Last month at the WWETT show in Indianapolis, I heard many excellent business talks throughout the shows “Business Training Track”.   I am a firm believer in working on our businesses not just in them as I am sure many of you are. The speakers presented some excellent ideas for doing just that. Here’s a little review of some of the high points that I took away.

First off, J. Kelly Newcomb of Newcomb Consulting Group gave a great talk about the reasons why most companies fail to grow and then shared some great tips on how to avoid that path.  He had advocated concentrating on four main points when it comes to your company.

1. Vision

2. Leadership

3. Growth

4. Implementation.

Of these great points, the one that stood out for me was implementation.  Kelly gave a great example here about the sacred cows of India and how we can deal with the “sacred cows” when it comes to our company.  In the country of India cows are considered sacred and because of this must just walk around or avoid these cows because nothing can be done to them.  If one is in the middle of the road, traffic has to move, not the cow.  Now, how about the sacred cows in our business?  Do we have things in our business that we have been doing forever that we “work around” instead of changing?  Perhaps someone told us to do something a certain way because that’s how it “should be done”, or because that’s “how its always been”, and because of this we just keep doing it that way.  Kelly gives us a wonderful reminder in this example to always look for improvement and streamlining.  Always search for the better way of doing things.

Kelly also talked about the need for us to target our best customers.  We can do this by identifying our best customers using the law of 80/20.  Generally 20% of your customers produce 80% of your revenue or close to it.  This may surprise some of us and it may also not work for some of us as well.  But generally speaking the 80/20 law and the principle behind it holds true.  When we look at our customers according to this law it helps us identify our best customers and then see if we can duplicate them.  By having more of these best customers, we strengthen our company.

In his next presentation, Kelly gave another great talk on branding our business.  According to Kelly, our brand needs to reflect why our best customers buy from us and promote their continued purchasing of our services.  In order to develop such a brand we need to be receiving guidance from our most valued customers.  Are we asking them the types of questions that will help us improve our brands in surveys or in person?  Building on this, Kelly talked about how “dropping prices is never a way to compete”.  We need to be competing on things besides price that matter to our customers.

In the afternoon we heard from Ellen Rohr of barebonesbiz.com who gave a great talk on “Business Basics 101”.   Her key point is that many business owners look at their companies and think “how can I fix my company without changing anything with my company”.  Ellen talked about how we have to look inwardly within ourselves and our companies and see where we need to make changes.  She told us about the small plumbing business that she and her husband were operating and how it was running into debt.  Through examining their financials, Ellen realized that they simply weren’t charging enough and needed to charge more.  But what happened when they began to charge more, did they go out of business?  Just the opposite!  They began to make money!  Ellen said they went from an hourly rate of $50 an hour to $150 an hour and still stayed in business.  However, if they had stayed at their low rate they would not have.   By showing us some basic accounting principles, Ellen reminded us how we should be keeping track of our companies through these financial indicators.  Her final great suggestion of this talk was to keep track of our financials each week so we know exactly where we are at.   This is a great idea that helps us think strategically and keeps us on track to be profitable.  If we aren’t doing this now, why not try it out?  After all like Ellen says, “you can fix the economy, your economy”.  By following her great reminders that “you must charge more than it cost” and improve our companies by implementing the advice to “don’t blow your top, just fix it”, we too can continue in success.

This is just a little sampling of some of the great points that these true leaders in the industry are helping us with. If you were in attendance maybe you could share with all of us some of your ideas that you took away and we could all learn from them.

Till next time keep being always-profitable in your life and business,

Frank Taciak