Improve My Business

Today I want to point out two great posts made by Professor David Dornfeld on his Green Manufacturing Blog (http://green-manufacturing.blogspot.com/). The posts are about low hanging fruit for manufactures to improve their environmental impact without expending a ton of resources. The posts draw on research that Professor Dornfeld and his students will be presenting later this year at a green manufacturing conference and have some great advice for smaller manufactures who want to decrease their environmental impact but can’t spare the resources to role out a huge environmental campaign. The first post can be found at http://bit.ly/8AXCLf and the follow up can be found at  http://bit.ly/5legqq. I hope you enjoy the posts as much as I did.

Technorati Tags: Business, enviornment, improvement

Every business needs a marketing plan. If you could create a robot that did all of your clients work for them in half the time and only costs $100, if no one knew about it you wouldn’t make any money. A marketing plan lays out the specifics of how you are going to let the world, and more specifically your targeted customers, know about your products or services. Many businesses and entrepreneurs don’t know where to begin with their marketing plans and wind up just piecing together strategies that they have heard about to create what they think is a marketing plan. Sometimes this works, but as with anything else, proper preparation will prevent poor performance. To increase the chance that your marketing will be affective, you have to have a marketing plan that starts with research.

Researching to begin your marketing plan is easy. The first step is to research who your customers are or if you are just starting out think about who your product is designed to help. The goal is to narrow who your customer is down as much as you possibly can to arrive at an ideal customer for your product or service. In other words you want to have an image in your mind of a person of business that would be the perfect customer for you business. This first step is imperative as you can’t move forward with your marketing plan until you answer the fundamental question, “who are my customers.” The reason you can’t move forward without answering that question is because you need to know that to answer the question “who should I market to?” Once you have the answer to the first question the answer to the second becomes clear and you are ready to move on.

Now that you know who you are going to market to you can start doing some more specific research about your potential customer/marketing target. You want to find out as much as you can about them: where do they eat, what is their average income, how old are they, where do they live, what to the do for work, how much do they work, etc. The more information you can gather the easier it will be for you to come up with creative and affective ways to market to them, which is the goal of putting together your marketing plan. If you are in a B2B business then you want to find out questions like: what is their average revenue, how many employees do they have, how many customers do they have, how do they make money, what are their main differentiators, etc. Whether researching people or business, the goals are to find out what the best marketing channels to reach your customer are and what kinds of messages will resonate with them. Knowing this will help you answer the two other fundamental questions for writing your marketing plan. First, how will I reach my customer? And second, what will I say to my customer?

It has been my experience that once you have all your research complete you will have so many creative ideas for marketing to your target customer that your marketing plan will practically write itself. The better your research the better your ideas will be and your marketing will be more affective. Let your research guide your marketing and you will probably save yourself both time and money because you won’t be chasing marketing ideas that don’t work.

Technorati Tags: Business, Marketing, Marketing Plans

Process Mapping should be the foundation for any initiative to increase the performance of your company. Whether you are trying to achieve cost reductions, increased quality, higher employee satisfaction, increased efficiency, decreased wastes, or improvements in any other company performance metric, you should start your initiative with process mapping. To show the importance of process mapping let’s start with an example we can all relate to, writing a paper.

If you were asked to write a report drawing conclusions about the value of a particular niche in a subject that you weren’t familiar with you wouldn’t start your research with a laser focus on the niche. If you did you would inevitably wind up writing a sub par paper. You wouldn’t have an understanding of the greater context of the subject and your paper would be lacking the depth of understanding that a well written report requires. Sure you may learn everything there is to know about that niche, but how could you draw an accurate conclusion about its value without first understanding how it fits into the overall subject. Most of us, if asked to write this kind of report, would begin by looking at the overall subject and seeing how it fits into everything else around it, then exploring the interactions between the different parts of the subject, then exploring our particular niche. This way, when we draw a conclusion about the value of the niche we have been exploring, we know that the conclusion takes into account how this niche interacts with the broader picture.

Trying to take on an initiative to improve the performance of you company without first going through a process mapping exercise is like trying to write the paper by taking a laser focus on the niche. Before you can try to improve the performance of any one particular area of your company, you first have to understand how each area of your company operates internally and how the different areas interact with one another. This is why process mapping is  invaluable for company performance improvement projects. With a good process map you will understand the ins and outs of each part of your company and how the work that makes your company run gets done. With this understanding you can then focus on improving particular metrics with an understanding of everything that affects that metric and is affected by it.

Targeting a performance metric and taking steps to improve it without having the context of a good process map will inevitably have negative consequences for your business. While you may be able to achieve increased performance in that area you won’t see or understand the organizational cost of those achievements. The goal of improving a performance metric is always to make the company as a whole better, and to do this you have to start from an understanding of how the company as a whole operates, which is precisely what a good process map gives you. Staring with good process mapping gives you the foundation you need to insure that your efforts to improve the performance of you company are achieved and sustained.

Technorati Tags: Business, eliminating defects, improvement, process improvement, process mapping, quality, Streamlining

First off I would like to welcome everyone to the 2010 edition of the Improve My Business Now blog. I hope you all had a restful holidays and are ready to get to work making our businesses better. Now let’s get going on the good stuff.

If your business is like ours you probably spent the last several weeks wrapping things up from 2009, getting caught up on the things that inevitably fall through the cracks, and perhaps most important of all, thinking about what you were going to do in 2010. Well 2010 is here now, are you doing the things you thought about and planned for?

Whether you went through a formal strategic planning session in the latter part of the year or not, the holidays always provide a break from the frenetic pace of business and allow us to slow down and take a critical look at where we are, how we got here, and where we want to go next. Usually this comes in the form of setting goals for the New Year then coming up with plans to help us meet those goals. I am sure you are all already familiar with the importance of setting goals and planning how to meet them, but in case you need a reminder there is a good article about the importance of strategic planning here. If you didn’t get an opportunity to do some strategic planning in 2009 it’s never too late to put a plan in place.

However, this post isn’t about strategic planning, it’s about follow through. For most of us, we probably have our plan for 2010 at least in mind, if not actually written out somewhere, but what are you doing to put it into action? The truth of the matter is that strategic planning is only as good as the follow through. Your goal to grow sales by 40% over the next year is tremendous and your plan to accomplish it through increased marketing efforts, development of your sales funnel, and increasing return business sounds like a surefire way to make your goal a reality, but at the end of 2010, what is really going to matter is not the goal and the plan, but what you actually did.

Take a look at 2009 or any other year that has already come to a close. What were your goals for that year? Did you meet those goals? Why or why not? It is just as critical to review your old strategic plans and compare them to your actual results as it is to make new plans. Even if you don’t have a written plan, think about what you wanted to accomplish last year. Did you get it done? These reviews are a great way to judge follow through and goal setting. You can look at your previous goals and plans and determine whether you were able to effectively set reasonable goals, come up with actionable plans that meet those goals, and follow through on those plans. The point of these reviews is not to point fingers and establish blame if the strategic plan failed, they are about information. If you were able to put your plan into action and meet your goal that is great, if not, that is great too, by reviewing you can discover where the break down occurred and make sure you do better this year.

What I find most often when I look back at old strategic plans is that as soon as the pace of business and life picks back up in the beginning of the new year we make a couple attempts to start the ball rolling on our plan, then the plan gets forgotten in a cloud of dust and finds its way into a filing cabinet somewhere never to be touched again. Part of my plan in 2010 is to make sure that I stick to the plan, follow through on what I have said I am going to do, and make sure that, when I review my strategic plan at the end of this year, if I haven’t met my goals, it isn’t because of a lack of follow through. Until you have adequate follow through on your plan, you will never be able to tell if your goals are reasonable and if you plans are adequate to meet them. When looking forward, the plan is the key, but in review, it’s your follow through that really counts. If you didn’t follow through, nothing else matters.

Technorati Tags: Business, Follow Through, goals, Planning, Plans, Strategic Planning

Here’s a great post about how to influence your boss (and maybe get him/her to listen to your idea for improvement). More importantly, this can work equally well for personal interactions - so you can use it in all aspects of your life!
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/baldoni/2009/10/the_smart_way_to_influence_you.html

Technorati Tags: Business, communication, working smarter