In the past 5 years of brokering business sales, we have been privileged enough to work with a wide range of successful entrepreneurs who have started and built profitable businesses from scratch. We’ve also been lucky enough to help a number of individuals get started online, even with little start-up capital or prior experience.
When starting out, it is very tempting to cut corners and take the easy route, especially if you have no cash and no contacts. However, the corners you cut starting out can be extremely expensive down the line, especially if you don’t look to improve. Conversely, doing things right from the start and continuously working to improve can pay dividends for years to come.
Anyone with any knowledge of finance can tell you the power of compound interest. Save a small amount each month, reinvest the interest consistently and over a number of years compounding will have multiplied the total amount invested many times over. Compounding also works the other way: build up small amounts of debt, don’t pay the interest and over a period of years you will owe significantly more than when you started. It’s an extremely powerful concept and these exact principles can apply to your business and its success too:
Small improvements, applied consistently will lead to steady growth in the long term.
And again, the opposite also applies:
Start out cutting corners, not improving will lead to a failed business in the long term.
It’s not uncommon to see or hear of popular entrepreneurs running profitable businesses that are out of business a few years later. Why is that? They didn’t try to improve. They became complacent. They became lazy. They were beaten by harder working competitors.
If you were forced to cut a few corners at the start it’s never too late. As long as you recognise areas that need to be improved and work on them consistently, things can be recovered. These often become the most successful businesses – those started in imperfect circumstances, lack resources and cutting corners in an attempt to find something that works. In the pursuit of initial success, a culture of consistent improvement is born.
In companies that found success early, it is often the opposite. It is easy to get complacent and lazy if things have always come easily. Why bother improving if you already have the best product or service?
Regardless of whether or not your business got off to a good start or not, building a mentality of continuous improvement with yourself and your team is going to increase the likelihood of your business succeeding over the long run. The changes you make do not have to be huge, they just have to be consistent. Every entrepreneur is busy –don’t use that as an excuse not to improve.
There are a number of practical ways to build a culture of continuous improvement within your company or as an individual. To start, identify the following:
- What are the key parts of your business (e.g. marketing, sales,)
- What are your goals/targets for each (e.g. double revenue in the next 12 months)
- Who is responsible for each of these (if you have employees)?
Once you have done all of the above, you can start planning what to work on. The key is not to get overwhelmed by the overall goals and focus on small changes that added up make a big difference over time.
Let’s say your overall goal is to double revenue in the next 12 months. This is something we have done consistently at FE International since the company started. Achieving goals like this doesn’t just “happen” and it’s very rare for one change to be the difference between $500k and $1m a year revenue (for example).
By breaking each down into much smaller and more manageable goals and tasks, it’s easier to make progress towards your overall goal. For example:
Sales
- Call 5 more clients a day. Put extra focus on those of highest value.
- Reply to emails 50% faster. Use a CRM to manage and track.
- Improve conversion rates by 10%. Tweak that sales copy!
Marketing
- Double the number of blog posts you write. You can even reuse old content to create something new (e.g. blog post into a Slideshare presentation).
- Improve email opt-in rates by 20%. Add a new free eBook for visitors to download.
- Get one more press mention a week or even a link from a relevant blog in your niche.
Financial
- Cut out one unnecessary subscription a month. Even if it’s just $50 a month, it all adds up.
- Negotiate a better deal with a third party supplier or service provider. Often you just have to ask and the savings can be substantial.
- Find one new referral deal. Figure out what your clients want and that you don’t (and won’t offer) and find a reliable third party who does and will pay you for it.
The list can go on – and this is just a tiny list of ideas to get you started. None of these changes will make a huge difference on their own, but together they are extremely influential on your overall goal. Many are repeatable which is where continuous improvement comes in. Don’t settle with where you are now – improve each week/month and it will eventually become a habit.
Here’s a real example from a site we worked on recently.
Goal: double organic traffic within 12 months.
Tasks to get there: double number of blog posts written each month, get one mention/link per blog post, and update social media 3 times a day.
Result: Tripled organic in 10 months.
A seemingly difficult overall goal became much easier by breaking the goal down into smaller and more attainable and tangible targets. “Double the number of blog posts written each month” is a better target than “Write more content”.
If you are ever considering selling your business, implementing continuous improvement within your business will consistently increase its value, too. Businesses that are steadily growing are always more desirable than those that are flat or even declining. Making small improvements is easy, even if you have limited money or time you can find aspects of your business to improve. Small changes made consistently will add up to a big improvement over time and should be considered as part of any successful exit plan.