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Step One: State Your Business

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This section is all about explaining in as few words as possible what’s your business does, what product or service it makes, and who you sell it to.

One way of describing this is an elevator pitch. Let me give you an example my business creative agency secrets, has the strapline “marketing success unlocked”.

That is the quick version of what it is that we do.  We offer marketing success to people who previously found this a problem that they could not resolve. You notice that this actually is also incorporated into our logo which is two things, a C. A. S. initials and also a padlock which is open. Thanks to Ross Murray who is our wonderful graphic designer, he designed this for us and it was a great moment when we saw what he had created and how well it aligned with what our business does. You can contact Ross and Angela Murray at www.redspark.co.nz

We then have a longer version of our elevator pitch.

A marketing agency specialising in execution marketing for small and medium businesses.

And of course we have an even longer version, you can read this on our website in the about us page.

How do you describe your business?

Here are some ways that you can help to think through the different options

  • What’s the company history?
  • Who are the key personnel?
  • Who are you trying to sell to, your target customers?
  • Do you have some specific objectives of the business, this may be to grow it, to sell it, to create an income for yourself, to be a social enterprise?  There are many more
  • Who are your competitors, what is unique, special or different about you?
  • What’s your track record? In previous businesses and in this current one.  What sort of clients have you helped?
  • Do you have case studies? Are they well known?  How did they reflect on your business?

Write down longhand the answers to all of these questions.

You may have some other questions that you think are particularly relevant to yourself. From this, you want to try and build 3 separate statements about your organisation.

The first one needs to be the equivalent of a strapline to go alongside the company name and logo. Here are some examples from clients

SD Talent, best practice human resource management for your team, outsourced.

Crossfire, trusted fire engineering.

Baucher Consulting Ltd, better tax stories for you: a better tax system for everyone.

Read the other posts from this series here!

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What is the New Business process?

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Continuing our series on the Art and Science of New Business – Read Part 1.

I’m going to start with the definition of a business process –

Process – a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that serve a particular goal.

I took that definition from Wikipedia but it’s very straightforward if you do something in exactly the same way over and over again you will get the same outcome and that’s a process.

I want to remind you of the title of this article series is the Art and Science of Generating Leads.  The difference between an Art and a Science is that in the science everything is replicable exactly, every single time that you do it.  And art is not.

Generating leads is not always identically replicable. This is because markets change, economies evolve, your product or service may differ; the needs of your customers and prospective customers may be altering over time.

This does not mean that it is impossible to create a replicable process. But it does mean that you must acquire more skill than just following a series of “paint-by-numbers” tasks.

But you knew that didn’t you?

A business process gives an outcome

Let’s begin with working out the different steps that lead to an outcome.  I’m going to give you an example from my own

BNI logo

BNI logo

business here. It’s Wednesday morning at 7 AM. I am in a cafe with a group of 32 other trusted business individuals who are all working to help me generate leads for my business. The group is called Business Networking International. We meet once a week in order to do our best to help each other win more customers. How we do it is a straightforward, replicable business process.

It’s a methodology developed by Dr Ivan Misner.  He found it to be effective and set up a network. He’s grown it to over 180,000 members in many countries across the world. It is a tried and tested methodology for business owners to find a group of other business owners whose business is to help you find leads for your business.

Sounds extraordinary? Well it is.

I’m not going to tell Dr Misner’s story here, but suffice it to say at a certain stage in my business I found BNI to be a very useful discipline to help me establish a business process around finding new customers. I commend it to you and suggest you go and research the organisation today; their website is www.bni.com.

The new business development 8 step methodology is a process

8 step new business process. Step 1 Who are you?In order to make a process you first need to ensure that you’ve got all of the component parts lined up and ready to work I will say that step eight is the actual process because you string together all the components.

Step one is Who are you and what do you do? and that’s the topic up next.

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