Understanding your competition is an important component of being in business. 

Yes, you’re important.  Your products, people and services.  However, when did you last benchmark yourself against your most important competitor?

What are they up to?  When did you last have a good look?  It’s easily overlooked in the hubbub 0f everyday.  Smart businesses take time out to understand the wider competitive landscape.

Here’s some simple tips for you to get started: -

1. Download their last company accounts from companies house.  They normally cost £1.00 a set.  You can have a look at whether they’re growing, their cost structure, their profit, stocks, gross margins and cash situation. 
2. Is one of their executives speaking anywhere?  Go listen to them. Hear what the culture is, how they motivate employees, how they see the market.
3. Are they advertising?  What are their key products?  How do they compare against yours?  What products do you have  that you could position against them?  What media are they using?
4. See what keywords they may be bidding in on google adwords.  What keywords might people be searching for in response to their ad that you might be able to hijack in google either through pay per click or organic search.  Get a blog going quickly to bag some easy clicks or implement a PPC campaign.  Seek advice if needs be.
5. Get on their mailing list.  Always good to hear what things they are saying.  What tone are they using?  What calls to action?  What offers?  Are you missing any tricks?
6. Ask your customers.  It’s surprising what they know.  They may have been to a recent launch, had a titbit off of a sales rep or spoken to the CEO by phone.  People will share quite readily if asked.
7. Prepare a SPOT chart.  A rectangle split into four.  In each box write one of these words. Strengths, Opportunities, Problems, Threats then detail all of yours down under these headings.  Then pretend to be your competitor and do the same thing and compare.
8. Visit their website.  Look at their news sections, special offers, announcements.  What messages are they sending?  To which markets and customer profiles?  What product is on the homepage?  Does this mean they might lose focus on some secondary products which might be your primary product offer?
9. Follow them on social media.  Check out this post I wrote on “The CIA in Social Media“.
10. Allocate time to this.  The clearer you understand where they are going, the easier it is for you to adjust your own strategy.

One of my favourite tunes from 1994 – Incognito “Positivity”.  Used to love listening to this in the car due to it’s uplifting words, always gave me a lift as a 26 year old salesman driving a White Cavalier. 

On the subject of “positivity”, last Friday night I spoke at a business awards in Tameside, Mancheser to an audience of around 250 people.  It was billed as an “inspirational speech” – so I’d pondered on what to say for a couple of weeks and decided on ambition and having a positive mindset (we call this 141%).

I’d clearly hit a chord as so many people came to me afterwards to say how much enjoyed hearing someone from a large company talk up small businesses and have an outlook that says you can achieve things.  Newpapers are still full of negativity, bad news and super-injunctions!   Five key points I covered were: -

1. Give, Give, Give – Giving has a wonderful karma effect.  The more generously you give your time to others unconditionally, the more opportunity comes and knocks on your door. 
2. Have a plan of where you are navigating to and programme your sub-conscious.    Your brain is a very powerful thing.  When you walk, you just walk, your brain does the clever bit.  When you pre-programme your sub-conscious with your objectives – it has an amazing effect of navigating you towards them.  What are your goals? Jot them down.  Process them.  Tell your brain out loud to help you get there (not at a bus stop mind you).
3. Have the mindset of an opportunity engineer.  Don’t think “What can I sell  you” – think - “What opportunities could we mutually work on?”  Win/Win wins business.
4. The world is a huge marketplace at your screen.  Never has there been a better time to open up your products and services to a global market.  It’s a click away.  Don’t limit your thinking to your local neighbourhood or regional.  Think Globally!
5. Small has a great advantage – you’re not BIG.  Speed is crucial in the hyper world we all live in.  Big businesses take longer to do things. Smaller busineses can punch above their weight using social media to engage customers, google to turbo-boost up local ranking and geo-location to grab people in local markets.  Get tech savvy.

There’s never been a better time to be a new start.  Free tools on the web.  Cloud based applications for money management, marketing and collaboration.  Social media to access markets.  Free business advice.  If you are positive and realistic, so much can be achieved.  That’s coming from a bloke that started out as a barman, who now shapes the direction of a £100m+ business.  Go get ‘em!

Chatting with a small business on the phone the other day, a quick conversation on the phone turned into an hours business clinic.  The business involved was suffering the after effects of a decision, which seemed good at the time, but is later paying the price for.

I won’t do the detail on the why’s and wherefores of the specifics, but there was some good advice there, which was worthwhile to share.  Again, this is linked to things that big businesses do well, that smaller businesses can learn from.  In no specific order: -

1) Know what your end game is. Selecting which pieces of business to progress/not progress rely on you having your end game down somewhere in a basic plan.  That sets the route for your business, the pace, the tone and utlimately the types of customers you want to attract.

2)  Don’t over-commit yourself. If your resources are limited, concentrate on the things that matter. In the early days of a start-up, there’s a tendency to do any piece of business at any cost, just to get money through the door.  If it totally overstretches you, it may be taking you away from more important potential higer value business opportunity.  Don’t be a busy fool, turnover = vanity, profit = sanity.

3) Opportunity Cost. You have a finite amount of time in working week.  Commit your time to achieving your plan.  Filling your time with business which you don’t make much money from simply limits the amount of available time you have to do more important things, like looking for more profitable customers or developing your offering.

4) Don’t always offer trade credit if it’s stretching you, particularly if selling to consumers. Ask for cash upfront or if for a trade customer, where you cashflow may be stretched.  Ask for part-payment up-front to cover your costs.  Be brave!  You’re not a bank or a charity.  Or give an early payment incentive (if your margin supports it).

5) Gear up to grow. If you know your end game and you know what working capital requirements might be, you will be far more selective about which bits of business you can do.  A good question to ask yourself is if a large customer walked through the door tomorrow, have you got the working capital to fulfill their order?  They will be expecting credit, probably 30 days net.  You’ll need to fund that.  Can you do it?

6) ABC. When taking a large order, take into account all the activity based costs (ABC).  What I mean is all the hidden costs of fulfilling the order.  The stuff that takes loads of time.  It’s tantamount to leaking profit.

7) Don’t get excited by the project, get excited by the profit. A common mistake I see is small businesses, particularly creative ones, being excited by a project and committing to it because it appeals to them.  Do a clinical assessment of every opportunity, you’re not a charity.  What’s in it for me?  How much net profit in this piece of business taking into account all the running round, the trade credit and the other costs.

Growing for Gold. That’s what I entitled a talk I gave at the Business North West fair in Manchester today to an audience of small businesses.  Examining three key areas of growing a small business to large, I made these points: -

Growing Pains – Things you’ll experience as your business grows.

• Feeling less connected with the breathing heart of the business.
• You’ll feel a bit out of control.  As you will realise you can’t do everything.
• You’ll spend more time in meetings.
• You’ll spend more time on people issues.
• You have to bring in managers to run areas for you (and by default spend more time managing them).
• You spend your time avoiding calls of people trying to sell you stuff.
• Life gets lonelier.  You’re not part of the team anymore.  You’re the big boss.

Things that Big Companies do well that small businesses can learn from

• They’re on the numbers. They always have a budget, 3 year plan and cashflow forecast.
• They make their processes slick, with as little human intervention as possible.
• They have a good plan A, but always have a plan B.
• They fail fast. If things aren’t going well, they don’t get wedded to an idea.
• They spend more time in the future. Looking at future markets, products and growth areas.

Transitioning from Management to Leadership

I ran through ten things from a previous post I’d written around leadership.  You can view it here and some tips to make you a better leader.

An interesting conversation came from the audience.  “What’s your motivation for giving this talk today?” – excellent.  Answer = My day job is creating market space for us to sell our products to SME’s.  It’s in my interest to see small businesss grow.  By growing, we get to sell more products to them (plus I enjoy the public speaking).

At the end of today’s talk, I spent about an hour talking to small business owners about various challenges, problems and opportunities that are on their desks right now.  It’s clear, that there are plenty of businesses with big ideas, ambition and the metal to get on with it.  Good for them.