I’d like to share with you a great book I read this week, which was written by Andrew James, someone I know well in my networking group and who is the senior partner in a Birmingham accountancy practice. It has GREAT IDEAS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS in capital letters splashed on the cover and it’s a manual, set out in 7 sections with helpful exercises to consider after each section. In appearance it looked like many other business development books, small and dark blue, with a hardback cover, but the content was a really pleasant surprise. I felt as if I’d become Alice, who had just tumbled down the rabbit hole and landed in an unexpected and wonderful world.
Reading it was a real joy; this is a marketing book that will help small business owners get to grips with their customers. It puts them at the heart and the focus of your business development. It explains clearly how designing and following systems & processes and monitoring the key financial indicators in your business will transform your turnover and profitability. If you’ve tried reading other business development books in the past and found them difficult to relate to your business, this is the book for you.
Through each section the book comes back to a typical small, owner managed business, called Mooredge Decorators, and shows how each change can be tracked and monitored by understanding the key numbers.
After the concept of critical numbers is introduced, the sections deal with getting more customers, improving conversion from leads to sales, getting customers to spend more with you and on a more frequent basis. It finishes by focusing on the extending the lifetime a customer buys from you and a discussion about different pricing strategies. The last section, perhaps the one that often gets forgotten by busy business owners, concerns the importance of systemising your processes.
In the summary section it brings all these ideas together – it’s more effective to spend time making gradual improvements in each of these sections that to put all your effort trying to get a big difference in just one of them. In other words, look at the simple stuff that works rather than the complicated stuff that doesn’t.
If you’d like a copy of this little gem of a book, please e-mail us, get in touch with Andrew through their website www.jamesstanley.co.uk or come along to one of our networking meetings and say hello in person.
Enjoy your reading!
Gill