9 TOOLS FOR CREATING YOUR OWN SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

They say experience comes from practise, and in practise is where you make mistakes, which then makes you perfect. For someone who wants to start a business or you already have a business you will experience challenges and problems during running of your business. Yes, there are a lot of problems coming from running a business such as disease coming from constant pressure of work, customer complaints and business losses. Instead of going forward, you may find yourself going backward in your life because of your business.

However, these problems associated with business should not scare you away, like many people who when they think of such problems, they fail to start their own businesses. With a number of sources of information you, may learn how to conduct a successful business, prepare yourself and have all necessary tools to run a successful business.

Though such tools may not guarantee success and lack of problems, they are surely going to help you run your business with ease if you really have them properly.

Don’t wait to learn from mistakes, learn what is necessary before you start your business. Take your time, prepare yourself as you know when you get into business, you must really be serious and prepared.

Here are 9 tools discussed for you:-

1.Right people: By people I mean the staff and management of the business. The right people are the ones who have skills, experience and motivation to perform what they are expected to perform. They are also supposed to be honest, can exercise professional conduct and they are motivated to achieve the goals of the business. You need well informed, creative and innovative people. Wrong people may be dishonest, unprofessional and unskilled resulting into poor services, and loss in your business due to theft, high expenses and loss of sales as you lose customers. 

2.Right Product: The reason that you are in business is because you want to provide a good or service to customers. If this product is not what is required by your target market, you will not succeed no matter how powerful your marketing plans are. The right product is the one that satisfies customers needs/wants; it can also add value to the customers. When designing and providing your product it is essential to ask yourself if that is what really customers want.

3.Right Location:  Location is the outlet you use to sell your product. Whether you do it online or offline, the right location is very important. The right location is the one known to your customers; it is where customers can easily reach your products. Right location is not only important for an offline business, but also for online businesses. For instance, having a website which is unknown to your potential customers doesn’t help you to succeed, the same as a website which doesn’t provide necessary convenience for your customers to buy or order your products. While offline businesses may want to locate themselves near busy places like commercial buildings, malls and across high ways, online business may use other techniques such as Search Engine Optimization, Ad Words advertisements, Social network fan pages and content marketing using blogs.

4.Right Knowledge of customers: You need to specify who are your target customers, know what they want and see if what you produce is what they want. You may also need to forecast their future needs, or changes in their current needs due to changes in their environment such as changes in technology, changes in culture, changes in their status etc. While you may focus on your existing customers, Antony – argues that focus should also be on understanding non customers who may be finding it difficult to purchase your product because of different reasons such as lack of enough information, or certain features.  Antony also suggests the use of work around method – whereby a company need also to access the environment under which a customer is served and buy a product. Customer interaction with the environment and process may give a clue of what is missing or what else can appeal to customers hence coming up with innovative products that satisfy customer best.

In understanding customer behavior and market trend a company needs to find out how customers use products, learn any gaps that exist when using the product. Getting to context insists that the company to learn the effectiveness of its products to the customers not just by hearing what  they say or reviews from different commentators , but by physically observing customers while they consume the products.

A good example of getting context is provided by Tide Laundry detergent ( cited from the distributed Marketing blog) while Lafley worked on Tide laundry detergent, he found that consumers told market researchers that they loved Tide’s cardboard box packaging. Yet, when Lafley was interacting with a consumer, he noticed that she almost always used a screwdriver or scissors to open the Tide box because she didn’t want to risk breaking her nails. She said she loved the packaging because she didn’t know of any alternatives, but in reality, she had to find a creative way to open the box because of its design limitations. 

Traditional marketing research can also help to uncover many facts about your customers that you were not aware of. In a research work; Engaging Customers on Facebook: challengesfor e-retailers, a focus group methodology of research were used by Lisa Harris and Prof. Denis Charles to uncover interest of the participants on engaging social networking and electronic shopping.  In the beginning participants of the focus group showed little interest on using facebook for e-shopping, but when they were introduced to the social e-shopping site www.boutiques.com , and the site demonstrated to them, and they tried it for themselves, they expressed mainly positive opinions based on access to (e.g.) large numbers of customer reviews and easy access to many e-retailers at the same time.

With the right knowledge of your customers you may be able to introduce new products that customers are not aware of, and ‘teach’ the customers why they need that particular new product.

5.Right Focus and Knowledge of business:  The right focus and knowledge will help you and your team overcome challenges, find competitive edge. You need knowledge of your specific product, operations, technology, competitors and industry trends. Focus and motivation is needed as there will come bad times in your business life, so you will need to have strength and overcome such hard times for instance general poor economic condition, losses in your business, or customer complaints. Your focus and knowledge may help to create good strategic partnership that may help your business. Of course you as the owner you may not possess all skills required to run the business, that is why I introduce the point – The right people. 

We will continue with the remaining 4 tools in our next post.