Building a Successful Business Requires a Plan

Builder business owners need three things to draft a blueprint for their companies

This article in completeness is one that was written for Colorado Builder and is featured in their April 10, 2020 online issue. See Colorado Builder for more.

In order to build a business that is highly successful and profitable, you need to develop a business blueprint. As with most home blueprints, there are three major considerations that must be addressed to create that dream home. There’s the foundation upon which the home will be built; the structure, such as the walls and roof; and the basic components that complete the structure, such as plumbing, wiring and so on.

Three Things Required for Success:

A business is no different. There are three factors that every business must have to attain success. The business must be unique (foundation), it must offer value to prospects and clients (structure), and it must be able to communicate that it’s unique and offers value (components).

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People want to buy products or services that meet their unique wants, but they will only buy it from you if you offer them the most value. If you aren’t unique, and you don’t offer extraordinary value, then you’re forced to compete solely on price.

Price, Quality and Service

When you consider what you are offering your clients, think of a triangle. On each corner, list one of the three values: price, quality and service. You can offer two, but not three. You can offer a low price and good service, but you are not going to have high quality. You can have great quality and service, but you are not going to have a low price. There is a place for everything, but just make sure that what you’re offering matches what your ideal customer is wanting. Once you determine what it is you offer, then you can create your value proposition.

Building a highly successful business takes consistent and concerted effort on the part of the business owner. Ask yourself:

• Do you know specifically what your prospects want from your business?
• How do you properly innovate your business?
• Will your proposed innovations produce a positive return on investment (ROI)?
• If you don’t innovate and are forced to forever compete on price, what will be the future costs to your business?

The problem that most small business owners have is they don’t understand how to make their business unique, create extraordinary value or properly communicate their message to their prospects. Even if they think they know how to communicate the message to their prospects, they don’t know how to measure the effectiveness of their messages.

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Successful businesses have systems in place.

Business owners who grow successful businesses have systems in place. They are very deliberate in creating a business that’s unique, while offering extraordinary value and effectively communicating that message to their prospects. Then it just comes down to numbers. In the next article, we will talk more about those numbers and how to track them.

Susan Raisanen is president of Profit Finder Pro, a CRM software provider serving small businesses. She can be reached at susan@profitfinderpro.com or 800-972-6952.