Business Planning

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Finding Acres Of Diamonds By Marketing In Your Own Backyard

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Acres of Diamonds is an old story of an African farmer who sold his farm and wandered the countryside searching for diamonds. It later turned out that the land that he sold was full of diamonds and eventually became the site of a large mine.

Similarly, many businesses seek their customers far afield when they might find acres of diamonds in their own backyard. Despite globalization and the trend towards working at greater distances, it’s worth taking a serious look at promoting your business in your local area. There are advantages to finding new customers close to home - the cost of communicating with and meeting these customers will be lower. By working with local customers you will lower your environmental impact by not having to travel so far for meetings and making deliveries.

Here are six ways you can expand your local market with minimal cost.

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Ten Cash Flow Tips

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1. Know your business’ balance sheet thoroughly.

This may sound obvious, but, as your accountant can confirm, many business people don’t know how cash flow works and its significance to keeping their operation afloat. Many owners focus on their business’ profit and loss statement alone. It’s a potentially fatal mistake because healthy profits can mask an impending cash flow crisis. Profit and loss statements don’t usually contain the information required to make an adequate cash flow projection. For that, you’re going to need a structured balance sheet that includes all the influencing factors including debts, interest payments, inventory and so on. This is the basis for your cash flow projection which represents an “educated guess” at the likely incomings and outgoings over the period of time you have selected to map out.

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Cash Flow Quickeners

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Cash flow is often called "the lifeblood of a business," and for several good reasons. But the flow of cash into most businesses is uneven and there can be times when a constrained cash flow creates serious problems, even if the long term situation is positive.

There are, however, ways to improve the cash flow of any small business and remove some of the worries about bills not being paid or not having enough on hand to pay wages. These mainly involve no more than adjustments to what you're already doing and so aren't difficult to implement.

Keep inventories as low as possible

Inventories are expensive in many ways. There's the interest paid on money borrowed to acquire items that are awaiting sale. There are also the costs for storage space and handling, as well as insurance expenses and the "opportunity cost" of what money spent on inventory could be earning elsewhere. In some cases, inventories are so badly managed that much of the material becomes obsolete before it can be sold.

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Why More Businesses Are Turning To Online Training

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As more people turn to the internet for news, entertainment and social interaction, online training, also known as e-learning, is being chosen by more businesses to deliver the knowledge their employees need to achieve organizational goals. With many benefits to both a business and its employees, it’s easy to understand why e-learning continues to grow in popularity.

Benefits to the organization

Lower cost. Research has shown that e-learning is 40-60% less expensive than classroom learning. When employees learn online there are no instructor fees, room costs, and travel and meal expenses. For general knowledge, there are many “off-the-shelf” solutions that are very cost-effective, while customized e-learning programs are often more economical than in-class training.

Consistency. For companies with many locations, employees may receive inconsistent training content delivered with variable effectiveness depending on their particular instructor’s knowledge, interests and capabilities. The standardization of e-learning alleviates these issues.

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Green Apple

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For 20 years now, Apple has blazed a reputation for stylish design and innovative products, creating a near-cult following among fans. Apple's computers appeal to the artists and designers who set so many of today's trends. Their iPod has helped change how the world listens to music. Their iPad has made online content available nearly anywhere. And their iPhone is helping change the way we communicate with friends, family, and colleagues. (Just a few years ago, your mother-in-law didn't have a cell phone. Now she sends text messages and "checks in" on Facebook.)

Apple may be the most successful company on earth. At one point last year, they had more cash on hand ($76.2 billion) than the United States government ($73.8 billion). And Apple is currently the most valuable company on the planet, with a "market cap" (total value of tradable shares) that topped $590 billion dollars on April 10. (That's right . . . those iTunes you casually download for a buck each have created a company worth over half a trillion dollars.) In fact, Apple's current market cap is more than the gross domestic products of Iraq, North Korea, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and New Zealand — combined.

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Keep Your Sales Pipeline Flowing

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Business owners spend a great deal of time and money marketing to many, in the hope of attracting the few to their business. This process can be likened to a pipeline with a wide mouth narrowing as it goes along. The wide mouth represents the number of prospects you need to get interested in your product, so as to end up with enough conversions to hit your sales targets – the (much) narrower end of the pipeline. If the pipeline isn’t constantly topped up with new prospects who are then moved through it to be converted into customers, sales become uneven, income is inconsistent, and running the business becomes crisis prone.

Classify and monitor prospects

The stages in a sales pipeline can be different from business to business, and particularly between business-to-business (B2B) and business=to-consumer (B2C) type businesses, but there are some essential similarities. In all businesses there is a need to generate inquiries. The technique may be through advertising, shopfront display, cold calling, word of mouth or networking.