Five Bullet-Proof Steps to Increase Small Business Success

Surprisingly, Many New Entrepreneurs Don’t Get It Right

It is simple and straightforward: Measure your revenue. Your revenue should tell you how you are doing. In a healthy business, revenue should grow anywhere from 5% to 30% every month and even more if you invest in advertising or targeted marketing and sales campaigns.

Yet as a business coach for early-stage entrepreneurs, I regularly get clients who are not measuring their success by their revenue. Instead, they are living on possibility, wishful thinking, or fake stories of overnight success they have sadly been influenced by. Here are some of the things I’ve heard business owners say:

“We bid on this really big deal and should hear back soon if we won.”

“We just launched our new website, so inquiries are going to explode.”

“I grew my social media following by 15–20%.”

“One of our posts went viral.”

“The get-rich-quick book I bought doesn’t say I need a business plan.”

While it is true that starting a business means trying many things, the only way you should measure success is by revenue. Here is how to organize in your business with the best conditions for generating strong revenue:

1/ Offer: Supply vs Demand

Develop branded product offerings that will be in high demand by knowing with confidence that you uniquely solve a problem for a very niche clientele whom you have carefully defined. Make sure you spend significant time with your ideal customers and have strong connections for feedback through beta testing, focus groups, and user communities before launching any offers. This is the point in time when you’ll want to write all of your branded, SEO-optimized copy and create branded assets for your Sales and Marketing, including setting up all online business profiles. Have you really defined your ideal customer?

2/ Set Pricing Based on Market Research

Since you know your client so well and what other offerings exist in your market niche, setting pricing should be easy. With that said, any new product may require some split testing and adjustments until you figure out the perfect formula. Get feedback, monitor success, and adjust, if necessary.

3/ Figure Out The Right Marketing Channels and Set Up Your Sales & Marketing Tools

Where do your clients spend the most time? Your job is to determine where they show up most and build a presence there for awareness, nurturing, and driving them towards your offers. Don’t spend a minute longer on the wrong channel.

This is also the time in your business where you’ll want to develop strong Sales and Marketing campaigns, build funnels for your offers, and set up tools to drive your Sales, including a website, email marketing software, CRM software, sales landing pages, analytics tools, payment processors, and customer service tools. It is a lot but once you set it all up, it is done and usually doesn't require much maintenance. Most importantly, these tools will deliver a ROI so you know your time and money were a good investment.

Sales is a lot like fishing. Marketing is your bait, your campaigns are your fishing rods, and the lake represents the channels where your target audience hangs out. If you have any of these things wrong, you won’t catch any fish.

4/ Set SMART Sales and Marketing Goals

A basic way to set Sales goals as a small business owner is to calculate your desired annual revenue. Make sure to factor in a percentage for taxes, your overhead expense budget, and emergency funds. Once you have the number, work backward to divide it by twelve months. Now you have your monthly income target so you can apply it to your products. How many units in each product category will you need to sell monthly in order to hit your target revenue? Once you have that number, you can set Marketing goals that directly drive your Sales goals.

5/ Track and Adjust Sales and Marketing Efforts Based on Sales Performance

This is where you’ll want to get project management and invoicing tools to help. There are several good options out there. Do your research to pick the best ones for your business needs and budget. I highly recommend picking invoicing tools that allow you to add your CPA for bookkeeping and tax purposes.

With your invoicing tool, you can print out reports based on the dates you select or by client. It is important to have these numbers in front of you so you can measure your performance and see how far off you are from hitting your income goals. Then use these reports to adjust your Sales and Marketing strategies.

A good project management tool can also supply valuable data to understand the actual success from a profit standpoint. Time and resources are the key elements to determine the profitability of a project. It can be very useful to analyze which projects drive more revenue so you can go after more of those kind as well as figure out how to increase profitability on the more complex projects.

If you follow these five steps, you will be headed towards healthy profitability. Many businesses fail because they skip important steps or fail at one of them mentioned in this article. There are too many fake success stories online that give the impression a person achieved overnight success. These stories have the goal to impress and get shared. Sadly, it is just sensation, not fact-based. The reality is that to be a successful entrepreneur, you need a plan. The behind-the-scenes truth is less glamorous and more routine and trial-and-error.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

Do you want to measure how your business is doing? Take my free brand audit to assess how you measure up. It is all in the planning. Happy fishing!

Thank you for taking the time to read this newsletter. It is an honor to be able to serve tips to amazing people like you. For questions, please reach out to me via Linkedin or Instagram DMs.

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