Focused on new ideas and actions, this principle usually holds the most promise for additional opportunity no matter the age, position, or size of the company.
However, the principle is listed after the first two articles in this series:
Drop What Isn't Working Like a Bad Habit
and
What Works Right Now? Do Loads More of That!
for one important reason.
As a company, if you don’t get the first two steps right, all of the new initiatives you try to implement will not be built upon the strongest culture of candor and thirst for improvement. A culture forged by multiplying on your best practices and shooting your worst ones in the head. Taking a clear, objective view of the business is often the most difficult step, and the one that makes a leader most uncomfortable. Many new business ventures end up failing because somebody talked the owner or leader into spending more money on marketing, hiring more sales people, or developing a better website without really having a clue what is and is not working for the company already.
If the platform for open and honest review of your business, your people, and all your initiatives is not there, then you have no way to judge how successful all those new and cool ideas are going to be before you invest your time, people, and financial resources in them. Take the time to build a culture of open and honest recognition, where each player in the organization, including you, can improve. Take the time to build a culture and a communication style in your business that recognizes and rewards excellence so you can do more and more of what has always proven to work. Similarly, the gains made through the identification and aggressive improvement of every definable weakness need to be recognized and rewarded as well.
Candid Culture. Mind Open.
Now ask yourself:
By pouring on the gas of new ideas and actions to a well-lit fire, you have the momentum to fuel every new idea that should see the light of day. You allow for the ideas to be openly, not defensively, discussed and considered. You will have every member of your team doing everything within their power to help every new idea succeed.
You can effectively deploy the ideas that make the most sense, use your resources most wisely, and expand all of your sales and marketing efforts with the success you derive from the first steps you take. That positive momentum breeds more success, which accelerates your drive and creates a self-feeding cycle that quickly and decisively brings your company to its next level of performance.
Learn as You Go. Improve. Repeat.
Follow up those new initiatives with simple and smart analysis that allows you to constantly evaluate the results of every new activity. Refine the ideas and execution with every new bit of insight you learn from your experiences. There is a bottomless well of new opportunities available just by introducing yourself to new customers, new revenue streams from existing customers, and new markets to offer your products and services.
-
Develop a proactive referral program that engages everyone in your network.
-
Launch a low-cost educational e-mail marketing newsletter that demonstrates your firm’s expertise and provides value to the reader.
-
Implement a customer loyalty program that encourages repeat business and long-term relationships.
-
Celebrate generating new ideas as a practice, and celebrate the hell out of ones that succeed.
-
Ask yourself, your clients, and your team, “What else could we be doing?”
-
Listen to them when they respond.
Content Builds Interest, Interest Builds Community, Community Builds Revenue
TradingEducation.com plans to be the best site on the web for traders of all levels to come learn about the financial markets and how to trade them most successfully. They are an ad and sponsor driven site focusing a significant amount of resources on bringing together free content, creating a social networking platform, and offering the education traders need that will spawn traffic of its own, through members helping other members.
One smart way to generate that traffic is their recently launched TraderEducation.com Today newsletter. The newsletter allows them to actively promote their market commentary in an easy to distribute manner. Their philosophy is based on educational content which builds credibility with traders. They have invested in strong content that has been developed for the website.
Giving the readers the lead for a number of articles draws them to the site. This generates ad impressions to sell, and most often introduces the reader to additional content and to a worldwide network of traders like themselves, generating more traffic, more loyalty, and more advertisers, who are often also potential content contributors. Advertisers are smart knowing their own contributions can drive exposure for themselves, which compliments their ad program and generates an intense circle of positive impact for the reader, advertiser, contributor, and website community. This also allows for easy viral marketing as people forward the newsletter or site link to their friends and colleagues resulting in more people becoming available to contribute. The contributors are then likely to refer to their own content both on your site and theirs. This all generates improved search rankings and can lead to more sales. An opportunity is then created as people may want paid subscriptions to that contributor or to get even more of their analysis and a greater use of their services.
It’s the Network!
What we are talking about here are just simple business principles designed to help expand not only your company’s client base, but its network of contacts, which can act as an extended sales force. As an entrepreneur, by nature, you may be bustling with ideas, but may be having a hard time executing them because of the day-to-day challenges behind running a business. Just recognize that every day, week, month, and year you can be making countless small, positive, new moves that can collectively steamroll you to great success. It is just a matter of finding time to work on your business, not just in your business -- sort of like you thought you would when you started.