The renowned business strategist and author, Tom Peters visited NZ a few years ago. Typically his writings are aimed at bigger businesses, however this time he presented a paper in which he outlined 56 ideas that any and all companies should consider incorporating into their culture, to create a sustainable aim of EXCELLENCE. Here are…
Here is a post by Janine Popick on the Inc.com website that I loved and thought I would reproduce it here. I hope she doesn’t mind. I like to watch Gordon Ramsey pull businesses apart, improve them and put them back together again. Through the magic of TV it can be done in 30 minutes,…
Chances are you use, pretty much, the same materials as all your competitors and follow similar construction techniques to complete projects. How then can you stand out from your competitors, that doesn’t take a million dollars to achieve? One idea is to develop an MVA for your business and make it part of your daily…
When you think about it, renovating a house is much like what I do in helping you improve your trades business. And when you look at it this way, using an outside advisor makes sense. How so? Scoping. When you look at a reno project you visit the site (I hope) and check it out. …
Your business can be viewed as a bucket. In the top your pour revenue, which comes from your sales process, then deduct the direct costs of producing that revenue. Unfortunately everyone’s bucket leaks and so the amount left over (as net profit) is often a lot less than it could be and what is required…
Wednesday night I ran a workshop for 30 Auckland Certified Builders entitled, “Make 2013 your Best Year Ever – Build Your Marketing & Sales Machine”. Received good feedback and some interested in having me help them improve their marketing and sales results, so was well worth the effort put in to put all the content.…
According to a study by the Centre for Small Enterprises at Massey University, during the next 10 years 64% of business owners intend to exit their businesses. For the North Shore, where I live, that means about 16,000 businesses may come up for sale (or other exit option) during the next 10 years. That’s 130…
I want to talk to you about one of the least understood, yet vital aspects of marketing. It is the principal that when creating an ad, a brochure, a sales letter, a web page or any other marketing piece you should COMMUNICATE WITH ONE PERSON AT A TIME. The natural thing to do when preparing…
Most small businesses stay small because the owner does everything. Simple maths means 24 hours x 1 = not very big. 24 x 10 = much bigger. So if you do all the estimates and present the quotes; sign all the contracts, subcontracts, and change orders; make the big site decisions; purchase all materials and…
You may be doing lots of quotes and only converting a low percentage of them into paying jobs. If this is the case you may think that your sales technique needs some work and you need to learn some high pressure closing scripts. You know. The ones the car sales guys seem so good at.…