Okay, so these are the five best pieces of business advice you will ever hear. I know that’s a bit of a big claim but trust me
#1 – you need to be focused!
So quite often in business, people get really overwhelmed and they try to go after every possible customer base and the problem is if you’re trying to be all things to all people, quite often you’ll end up being nothing to anybody.
A lot of businesses that are really successful are successful because they own a niche. If I take my own business within the craft industry we weren’t just within a niche as in craft, we were a niche within a niche because we focused on paper craft within that sector.
And, even in the niche that is papercraft, we went after a specific customer base and you could be the world to that customer and it’s better to be the world to one customer base than trying to be all things to all people.
If you think about that in everyday life as well, focus is brilliant. If you think that you’re a prolific multitasker and you can sit on a Teams call and at the same time be busy doing emails, actually splitting your focus across multiple things means nothing’s getting your full attention, which means you’re not doing a great job of anything either your emails or being present on that call.
So, my first bit of advice is to try and just keep focused on one thing. It’s okay to switch your focus from one to the other, but stay focused on one thing. If you’re 100% committed to the task in hand, you will always do the best job of it.
Now, #2 – set goals
If you think about this in your everyday life, you wouldn’t dream of going on a diet and just saying, ‘yeah, I wanna lose some weight’ but not having an idea of where you want to get to, whether that’s a dress size or so many pounds.
Having an idea of where you want to get to and some milestones of success along the way is a surefire way to enable you to succeed. By setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you’re going to know when you have achieved certain things within either your business or within your life becauseI try to use goal setting in all areas of my life, not just in my business.
Now if we are thinking specifically within business, your goals may come in the form of a revenue plan, a target for profit, a set of customers, a certain customer number you want to achieve or something like increasing your average spend of a customer. These are all different examples of goals that you can set yourself and what I would encourage within goal setting is to be SMART. We’re going to be specific, we’re going to be measurable, achievable, relevant and then we’re going to set time frames.
#3 – you need to be is adaptable.
You have got to be prepared to adapt and change your plans to react to situations and the most prolific example of that is the pandemic. All of the businesses that succeeded through the pandemic were able to adapt their business model and really change how they were doing things in their business.
And change shouldn’t just be reserved for challenging times, you should be looking at how to adapt your business model all the time. A great example of this is Kodak. We all know Kodak used to be the biggest photographic company in the world however they failed to react to the digitisation of this market and the company was reduced to nothing.
Then in contrast, if you look at Netflix, a lot of people don’t realise that Netflix actually started out as a company that was renting DVDs. Now they stepped away from what was a hugely successful business model for them at the time, and in 2007, they instead adapted to focus on streaming via the internet and look where it’s got them!
Now, #4 your customer is king – or queen!
There is no business without customers and it seems really obvious, but a lot of businesses forget about this. You’ve got to put the customer at the true heart of everything you do and at the forefront of every business decision that you are making.
Think about it from the customer’s point of view, put yourself in their shoes and see it through their lens. You need to make sure that your product or service is something that your customers want, something they need and that it’s something they truly love. You should be listening and responding to their needs all of the time.
What you’ll find is the more that you let customers shape your business, the more successful you are going to become as a business.
And then finally, a fantastic piece of advice in business and in life in general is be yourself.
There’s a saying ‘be yourself, everything else is taken’ but it’s true. If you are authentically you, you never have to remember to be another version of yourself and it’s effortless as opposed to keeping up a pretence all of the time.
You can’t build a business unless you’re really being true to yourself. If you look at me, I love crafting. I love the challenge, I love the creativity, I love the diversity, I love people who do crafting and are in love with crafting. So for me, building a business within crafting was just natural, it was aligned to what I love to do and it meant that I had this huge passion for what I’m doing and because of that, it doesn’t feel like work to me.
I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the same passion if I started a software company! So do something that you love, be yourself and you’ll find the rest will come naturally.
Hopefully those are five great tips not only to run your business by but to live your life by as well!