For my last post of the year I thought I'd have another Guest blog. This is more as a help to an old friend who has recently published a book entitled “50 Essential Business Advice Tips To Help Prevent Your Business From Failing” This blog explains the thinking behind his book. You can get it as a free download and I'd encourage you to do so.
A happy Christmas to everyone and a prosperous 2011
Kind Regards
Laurence Ainsworth
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There are over 4.5 million businesses in the UK and every year 400,000 are formed, with nearly as many failing. Most businesses stay small or plateau at a certain turnover without being able to grow - probably because business owners are working ‘in’ the business rather than ‘on’ it; making tactical day to day decisions rather than strategic ones.
No one wants to fail in business; however statistics show that 1 in 3 businesses fail in the first year of business and a further 50% of the remainder don’t progress after the third year.
So what distinguishes a successful business?
How about the following?:
● Knowing your strengths and weaknesses
● Having targets in place
● A business plan covering all aspects of the business
● Effective targets and measurements in place
● Ensuring that product and service offerings meet the needs of the market
● Ability to create a competitive edge
● Efficient, clear and consistent business processes
● Inspired and driven leadership
Whatever stage your business is at, you could probably benefit by getting back to basics and reviewing all aspects of your business to identify what is missing.
Consider that your business is covered by the following ‘pillars’ of business: strategy, finance, sales, marketing, operations, resources and personal issues - if you could look at each of these in turn and identify what changes are required to ensure the future success of your business, this could form the basis of a business plan for your business.
Once you have identified those key areas in each ‘pillar’ that need addressing, the challenge is then to take action and improve the way that your business operates. The important thing here is to prioritise which actions to take from the list generated - what needs to be done ‘now’ and what can be done ‘next’? Then who is going to do what, by when and what is an indicator that this step has been achieved.
Finally put some appropriate targets and measures in place to ensure that this simple business plan is moving forward and impacting the profit and performance of your business.....leading to success not failure.
To help you with this task, a book has recently been compiled by Paul Green - “50 Essential Business Advice Tips To Help Prevent Your Business From Failing”. Available as a free download here: http://www.paulgreen.biz/success_tips.htm
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