were paramount in the minds of the founders, including where to locate the new company’s hub— its base and the place where all flights eventually passed through. Newark, N.J., was first on their list because the airport seemed to be underutilized and was smack in the middle of one of the nation’s most densely populated marketplaces. “We talked about Baltimore, Hartford, New Haven, Oakland, and Kansas City,” Burr recalls. Oakland in particular intrigued them because its airport also seemed to be underutilized and was located in an attractive market. But PSA was already well established in California. In addition, PSA was, according to Burr, “a better-run carrier than you tended to find in the East.” Continue Reading »

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It’s important to note, however, that marketing is not the same thing as selling or promoting. Those are separate tasks. Selling and promoting are essentially the implementation of your marketing plan. That is, once you have identified your customer prospects and determined how best to reach them, you then have to go out and make it happen. You make it happen through selling and promoting, which are covered in a separate section of the business plan—and of this book.

Clearly, you can’t do an effective job of selling and promotion unless you have identified who you’re selling to and how you can best reach the prospects to make your sales pitch. That up-front work requires the orderly accomplishment of several tasks, which are described in this chapter and become the basis of the marketing section of your business plan. Continue Reading »

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Here is a brief overview of the contents of the written plan. Keep in mind that after the first two items, the titles of the subsequent sections can vary. But every business plan should cover the subjects addressed in this overview:

1. Cover Page. On the cover page goes the nary of your company, its address and, phone number, and the chief _executive’s name. That may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many business plans don’t have a cover page or have an incomplete one. Nothing will turn off a banker or investor faster than having to look up your telephone number in the phone book because you left it off the cover page. Moreover, if the plan is going to be distributed to several bankers or investors, you will want to number each plan prominently on the cover page—to allow you to track the plans and to inhibit recipients from copying or widely passing around the plan.

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The best benefits are those that favorably affect either people’sfeelings or their pocketbooks. Entrepreneurs who can express the market impact of their business in those terms usually have an advantage. For example, I read a local newspaper article about two women who had started a highly successful mail-order business selling clothing for overweight children. The children were thrilled with the product because of the difficulties—and the humiliation—they encountered shopping for clothes at traditional retail outlets. As one of the women observed, “What we’re really selling is dignity for these children.”

And so this company was. Sure, their clothing was of high quality and they delivered in a timely way. But the real reason for their success was they made children feel better. That pleased both the children and their parents. Continue Reading »

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If there is one single factor that has enabled small growingcompanies to compete on a level playing field with large corporations it is the availability of ever greater computer and othertechnological capacity at lower costs. Entrepreneurs can now easily acquire the computer power that during the 1960s and 1970s filled entire rooms of large corporations and cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Increasingly, technology and information management are being used by small growing companies to achieve competitive advantages. Mail-order firms can immediately access past buying records of customers who call in orders, determine availability of products, make the charges, and initiate the packing and shipping—all with a few keystroke taps on the computer. Continue Reading »

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When I speak with entrepreneurs who are embarking on writing a business plan, I begin by asking them some of the questions Iincluded at the end of the last article. What do you personally want from the business? What kind of business are you most comfortable with? What do you do best?

As they consider such questions, they invariably have inquiries of their own. What should the business plan look like? How should it be arranged? What should be included in each section? How long should it be?

In other words, as they begin the planning process, they also want to have a vision of the plan. They want to know what blanks they’re going to have to fill in. That’s understandable, and to help in that process this article offers some introductory answers to those questions. To illustrate different approaches to writing and organizing business plans, the article includes some contents pages and excerpts from the business plans of several successful well-known companies. Continue Reading »

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Once you’ve identified customer benefits, you must determine if, indeed, enough customers exist to make yourproduct/service profitable. That requires market research.

There’s a tendency to think of market research as something very sophisticated and complicated, involving long surveys, regression analysis, and similar sorts of exercises. But market research is really a matter of learning two things:

1. Whether enough potential customers exist to enable your product or service to achieve the growth you’re looking for_;
2. Whether the industries you are going after are on the upswing or the decline.

Continue Reading »

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