There are many areas for a new business owner to focus upon and of course there are many views or opinions on what could be the most critical areas to support the initial survival and later growth for success.
Each business is perhaps different and has different priorities, but from our experience of working with start up businesses, we believe there are 12 key areas for focus:
- Be clear on your ‘reason why’ and reflect back to this regularly to ensure your activity is for purpose
- Work to establish the right foundations from the start with a clear plan
- Manage your time effectively with a focus on the activities that give you a high pay off
- Really know and understand your target market
- Create great opportunities to take your product or service to market
- Maximise your lead conversion to sales and constantly review the process from enquiry to sale
- Have an effective forecast to make the financial numbers in your business work for your future success
- Know and understand the impact of managing your key performance indicators
- Create and develop strong relationships with customers, employees and referrers
- Understand the 7 steps of effective business growth and make marginal gains in each – increase leads, improve conversion rate, make more cross sales, increase the value of your sales, improve your margin, encourage customers to buy more often and retain your customers for longer.
- Undertake the 8 actions that the UK’s successful businesses do every year – plan, measure, review, evaluate, compare, value, analyse, improve.
- Remember that Work / life balance
