The 60-Second Guide to Accelerating Your Focus

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Focus

In this competitive economy, the only way to really keep your small business moving forward is to Accelerate Your Focus so you can stay in business and keep growing! This is the time to do a reality check on your small business.

In just 60-seconds, we’ll show you how to really accelerate your focus to grow your business!

0:60 Reality Check
Your business has three major categories: 80% is Sales/Relationships, 10% is Finance and 10% is your team. All are important, however, to stay in the game, you must really focus on being the face of your company in order to grow and retain key relationships that are making it a success. You must do all you can to promote your business – online and offline. Get involved in local small business communities, online niche social groups as well as attend conferences with others in your field.

0:42 Reduce Expenses
Talk with your employees, and see if they might have any ideas on how best to reduce costs in their day-to-day work. Also monitor employee expenses to see if you can find places to cut costs. Make sure you order smaller, moveable quantities of inventory. Review your current advertising and find places where you are not getting a good return on your investment. Then come up with free and low-cost ways to promote your business, such as within social networks online, handing out flyers or with a business blog.

0:30 Establish Systems
Create a focused work environment for yourself and your employees by meeting with them each morning to go over that day’s priorities and how they will be executed. Keep consistent communications with your vendors, clients and your banker. Each group is what is keeping you in business, so be sure you are keeping them updated on your business needs and what you can offer. Think of other low-cost ways to automate your communications and finances.

0:20 Realign Duties
Empower your employees by delegating smaller projects to free your time up to manage the overall business, while helping them to grow in their career path. Instead of writing all of your marketing emails, find an employee who shows signs of wanting to do more to help you write them. By challenging your employees, it helps them feel necessary to the business, thus retaining them. Think of other ideas to motivate your employees, while taking the work off of you so you can focus on the 80% of your business – Sales.

0:10 Focus on Sales
Improve the marketing of your product by RE-marketing to your own clients. Only this time freshen up your message and methods of marketing: email marketing, mobile alerts, viral and social networking marketing. Offer other products closely related to your products. Be sure your product offering is current and that you have done due diligence in order to keep up with the competition – do it better and lower your cost just a bit to land the sale. Increase your marketing budget if you can find the money from the reduction of expenses above.

Article courtesy of SCORE.

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SCORE is a nonprofit association dedicated to helping small businesses get off the ground, grow and achieve their goals through education and mentorship.