Get In Gear For Business Growth

Readers who drive a car or ride a bicycle will appreciate the value of having gears. They give leverage. Without them, you don’t go very fast and so you don’t go very far.

The same philosophy applies to all businesses. If you don’t get leverage, you won’t build up momentum and you don’t progress far quickly. Yet, it’s been my experience that many businesses don’t even get out of first or second gear even though there are some extra gears available to them!

Traditional thinking encourages us to build wealth by selling more of our products or services. Yet sales is just one component of wealth creation. Whether you manufacture and sell products (eg, food, toiletries, toys, software) or deliver services (eg cleaning, car wash, dentistry, accountancy), the source of wealth in your business is determined by three key components:

1. Your external people (customers, suppliers, referrers, friends)
2. Your internal people (team members)
3. The know-how (intellectual property)

Most people would agree that each of these three components is essential to the product/service delivery chain. You need know how to develop your product/service, you need your internal people to create, manufacture and market and you need external people to buy and supply.

However consider the possible opportunities that lie beyond this traditional continuum.

External people

Your external people can provide additional sources of income for your business simply by involving them in your business and offering them a spin-off.

Here are some examples:

• Sell advertising space to them in your newsletter; so, for example, an accountancy practice that sends out a monthly newsletter to several thousand external people could sell advertising space to a client or supplier such as a wine company looking to sell its wines to the accountancy firm’s other clients.
• Run a joint seminar with a referrer of business to which both parties’ external people are invited; so, for example, a financial planner might team up with a trusts lawyer to present a joint wealth protection seminar. Both the financial planner and the lawyer invite their own external people and so benefit by gaining exposure to each other’s external people.
• Take advantage of your existing customers’ goodwill and offer them an incentive to refer other customers to your business; for example, GMT, a recruitment company based on Australia’s Gold Coast, offers ‘artificial’ cheques to the value of $250 in its reception as an incentive to clients and visitors to refer new business.

Internal people 

Your internal people also offer opportunities for leverage. Many businesses employ people to do ‘a job’. Yet most people want to do more than a ‘job’. They want to feel they are making a contribution beyond selling their time. The failure of many business leaders to appreciate this simple fact leads to disillusionment in the workplace and inevitable dissatisfaction and turnover of internal people.

The recent Hewitt Best Employers Survey suggests that 42% of CEOs in Australia and New Zealand believe that acquisition and retention of internal people is the single most important factor facing their business. In order to leverage off your internal people therefore, the trick is to engage them in such a manner that their role offers broader opportunities than their ‘job description’.

Here are some examples:

• Treat all your internal people as sales representatives of your business; ensure that they know the range and value of your products and services and give them all a business card. By doing so, it not only makes them feel involved and valued but also provides them with a tool to promote your business within their own social networks. Don’t assume a secretary can’t sell!
• Involve your people in all aspects of management, training and development. Your internal people represent a big talent bank of expertise and experience, so make use of that by giving them managerial roles and by encouraging them to train and develop less experienced team members. Sadly many businesses take a short-sighted approach and fail to invest in their internal people for fear of losing them and thus losing their investment. So, to prevent this from happening;
• Start an alumni and maintain relationships with ex-team members. Accept you will lose internal people, but be prepared for it. The lure of opportunities elsewhere is inevitable and sometimes beyond your control. Aim therefore to build lifelong affiliations. Former employees can benefit businesses in a number of ways: they may return one day to the business or be able to source new team members thus saving on recruitment costs; they may refer business to you from their new place of employment or network; and they can be a source of industry intelligence and fresh new ideas.

The know-how 

Finally, every business has know-how in the form of knowledge, information, experience or expertise. Businesses that can capture this know-how can then leverage off it by retaining it for the benefit of existing and new team members or by on-selling it to other interested parties.

So for example:

• Imagine you bake and sell cookies. Over time, you will have developed the recipes to bake cookies; additionally you have learnt what systems work best when it comes to manufacturing and distribution. So perhaps there is an opportunity for you to licence or franchise your methodology? Just look at MacDonalds; its success wasn’t due to its hamburgers!
• If you are a lawyer, your training, experience and expertise gives you the ability to operate as a lawyer. However, you only have 24 hours in the day, yet so many lawyers restrict their earning capacity to selling time. Smart lawyers are now leveraging their know how by packaging their services such as an educational seminar on legislative changes and making it available to a wide range of clients for a fee on CD/DVD or by tele-seminars.
• Successful business leaders and sporting personalities all understand that people want to find out what makes them tick; consequently they leverage off their experience and expertise by becoming public speakers, authors and coaches who teach others their methodology and psychology and they get paid for it in the process. Effectively they tell others ‘this is how I did it and this is how you can do it too’.