How Entrepreneurs can Improve their Business Success Rate in the Market Scale up your business by engaging into the right funnel of business "Planning and Networking"
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As in any area of life, Business success rate has to have multiple forces working behind the scene. Any good idea that can be turned profitable becomes business. Success of that business depends greatly upon how detailed you can draw the business map and understand all the components involved and arrange and manage all the resources required to run those components successfully.
So we start with the building blocks of a successful business with components like:
1. BUSINESS PLAN: Any entrepreneurs with a detailed business plan or yearly goal plan has higher chance of achieving success than those who don't. However, it's quite surprising to know that most entrepreneurs, due to scarcity of resources, working in a very fluid style, never get down to drafting a yearly goal sheet or plan. And as its said, if you don't know where you are going, how will you reach there. So having a yearly goal plan, or target plan, in as much detail as you can make it, is the foundation stone of business success. The word "PLAN' added to Goal or target adds many components like resources planning, monitoring mechanism like reporting, dashboard etc.
2. RELIABLE TEAM: Second and another very important component of a successful business is a reliable team. As many biggies say in Industry, Execution is everything. You need to have a team that can execute your yearly plan. You need to do skills gap analysis of the team and see what skills you need to hire, partner, collaborate or outsource in order to execute your yearly target plan.
3. TIME MANAGEMENT: Entrepreneurs are not corporate with large yearly budgets for everything they can dream about. An entrepreneur has limited resources and one of the most important resource is Time. We must be absolutely clear about our time management.
4. CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT: There are only three ways to grow your business:
a. Repeat customers
b. Expand range of products and sell more to the existing customers
c. Acquire new customers
Keeping customer acquisition cost low and still stay effective is tricky but can be achieved by developing good relationship with your existing customers. Taking their help to develop and grow your network and acquire new customers from their circle without incurring major cost is the best way. You should also keep taking regular feedback from existing customers and firstly reward them for the same and secondly, use the feedback to develop new products and services. Once customers see that they are part of the process, they stick around as real stakeholder.
5. GO DIGITAL: Use of technology in various areas of business has started defining the success rate of a business. It can range from Customer relationship management to Digital Marketing to bookkeeping. Use technology to be more effective and efficient in management of operations and in your business offerings.
6. BE A FOCUSSED NETWORKER: Develop a strong network in society, be it professional or personal, social or spiritual. It's often said "Your network is your Net Worth", though I agree with this, a word of caution will be to be careful on the focus of networking. One has to be very clear and very focused on the objective of networking, its inputs and its desired output. If not careful, networking can eat up most of your valuable time without yielding anything useful.
In the end, nothing beats good old-fashioned hard work. An unknown number of people may be working on the same idea as you are somewhere in the world, planning to approach the same client that you are eyeing or deserve, but who gets there first sometime matters more than who is better. So work hard to win this game of business.
