|
Trends will be toward the humanization of business practices, with small businesses leading the way.
1. Work your Relationships - The most valuable and competitive asset you've got is your rolodex. Work it. Develop a system for staying in touch with everybody you know (via email, phone, hand-written notes and face-to-face conversations). Spend less time trying to find new clients and more time taking care of the relationships you've already got.
2. Be Different - Resist the temptation to blend in with all the other accountants, financial planners, executive recruiters, etc. Let your style, personality and good natured personality shine through and you'll stand out from the crowd.
3. Become the Leading Expert in Something - In other words, narrow your focus. Although it seems logical that the more territory you can claim to cover the greater the chances are that clients will come your way, in practice the exact opposite is true. When you offer a broad array of loosely connected services (i.e., executive recruiting in all specialties, legal services for small, medium and large client), people come to associate you with nothing in particular. Narrow your focus and become the leading expert in something.
4. Put your Large Company Envy Away (forever) - Operate your business in ways that the big guys can't copy. Send hand written thank you notes; answer all inbound emails from your website within 2 hours; revise all your outbound communications so that they sound like they were written by a normal person. In a world where we are all tired of dealing with automated phone systems and anonymous websites that don't respond, dropping the barriers between your people and the outside world works to your advantage.
5. Don't Shoot from the Hip. Plan. The flip side of our impatience with bureaucracy, is that as a group, small business owners usually shoot from the hip. Force yourself to take one full day a quarter out of the office to plan the coming three months.
6. Take a Position - You have to believe in something. You need an approach, a perspective, a vision for why you started your business (can you still remember what it was?). Don't hide the facts that led you to throw down your corporate ID badge and walk out the door years ago.
7. Have Patience - Most larger competitors have quarterly numbers to meet and short term results are king. You don't. You can make decisions even if the payback isn't immediate, because as long as you believe it's good for the business, you don't have to answer to anybody else. Have the courage to build your business one customer at a time, making the right decisions every day.
***Carol's Confident Comments - "The key to achievement lies in being a 'HOW' thinker not an 'IF' thinker." - Unknown***
|
