Author: Michele Margetts

Shhh… I Have a Secret

Posted on by Michele Margetts

Customer service is a hot topic and can make or break your business. Consumers have little patience for poor customer service and easily get tired of waiting in long lines, trying to get a live person on the line, going through an interrogation to return something, or trying to communicate through a language barrier. 

If you provide your customers with a simple, efficient, pleasant experience they will revisit your business over and over. More importantly, they will become a champion of your business and recommend it to everyone they know!

There are three secrets to good customer service; the first one we’re going to explore is knowing exactly what YOU want.

You are the captain of your ship and the visionary of your business, so you need to have a clearly defined plan for your business, which includes customer service. There are three main goals you need to consider:

  1. It must be easy for your customers to do business with you. This can be accomplished through advertised discounts, kiosks, your website, and other technology-based programs to help them shop.
  2. It is imperative that your customer feels appreciated and every transaction is a welcoming and pleasant experience. Your staff must be knowledgeable, approachable, kind, and patient. Your customers need to feel like they are getting good value for their time and money. Perceived value goes far beyond the price of the products and extends to their overall shopping experience.
  3. Change your mindset by asking yourself “How can I NOT afford to do these things?” This shouldn’t be a question of your business expenses, but making and keeping customers happy.

With these goals in mind, you must also take the following things into consideration when deciding on the actual programs and standards you will put into place:

  • Share your customer service vision with the rest of your staff;
  • Connect your incentive programs and bonuses directly to customer service;
  • Monitor the level of customer service your staff is providing to your customers;
  • Know when you can disregard the desires of your customers;
  • Continuously focus on your goals.

This should give you a good foundation to start thinking about your goals for your business and how to build it to create a positive customer service experience.

If you’re having a hard time deciding on what this looks like for your business, please reach out to me so I can provide you with the proper tools and resources to assist you in defining the wants and needs of your company in relation to customer service.

Add Some Compost

Posted on by Michele Margetts

In the last post, we covered the first three of the 7 specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process. To refresh your memory they are:

  • Primary Aim
  • Strategic Objectives
  • Organizational Strategy
  • Management Strategy
  • People Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Systems Strategy
  

These 7 areas will fine-tune your plan for the ultimate level of success. Today we are going to examine the last four.

Think of constructing your business model like planting a tree. At first, it’s so small and weak you wonder if it will even make it through the night. But as you keep watering, fertilizing, and nurturing it with your ideas, the trunk begins to grow and each of these strategies forms the branches of your now strong tree. Finding the perfect support staff, employees, vendors and/or suppliers, and other relationships will make your tree flourish with leaves and flowers.

Management Strategy

The way you structure your management team is not only essential to your growth, but the happiness of your employees, and ultimately, your customers and/or clients. This strategy is results-oriented and doesn’t depend on the people, but the actual system that’s in place.

In short, a management strategy is a set of standards that include goals, rules, a mission statement, and other concrete things that tell your employees how to act, your management how to grow your business, and your customers and/or clients what to expect.

The management strategy should all be in perfect alignment with your business goals.

Employee Appreciation

You need to have a people strategy in place that shows your employees how you feel about their job performance and dedication to your business. They also must understand “why” they are doing specific tasks to help them personally connect to their job, which in turn leads to better production and a happier workplace.

There are a number of strategies you can use to keep it interesting at “the office”:

  • Performance Incentive Programs
  • Contests That Reward High Performance
  • Employee of the Month
  • Performance and/or Holiday Bonuses

These are just a few of the ideas you can use to keep employees engaged in your business. One of the best ways to show appreciation to employees is by calling a meeting and asking them how they would like to be rewarded. Spend some time considering different options to put the best strategy into place. Keep it fresh and don’t be afraid to change up the strategy from time to time to keep your employees guessing. Once they become accustomed to the reward, it is time for a whole new approach.

You need to build a community within your company. There needs to be support, appreciation and respect. The more “at home” an employee feels, the better they will perform and the higher their level of loyalty.

 Marketing Strategy

Marketing is essential to the success of any business, but it also must work cohesively with the other strategies you are utilizing. There are two major pillars of a successful marketing strategy: The demographic and psychographic profiles of your customers.

The psychographic reveal what your customers are the most likely to buy and the demographic explains who they are, which can help you identify why they buy specific items. Without this pertinent information, it simply doesn’t matter how good your business prototype is.

Systems Strategy

There are three types of systems in every business:

  • Hard Systems
  • Soft Systems
  • Information Systems

Hard systems refer to inanimate systems or systems that have no “life”. Soft systems are those that could be living. Information systems are everything else, including customer data, product information, financial information, etc. It is anything with data and numbers.

The most important of all three systems is the soft system because it includes the sales systems used by your business. In your sales systems, the two keys to success are structure and substance. The structure is what you sell, and the substance is how you sell it.

All three systems are essential to the success of your business and while they all have their own very specific roles, they all must work together to get the job done. This is also true for your entire business development program.

I would like to take a moment to summarize the ideas we went over through the business development lessons.

An entrepreneurial myth, or e-myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with:

  • Desire
  • Some capital
  • A projected target profit

There are essentially three key roles that need to be filled to set your business up for success:

  • The Technician
  • The Manager
  • The Entrepreneur

The four different stages of a business life cycle are:

  • Infancy
  • Adolescence
  • Growing Pains
  • Maturity

There are a few things we are going to explore with respect to business franchises:

  • Business Format Franchise
  • The Franchise Prototype
  • Franchise Prototype Standards

There are three main areas of business development:

  • Innovation
  • Quantification
  • Orchestration

The 7 specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process are:

  • Primary Aim
  • Strategic Objectives
  • Organizational Strategy
  • Management Strategy
  • People Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Systems Strategy

I can help you work through all of these areas and give your business a jumpstart that puts you ahead of your competition right from the start. Reach out to me to gain access to a wealth of tools and resources.

The Corporate Puzzle

Posted on by Michele Margetts

These are the 7 specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process:

  • Primary Aim
  • Strategic Objectives
  • Organizational Strategy
  • Management Strategy
  • People Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Systems Strategy

These 7 areas will fine-tune your plan for the ultimate level of success. In this post, we are going to cover the first three.

Primary Aim

It’s essential in business development to set goals and see a vision for the future. This needs to go beyond the business as you must consider what you want out of life. What do you dream about? How do you see your success unfolding? Recognizing and understanding these things will give you the momentum to get started and the stamina to see it through. Even take a minute to write them down and tape to your desk for a constant reminder of your goals.

Strategic Objectives

These are essential in taking your business from surviving to thriving. All of these objectives should offer solutions for how to get to your primary aim. There are many things you can use to set strategic objectives, but here are a couple of the most popular:

  1. Money: Setting monetary goals is a powerful yet simple way to see how you are doing at any point in time. It’s simple to measure and easy to find adjustments to help meet this goal.
  2. Worthy Opportunities: When considering partnerships and other business opportunities, you need to think about whether or not they will help you reach your primary aim. Those that will are the best opportunities to seriously consider.

The key to setting standards and goals is not to limit or stress yourself out. You need to find some quantifiable things to measure your progress toward your primary aim. The above are just two suggestions, but regardless of the standards you set, make sure you are paying attention to the details, as this is one of the biggest keys to your success.

Organizational Strategy

The strength of your organizational strategy can make or break your business so it is important to take the time to put together a solid structure from which your business will grow. Generally, a company is organized around the roles and responsibilities that need to be addressed on a daily basis and the personalities that are required to fulfill these roles.

No matter what roles and responsibilities you have defined for your employees, you must always keep your personal primary aim separate from your company’s primary aim or mission statement. Once you’ve identified the primary aim for your company it will be easy to set up a position structure that will work.

Don’t forget to develop position contracts. Your employees should sign a contract for their roles and responsibilities. This helps keep them unmistakable for you, the employee, other employees and/or vendors, or other individuals.

You can see how these areas all work together to build a solid structure on which to build your business. If you need help defining any of these areas, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

Mortar Makes it Happen

Posted on by Michele Margetts

Today we are going to examine the three keys to business development and how you can put the right bricks in place to build a solid foundation.

There are three main areas of business development:

  •  Innovation
  •  Quantification 
  •  Orchestration

If done well these three areas will help you build a solid foundation for you business. Let’s consider each one of these for just a minute.

Innovation

Innovation should not be confused with creativity, which is the expression of ideas. Innovation is taking these ideas and putting them into action. This is where a large amount of your focus should be at the beginning of your business and should continue for the lifespan of the business.

Quantification

Quantification, of course, refers to numbers. This means the value of your innovation. The best way to gauge this is through your customer response. Look to positive responses for what you are doing right, and keep doing it. Look to your negative responses to find out what you’re doing wrong, and fix it. This will ensure that you keep growing and evolving with the needs of your customers and the overall business climate.

Orchestration

Once you’ve had a chance to find what areas of your business are working to generate success, you can zero in on those areas and concentrate on making them stand-out ideas. You pivot your focus here to get the most out of your business and to meet the needs of your customers.

I can help you work through these three areas to put together your franchise prototype, just reach out to me for assistance.

In the next few lessons we are going to transition to the 7 specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process:

  • Primary Aim
  • Strategic Objectives
  • Organizational Strategy
  • Management Strategy
  • People Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Systems Strategy

These 7 areas will fine-tune your plan for the ultimate level of success.

You Turn Me Right ‘Round Baby, Right ‘Round

Posted on by Michele Margetts

The biggest area of turn-key businesses is franchises. There is a franchise for ever industry in the world. They are fairly easy to acquire and come with a pre-packaged, easy-to- assemble system. McDonald’s is a prime example of a franchise business, more specifically a 12-figure, 38,000 franchises example.

There are a few things we are going to cover:

  • Business Format Franchise
  • The Franchise Prototype

Franchise Prototype Standards

Business Format Franchise

The business format franchise came from an earlier model call the “trade name” franchise. The major change was in the rights. During the “trade name” days, the franchise owner only had marketing rights; now franchise owners have owning rights to the entire business, including systems. This has allowed for a shift in focus from the quality and name recognition of the products carrying the business to sales techniques that carry the business.

The Franchise Prototype

It was really the franchise prototypes that allowed for the modifications that help today’s franchises really stand out with techniques developed by the owners, rather than those of the corporation. This can make a significant difference in the success of the franchise, as the owner is able to custom tailor their marketing and promotions to the direct needs of their local target customers.

Franchise Prototype Standards

Notwithstanding the above, no one in their right mind would purchase a franchise if the parent company didn’t have a solid plan of action in place to ensure success of the business. So there are a few standards that are put into place that helps to jump start the process of opening a successful franchise.

 

Build a model of prospective customers and/or clients, suppliers, creditors and employees who will consistently offer high quality work.

  • Build a user-friendly model that can be used by individuals of any skillset;
  • Build a defect-free model;
  • Build a model with Operations Manuals;
  • Build a model that will provide guaranteed, consistent results;
  • Build a model that encompasses the same branding in color, dress and facilities codes.

These are all ways the parent corporation can ensure their brand stays the same and in the front of the minds of customers. When you are purchasing a widely-known brand, you will attract customers just for being you.

Expand the Life of Your Business

Posted on by Michele Margetts

Today I’m going to talk about the life cycle of a business and how to get the most out of each cycle while also extended the lifespan of your business.

The four different stages of a business life cycle are:

• Infancy
• Adolescence
• Growing Pains
• Maturity

We’ll talk a little about what each of these cycle’s means and how they can each help expand your business’ lifespan.

Infancy

This is generally considered the technician’s phase, which is the owner. At this point, the relationship between the business and the owner is that of a parent and new baby. There is an impenetrable bond that is necessary to determine the path your business will follow. Never drop your baby.

The key is to know your business must grow in order to flourish. You cannot stay in this stage forever.

Adolescence

In this stage you need to start bringing your support staff together to delegate to and allow growth to happen. The first line of defense is your technical person as they need to bring a certain level of technical experience. This cycle really belongs to the manager though. The plan stage needs to start, and a relationship should be built with the entrepreneur to plan for the future.

Growing Pains

There’s a point in every business when business explodes and becomes chaotic. This is referred to as growing pains. It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. You are often faced with a number of choices:

  • Avoid growth and stay small
  • Go broke
  • Push forward into the next cycle

Maturity

The last cycle is maturity, though this doesn’t mean the end of your business. Your passion for growth must continue in order for your business to succeed. You need to keep an entrepreneurial perspective in order to push your business forward.

You see how all four of these cycles are connected and depend on a strong foundation for each one of them for your business to be and continue to be successful. All three of your key roles (the technician, manager, and entrepreneur that I mentioned in my previous post) must also work together to work through these cycles.

If you’re having trouble putting together your business life cycles and figuring out which of the key roles you fit into, try our FREE test drive and work with one of our amazing coaches.

Gather the Troops

Posted on by Michele Margetts
Today I’d like to chat about the different types of support staff you need and what makes them so important.
 
There are essentially three key roles that need to be filled to set your business up for success:
  • The Technician
  • The Manager

  • The Entrepreneur

    All of these roles need to be played simultaneously by different people with the right talents. It’s all about balance.

    The Technician
    This person represents the present and all that needs to be done for the physical aspects of the business building process. They are the “doer”. This is usually the most visible person in the entire operation.

    The Manager
    This person represents the past and works to fix problems by learning from past mistakes. They are on the practical side of the business and are in charge of putting together the company and overseeing the planning.

    The Entrepreneur
    This person represents the future and the vision for the business. They are responsible for the creative side of the company and are always considering ways to enhance products/services, business image, branding, and more.

    All three of these characters are essential to the success of any business and to build a solid foundation from the start, you need to work harder to find the right people to put in these roles. Obviously, you need to be one of these key people, but ensure you find the role that fits your skills and talents, not necessarily what you THINK you should be doing.

    This may be a hard process for you as you will need to relinquish some control over the business and instill trust in people to allow them to do their jobs.
    Remember, our business coaches can help you through this entire process and teach you how to avoid falling victim to e-myths when you try our FREE test drive.
 

Are You Aiding & Abetting E-Myths?

Posted on by Michele Margetts
We are going to embark upon a journey through the world of e-myths and debunk them to help you avoid falling into the e-myth trap. First, let’s take a minute to talk about what an e-myth is. An entrepreneurial myth, or e- myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with:
  • Desire
  • Some capital
  • Projected a targeted profit
This sounds great, but it is just not realistic. Think of starting a business as a marathon. Sure, everyone starts out of the gate at a record pace, but after a few miles, people start slowing, and some drop out entirely. Building a successful business takes stamina and agility. The reality is that there are many different facets to a successful business and none of them can be ignored if you plan to find success. Let’s take a minute to talk about the entrepreneurial seizure. This defines the roller coaster of emotions that comes with starting, nurturing, and the potential failure of a business. The emotions that occur, in order, are:
  • Exhilaration
  • Exhaustion
  • Despair
  •  Sense of self-loss
This is usually caused by the e-myths and assumptions we talked about. You can get your hopes so high on the instant success that even the smallest lag and you are sent into an emotional tailspin. This is also brought on by the stark realization that you can’t do it all and will need help in the areas where you don’t have the knowledge. Now, faced with limited choices you may feel like you need to back out and hide, but don’t do this. Use our FREE test drive to get the business coaching you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed and defeated.

Put Them in a Trance

Posted on by Michele Margetts
We’re going to go through the 5 essential keys to a successful and reusable marketing campaign launch. Once you have these basics down, you can use them over and over again. The 5 essential keys are:
  1. Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
  2. Put an effective sales offer to work
  3. Avoid the marketing pitfalls
  4. Use a world-class marketing perspective
  5. Get results!
We’ll go through each one of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign. Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Take the time to ask yourself some questions from the perspective of the customers/clients. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you have that need to be met? What are the promises you want to be fulfilled? Once you know the answers to these questions you can start putting together a plan to meet these needs. Then take a look at what USP your competitors are using to help you develop your own USP. Your USP is what you are “promising” your customers/clients. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competition.
Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
To develop an effective sales plan, you need to:
  1. Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
  2.  Share the benefits of your products/services speaking from the customers’ perspective.
  3.  Identify the specific needs met by your products/services.
  4. Make it easy to do business with you by offering guarantees.
  5. Share your specific sales proposition.
  6. Walk your customers/clients through how they should respond and act.
  7. Motivate with a call to action.
What this all means is, you need to put together what makes your products/services special and compel customers to buy. If they don’t feel like they NEED your product, they won’t buy. You need to answer a question, solve a problem or feed an obsession. You need to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. Buyer’s remorse is one of the worst things that can happen. Avoid the marketing pitfalls There are 5 major marketing pitfalls many businesses fall into and you should avoid:
  • Ignore market testing and push on with an inaccurate plan.
  • Offer an incomplete case, or reasons, throughout their marketing plan.
  • Fail to notice the needs of their prospective customers/clients.
  • Fail to diversify their marketing options.
  • Fail to get market opinions on their offers. These are all areas to avoid. If you’ve been working through these lessons, avoiding these pitfalls should be easy and natural. Use a world-class marketing perspective A world-class marketing perspective is important, especially if you want to attract customers/clients from all over the world. You can do this with a number of different techniques and activities:
  1. Keep a marketing journal and scribble down anything innovative you see.
  2. Keep encouraging your marketing department, or yourself, to try new things and dump the ones that aren’t working.
  3. Order from your own company under a different name and analyze the process of ordering, shipping, online store, customer service, and the product itself. This will show you where the areas for improvement in the customer experience.
  4. Read every quality ad you can find and keep a file for future ideas to consider.
  5. When out in public, watch how consumers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases.
  6. Step down a notch or two and work on the front lines with your sales and customer service staff.
  7. Continuously acknowledge your staff, vendors, and customers. Everyone works and shops better when they feel appreciated.
  8. Always listen to feedback from employees and customers.
  9. Continuously test markets, ads, and marketing techniques. This is the only way to stay successful and know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.
  10. Offer more information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products/services you’ll sell.
A great marketing plan can only get better. Continue to fine-tune and refine your marketing plan based on testing results and feedback. Be classy in your marketing. Make sure your marketing and advertising fit your company image, products/service, and quality. Improve your best marketing areas and drop those that aren’t working. Focus on what you say, not how you say it. The best marketing ideas turn into the best marketing naturally. Develop all your ads, campaigns, and sales materials with attention to compelling and factual information. By using these techniques you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your industry. Get results! The last area we are going to talk about is the best-satisfied customers. If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and all chance of positive word-of-mouth advertising. You can satisfy your customers by:
  • Providing high-quality customer service
  • Providing a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
  • Taking all the risk away with a great guarantee To generate more business there are a couple of simple techniques that work every time:
  • Build your database with a contest.
  • Do regular mailings with sales, discounts, or other incentives.
  • Find other creative ways to keep your current customers coming back for more. “As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can’t lose. Why not get started today? It’s so simple, it’s so seldom done, and it’s so profitable. And that’s the bottom line.” Jay Abraham It is so simple! So, why aren’t you starting today? We can help you put together a great marketing plan that will get you results. Try our FREE test drive and find the tools and resources you need to be built by some of the biggest names in the marketing world.

Do It Like the Big Dawgs!

Posted on by Michele Margetts

Today we’ll take a look at how the kings of industry wine, dine and otherwise cajole prospects.

Most successful professionals use a series of information-based ads that build emotion and a call to action. These are much more effective than a standard company branding advertisements. The same principles that go into putting together a high impact (and, often, high priced) ad campaign can be adapted to fit your needs with similar results.

Here are some ways to put together and execute a professional, effective ad campaign:

 

  1. Put together a short report that’ll you’ll automatically send to prospects when they contact you. This should include a short description of your business and what you specialize in. Don’t forget to include case studies, samples or other proof of your success.
  2. Develop value-oriented yellow page ads.
  3. Consider newsletters as a way of educating and informing customers about your industry and services offered.
  4. Offer a free seminar, webinar or other lecture to build awareness of your business, but make sure you make the information pertinent to your target market and find speakers who are respected and known in the industry.
  5. Buy an existing business, introduce better marketing and grow this new business faster than a “from scratch” business.
  6. Always test different versions of your ads to find the most effective ones.
  7. Use direct mail marketing to grow your business.
  8. Put together a database of previous customers and send them new information.
  9. Offer incentives such as frequent purchasing benefits, loyalty programs, referral programs or others.
  10. Approach large firms who may need your services and negotiate a deal to be their exclusive expert in your field. 
  11. Offer a 24-hour information line with a regularly updated recorded message. Make this available to all past and future customers/clients.
  12. Donate time or materials to local charities to show support in your area.
  13. Offer public clinics for the general public to come along and discuss what they need that’s free and approachable.
  14. Organize seminars your customers/clients can pay to attend by putting together a high-perception value package.
  15. Approach local newspaper by offering to write a weekly column about your area of expertise. Don’t ask for money, just a byline and bio.
  16. Develop a weekend or other destination seminar for customers/clients, not only does this give you an action-packed weekend with the most important people, but it also gives them a tax-deductible business adventure.
  17. Take a good seminar and turn it into written form as a home study, member site program, audio or video program.
  18. Approach large companies and offer to give seminars to their employees, investors or management.
  19. Be proactive with your marketing plan.
  20. Barter for your marketing. Offer products or services in lieu of payment.
  21. Be willing to bring in new clients, even if at an initial loss because it will likely pay off later.
  22. Regulate your marketing budget to maximize the potential income from them to hit the next year and try to push back advertising costs for the next year to offset your expenses.
  23. Make offers to target markets or target market businesses to pay them for referrals or shared databases.
  24. Offer loaner products to replace equipment that is to be repaired or refurbished.
  25. Give away something free to everyone who brings in a print version of your advertisement. This is a great way to see which ads are giving you the most bang for your buck.
  26. Continually consider what new products/services you can offer to current customers/clients.
  27. Develop a mail order division of your company.
  28. Offer a proposition to your competitors to trade customers/clients you were both unsuccessful in selling to.
  29. Use different marketing tactics as an excuse to attract new customers/clients with new offers and goodies.
  30. Offer a “you-choose-the-price” program. This is especially good for product you just can’t seem to sell.

So, there are 30 great ways to market to other professional and businesses. Some other great ways to get your name out there for little or no cost are:

  • Get involved you in your community-volunteer, donate to local events, etc.
  • Join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend the networking and otheractivities throughout the year.
  • Join a local, state or regional professional associate for further networkingopportunities.
  • Become a board member of a local organization.Advertising should never be your only method of marketing, there are a myriad of ways to get your name out there in a way that feels personal to potential customers/clients.

    “Effective advertising…must be used to get your name out to the public. If your name is not familiar to people, they will not come to you.” Jay Abraham

    If you’re not sure where you start with your marketing plan or how to reach out to your local community, competitors, customers/clients and others who could influence your business in a highly positive way, try our FREE test drive to experience the tools and resources we have to boost your business to the next level and beyond.