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Here is a top-10 checklist for profits:
1. Review and fine-tune your business plan. Be sure to discern your competitive landscape and benchmark your main competitors.
2. Bring on the A team – both in staff and advisors. Recruitment and training will remain important, and seek the best mentors and professionals for inspiration to help you sustain growth.
3. Remember Pareto’s Principle – the 80/20 rule – that applies to you and your business in a variety of ways.
It means, for example, that 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customers.
So evaluate how you spend your time and resources.
4. Enhance your staying power by concentrating on your most profitable customers while identifying new revenue sources.
5. In prospecting and marketing, select and target the right customers.
6. Add sizzle by improving your niche-performance. Uniqueness counts more and more each year.
7. Watch your cash flow and your firm’s overall budget each week.
8. Focus on quality in your business processes – make it your No. 1 job.
9. Innovate – plan for more marketplace changes and evolving consumer preferences.
10. Practice the art of mental toughness. Remember when it’s appropriate to ignore the opinions of others, and to persevere in your dreams against seemingly insurmountable odds.
From the Coach’s Corner, editor’s picks:
Strategies for Stronger Profits by Optimizing Prices — In general, how can you manage the sweet spot – between your price-optimization and costs? Dennis Brown of the consulting firm, Atenga (www.atenga.com), says many companies make 11 pricing mistakes: Companies base their prices on their costs, not their customers’ perceptions of value.
For Profits, Manage Your Growth at the Right Pace — Entrepreneurs frequently try to rush their business growth. Certainly, growth is great but if you scale too fast, you’re looking for trouble. The key is to prepare.
Profits: How to Save on Sales Opportunity Costs — There are five basic dos and don’ts for productive selling.
How to Create Luck So You Can Fly High with Profits — Companies survive and gain market share when their competitors fail. But that’s often because successful firms know how to create luck.
“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
–Henry Ford
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