- Lack of strategic business focus
- Intense competition
- Not enough time in the day
- Lack of profitability
- The team isn’t working well together
- You’re just not having any fun!

These reasons for a business not achieving its potential are very common. And if one or more of them apply to your business, it simply means that your game plan is not working properly.

The Business Building Challenge

Maybe your business game plan doesn’t take all the important issues into account. Like the condition of the ground you are playing on. Or maybe you need to better understand the other teams so that that you can can outwit them. And maybe the tactics you are using are just not appropriate.

What you really need is an innovative, robust and inspiring plan for building your business. And you need to start from the beginning. You need to make business plans that, firstly, lay a solid foundation. And then you have to follow the plan, and build your business from the bottom up.

Petri dishes are another popular item especially for those who are into marine life or work in a school. These items are great for your science classes or for your children to enjoy with their own microscope and science equipment. They are very affordable and with many different sizes to choose from you will be able to purchase as many as you need for your children or students.

The sports display cases is the perfect gift to give any collector. This will allow them to store all of their sports collectibles and keep them safe from dust or harm. Any good collector should use cases that will keep their items in the best shape possible especially since the better shape that the item is in the more in value that it will be. For things such as sports cards, signed balls and anything else that hold high value can be worth a lot of money at one point or another and you will want to keep them in the best shape possible just in case you ever want to sell them.

However, help could be on the way thanks to Staples. The office supply company is providing a chance for a small businesses to reach their marketing and advertising goals thanks to a new contest. The recently-launched “Give Your Small Business the Push it Need” contest will give five small business owners access to up to $50,000 that they can use to advertise their company locally through TV commercials.

If you are one of the five winners, you can choose from receiving $50,000 in advertising or $40,000 in advertising and $10,000 in cash. Here’s how the contest works: people are being asked to submit information about their company at the Staples Facebook page at www.facebook.com/staples along with a 15-second video explaining why they deserve to win the contest. Staples will select five winners, who will receiving 15 seconds of advertising during Staples commercials airing in their local market.

Of course, the IRS also has strict rules governing how these deductions are handled and is often stringent in their enforcement. Here are a few tips to help make sure you get the most our of your potential home office deduction and avoid running afoul of federal tax laws:

Calculate Your Home Office Area: How much of a deduction from your mortgage or rental costs (along with utilities, rental fees and other costs) you can claim is determined by what percentage of your home is used for work. Provide an accurate assessment of how much space you use during work and avoid the temptation to exaggerate.

Keep Private and Personal Effects Separate: Your office spaces needs to be clearly defined as such, so you need to keep any private items away from it. Of course, you can decorate your office space with pictures or have items such as an MP3 player. But having items such as a baby crib or video game system that you would never have in a traditional office is a no-no.

Only Expenses for Your Office Space Are Deductible: This means that you can’t include expenses for the upkeep your your overall home in your deductions. Deductions relating to fixing your office space are acceptable; deductions for landscaping your front lawn or installing a new oven aren’t.

So why do so many franchisees wind up failing, never making money and eventually having to close their doors. In many cases, it’s because they made a poor choice when it comes to choosing the business to operate. There are thousands of potential options for people looking to franchise an existing business, meaning people have a lot of choices – and potentially a lot of wrong choices. Many markets are saturated, so choosing the right franchise to operate is a huge step.

Potential franchisees need to do careful research of the market and their area before making any decisions on opening a franchise. A franchise should fill a gap in service to a community. If there are two fast food restaurants on a street corner, chances are that it doesn’t need a third one. Pay attention to demographics as well – a video game franchise located near a high school is going to do better than one located in a neighborhood that mainly consists of senior citizens.

Another factor to consider is if the business you are potentially franchising has long-term staying power. Many business are successful in the short-term but only cater to one specific need. If interest in those needs suffer, the franchises can lose value remarkably fast. Recent example of hot franchise areas that have fallen on hard times include ink cartridge replacement and meal preparation services.

After all, if you don’t do anything with the customer data that you collect, what‘s the point of getting it in the first place? It’s important to study the information that you receive from all angles in order to figure out patterns that can tell you what people are looking for. Take a hard look at demographic information such as age, gender and income levels when reviewing your data.

Another thing to look it is how people are coming to your business. Are they being drawn in by your website? Maybe they found you on a social media network such as Facebook or Twitter, saw advertisements that you made online or on billboards around town or were referred to you by a friend.

This is just a small sample of the information that you can leverage by reviewing the customer data you collect. Raw data is great, but it’s only value if you can turn it into actionable information that can shape your business and marketing decisions. Leave no stone unturned when it comes to evaluating your data.

So what are the first steps that you should take in order to start a smart location-based marketing campaign? Take a look at three things you must do:

• Claim your brand on sites such as Yelp, Facebook Places and Google Places. These are incredibly popular services and claiming your listings gives you a chance to give people information such as your website, hours and the products you offer.
• Collect customer information such as emails and home addresses in order to follow up with customers after their initial contact. Giveaways are a great way to collect information and engender customer loyalty.
• Provide specials or contests on sites such as Facebook or Twitter to encourage fans to follow you. Get creative and come up with ideas like online or physical scavenger hunts with clues that people can get from following your social media accounts. Followers will spread your information and help your brand grow.

As they ascend the ladder, your customers become more loyal and their value to your business increases. They start off as Suspects and your objective should be to eventually turn them into Raving Fans.

On the bottom rung of the ladder are all the people who fall into your target market.

You can reach these people through various forms of promotion such as advertising, flyers, inserts, mail-outs, in-store promotions, etc. They are suspects because they may or may not be interested in the product or service you offer.

Suspects take a step up the ladder and become Prospects when they respond to your promotional material. They do this by phoning for more information, walking into your store or interacting in some other way. They have expressed an interest in your product or service by taking action.

When Prospects buy from you, they become customers and move up to the next rung of the loyalty ladder.

Converting a Prospect into a Customer is the purpose of the sales process. It can involve supplying information, making value added offers, giving discounts and guarantees, providing testimonials, etc.

Getting new customers is expensive – it costs six times as much to get new customers as it does to get existing customers to return. So you need to get your existing customers to come back over and over again. You want your customers to take another step up the ladder and become members.

You turn Customers into Members by giving them very good service and providing incentives for repeat business. Various methods can be used to give customers a sense of belonging, eg, giving customers cards like AA and Foodtown.

When Members become Advocates, they start telling their friends about you and why they should also use your product or service.

You get Members to take that step up the loyalty ladder by going the extra mile for them. You have to under promise and over deliver, ensuring your customers’ experience is beyond their expectations.

You create Raving Fans by delighting your customers — getting close to them and anticipating their needs.

The great thing about raving fans is that they do your marketing for you, saving you substantial costs while enhancing your reputation.

Building a House
Imagine that, for your new home, you will have a house built and that you have already bought a section. Your challenge is to ensure that you move into a house that satisfies the family’s requirements and does not have any building defects. The process for ensuring that this happens can be divided into 4 steps:

• Review Requirements
• Conceptual Design
• Detailed Plan
• Build House

Step 1 involves visualising how the house would be used. You need to look at the house from the perspective of different stakeholders – partners, children, the bank (who will be providing the finance) etc. The result is a good understanding of required specifications – number of bedrooms and bathrooms, configuration of living area, and so on.

Only after doing this are you able to give your architect the information needed to do a Conceptual Design (step 2). During this step, options are explored and your initial thinking is clarified. But the thinking is still focused on what the house will look like and how it will fit together –the number of rooms, layout and style.

Step 3 is the Detailed Plan, which specifies exactly how the house will be built. It provides detailed instructions for the builder to follow and, provided that it is followed correctly, will result in the desired outcome.

This simple process should deliver the house of your dreams. But it is very important that each step is successfully completed before moving on to the next step. For it to work, no steps can be left out and the sequence of these steps must not be changed. If the process is corrupted in this way, the project will most probably not deliver the desired outcomes – a comfortable home and a happy family.

Built into our house building process are the basic rules of project management, and they are just as applicable to Strategic Planning.

Strategic Planning
When doing Strategic Planning for your business, you need to go through a similar thought process as you would for building a house. The steps are :

• Explore Business Vision
• Set Strategic Objectives
• Tactical Action Planning
• Take Required Action

Each step is similar to the corresponding step in building a house. Compare these steps as we move through the process.

Exploring the vision you have for your business (step 1) is a lot like reviewing your requirements before building a house. It involves considering all the outcomes you want from your business, from the perspective of different stakeholders – the owners, customers, staff etc.

An effective way to do this to ask the question “If this business was a stunning success, what would it look like?”. For example, the business owners might want profitability, having more time for themselves and maximising the saleability of the business. Staff might be mainly concerned about career development, sharing in profits and flexible hours.

Your business vision is the foundation on which Strategic Objectives are built (step2). The Strategic Objectives, when they have been achieved, will turn your business vision into reality. Setting Strategic Objectives clarifies your thinking on what you need to do to achieve your business goals. It is like telling the architect what the key success criteria for your new house are.

Step 3, Tactical Action Planning, involves planning in detail what has to be done to achieve your Strategic Objectives, based on the use of appropriate tactics. It is like the detailed plan an architect does before building starts.

The final step is taking required action (step4). If all these steps take place successfully and in sequence, your strategy will be turned into action. Success in your business will inevitably follow…

Strategic management is an approach to running your business that focuses on delivering the long term outcomes you really want.

Strategic management transforms your business, so that it satisfies your top priority desires. They could be a capital gain, a passive income, more time for yourself, better teamwork, or just having more fun!

The Strategic management approach builds your business into what you want it to become. Its like building a house. You start with laying a foundation. And you build on it, from the bottom up.

The Strategic Planning Model illustrates the process. It is a layered model and you start at the bottom. It is shaped as an inverted triangle because, the process starts with a few key thoughts – what you want your business to become.

Each of the 5 steps that follow, expands on the step that precedes it, broadening the scope and increasing the level of detail.

In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Stephen Covey captures the essence of Strategic Thinking. Covey’s second habit is Starting with the End in Mind. Before you start doing anything, make sure that you are absolutely clear on what outcome you really want.

So your first step in the Strategic Management process is to build a Mission or vision for your business. It is a detailed mental picture of what you want your business to become. This is the raison d’ etre, or “reason for being” of your business.

Your business will only give you what you really want if your Mission becomes the driving force behind it. Which is why getting clear on you Mission is a good place to start.

With you Mission under your belt, you have clarity on where you are going with your business. The next step is to understand, in detail, where you are coming from. In other words, you have to systematically analyse your Current Situation.

Strategic Management is like reading a map. Before you can plan a route to get there, you first have to locate your destination and current position on the map. You are then able to choose the most effective route for making the journey.

Now that you are clear on where you are going with your business (your Mission) and where you are coming from (analysis of Current Situation), you start to get a good idea of what the strategic gap is. And you are well placed to Develop a Business Strategy that will bridge that gap. This is the next stage in the process.

Developing a Business Strategy is often hyped up in the media as something that only expensive specialists and business fortune-tellers can do. In fact, it is fairly straight forward and can produce spectacular results for anyone. As long as you use a systematic approach and follow through to the end.

The temptation, when developing a Strategy, is to focus on marketing, sales and the generation of income in the short-term. But it is very important that you take a balanced view of the whole business. In addition to Financial returns, you must also consider Customer Satisfaction, Business Processes and Learning & Growth areas in the business. Most importantly, you must understand the interdependencies between what is happening in these business areas.

Let me explain. Getting good financial returns from your business depends, in the long run, on how satisfied your customers are. In turn, customer satisfaction is largely a function of how good your business processes are.

To take it one step further, how good your business processes are depends on how good your equipment is, how skilled your people are and how well your systems have been set up (Learning &Growth).

All these interdependencies work together to produce the ultimate business outcome – the performance, or lack of it, of your business. Strategy is the key to the growth engine in your business. Without strategy, the business won’t go anywhere.

There are three key steps in developing a strategy. And you must go through them in order:

1- Understand interdependencies between different areas of your business
2- Figure out the critical success factors in these business areas
3- Identify tactics that support the critical success factors

A Tactic is a group of related activities that support achievement of an objective. For example, if the objective is to get more clients, a tactic could be getting referrals from existing clients. The activities are all those things you have to do to implement a referral campaign.

Your Strategy will consist of a whole lot of Tactics. Your next step is to organise these tactics into a Plan Design. At this stage, don’t worry too much about the detailed actions involved. Prioritise your tactics and decide which ones you want to start working on.

When you know what tactics you want to implement, you can start to Make Action Plans. Simply break your tactics down into detailed actions, and schedule them over a period of time.

Don’t think too far ahead. Planning for the month ahead works best in small businesses. At the end of the month, you review what you achieved and plan for the next month.

The final step in the Strategic Management model is taking Strategic Action. This is where the rubber hits the road. And this is where strategic management efforts often falter. It goes almost without saying. If you don’t take the action, all the planning you did beforehand was a waste of time.

Many businesses never manage to implement their strategies because key stakeholders were never adequately committed to the process in the first place. And they failed to re-arrange the way they work to ensure that strategic action gets taken.

To avoid this happening to your business, you must ensure that key stakeholders buy into the process. And that an effective, action focused ongoing Strategic Management process is used.

Note that the Strategic Planning Model has a Feedback Loop. This is because your business operates in a constantly changing environment.

While, your Mission may stay the same, your Strategy has to constantly adapt to changing circumstances. This is why a monthly planning cycle works best. At all times, you have to scan the environment and re-focus your Strategy when necessary.

Rapid and sustained growth in any business, has to be launched from a strategic platform. Failure to create and maintain a strategic focus means that growth, if it happens at all, is short-lived.

It also doesn’t matter how big the business is. Whether you work alone, or you are supported by a large team, the challenge remains the same. Developing a balanced business strategy, and making sure that all that strategic action is taken.