Having a strong customer value proposition is essential for your business. Why? Because it can make the difference between having a strong, thriving business and a mediocre one. It can make the difference between a successful business and a failing one.
There’s no doubt that customers are the corner stone of any business. No business can thrive without a strong foundation of customers. So you need to make sure that you have the mind and heart of your customers. Doing that not only can increase the loyalty of your existing customers, but also can attract new customers to come to you.
To attract new customers and satisfy existing ones, you need to have a strong customer value proposition. You need to be clear in what you can offer to your customers. What can you give to your customers that other companies can’t? Is there anything that you can do better than your competitors? Or perhaps there’s an unfulfilled need your customers have that you can fill? Your answers to these questions are important because they represent your value proposition. Of course, the questions aren’t easy to answer so take the time you need to answer them.
After you find a compelling proposition, the next thing you should do is communicating it to your customers and prospects. Make sure that they get the message. For this, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter could be helpful so build a presence there. It’s also good to have a blog for your business where you can communicate and interact with your customers.
Of course, you must also make sure that you deliver on your promises. There’s nothing worse than promising a proposition but fail to deliver it. Make a compelling customer value proposition but don’t overpromise because you will only hurt yourself.
The short answer is yes. But, as with anything valuable in life, it’s not easy to create automatic income.
Automatic income means you can earn money automatically without manual intervention. You don’t have to trade your time with money (this is what most people do to make a living). Some people call it passive income. No matter how you call it, automatic or passive income, the dream is that you can have financial freedom. You don’t need to worry about money because you make money while you sleep. Therefore you are free to pursue other interests in your life.
But how can we achieve it? How can we have that kind of income? Well, you need to create a system. You need to have an automatic income system in place that will make you money automatically over time. The difficulty lies in building the system and make it work.
The difficulty is real. In fact, most people stop before they ever achieve the level of passive income they want. The reason is that they can no longer deal with the difficulty. They can no longer spend the many hours needed to make the system work. Few are the people who eventually have a working system, but they are the ones who enjoy financial freedom while other people still have to trade their time for money.
One of the best automatic income systems is building a network of income-generating web sites. Why? Because, unlike offline stores, web sites can keep selling your stuff for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They know no holiday nor do they feel tired. They can make you money while you sleep. They keep working no matter what.
You can start by finding what you can sell. You don’t need to have your own stuff to sell. You can also sell someone else’s stuff. If someone buys it through your web site, you will get a commission. If you sell many items, you can potentially earn big income. This is known as affiliate marketing is a good way to make automatic income.
The competition in business is becoming more and more intense these days. Not only do you need to compete with local companies, but also you need to compete against overseas companies. This is true not only for big businesses but also for the small ones, thanks to the Internet.
In such a situation, it’s very important to find a sustainable competitive advantage for your business. Otherwise, how can you compete against other companies? The earlier you find your competitive advantage, the earlier you can start to work on it and strengthen it.
This isn’t easy, of course. Finding a competitive advantage itself is difficult, let alone finding a sustainable one. But that’s what you need to do if you want to have a lasting business. Finding one helps your business not only to survive but also to thrive in this global landscape.
You can find your competitive advantage by identifying what the market wants and how your competitors deliver value. There might be a gap between what the market wants and what your competitors are offering. In addition, you need to look at your own strengths and weaknesses. Where are you good at? Where are you weak at? Identifying these helps you focus on the right things (that are your strengths) and not waste your time on the wrong things (that are your weaknesses). Of course, this process could be complicated, but here I just want to give a short version of it.
Next, you need to find a way to make the competitive advantage sustainable. One way to do that is by increasing the switching costs. Once you get some customers that are attracted to your competitive advantage, make it difficult for them to switch to your competitors in the future if your competitors eventually offered something similar. You might want to create loyalty programs, build deeper relationships, or simply make it technically difficult to switch.
Finding a sustainable competitive advantage is essential for the success of your business, so make sure you find yours.
When it comes to building your own business, one important thing you need to have is a strong network. If you have strong network of friends and acquaintances, you will be able to grow your business much faster. Why? Because you will have many more opportunities come your way and also a lot more resources to get solutions for your problems.
Just think about it. If you don’t have a strong network, how can you get the resources you need to do your business? Of course, you can find other sources of information for that, but there’s one big advantage a strong network has that other things don’t and that is trust. Since you are related to your network, you have their trust that will make the resources you get of much higher quality. They will help you get the best resources possible simply because they trust you.
But trust isn’t easy to achieve. It takes time to build. That’s why it’s essential to build your network before you need it. If you start building your network only after you feel the need, you’ll be too late. By the time your network is ready, you will already miss a lot of opportunities.
So start building your network today. Don’t postpone it until later time because the more you postpone the more opportunities you lose.
The question is: how should we build our network? Well, you can start building your network by helping other people. Just give sincere, genuine help to those who need it. This way you are building goodwill with those people and they may help you in turn when you need it. But be careful not to help with the motivation to get something back in return. Your interaction will be superficial if you do that. To the contrary, make sure that you do things in a genuine way. Make sure you’re sincere. People can easily see through selfish motivation and that will make your effort to build your network a failure.
Have you ever thought about having your own business? Perhaps you are the kind of people who don’t like working in a corporate environment. Or perhaps you are the kind of person who want to have a lot of control over your own life. Whatever it is, you might consider building a business of your own.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to build t your own business. You need to ensure that you have what it takes to make your business a success. More important, you need to give yourself enough time to build it. There’s no such thing as instant success, and only with persistence over a long time can you build something that will give you and other people lasting value.
That’s the reason having a side business is a good way to start your own business. In fact, I will recommend it to practically everyone. If you ever dream of having your own company, start it by having a side business.
There is one important benefit of it that I’d like to highlight: it allows you to keep your day job. As I mention above, it takes time to make your business a success and that means you may not be able to earn enough income (or even any income at all) for pretty long time. This is a problem, especially if you have a family, that prevents many people from ever having a business. But if it’s just a side business you, of course, don’t need to quit your job. You can still enjoy the income from your day job while building your business. Later on, when the business is mature, you can safely quit your day job to fully concentrate on your business.
Now how should we apply this? Well, what you need to do is setting aside time for your business in the evening or weekends. Give yourself two or three hours in the evening to work and more hours in the weekend. Use the time to tackle big tasks related to growing the business. It takes persistence and hard work, but over time your business will grow to the point where you can safely leave your day job. Of course, don’t forget to always keep your life in balance.
Do you want to have your own business? If your answer is yes, one thing you should keep in mind from the beginning is you should build your business to last. Don’t make the mistake that many people make. They just think about their businesses in the short term without ever thinking about how things would be in the long term. If you do that, there’s a good chance that your business won’t survive past its first years.
That, in my opinion, is a reason why more than 90% businesses close their doors within five years of operation. They might have a clear picture about what they are going to do in the first years, but they aren’t prepared for the long term.
There are two possibilities that might happen if you only think short-term about your business. The first one is that you aren’t prepared for the changes that occur in the business landscape. As a result, you can’t adapt to the changes and your business eventually becomes irrelevant.
The second one is that your business may fail to scale. You just think about how to do things when the scale of your business is small. But, thanks to your hard work, your business may grow and you may need to change the way you do things in order to keep up with increasing demand. If you don’t think about it from the beginning, the success of your business may actually have adverse impact on it. In such a situation, the success may actually kill your business.
To avoid such things from happening, you need to think about your business for many years down the road. Prepare yourself for changes in the market. Also prepare your business to scale. If you do it, there’s a good chance that you will have a business that lasts.
If you own a business or want to build one, it’s important that you build a system for your business. Don’t just run your business as it is, by using whatever technical skills you have, but try build a system around your business.
Why? Because by building a system, your business will be independent of you. It will take time to build the system and even more time to make it run smoothly, but once it does you are free to pursue other interests in your life. You are no longer required to always be present for your business to run.
Just think about it. If you don’t have a system for your business, then your business is actually just a job. It’s something that you can’t leave. Even worse, you might need to always be there which means that it’s even worse than normal job since you can’t take a leave. That’s why it’s essential that you build a system around your business.
To do that, the book The E-Myth Revisited has a lot of great tips. In essence, you need to organize your business around functions instead of around personalities. Do this from day one even if the only person in your business is you. When you think this way from the beginning, it will be easier to recruit and empower new people since you just place them inside the system you’ve built.
The difficult part is building the system. You need to put a lot of thoughts here. In this perspective, the main product of your business is the system rather than the commodity that your customer consumes. This is a different paradigm that what most business owners have and it does take a lot of effort on your part. But it will pay off big time.
While it’s not always the case, most likely you will need to find an investor for your startup. You have an idea, but it needs money to make the idea comes true. And since you just start, you might not have your own money to put into your startup. That’s why you need to find investors who are willing to put money into your startup in exchange of a portion of the ownership.
Sometimes you will find potential investors at unexpected times. That’s why you need to always be prepared to introduce yourself and your business. Moreover, you need to do it in the limited time available. You might have just a couple minutes to explain your business and because of that you need to prepare an elevator pitch.
The purpose of an elevator pitch is to rise interest of your business so that you can make further contact with the potential investor. The important thing here is to build interest. You don’t have time to explain your business in detail so don’t do that. You just need to make the investor interested enough to keep communicating with you. You can explain the details later when you already secure an open channel of communication with her.
So learn to explain your business in a concise way. Make sure to include all the points that make your business different from your competitors. Make sure to explain that there is demand for your product and that the demand will grow. Explain how your idea can solve your customers’ problems.
After preparing a pitch, practice it with your friends and ask for their feedbacks. Keep revising your pitch until you and your friends are satisfied with it. Now you are ready when those opportunities come.
Nobody wants to fail, though someone can learn a lot through failure. To minimze the chance of failure in your business, you need to prepare a business plan. A business plan won’t just help you get fund from investors, but also prepares you to manage your business successfully.
The reason is that preparing a business plan pushes you to think more about your business before taking action. It pushes to look at different aspects of your business so that you can anticipate potential problems that might arise. It also helps you prepare your business to face the competition and thrive.
For that reason, you need to prepare your business plan seriously. Don’t just make it for the sake of having a business plan. Instead, look at it as a thinking process that will prepare you for every aspect of your business. I’d even say that the thinking process is more important than the business plan itself. Why? Because the business plan – the document – could be irrelevant if situation changes. But the thinking process trains you to have a prepared mind that will be useful in any situation. Even if you meet new problems along the way, you will already know how to think about it to make the right decisions.
If you have partners, make sure to get them involved in preparing the business plan. Not only do you need to learn how to think, but also you need to learn how to think collectively. It’s a very useful skill for you to have.
When you want to start your own business, one of the most important factors you should pay attention to is finding the right partners. Don’t be so focused on the financial side of your business that you forget about the people side.
A business, after all, is run by people so the quality of the people you work with should be a top priority. Even the best business plan won’t help you a bit if the people can’t execute it. You need to have the best people on your team. In fact, many potential investors will decide whether or not to invest in your startup based on the quality of the people in your team.
So spend enough time to find the right partners. Don’t be in hurry in this phase. You want to make sure that you get the right people because it will affect you in the long term.
Now that we’ve seen the importance of choosing the right partners, how should we choose them?
One thing you should find in your partners is complementary skills. Don’t find someone who has the knowledge and skills as you. If you do that, you won’t be stronger as a team because you don’t broaden your range of knowledge and skills. Instead, find someone who can complement you. Look at your weaknesses and find someone who can cover it. On the other hand, make sure that your strengths can cover his weaknesses. This way your team will be much stronger because the people in it complement each other.
The next thing you need to find is, of course, the ability to work in a team. If someone has the best skills in the world but can’t work in a team, then don’t choose him. You need to synergize with each other as a team. Find a team player, not a solo player.
