Small Biz Liz - The Small Business Owners' Solution Center

So hopefully by now you have been working ON your business at least one hour at the beginning of each day.

But maybe you feel a bit "stuck" because you don't know what to start working on...

If you are like most of us small business owners, you probably have a million ideas on what you can do to grow your business, but you just don't know which one of those ideas is your number one priority.

Instead of spending your time fixing small issues, try to focus on fixing the one big problem that is holding you back. It will have much more impact on your business that if you just focus on small problems.

Find the underlying cause
We've found that a good way to identify your top priority item to start fixing your business, is to find the underlying cause of several effects that are preventing your business from growing.

If you are not making enough money from your business to be able to hire someone to help you grow, then you should be able to boil it down to three major reasons:

1. You don't have enough work to bill for
2. You aren't charging enough money for the work that you are doing
3. The work is taking too long and you are not making a profit from it

"I'm not making enough money from my business"
In the first case of "You don't have enough work to bill for", the simple (but not EASY) answer is to get more work. This involves a bunch of small baby steps that all adds up to a giant leap in your income.

Some of these investigative steps are:
Find out why you don't have enough work.
Is your current market too small?
Do your prospective customers know about you?
Is your competition grabbing all the customers?

Answers to these questions will provide you with the next steps that you need to take.

For example, if you think that your current market may be too small (and perhaps one of the reasons is because your competition already has your current market all tied up), then you have to start doing some live-on-the-street research, interviewing prospects, lunch dates, prize giveaways or whatever it takes to get the information you need to make an informed decision.

Real people needed
The important part here is to get out there and actually talk to a real person. You can't just imagine what they might be thinking and assume you know the answers to your questions. You have to summon your courage to meet face to face with people, be ready to be told things you don't want to hear (like I'm not interested, I don't have time, etc) in for the sole purpose that you need to find out the truth. Even if the truth hurts, you can take corrective action to work with the truth and really solve the problem.

Otherwise, if you are going to guess what your market needs, you'll end up wasting a lot of time and money trying to attract new business based on what YOU "think" they want.

The next post we will continue discussing these topics of strategic thinking, market research, and problem solving. All for the purpose of helping you grow your business.

Labels: market research, problem solving, strategic thinking