When you enter a big shopping mall you have never been to, what is the first thing you should look for? A Mall directory…and then you look for… an X marking ‘you are here’. Once you find that, you look to see what in the mall interests you and you plan your journey.
Ahh.. the concept of a mall. You have the big ‘anchor’ stores which hopefully attracts the customers to the mall with the big signs on the outside leading into the mall. Then you have all these other smaller stores that the customer sees along the path to the big anchor stores. The purpose of those small stores is to entice the potential customer to enter the store to purchase something they either need, want or something that catches their eyes that they have never seen before.
Now supposed the picture looked different. This time, the anchor stores are your professional services you offer to your customers. The smaller stores are any offers, resources, or other complimentary services you have. And the ‘X’ is your current position as a business owner.
Do you know where you are right now?
Many times, small business owners do not have a firm grasp of where they are. Whether it’s their business data, their current strategies or their current systems. They do not know the complete picture of where they are.
If you don’t know where you are, how can you expect to get to where you are going?
Here are 3 areas to help you find out your current situation:
1. Your current data
There is nothing like your current data in your business to find where you are. The problem is most business owners do not look at the complete picture. I talk about this all the time. Your data is the dns of your business and it tells a very vivid story. The question is do you have the complete story. You want to look at all the data your business is collecting (or should collect). Look in the areas of Financial, Leads, Sales, Marketing, Website, Social Media, Clients, Internal Systems.
This is not for the faint of heart. The more digging that occurs here, the better picture you have. No matter what the picture looks like, you want to have a clear understanding of where you are.
Do not skip over this section or do a shallow dive… the person who suffers the most from not doing this step is the business owner!
If you don’t have the time to do this part, get someone to do it for you. Make sure the person who is doing this knows how to do it and can give you results along with a clear picture of your data and the analytical capability of knowing the story it is telling you and can show this easily to you.
2. Your current offers
Now that you know where you are…where do you want to go? Look at your mall directory and look what you current offer to your clients.
Ask yourself:
- How good is your business at achieving the results for your clients?
- Are the results meaningful to your clients?
- Do you provide value?
- What makes your company unique?
- Are your clients happy?
- How often do you get referrals or testimonials from your clients?
- Are you collecting the data to show the results of all these questions?
3. Your current systems and strategies
Are your current systems and strategies supporting your data and your offers? Are they going in the same direction or is one falling short of the other?
Once you complete these 3 areas, you will have a firm knowledge of where you are. Now you have a firm picture to ask yourself:
- What offers are working and not working?
- Do I need more services or do I need less?
- How can I bring more value to my clients?
- How can my business be more unique in our services and results?
- Are the business goals in line with where I want to go as a business owner?
- What new strategies need to be implemented?
What new systems need to be implemented? You can answer these questions better now that you know the ‘X’ in the mall.
If you want to see more information or potential next steps, click here.
