Here are 6 tips for improving some of the areas in your business that may need help.
- Customer satisfaction: The best way to build your business is by referral work. This point is well known. Think of this: if every one of your current clients referred one client to your business you would grow at 100%. The key to achieving this level of referrals is to keep your current clients extremely happy with your product.
- You need to make sure your clients give regular feedback about your product. Surveys can be good for this.
- Constantly review each element of your delivery and search for improvements.
- Keep in good contact with your regular key clients.
- Check your marketing: Have a clearly defined marketing strategy for your business and make sure this strategy includes all elements of marketing. You need to have someone in charge of your marketing, internal or external.
- Try and niche your service or focus on the profitable areas of the business.
- Create different channels of communication.
- Develop a strong digital presence.
- Build strategic partnerships.
- Systems and processes: This is one of the most important elements of your business. Having a system and process for every area of your business will build real business value.
- Use different cloud applications to store the systems you create.
- Your systems need to be dynamic and easily accessible.
- Make sure you review each process regularly and search for improvement.
- Regulatory bodies: The trade industry is one of the highest regulated industries in Australia. You need to have advisers that understand how these bodies work.
- Use trade specialists as advisers (accountants, lawyers, brokers, etc…).
- Focus heavily on compliance in your business.
- Regularly review ratios and benchmarks and understand requirements.
- Financial literacy: This is a very important aspect that will ensure the future success of your business. As a director, you need to make sure you understand what the numbers in your business mean.
- Review your financials with a specialist adviser.
- Create key point indicators (KPIs) that you understand and can track.
- Set meetings with the management team and hold each other accountable around the numbers.
- Understand your industry: We work exclusively in the trade industry. From my experience, this is a brutal industry and is not forgiving. You need to understand the game you are in and limit your business’ risk as much as possible.
- Structuring is crucial so you need to review this with an expert.
- Understand the risk in your business.
The above tips are just a few of the ways to improve your business. The main advice we can give is work with quality advisers. The most expensive thing you can do with your business is use cheap advisers!
Contact us if you have any further questions on how to better your trade business.