Low cost business building ideas

Quick LOW COST Business Building Ideas
Here are some quick ideas on building your business. Are you working on these things?

1. Delight Your Customers - and Treat the Best Ones Very Well
With customer visit cycles slowing down and average ticket amounts dropping it is
critical to get the most out of every customer. Your best new customer is your present customer.

"Don't measure 'Are you (the customer) happy?'" Ask 'Did we exceed your
expectations?' When you move that number, business will come flowing in," said Doug
Hall, former Procter & Gamble marketing whiz, professional "idea man," and author of
Jump Start Your Business Brain. Run your SMS Customer ranking report for the top 2
pages of customers. What have you done for them lately? Run the list by service
provider and flag those customers on their work tickets (use the card that is set to always print).

Steven S. Little, who has been president of three fast-growth companies, said retaining customers is key to building a business. Think about how much you can improve your bottom line by hanging onto your customers for longer. Run your SMS Retention Report by employee and see who your top employees are. What do they do differently to create the increased retention? How can you systemize the things they are doing to improve everyone’s retention?

Instead of offering a rebate to everyone when you're faced with excess inventory, offer a rebate only to your best customers, suggested James Taylor, former head of global marketing for Gateway 2000 and author of The Visionary's Handbook.

2. Hold onto Great Employees
The strongest salons and spas are the ones that cultivate long term employees. Build a strong business by keeping your best staff members for as long as possible (I know they don’t stay for ever but let’s keep them as long as we can). Why not do lunch – it works in other industries! Executive lunches have been a huge success at BORN, a Minnesota based IT consulting firm that has been on the Inc 500list five times and has been named one of the nation's Best Places to Work by Fortune. Executives routinely have lunch with 10 to 15 employees so the employees can get to know company leaders and share their thoughts about the future of the company. Maybe you can’t have lunch with a dozen employees every week but how about taking your 6 best employees out to lunch? Pick one each week from your SMS Employee Ranking report and take them to lunch. Pick a restaurant whose owner is a customer of your salon/spa. You may even be able to barter the meal for a service. You can pick different criteria for the employee to take to lunch.

One week it might be the person on the SMS Ranking report with the highest average
ticket, the next week it may be the employee with the highest service sales, or most
requests, or highest retail. Pick a slow day each week to do the lunch and book the time out on both of your appointment books so it is a firm date and time.

3. Stimulate Your Brain
Read 50 magazines a month -- that's less than two a day -- and you'll start seeing the big trends that will affect your business in the future. Fashion and People Magazines count but also read Fortune, Inc., Forbes, and other business periodicals. (Newspapers and Web surfing count, too.) You're too busy? "Get over it," Subscribe to news services that automatically e-mail news to you. Log onto Forbes.com and Inc.com and sign up for their news services. Just reading the news and business ideas will help you to see trends in the business world that will impact your business.

4. Spell out the Benefits of Your Product or Service
Do you know your USPs and IO? Make a list of your USPs – Unique Selling Points and
always promote them. Make sure you have a IO – Irresistible Offer that creates a phone call when a prospective customer hears about the offer. Log onto www.mikal.com and look at our presentations section. You will see our marketing ideas that will give you ideas on creating your USPs and IO. In advertisements, don't list the features of your product or service. List the benefits - but not too many -- and give your customers a reason to believe you. Then tell them what dramatic difference your product or service can make.

Customers love news and hope, all of the money is in uniqueness. Make sure your staff can rattle off your USPs at the drop of a hat. Educate your customers on all the things that make there visit to your salon/spa unique!

5. Join Forces for Mutual Benefit
Get connected. Barter is back! Get into your local Chamber, Womens Club and PTA.
Find out who is in each organization and who you can align with. Forming alliances is
an increasingly important way to accelerate growth, access new competencies, and enter new markets, according to Marc S. Margulis, managing director of the corporate alliances group at an investment banking services firm. Can you believe they have professionals to manage this concept at large companies? He says "The question is no longer, 'Should I consider an alliance?' Now the questions are much more interesting than that. They include, 'What form should the alliance take?' and 'How do I find the right partner?'"

Do choose your partner carefully because Inc 500 CEOs surveyed about failed alliances
said their biggest mistake was choosing the first partner who came along. "Dating is the best way to find out who's the best partner," Margulis said.

6. Get Back to the Future
"Ask yourself at the beginning of every week, 'What can I do that will matter three years from now?' "That's the suggestion of Mark Helow, founder of The CEO Project. After conducting 200 interviews of CEOs of successful companies, including some Inc 500 and Fortune 500 companies, he concluded that too many CEOs spend most of their time working "in" the business, rather than spending time on big-picture issues.
Spend 30 to 60 minutes a week with your staff talking about plans for 2012 and 2013.

Talk about your plans at every staff meeting. Get their input. Get your best customer’s input (see #1 above).

7. Appreciate the Power -- and Profits -- in Information
Look through the records you have on old customers and come up with one great idea for each of them. Run the SMS Customer Report based on customers with Greater than Tne visits that have not been back in the last 12 months (last visit date before 12 months ago).

Do the same for your top 40 customers by running the SMS Customer Ranking report for
one page. It's an easier way to get new business than looking for new customers.
Don't just mine your data -- market it, too. How valuable is your information? If you have a landscaping business, you probably know which trees and shrubs grow best in different environments. Sell that information to your suppliers and sell it to potential customers who are looking for landscaping ideas. Some companies have spun off information businesses that have become orders of magnitude bigger than the original business.

8. Hire the Right People
Most of our employee problems come from not hiring right. If you hire an unmotivated
or lazy or sickly or unlucky or low self esteem person you will never be able to change them. Southwest Airlines tests job applicants' knowledge of the company and looks for people who are compassionate and able to laugh at themselves, said Anastasia Albanese- O'Neill, the company's district manager for Southern California. In 2000, the company reviewed 216,000 resumes and hired about 5,000 employees. Group interviews help speed the winnowing process and provide a more candid look at applicants than the traditional one-on-one job interview. Frequent fliers participate in the group interviews.

After all, they know what they're looking for in a new employee, Albanese-O'Neill said. One more bit of advice: "It's 10 times better to wait to hire the right person," she said.

Pick your best employees (that means the ones who are on time, have high retention,
dress appropriately, don’t get sick, and support the company policy) and have them take the Meyer Briggs Personality Profile. Test your applicants and hire the ones that have scores most like your best employees. You can take the test by doing a search on the Internet for Meyer Briggs and select one of the free tests. You can even save some of the programs as a favorite on your computer and mark it for Work Off Line then you can use the test on that computer any time you want!

9. Generate Free -- and Fun -- Marketing
Set yourself apart from the competition with creative low-budget marketing. Use event
marketing, ask your staff for ideas and have them run with the concept. Have a sports
night for men on Monday nights in the fall and have football on 2 or 3 tv sets, do a
referral contest (call MIKAL at 513-528-5100 for a FREE 8 page plan on how to do the
referral contest), Do a product of the month and send postcards using SMS to everyone
who bought that product in the last 3 months. Get your distributors involved. Have a
model night each month and have each stylist do a model. Take before and after pictures and make up a book for the waiting area. Albanese-O'Neill suggested. Among
Southwest Airline's most successful efforts: an Elvis impersonator contest when it
introduced service to Las Vegas, and an arm wrestling contest between CEO Herb
Kelleher and the CEO of another aviation company with the same slogan, "Just plane
smart." The winner got to keep the slogan.

10. Hike Your Prices -- for Good Reason
Are your sales falling? Don't even think about lowering your prices! Figure out how you can provide more value - and double or triple your prices. Keep working on your USPs and WOW your customers. Add value with everything you do. Keep the lower (old)
prices on your slowest days of the week to increase sales on those days.
Want more ideas? Call us today at 513-528-5100

Check out our web site www.mikal.com and look at the presentations and articles!
Come to our classes at the shows (see our schedule on the web) or at our training center in beautiful Cincinnati Ohio – the Queen City!