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
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.
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist born in the Macedonian city of Stagira, Chalkidice, on the northern periphery of Classical Greece.
“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.” Aristotle
Jay Abraham
Jay Abraham is an American business executive, conference speaker, and author. He is known for his work in developing strategies for direct-response marketing in the 1970s
“Everything a business does is a process. And as a process, it can be measured, it can be compared, it can be quantified, it can be improved.” – Jay Abraham
W. Edwards Deming
William Edwards Deming was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” W. Edwards Deming
Peter Drucker
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an Austrian-born American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation.
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker
Jack Welch
John Francis “Jack” Welch, Jr. is a retired American business executive, author, and chemical engineer. He was chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. During his tenure at GE, the company’s value rose 4,000%.
“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” – Jack Welch
Tom Peters
Thomas J. “Tom” Peters is an American writer on business management practices, best known for In Search of Excellence.
“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.” – Tom Peters
This is the reflection of a Quora question that I had asked. And recent thoughts after seeing a lot of imports (excluding petroleum) coming into Singapore from the US and other First World economies.
We in India have this slavish mentality, the reason why we concentrate more on building service-based organizations and end up working for someone else for the rest of our lives.
Companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and SAP concentrate more on creating products. Some concentrate on making innovative products – some clone products or make products that are better than others.
I feel that their success is only because of three reasons:
Innovation, Research, and Design
Completeness, Perfection in their offering
Strong Branding
We Indians go work for these companies to build the innovative products to make their dream successful.
Why don’t we see more innovative products from this part of the world? We end up buying and importing a lot of these products from the other part of the world. From the US, Japan, China and from Europe. This is costing Indian Economy a lot.
While companies like Micromax are making the news, they have to build their Innovation, Research, and Design capabilities and concentrate on building Global companies rather than serving just India.
Being in Singapore I observe that the interest rates are like 5.5% to 7% Effective Interest Rate (EIR). In India, the least I could get is a loan at 14% EIR.
I observed that RBI is keeping the Interest Rate very high because:
People won’t take more loans
To motivate people to save more
To curb inflation
Well, I think we are going on a wrong path. By asking people to save more, they will end up working for someone else for the rest of the life and save ‘X’ rupees every month, buy a house and pay ‘Y’ rupees for the mortgage. And because of people are like this, the top 1% will continue “using them” and keep the Middle Class!
As Asians, we are risk-averse. And Indian culture is in such a way that people won’t be motivated to try something new. Even if they try something new, they are not encouraged rather they are criticised for trying something new and if they fail that’s it – it’s end-of-life.
We need too many things in India:
Motivate students to try new things from Schooling onwards
Embed innovation culture into the school curriculum
Give more grants and funding for people who work on innovation
Encourage colleges and universities to fund such innovation projects
Build a network of successful CEOs, VCs, Corporate Executives as mentors
Teach students and parents the importance of Innovation
Make it easier to fail and encourage to fail
Bring India to the top 10 in the ease of doing business index (https://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings) – At the time of writing this article, we are at 134th rank.
Why do I say that they should start at the school itself?
Because they will end up with commitments and the social pressures once they finish college or while they are at college. Most colleges just do spoon feeding in India. They don’t have quality teachers who know practical stuff. They just teach Theory. Practicals are like “name-sake”.
In my life, while I was in college, I am really gracious to have very good teachers who knew stuff in and out. I used to ask a lot of questions. Sometimes some teachers started getting angry at me for asking questions. So eventually I developed a mentality to stop asking questions. But thankfully the Internet was a better option and google was my best friend at a later point.
Another video I came across, really gave a lot of inspiration. It’s a Harward Under Graduate’s Graduate address. Watch this:
Undergraduate Speaker Sarah Abushaar | Harvard Commencement 2014
This reflects on how her parents killed her curiosity and how Harward University gave her the freedom to become curious again. We should develop our Universities and colleges like Harward, Stanford, MIT or any other top University.
We need companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and Apple out of India. This cannot happen if the politicians don’t support them. Reva from Bangalore could have been the Tesla. But because of the stupidity of Politicians and Petroleum companies that is a lost dream! I envy them!
The government should increase their grant schemes for innovation. Like Singapore Government does. They have multiple schemes to help citizens build innovative companies in Singapore.
We should become self-reliant. Move to solar power, electric cars, use more products from out of India. The government should help and encourage companies, give aids in all the industries. Build a better supply chain. Stop online trading of commodities. Make Rupee, a global tradable currency.
India needs to improve production from India and increase exports. It could be technology, it could be agriculture, it could be manpower. Whichever way, it’s only going to improve India’s economy.
What do you think that India needs to improve its economy and to become a SuperPower? Discuss!
