Practice The Four M’s & Focus On Sales, Profits & Cash!
By Damien Parker | October 13, 2014
As a business owner and/or manager, YOU are the General at your business and YOU can make massive improvements within the four walls of your business. YOU have total power and freedom to do whatever you want and this is where your total focus should be.
Don’t get blindsided by trying to change the external factors. Changing governments can happen but your 0.0000000001% voting influence won’t get you much bang for buck. Equally, your influence over economic and trade policy is likely to be miniscule.
Head to the areas where you can get massive leverage and there are four standouts – think:
- Mission
- Marketing
- Management and
- Motivation
Let’s deal with them now.
Mission
You need to be able to impart to staff, customers, prospective customers and the community at large a clear MISSION of WHY you exist as a business and WHAT purpose you aim to achieve. And more importantly in these tougher competitive times…how and why are you different and better, faster and smarter than your competitors.
Well, why are you different? Would your customers and local community see you as different from the competitors?
If “no”, then believe me, you are exactly the same as those competitors and regrettably, all you can compete on is price. Very definitely not a place for you to be because the ultimate winner on this battleground is the person with the deepest pockets!
Marketing
A wise man once said that business is 75% marketing and the other 25% is what you’ve got to do to manage, support and back-up the marketing. True isn’t it?
You are in business to make a profit and you cannot do that until you make a sale and you cannot do that until you have a customer and before you have a customer you need a prospect and before you have a prospect you need active marketing to discover the prospect.
A lot of people don’t properly comprehend what marketing encompasses; so here’s my simple definition:
Marketing is anything – anything – which brings the prospect to your business!
Thus the natural order of things is this:
MARKETING 
PROSPECT CUSTOMER SALE PROFIT CASH
I’ve added the all important last item “CASH” because it’s the Holy Grail…it’s what we need to establish the business and lifestyle we want and deserve.
Management
As manager, your job is to get your entire team to fully understand the mission of your business and the part they play in it.
Come on, fess up now, both you and I know there is a damn good chance that some of your staff don’t know the mission; nor do they know of their part in it; nor do they fully know of their job functions. That’s not their fault…it’s the fault of the manager.
It’s only when they have the knowledge to truly understand how all the parts make up the whole that they can begin to make worthwhile improvement suggestions.
The other key factor of management is to protect the limited resources of the business. You just can’t be all things to all customers, suppliers and the market place in general. So, preserve the resources of your business and use them where you will maximize your profitability.
Motivation
As a manager, your job is to motivate your staff. Are you a natural motivator or de-motivator?
Then again, who motivates you?
I’m going to leave you hanging here in the hope you will spend constructive thinking time about the mood and atmosphere of your business…and specifically, just how motivated is your team?
If you don’t know…why not ask them?
Here’s to more sales, profits and cash from your business,
Damien Parker
Business Improvement Specialist
www.salesprofitscash.com
Follow my Tweets: @salesprofitcash
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