How often do you look at what your business does?  This might sound like a bizarre question for many business owners. You wake up every day and go to work in your business and do what you did the day before, the week before, and the months before or, maybe even years before that.

However, can you do things differently in your business that would improve it and make you more money?  Maybe you can introduce a new product or service or reach out to a new customer segment that didn’t exist 3 or 12 months ago due to changes in your segment.

Maybe you have new competitors that have entered your space and are eating away at your sales.  The simple solution for many business owners is to reduce prices for your goods or services. However, unless you reduce your business expenses in line with any reduction in your selling prices, your profits will decrease.

In this day and age, market shifts are happening faster every day, and even the largest companies get caught flat footed. Whatever happened to Nokia?  One of the largest Mobile manufactures and now it’s virtually non-existent. How did that happen? Could that happen to your business?

Coca-Cola has introduced a new Coca-Cola product which has zero sugar. Why? Because consumer habits have changed. People are looking at ways to reduce their sugar intake. Even though Coca-Cola has Coke Zero and Diet Coke, Coca-Cola found out that only 1 in 2 consumers realised that Coke Zero had no sugar.

Like Coca-Cola, by simply taking some time out to look at your business along with your market segment, which includes your customers and competitors, you will be able to determine what changes, if any, you need to make. It might be that everything is fine, and you keep going—great! At least you have taken the time to look.

Set aside a day, or half a day, away from your place of work with a pen and paper and write down what changes you would like to make to your business. If you have staff, invite them to join you.  Often your staff will have great ideas on how to improve the business but they might be too timid to let you know or feel it isn’t their place to make suggestions. They are on the front line and see and hear a lot of things you don’t even know about.

If you get so busy running your business that you never take time to actually review what your business is doing, you may wake up someday and wonder why you no longer have a business.

Feel free to drop me an email with any questions at julian@julianwhite.com.au