First Step Marketing

How will you know if your business is growing not only at a pace you can handle but at a reasonable pace that will let you reach the goals you’ve set for yourself?

Easy. Check in with your business plan at least once or twice a month to see that you are on track with the goals and projects that you have set for the month, and to alert you to upcoming tasks for which you will have to prepare. Remember, you developed and selected each step of your business plan as a way to grow your business as each step is accomplished. So if one project is taking more time than you had planned, it may throw the rest of your growth timeline off kilter.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Keep in mind that you developed and wrote your business plan before you had a clue about the demands your business would place on you once you were up and running. The tendency to strive for a lot more than can be handled is a common occupational hazard of new entrepreneurs.

Watch the Numbers

That’s why it’s important to compare your sales figures and other benchmarks with the projections in your business plan. If you discover that you are consistently pulling in less revenue than you had projected, but are still able to cover your expenses, don’t be too hard on yourself; you’re obviously doing fine. Once you see that your early projections may have been overly optimistic, you may want to revamp some of the other projects you have scheduled for the rest of your first year in business. An abundance of enthusiasm is normal when you first start to plan your own business. However, now that you have a better idea of what it’s really like and how much you’re realistically able to accomplish in the course of one day, you should feel okay about adjusting your plans, since your business may have grown so quickly that you barely have time to take care of the customers you currently have, not to mention adding even more to your workload. After all, they haven’t been able to clone humans . . . yet.

Who’s Buying?

Another thing to watch for is where the majority of your sales are coming from. When you first started to plan your business, perhaps you thought you would tailor one service to four distinct groups of people. But now that you’ve been in business for several months, you find that more than half of your sales are derived from only one group.

There are several possible reasons for this. Perhaps it’s the time of year in that particular industry when people are particularly alert to the product or service you offer, and so have noticed your ads and brochures more than your other targeted groups. Or it may be due to the fact that the people in this group are more closely knit than the others and word of mouth travels faster than lightning.

Or, face it, it could be that this group of customers were your best bet all along, something that you are only discovering after an initial period of trial and error. In any case, there are several things you can do. One is to continue marketing equally to all four groups, and hope that the other three just need more time to respond than the first. Or you can step up advertising campaign to the other three groups, figuring that perhaps they just need more of a nudge.

Or if you’re getting as much business as you can handle from the group that’s responding, you may want to either widen your reach of marketing to more people who fall under the same umbrella, or postpone future marketing to this market and steer the earmarked funds toward a totally new group of customers.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Advertising, Business Plans, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.