I recently attended the Growth Strategies Conference in London – they had a rather cute vote-catching system. Delegates had to press a button on the handsets and votes and results came up immediately.
The results of the votes were as follows:
The biggest factor restricting growth is:
31% skilled staff
23% economic climate
18% lack of capital
11% competition
9% resource prices
8% regulations
I recently attended the Growth Strategies Conference in London – an array of speakers and a good day overall catching up with numerous contacts.
Highlights/most memorable parts of the day: Colonel Tim Collins OBE, Martin Higginson, Doug Richard.
A couple of themes came through loud and clear.
Another quickie here.
The Question: “How can I tell if my advertising is giving me good value for money?”
Answer from me: “Test, measure, evaluate. Ask all your customers why they have come to you… put a code on the advert so you can see which sales relate to which advert.”
Here’s another question from one of my Bristol seminars: “I have to work so hard in my business I sometimes wonder if it is worth it. What does the panel think?”
Answer from me: “Somehow you’ve managed to get things the wrong way round. As Michael Gerber says, you’ve got to stop working for the business and get the business working for you. To me, a pretty good definition of a business is ‘a profitable operation that can work without you’. Otherwise what you have is a glorified job where you get paid an hourly rate for what you do.
At a recent workshop in Bristol I was asked the following question.
“I’ve done loads of adverts on the radio and in the local, and even national, papers but none of it seems to work for me and I don’t understand why. How can I get more customers?”
My simple answer was that for most of us advertising does not work.
At a recent workshop in Bristol I was was asked the following question: “One of my key channels to market has dried up – it’s the internet. What should I do?”
Answer from me: “Get off your backside, get in your car and go and visit your current and past customers and find out what’s going on!”
It is clear that to sell a business it is necessary to have certain aspects in place.
The business must be able to put ticks in all of the boxes below to find a buyer.
In a nutshell, key barriers to becoming a Magic Million business are:
Here are some more findings of the survey:
We see the winners and “learn” from them, while forgetting the huge, unseen cemetery of losers. This causes skewed results because only companies which were successful enough to survive until the end of the period are included.
Here’s my note to owner managers trying to get past the million pound turnover threshold:
Robert Craven is a keynote speaker and the author of business best-seller Bright Marketing - Why Should People Bother to Buy From You? (Crimson Publishing).
He has recently been described as "one of the UK's leading marketing specialists" and the "entrepreneurship guru". He runs The Directors' Centre, helping small businesses to grow.
