by Ahmed Muzammil | Dec 20, 2015 | Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing |
1. BOOST YOUR MARKETING
Increase your marketing efforts. Bring in more leads. Get the word about your company out.
More leads count to more profits, as you will get more clients. You can use online ads or leverage on an efficient offline method to do this.
Sometimes cold calling your earlier prospects, and leads can also help. Also, you can ask your existing customers for a referral.
2. REINVENT YOUR PRODUCT OFFERING
Optimize your product or service offering to improve conversion. Re-inventing your product or service offering can increase the likability of your product.
Eventually, it can drive to an improved lead to customer conversion. Sometimes even adding a bonus would help.
For example, a car wash services company can offer a gift of a non-slip dashboard mat. Although the mat may cost just $1, it might end up convincing the customer to accept a higher price. Plus, when they compare two car wash companies, your offering can stand out.
3. BUILD A PRODUCT PATH FOR YOUR BUSINESS
It’s about increasing the Customer’s Life Time Value (LTV). Add more products and services to your business, so that you add sensible offerings for your clients.
It’s called a product path or upselling. So a customer can buy a cheap ticket item and gradually you can move them through the product path to a higher ticket item.
An example of a Cleaning Services business would be to offer a yearly contract or a painting service.
So imagine, that the customer pays $50 and signs up for the cleaning service. The next step could be that the cleaning services company can offer them a monthly contract that runs for a year at $100 a month.
That’s a $1200 in extra revenue for one customer. Or, in the case of offering a painting service, it could lead to a sale of $2000 to $4000.
4. SYSTEMIZATION & AUTOMATION
Decrease your operational cost by systemizing parts of your company operations. You could do this by using,
- Operational guides (which I showed you as an example in my previous post)
- Build a Custom Software
- Using Business Process Management (BPM) tools.
5. CHARGE MORE
Increase the price of your products and services. Are you charging market rates or below market rates for your products and services?
If yes, you should consider raising your price. Raising your price will filter out the cheap buyers who sometimes end up being the most demanding customers.
Also, charging more means you achieve higher revenue with less number of customers. Which will also bring your operational costs and customer service costs down.
6. OUTSOURCE
Outsource your operations. Are some roles in your company good enough to work from a remote location?
You can find Virtual Assistants online costing about $200-300 a week from the Philippines or India. You can also find plenty of freelancers on Freelancer.com and Upwork.com from other countries.
Freelancers and Virtual Assistants can offer a wide range of services from design and development, to cold calling and event organization even personal errands like scheduling a doctor’s appointment.
7. JOINT VENTURE PARTNERSHIPS (JV)
Create partnerships. When you create connections with fellow business owners, it could also add more revenue to your business.
Some JVs will be reference providers for your business, also known as Affiliates. They might be running a business similar to yours but your product could be an upsell for them.
And for some JVs, you could be the affiliate for their business. i.e. You could upsell your customers their products. And take a commission out of the sale.
These are 7 different ideas to increase your profits two-fold. If you want to read about 3 ways to increase the revenue of your business, then read my next article: 3 Ways To Add More Revenue To Your Business
by Ahmed Muzammil | Dec 18, 2015 | Business, Development, Entrepreneurship, Startup |
Jamie runs a business, and she wants it to grow and make a full-time income. She started her business out of a passion. She got frustrated about having the worst customer service at the local retail store and went to build her own retail store with the best ever customer service.
She gathered her savings, rented a space, stocked it up and all the things went well, she got customers visiting the store. She happily served the customers, then she hired a few employees. She trained them, she managed her employees and propagated the customer service ideas to them. All was going well.
Now, it’s the holiday season. And she started running a few promotions in her store. Jamie starts her car to go on a vacation. Suddenly she gets a call.
A call from her regular customer complaining about the long queue at her store’s cash counter. He’s really frustrated about the level of service he received from Jamie’s store. Jamie talks to the customer cool him down and rushes to the store instead of the vacation.
When she enters, she found chaos everywhere. Things were not kept properly in the racks. A long queue of customers standing at one of the counters, the other two counters don’t have cashiers. Everything is out of order.
What happened? Jamie is a very cool person. So, she calls her manager Dorothy and asks her what happened. Dorothy said, Jamie, that there was a huge influx of customers.
That’s fine, But Dorothy… “Why is there no cashier in the other two counters?”. Dorothy says that her cashiers were re-routed to the warehouse to pick some things up and re-stock them.
If Jamie would’ve been there, then things would’ve been completely different. The priority would’ve been to clear the queue first, rather than to re-stock. At least Jamie would’ve stepped into the cash counter.
Welcome to the chaotic world. Where nothing happens as you want it to happen. Jamie thought that Dorothy is capable of delivering the level of service that Jamie wanted to provide to her customers.
Jamie starts to lose confidence as she dwells in the chaos. Suddenly her vision of having the best retail store with the best customer service is fading away…
So what are the options for Jamie to have a seamless operation, for everything to be in order, for her employees to deliver her vision to her customers, to make sure your manager thinks like you want them to think, to ensure that proper training has been provided?
Jamie is smart and seeks the help of a business coach. Mr.Business Coach now steps into the business. He understands what’s going on and what her real mission and vision are about her business.
Mr. Business Coach finds that Jamie wanted to travel and take a lot of vacations. He advises that Jamie needs to systemize her business. So that when Jamie steps away, her systems can work in such a way that Jamie can ensure that employees follow without errors. Her job will be to keep the systems up-to-date, train, and to keep her employees happy. And her systems will take care of the customer service and other things.
The coach teaches her how to “work ON her business” and not “work IN her business!”. Working ON the business freed up a lot of time for Jamie, so that she could focus on bigger problems and business growth. And what not, to take the long pending vacation plan.
Systemization also makes the business a rapidly scalable one, Jamie went on to open her store in almost all parts of the city. She now never visits all her stores. Her profits went higher, her customer service goals were achieved regardless of whether she’s present or not.
Finally, Jamie’s dream of building her own retail store with the best ever customer service and also make a full-time income became a reality.
How to systemize your business in 3 simple steps:
- Note down the repeated jobs that are there in your business every-day
- Write down a step by step procedure on how to do those repeated jobs
- Prepare a checklist of outcomes of each of those repeated jobs
Examples Repeated Jobs for Jamie’s Case:
- Cleaning the glass door every hour
- Check whether all the things are properly placed in the racks
- Clean the bathroom every hour
Example Step by Step Procedure to clean the glass door every hour:
- Spray on an all-purpose cleaner
- Scrub off the stains and dirt
- Finish it off with a basic glass cleaner
Example Checklist:
- The door has no water stains
- The door doesn’t have any fog
- The open/close sign is in place
Stay tuned, I’ll dig into detailed systemization techniques, automation techniques, and using technology to take your business into auto-pilot mode in my upcoming posts. So hit the Follow button and subscribe to my posts.
![[Part 2/2] A Short Story About Systemization In Business](https://i0.wp.com/ahmedmuzammil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/A-short-story-about-systemization-in-business-2.jpg?resize=1080%2C675&ssl=1)
by Ahmed Muzammil | Dec 18, 2015 | Business, Management |
Jamie starts to lose confidence as she dwells into the chaos. Suddenly her vision of having the best retail store with the best customer service is fading away…
(Continuation from Part 1 of this article)
So what are the options for Jamie to have a seamless operation, for everything to be in order, for her employees to deliver her vision to her customers, to make sure your manager thinks like you want them to think, to ensure that proper training has been provided?
Jamie seeks the help of a business coach. Mr. Business Coach now steps into the business. He understands what’s going on and what her real mission and vision are about her business.
Jamie needs to systemize her business. Her systems work in such a way that Jamie can design and ensure that employees follow without errors. Her job will be to keep the systems up-to-date and to keep her employees happy.
Mr. Business Coach teaches her how to “work ON her business” and not “work IN her business!”. Working ON the business freed up a lot of time for Jamie, so that she could focus on bigger problems and business growth. And what not, to take the long pending vacation plan.
Systemization also makes the business a rapidly scalable one, Jamie went on to open her store in almost all parts of the city. She now never visits all her stores. Her profits went higher, her customer service goals were achieved regardless of whether she’s present or not.
Finally, Jamie’s dream of building her own retail store with the best ever customer service and also make a full-time income became a reality.
How to systemize your business in 3 simple steps:
- Note down the repeated jobs that are there in your business every-day
- Write down a step by step procedure on how to do those repeated jobs
- Prepare a checklist of outcomes of each of those repeated jobs
Examples Repeated Jobs for Jamie’s Case:
- Cleaning the glass door every hour
- Check whether all the things are properly placed in the racks
- Clean the bathroom every hour
Example Step by Step Procedure to clean the glass door every hour:
- Spray on an all-purpose cleaner
- Scrub off the stains and dirt
- Finish it off with a basic glass cleaner
Example Checklist:
- The door has no water stains
- The door doesn’t have any fog
- The open/close sign is in place
Stay tuned, I’ll dig into detailed systemization techniques, automation techniques, and using technology to take your business into auto-pilot mode in my upcoming posts.
![[Part 1/2] A Short Story About Systemization In Business](https://i0.wp.com/ahmedmuzammil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/A-short-story-about-systemization-in-business.jpg?resize=1080%2C675&ssl=1)
by Ahmed Muzammil | Dec 18, 2015 | Business, Management |
Jamie runs a business, and she wants it to grow and make a full-time income. She started her business out of a passion. She got frustrated about having the worst customer service at the local retail store and went to build her own retail store with the best ever customer service.
She gathered her savings, rented a space, stocked it up and all the things went well, she got customers visiting the store. She happily served the customers, then she hired a few employees. She trained them, she managed her employees and propagated the customer service ideas to them. All was going well.
Now, it’s the holiday season. And she started running a few promotions in her store. Jamie starts her car to go on a vacation. Suddenly she gets a call.
A call from her regular customer complaining about the long queue at her store’s cash counter. He’s really frustrated about the level of service he received from Jamie’s store. Jamie talks to the customer cool him down and rushes to the store instead of the vacation.
When she enters, she found chaos everywhere. Things were not kept properly in the racks. A long queue of customers standing at one of the counters, the other two counters don’t have cashiers. Everything is out of order.
What happened? Jamie is a very cool person. So, she calls her manager Dorothy and asks her what happened. Dorothy said Jamie that there was a huge influx of customers.
That’s fine, But Dorothy… “Why is there no cashier in the other two counters?”. Dorothy says that her cashiers were re-routed to the warehouse to pick some things up and re-stock them.
If Jamie would’ve been there, then things would’ve been completely different. The priority would’ve been to clear the queue first, rather than to re-stock. At least Jamie would’ve stepped into the cash counter.
Welcome to the chaotic world. Where nothing happens as you want it to happen. Jamie thought that Dorothy is capable of delivering the level of service that Jamie wanted to provide to her customers.
Jamie starts to lose confidence as she dwells into the chaos. Suddenly her vision of having the best retail store with the best customer service is fading away…
Continued… Follow me to receive the second part of Jamie’s Story. I’ll share the 3 simple steps to systemize your business operations.
[Update] Part 2 is here: [Part 2/2] A Short Story About Systemization In Business
by Ahmed Muzammil | May 8, 2015 | Business |
- Reduction in your overall cost of doing business
- Save Time spent on doing day-to-day business activities
- Improve the quality of your work/services
- Better management of Service Levels
- Improve Customer Satisfaction
- Monitor your business real-time with Dashboards and Reports showing the past and current state of your business, orders etc.
- A foundation for continuous process improvement within your business to catch up with the ever-changing needs of your customer
- Ensure proper adherence to Business Rules and Government Policies
- Make your employees more focused and productive
- Provide a consistent experience to your customers
by Ahmed Muzammil | May 8, 2015 | Business |
The concise guide to what Business Processes are
A business process is a collection of structured activities or relevant tasks that produce a specific service or product or serves a particular goal for a customer (or a customer segment).
It may often be visualized as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a Process Matrix of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process.
What can identifying, documenting and automating Business Processes do for your organization?
1. Simplification
As a first step, documenting Business Processes can help you turn flipcharts and stickies on your wall into process models. Once you have the process models, as a second step the process models can be analyzed through simulation to quantify projected performance improvements for your organization.
2. Efficiency
Process models describe a sequence of business activities. Some may be performed by people, others maybe by automated systems – linked by rules. BPM software can help you automate the business processes, enforce rules and track completion against assigned deadlines. This will dramatically increase efficiency in the organization, enable you to find the bottlenecks, and improve the cycle time.
3. Control, Regulations, and Compliance
The consistency of Business Processes across your organization is important in this competitive world. Moreover, the regulatory burdens and governmental policies require your employees to follow certain guidelines, failing to which will cost thousands or in certain cases millions in fines. By taking control of the business processes, a BPM software can help to ensure compliance with policies while allowing local variations wherever they make sense.
4. Growth
Having the documented processes and systems in place enables you to maintain the consistency and to be agile in terms of adding more customers or expanding your business to new markets.
5. Continuous Improvement
Dashboards and reports enable you to monitor the performance of your automated business processes and allow you to define key metrics and performance targets. The ultimate goal of Business Process Management is the optimization of business performance. Once you have the data, another possibility of improving your business will be to leverage on big data analytics and real-time alerts when results begin to deviate from performance targets.
In addition, BPM software can enable you to have rule-triggered automated escalation and remediation procedures, providing the zero-latency response to the business environment.
Business Process Modeling and Automation
There is a variety of BPM software that is useful for companies of different sizes. While documenting the business process, itself is a significant advantage over other companies, automating and monitoring them will enable businesses to continuously improve their processes and run their organization in a cost-effective way.
