Insights, Ideas, Results
If you are looking for a good business idea that you could set up with reasonably little time and effort, a janitorial supply business could be a great option. Janitorial supplies will always be in demand, no matter what happens to the economy. People will need to clean their homes and offices whether they like it or not.
So how could you go about setting up your own janitorial supply business? Here are a few things to consider.
Get your salon equipment right, and the rest will follow. Of course, all stylists are looking to strike a balance between low cost salon equipment and high end products, but there doesn’t necessarily need to be a trade-off between the two.
You can save money and retain your favourite supplies – it’s possible! But it’s also possible to get creative with your boutique’s budget. Read on for more information on how to revitalise your salon for next-to-nothing.
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If the economic downturn of the last few years has taught anything to business owners it is to stay flexible and nimble. This applies to large corporations, but it has been even more critical for small business owners. After all, small businesses are working on a shoestring budget and do not have much room for error. I discussed the actions small business owners can take to become flexible in earlier post. I also showed a framework that can help you reduce costs in a systematic fashion. It involves looking at various costs and eliminate, rent, share and optimize them in that order.
For small business owners one of the biggest costs and impediments to being flexible is the real estate expense – either owned or leased. Lately, some entrepreneurs have come up with novel approach to help you reduce this cost, while still letting you keep the appearance of having full service office. Let’s look at how it works and what you can gain from it.
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What small business owners in his right mind would not treat his customers well if that leads to business growth. Yet there is no shortage of companies, large and small, that fail to take care of this basic fact resulting in disastrous results. Try calling customer center of your telephone company and see how long you have to wait before being able to talk to someone. Or go to a mall and study look at the expressions of customer service reps when talking to customers. How come very few of them bother to smile?
So, why is it important to treat customers properly?
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What is the best way to get rid of products that are not selling well? You can reduce the price to generate more demand. But there is a way better way to manage it. It is known as scarcity principle and it works by making customers believe that the item will not be available if they wait longer. The technique works because of human psychology that makes people want something more when they are told they cannot have it. Fear of losing out on something can be a powerful motivator.
You don’t have to use this principle to sell only slow moving items. You can incorporate it in the normal marketing practice to increase the sales of regular products. If you look around you will notice that many businesses are already using this principle in various forms. QVC always shows how many items are left when promoting their products on television. The last few items are always sold very quickly. When a sales person tells us that the item is out of stock, but he can probably find it at another store your reaction will always be to order it so as not to miss out from that store too.
There are several approaches you can take to implement this scarcity principle in practice as shown below:
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In the previous post we discussed how you can charge premium price without losing sales and still have customers love your products. No one does this as well as Apple, the most valuable company in the world by market value. Apple never competes on equal playing field with their competitors. They write their own rules and come up with innovative products that no one has dreamed off year after year. Their slogan explains how they have been able do this – Think Different! As a result Apple has been able to charge premium price for all its products and enjoy remarkable sales growth and margin for a long time.
What is their secret sauce? In this post we attempt to decipher their strategy by understanding how they apply the rules of premium pricing we described in the earlier post.
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Do you want to increase prices for your products without getting a hit on your sales? How about customers thanking you for charging them higher price? You probably think we have lost our minds, but trust us; it is possible do just that! We will show you how in this post.
It seems counter-intuitive to say that you will be able to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales while at the same charging more. Conventional wisdom says that if you are not doing well lower the price and customers will flock to your business. As natural as it seems, this is simply not true. Competing on price is not a sound business strategy for small business owners as explained in the previous post.
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In the previous post we discussed how you can find the “right” customers for your business. By segmenting your customers based on their needs you can not only identify the customers that best fit the value your business provides, but also it provides you the action plan to target those customers. This is one, and most important, reason why we prefer to segment and target customer based on their needs. Once you have identified the “right” customer base you don’t need to spend extra effort to attract them to your business.
So, how do you go about finding the customer needs? While there are several approaches you can take to find out what customers are looking for, you can start with a set of attributes that are universally valued by various customer segments. These attributes give you a good starting point towards the path of finding right customer base.
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One of the biggest mistakes you can make as small business owners is try to serve all customers who walk in to your business equally. We showed in an earlier post that not all customers are created equal. It is your responsibility to find the customers that are “right” for your business. Many business owners, however, struggle to find these “right” customers. They either go about finding them in an ad-hoc fashion or not worry about it at all. This could be a mistake.
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For small business owners dealing with social media is equivalent to a relationship with a spouse or girlfriend. You cannot live without it nor can you (sometimes) live with it! Just like the other relationship, you still have to deal with the situation, whether you like it or not. Even if you do not want actively use social media for business marketing, you have to stay engaged to make sure your business image is not being tarnished, which can hurt your business.
You can overcome your social media fears with the 3-step approach we described earlier. We also showed best practices you can use to get the most out of social media. In this post we will show how you can deal with negative comments customers may post about your business on social media.
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