One Coach

This post is the first in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth.

To be a market buster, you’ve got to demonstrate a major growth move. And there are obviously different ways to make these aggressive moves.

In order to make any move, you’ve got to be able to explain what you’re doing. If you can’t explain to somebody what your thought process is, then you’re limited to how much you can delegate, and that limits how fast your firm can grow. This falls under the broad umbrella of business strategy. Without a comprehensive strategy mapped out, then you will fall short of identifying your risks, challenges, and potential gains, and it will be difficult to explain your approach to any employees or prospective clients.

A starting point for any small-business owner is that you need to be alert to the changing environment around you. Small-business owners are very vulnerable in terms of resources. So, if you’re not faster, more nimble and more tuned in than the larger businesses, you don’t have the fat to fall back on like they do.

Another advantage of being nimble is that it’ll be easier for you to adapt your business model. What’s working today may not work next month – don’t get stuck in a rut. Your business should be a living breathing organism.

Part of this need to change stems from the fact that your customers will get used to you. Building rapport is one of the best things you can do in any business relationship, but that is quite distinct from your client getting used to you. You want to change, evolve, and always be able to offer your clients innovative methods and products – stay fresh.

Next in this series: Distinguish your business.

If this information was useful to you and your business, consider attending Mind, Marketing & Millions, the ultimate business-growth event, set for Oct. 23 - 26 in Los Angeles.

This content is excerpted from an interview that OneCoach CEO John Assaraf conducted with business consultant Mitch Axelrod, author of The New Game of Business. A previous excerpt from this interview, about when to give your product away for free, is here.

The game of business has permanently changed, says Mitch Axelrod.  Here are some of his new rules:

Don’t fall in love with your products and services.  Of course, you have to like and believe in what you sell.  But when you become overly enamored of what you produce and sell, you can easily become blinded to what the marketplace actually wants.

Instead, shift your attention to the people who buy your product or service.  They will tell you what they want and need, and they will help you improve your products and services to better serve those needs. 

Ultimately, your customers determine your success in the marketplace.  Passion is good.  Enthusiasm is good.  But never fall in love with your product or service at the expense of your customer base.

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When you are shopping for something, what’s the first question you ask yourself when considering a particular vendor or store? If you are like most consumers, the fundamental question, asked on reflex, is “Why should I do business with this person or business?”

Have you answered this unspoken question for your own customers and prospects? If so, does the answer make you stand out in your field, or are you simply part of the herd?

Every day, your customers and prospects are showered with advertisements, brochures, newsletters, Web sites, and other media that ask them to open their wallets. As a result of this barrage, buyers strive to tune out the noise by ignoring things that are the same.

Said another way, they commoditize the available choices. They identify the goods or services that, in their perception, are identical and differentiated only by price. Commoditizing makes everyone the same, part of the herd, and helps prevent “decision overload” by decreasing the number of choices from which to select.

Your challenge is to keep your business from being turned into just another sheep in the herd by your customers and prospects. How do you do that?

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The ultimate goal for every business, obviously, is to be successful and make money.

To create that success, there are three crucial questions that every business owner must ask every day. These three questions will help you optimize your business performance and ensure that you are taking the right actions to increase profits and decrease overhead costs.

The first question you should ask yourself is: How do I generate more profits per sale?

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You may have read a post here early last month that talked about when it makes sense to give your product away. In that post we were explaining the value of getting your message or product out to the masses of prospects who might value your core product or service.

And, in my previous post  I wrote about a couple of ways to boost the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers.  To refresh your memory, the LTV of a customer is defined as the total gross profit that you accumulate from a customer over their lifetime (based on the definition of lifetime you pick as noted above), less the original customer-acquisition cost and the subsequent marketing expenses over their lifetime. 

Both of those posts are central to my message today.  You may have heard us mention the value of acquiring a new customer at a loss.  This seems counter-intuitive, but it plays right into the psychology of marketing, and it leverages the LTV of your future customer. 

It is a basic fact in marketing that your current customers will be more likely to make an additional purchase from you than the likelihood of a purchase from a prospect.  I’ll give you an example from world of catalog marketing where, one of the measures of marketing campaigns is revenue per thousand catalogs mailed (Rev/M).  Using a generalized example, when a cataloger mails their “Christmas Wish Books” to prospects and to existing customers the difference is dramatic: 

Rev/M of catalogs mailed to current customers is $5,000/M catalogs mailed while Rev/M coming from catalogs mailed to prospects is $1,250/M.

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Growth is the lifeblood of entrepreneurship and business success. It is also the lifeblood of our economy. It is why we at OneCoach are dedicated to teaching and empowering growth. But growth requires work, change and transformation. Perhaps most importantly, growth requires personal transformation in the leadership of the organization.

Most small-business owners have enough knowledge, experience and resources to get themselves into business. However, few have the depth and breadth of knowledge, experience and skills to remain capable as a leader as the business grows– unless they grow too. Growth brings increasing demands, of:

• complexity
• management
• human systems
• financial management
• competitive response
• planning
• training
• development
• technology and information management
• and leadership itself.

Hence, the leader must transform to adapt to all of these changes. The leadership skills, experience and methods that were appropriate for a three-person startup operating out of a garage will not serve a 100-person firm or a multicultural international enterprise. Business growth constantly puts a leader in new positions that require learning, new perspectives, new skills and new stamina. If the leader relies upon what has served in the past, it may not serve in the future. Unfortunately this realization may come too late, unless the leader is ready and prepared for change, expecting, waiting and preparing for it rather than being forced into it or surprised by it.

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What is the single most important characteristic of successful entrepreneurs? And if you had one question to ask an entrepreneur that would uncover that characteristic, what would you ask?
 
The most important characteristic of successful entreprenuers, I believe, is integrity.

There are countless definitions of what, who and how are entrepreneurs. There are countless definitions of the meaning of “success.” And there are countless traits and characteristics of successful entrepreneurship and successful leaders.

Much of this data is myth and folklore, and some of it is derived from decades of academic research, which has yet to be definitive. Moreover, success is interdependent with time, and a key test of success is, does it withstand the sands of time?

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You’re in business to make money, right? So why would you want to give away any part of your product or service? 

Giving it away can actually a winning strategy, if you do it properly. OneCoach members learned this last year through OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Mitch Axelrod, author of The New Game of Business.  Among Mitch’s new rules:

Position yourself as a trusted advisor.  The old game was all about positioning yourself as a vendor or salesperson first and then as an ally or friend.  In the new game, it’s essential to establish yourself first and foremost as a trusted advisor.

To become a trusted advisor, add value to the relationship before someone becomes a client.  Ask your prospects questions like, “What’s the single biggest problem that keeps you up at night?  What excites you the most?”  Then isolate their biggest issues and give them as much support as you can. 

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At OneCoach we have a bias for action. So while there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on over the state of the economy, we believe it’s actually the ideal time to act. It stands to reason that businesses that move boldly and assertively now will gain ground, while others retreat.

So yesterday we presented a OneCoach teleconference that gave listeners 10 steps to take now to move their businesses forward. It was really well-received. Here’s what one listener had to say:

“You’ve just outlined, in the short space of one hour, a Master’s Program in Business. Over my almost 40 years in business, I’ve heard bits and pieces of your 10 steps, been trained in some of them, but never have I seen such a precise, well-prepared stepwise plan. It is unimaginable that one, following your steps, could help but succeed. Pure genius! Thank you for the most informative hour I’ve spent in years…”
- Jim D.

You can judge the value of the call yourself, because we’ve made it and an accompanying PDF available for download here. It will be only be available for 72 hours, through the weekend.

Step one, just so you know, is to specifically define your vision for your company, and get yourself in the right mindset to succeed. Scott deMoulin delivers some great stuff on this, as does OneCoach CEO John Assaraf.

They cover 10 critical steps in all, laying out an action plan for how you can insure that your business continues to grow (and you make more money), recession or no recession.

At a time when all the headlines seem to be gloom and doom, this call might be just what you need to get your business back on track. Now really is the time to act, boldly and confidently – and the first step is to listen to the call.