Tag: small business

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What a start-up really needs to know about marketing

Original Recipe Chutney

What does an entrepreneur need to know about marketing to win with their new product or service?

Let’s first see what marketing is and what it isn’t for the start-up business.

Marketing is about offering a potential customer a product or service that meets or fulfills a need, want or desire that they already possess. Don’t let statements like marketing “develops a demand for your product or service” mislead you. Demand must already exist in your potential customer, even an unmet need. For a small business to try create demand is simply foolishness. Yes, you can offer potential customers a product and service that satisfies the need that they already have but you really can’t create the need, want or desire in them. You need to channel their demand towards your product or service. Continue reading “What a start-up really needs to know about marketing”

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How can you develop a roadmap to turn your idea into a product or service that customers will buy?

Pencast: “How to turn your ideas into profit”

The simple four-step system that transforms your new product or service idea into an income generator

Click the beginning of the pencast (on the image) above to listen and view.

Coming up with new ideas for products and services can be the biggest challenge for some start-ups and small business owners. Others find the idea-generation process exciting and fall in love with their ideas.

Identifying which business ideas have real commercial potential is one of the most difficult challenges that would be entrepreneurs and even experienced small business owners face.

Some entrepreneurs, product developers and creative people love creating products. But they can easily fall into the trap of not performing essential commercial tasks such as marketing and selling without which they won’t have customers. Continue reading “How can you develop a roadmap to turn your idea into a product or service that customers will buy?”

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Are your customers satisfied with your service?

Weevil
Imagine  opening your pack of pasta only to find it covered thick with weevils (Photo credit: John Tann)

The food came late. The meal tasted awful. The unsmiling waiter kept us waiting for the bill. The restaurant manager wasn’t there to listen to our complaints.

This isn’t about customer gripes. We all have our own tales of service woe:

• Deliveries that come a week late.
• Waiting on the call centre line for up to half an hour to speak to accounts for your utility bill and getting cut off and having to call again… and again. Continue reading “Are your customers satisfied with your service?”

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Is a biz-in-the box the right idea?

My home town featured recently in a Virgin Money flier. Always believed Kalk Bay had potential to be a star. Never crashed cars in Kalk Bay but brought boatloads of fish to the quayside for auctioning.

Off-the-shelf business opportunities (biz-ops) are springing up like Kalahari Desert truffles after the rainy season mainly because of the difficult economy.

The many biz-in-a-box options are so ubiquitous that it’s terribly confusing.

Take your pick: floor cleaning, carpet cleaning, custom engraving, website building and hosting, sports nutrition, vending wholesale computers and electronic products and roof repairs.

The list goes on and on…

Whatever you can think of there’s a ready-made business-in a-box with a DVD waiting for you.

But here’s the bottom-line:

Do you really want to buy a business system off the shelf?

Will it hold your interest and passion?

Will it bring in enough money to be more than a sideline business?

Another important question about these ready-made businesses is how well do they really work?

Continue reading “Is a biz-in-the box the right idea?”

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This SOB boss taught the wrong way to be tough

Hondeklipbaai
Hondelipbaai (Photo credit: www.alltravels.com)

Before sunrise the wind was blowing so strong that I knew we couldn’t take our diving vessel up the coast to dive for diamonds.

I didn’t bother to get up. I had grown up in False Bay and when the wind blew this hard we wouldn’t risk going out fishing on our ski boat.

Here on the isolated West Coast the Atlantic Ocean would smash tons of water against the shore when the sea was big and dangerous.

I heard knocking on my door. It was my fellow diver who announced that we were going to sea. I had better get up and come down to the jetty in a hurry. I told him this was crazy and that I’d tell this to our boss. His face told me that I was looking for trouble. Continue reading “This SOB boss taught the wrong way to be tough”

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Save me from this brutish barber

Rome, Barber Shop a via dei Portoghesi
What’s your experience been like at a hair salon or barber shop lately? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When the price of mall barbers became too much to finance from my current account I stepped down several notches and patronised the local community barber shop.

Things went all right the first few times. The barber, a young man with a faint resemblance to dapper looking Clive Owen, cut my hair. A soft-spoken, friendly person good at his job, he soon became a favourite with the ladies. I was passed over to another barber.

Now, let me tell you I like to think I’m broad-minded so I let this new barber cut my hair. She looked and dressed worse than Kelly Osbourne ever did. Even in her most rebellious days. But I mean, to be dressed like this in your very late 30s. Come on, even Kelly has cleaned up her act for reality TV (though I suspect mum Sharon has had a hand in this but I could be wrong as she’s never really tidied up Ozzy’s act).

The problem: not only did this barber look weird but she had an attitude. A chip on her shoulder so big that I trembled climbing into her chair. She looked more intimidating than Edward Scissorhands when she held her shaving razor to my neck.

Sitting erect in her chair, I couldn’t imagine this barber ever playing with Barbies. Instead, I could imagine her sticking pins into a rag doll and pulling off its ears.

The worst of it was that she was sullen, unfriendly and spoke to me with a sneer. Foulmouthed beyond what you’ve ever encountered in a low-class London pub. Worse than a weirdo spiked high on drugs stumbling and mumbling filth outside King’s Cross station.

Goodness knows, just to save some money on a haircut, was this really worth it? I mean, on Saturday mornings you want to relax, do some shopping and get on with your day. I knew the owner of the barber shop but I wanted to at all costs not complain about her lest something untoward happened to me. Continue reading “Save me from this brutish barber”

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A flight plan before you take off with your new business idea

soaring at sunrise
soaring at sunrise (Photo credit: (nz)dave)

It’s time for action. You’ve tested your useful, new business idea in the marketplace and refined it. You’re ready to introduce your product or service on a wider scale.

Don’t be too hasty.  Preparation – organised planning –that important final step needs careful thought before you thrust your business into flight.

It’s astonishing how many would-be entrepreneurs and start-up owners forget this step, plunging headlong into their business venture without proper preparation.

Here are some important considerations before you take the plunge: Continue reading “A flight plan before you take off with your new business idea”

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Stuck for ideas? Try these tools for brilliant results

shower out
Some find ideas flow under the shower.

Coming up with new business ideas for products and services involves observation, listening especially, especially to gripes, and reading in your chosen area of interest. These are the tools we all have, some more developed than others, and that with effort and imagination we can spot opportunities. This is particularly so when we make connections between unrelated or random thoughts, concepts, ideas, and objects.

But what should we do when we are stuck or simply need to explore ideas? This is when we can use idea generation tools to show us new possibilities for products and services. Using idea-generation tools and techniques we will be able to come up with more ideas than we can use. This increases our opportunities for coming up with better ideas and perhaps even breakthrough ideas.

Let’s look at a simple example to highlight the value of generating ideas in quantity. Top commercial photographers for high-readership, quality magazines take many photographs before they find one that will perfectly illustrate their subject of interest. In National Geographic’s “50 Greatest Pictures” some of the behind-the-scenes secrets were given. One sentence shows just how much trial and error goes into shooting iconic images:

“A photographer shoots 20,000 to 60,000 images on assignment. Of those, perhaps a dozen will see the published light of day.” Continue reading “Stuck for ideas? Try these tools for brilliant results”

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Freewriting spawns new business ideas

Need a single little-known idea-generation technique that will produce new business ideas for you? Help you solve problems? Explore issues in your business on a deeper level?

But here’s the thing: when you know what the technique is please don’t just forget about it and not use it.

Will you?

Ok, now with that out of the way let’s get down to briefly showing you what it’s all about… Continue reading “Freewriting spawns new business ideas”