Business Strategy Success Principles

An Action Plan to Grow Your Business and Enjoy an Easier Life

Paul Arnold

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781631957949
• eBook ISBN: 9781631957956
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Business Strategy Success Principles outlines 20 essential principles for entrepreneurs and small business owners to apply in order to operate a focused, strategic, and efficient business.

PART 1:

YOUR PLAN

1. Should I?

Do You Have a Solid Business?

Don’t Fall into One of These Five Traps

The first step to improving your business is to understand why businesses fail and don’t fall into any of those traps. According to the 2018 Forbes Finance Council study, 20 percent of businesses fail after one year, 50 percent by year five, and 65 percent by year ten. The top five reasons businesses fail are as follows.

1. No need in the market: nobody wants what you are selling.
2. Not enough capital: one-quarter of business owners say they aren’t able to obtain the funds they need to operate their business; there is not much you can do if your business does not have sufficient capital to operate.
3. Not the right team: either they had no partner to balance them out or the founding team could not find the right person to launch the business.
4. Competition: in some businesses, such as technology, there is a lot of competition; while it is important to be aware of your competition, one must avoid being obsessed with or run down by it.
5. Price: if you price your product too high, you’ll push customers away, and if you price it too low, you won’t be able to turn a profit.

Understanding the top reasons businesses fail can help you learn valuable lessons to position you and your business for a greater likelihood of success. Employing these principles into your business will enable you to create a six-figure business in less than five years. Once you are established, you can further refine the systems, strategies, and focus to double revenue, free up time, and create the business of your dreams. To build your perfect business, follow these principles. It is also important to have an accountability partner to inspire you and achieve success. An accountability partner can either be a business coach or consultant. You can also use a group accountability team, such as a mastermind or business club.

Is It a Good Idea?

Take a step back and do not fall into the number one trap for why businesses fail, which is to create a product or service for which there is no market need. Before you launch your wonderful business and focus hours upon hours on growing your business, let’s step back to examine your product or service. Often, we become enamored with our idea and want to invest all of our time and money into promoting our business venture.

We imagine that others will see our beautiful business just as we see it in our own eyes. The fact is that everyone else is busy in their own lives, facing their own problems. Ultimately, they will only invest capital in your product or service if you have a sound business brand they know, like, and trust—that can benefit them personally.

I encourage you to step back at first. Try to find someone in the same field or a similar business and discuss your concept with them. I am not suggesting giving all your trade secrets away. I want you to hear from another’s perspective. Most business owners would be flattered to be asked for advice and would be happy to share their ideas on the viability of a similar product or service. Even for established business owners, feedback will only help you improve by gaining a qualified outside perspective.

There could be excessive costs to market your product in a competitive industry. If you are trying to launch an energy drink or new clothing line, you will be up against companies with million-dollar marketing budgets and mass production. If you are launching a personal training business, you will also be up against established national gyms and personal trainers. You want to make sure you have done a reality check to examine the viability of your product or service to ensure success.

Watch some episodes of Dragons’ Den or Shark Tank. Examine episodes where the entrepreneur is trying to launch a board game or an energy drink. The first problem is these people usually think their idea is worth ten times more than can be proven through sales. They usually have unrealistic expectations of potential buyers of their product. They may not have sufficiently examined their competition.

An entrepreneur may launch a board game without considering Hasbro: an established board game corporation now modernizing classic games like Monopoly and Game of Life. If you are starting an energy drink, you are going to up against Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which already have established billion-dollar brands and distribution. However, if you are launching a beverage with the ultimate goal to sell your company to Coca-Cola or Pepsi, you are on the right track!

My First Bad Idea

When I launched my first business, I wanted to work as an electronic music promoter. I learned some important lessons and consequences of not understanding the market. I loved going out to these three-to-four-day electronic music festivals and meeting these free-minded, rainbow-gathering, hippy people. I discovered new artists and new music sounds that stimulated my temporal mind. I loved the tribal visceral rhythms. I would dance through the night while feeling free-spirited in this tribal community.

In my early twenties, I had the ill-informed idea to start my own music promotion event company called Spectrum Music. The first problem was that I lived in a small city of about 100,000 people that would not support an individual music promotion company. The second thing I didn’t realize was that the underground drug dealers make their living from these types of events.

I learned a hard lesson after I had kicked a drug dealer out one event. That same individual ruined my reputation, which negatively affected the turnout at my next event. The third mistake I made was growing too fast, too soon. I convinced my parents to cosign on a loan so I could hire and fly an international group to my small city of Kingston.

It was also a miserable experience, and I had a horrible time at the event. I had people show up at the event assuming that I was lying about these international artists performing in our small town. I had to arrange for a friend to drive all the way to Toronto to pick them up. The security team I agreed to provide, which included the local ski patrol, did not even show up except for one guy I woke up in the middle of the night and convinced to attend. I had to call my parents in the middle of the night to become my new security detail. The performers hardly made it through customs, and, luckily, I was guided in my response to the border custom officials.

The company that provided the visuals (which I learned after had included some pornography) forced me to drive to my bank and pay them after I had no money left at the event sales. I ran out of funds to pay the artist the full amount after paying for their flights. I wrote them a check for the balance, which I had no intention of honoring. My justification for not paying them more was simple: I had already paid for their flights, and they had gigged an extra night in New York on my dime without consulting me.

I ended up in about $5,000 in debt, which took me a few years to pay off. This event was also a miserable experience as I was stressed the whole evening. I had every vendor asking me for money. I was flying by the seat of my pants and paying vendors in cash as we made money from the canteen. Lesson learned: understand the market need and environment before launching a business. It is better to identify market opportunities and threats ahead of time before you invest too much time or energy into your business. The easiest way to do this is by creating a business plan.

2. Why Do This?

Plan Your Destination

What is Your Mission?

Your mission statement defines your business, your business goals, and strategies to achieve objectives. Start with defining what your product or service is in layman’s terms.

The first step is to define your product or service without sounding “salesy” or marketing. For a financial advisor, you sell investment products, including stocks, bonds, GICs, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds. For a realtor, your product is residential homes or commercial real estate.

The next step is to define the service or value you provide to your clients and figure out what differentiates you from everyone else in your market. What is the reason someone would do business with you, your product, or your service rather than doing it themselves?

Typically, the biggest differentiator is you!

For example:

A. For a financial advisor, your service may include retirement plans, estate plans, and investment strategies.

B. Services for a realtor would be buying or selling your home. It could also include providing a local market analysis on the area where you are buying or selling. It could be a marketing strategy, including local listings, open houses or virtual viewings, and direct marketing to other realtors.

Ultimately the differentiator is the purpose and objective related to your customer needs and team values. You want to define your target market here and the end goal of your business. Do you help established business owners manage recruiting and human resources? Do you help women ages twenty-five to fifty-five get more fit and healthy through a structured diet and innovative exercise routine? You should have a specific target market. If you can’t be specific at the start, strive to define your target market in your second year after you experiment with several profitable target markets.

Your mission statement describes where you want to be and how you will get there. You want to define what the ultimate goal is that you want to achieve. Maybe that is to have your own real estate team. Maybe you want to be a leader in your community and help first-time home buyers find their dream home.

What is Your Vision?

Your vision statement describes the desired future position of your company. Your vision is the ultimate goal of what your business will accomplish. It can be combined with a mission to state the business purpose, goals, and values. Create your vision of your business, where you want to be in five, ten, and twenty years.

For example:

A. By 2040, my business will serve three hundred family households of $100 million in assets and support the local little league baseball league.

B. As a couple’s relationship coach, I want to service two hundred family households, improving communication and listening strategies to improve intimacy and wellbeing. I will be a leader in my community and be an expert in improving relationships. I will do this by improving communication between couples and reducing the divorce and separation rates.

Revisit Your Mission Each Year

When a composer is creating a symphony, there are three main sections: the exposition, development and recapitulation. When Beethoven was composing “Symphony No. 5” and he was expressing his notion of fate as he learned that he was losing his hearing, he had the fundamental idea of the three repeated notes that end on a lower note a minor third below. He had an overall framework of the piece, including the main theme, development, and recapitulation (return of the theme) with the fate note theme used throughout.

By having a structure to his symphony, he was able to eventually create his “Symphony No. 9” without hearing. Despite the terrible tragedy of losing his hearing, he still overcame this obstacle because he had a plan. His “Symphony No. 9” became one of his greatest works and was performed during the tearing down of the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany.

You need to do the same thing in business. You may have a powerful core product or service. You can improvise your way through your business, or you can start with a framework. You should have an overall plan and mission to your business so that you can stay on the right course and achieve the objective for your business. Ask yourself: Why is my product or service going to change peo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Why Should You Read This Book?
• PART 1: YOUR PLAN
• PART 2: YOUR BRAND
• PART 3: YOUR PURPOSE
• PART 4: YOUR COMMUNICATION
• PART 5: YOUR PEOPLE
• PART 6: YOUR PIVOT
• PART 7: YOUR STRATEGY
• BUSINESS PLAN WORKSHEETS
• About the Author
• References