Don’t Make a Hassle of Redirecting Your Small Business to Big Business
Giving business any edge is a combination of methods, beginning with taking charge, resulting in relieving pressure points. Via the route of creating a business that your customers want as first choice; not something that is convenient until another comes along with a better offer.
There is a perverse excitement floating around challenging times which, reacted to by business, can engage customers. Turning the hassle, the continual irritations, frustrations and troublesome annoying inconveniences that effect and complicate every day, for your customer or your business, to mutual benefit. Business thinker Adrian Slywotzky uses the term hassle map for big business market gap identifying but there doesn’t seem any reason that small and micro business, who are interested enough to want to know about their customers’ or their own grizzles, can’t adapt the fundamentals of the hassle map for improvements.
Some businesses adopt an `all change is not growth and all movement is not forward’ philosophy because their model and customers appear to be content. The hairdresser, mechanic or dentist who never works outside 9-5 hours, the builder who gives a basic estimate without any guidance to other costs the customer might be facing, the landlord who cuts corners; the list is exhaustive in terms of what a business perceives as good value, exemplarily service or a positive experience. It might appear that customers’ needs are being met but what does your customer perceive as a frustrating element that they’d be willing to trade loyalty in a flash should a better offer come along? Or what has become a routine to your business that appears to work but is leaving the business exposed?
There is no denying that confronting the truth is hard, yet the risks paradoxically decline because anything becomes probable when the door to business is thrown open wider. Radical improvements are available to any business willing to get of its backside, take a look from the outside in, and seize the opportunity.
5 Opportunities for Small Business to Work with Customers, Reduce Costs and Increase Efficiency
- Waste comes in many guises for both business and customer; ineffective marketing, staff potential, misdirected advertising, overbuying or under buying, financial products. An exhaustive list which requires someone to take responsibility and organise for mutual benefit and cost /capital savings.
- Time also comes in many guises for both business and customer; mismanagement is the core challenge in all aspects of the business along with unimaginative ideas for customer and ultimately business benefit. Relieve the pressure points for mutual benefit. Lower disruption times, become accessible, increase efficiency and profit.
- Challenge your business and your customer; inspire and be inspired, seek out the problems that might not be obvious but are creating hassles, seek out budgets or cost cutting, be aware of value.
- Test yourself, be your own customer or staff and see if your ‘product’ is satisfactory from the outside looking in; pay close attention to detail or feedback, identify your business ‘message’ before the exercise and aim for clarification as post objective.
- Polish the Value; The business is your family silver, look after it and everyone benefits. Take out any scuffs and make it shine with a magnetic quality. Polish off the bits you or your customers don’t like.
There are many hidden obstacles between a business and its customers, protect yourself and think and work like big business. A business is identified when the answer to what drives a customer to purchase your ‘product’ is answered ……because what a customer buys and what they want all too often have a gap which is a part of the ongoing challenge for all businesses, not just those that appear to be in a hopeless situation.
(Image credit: Article credit: Copyright SUF)
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