I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who owns his own ground care business. He is very busy at this time of year with grass and hedge cutting contracts.

We were discussing ways that he could grow and develop his business and we identified a number of areas where he could get a lot of growth in his business.

However we also identified that he is personally doing just about everything in the business himself. From bookkeeping, invoicing, tendering for work and actually doing the ground maintenance he is doing it all.

In doing so he is making more money than he has ever done, but at what price? He is in a very precarious position, if he injures himself or gets sick his business will fold with him.

Do you fall into this trap like other business owners thinking that you have to do everything yourself?

Perhaps you feel that outside help is expensive or won’t do as good a job as you would. In the long run if you want a real business and not just a Job you need to start delegating some of the lower value tasks in your business.
 
This may mean reducing your income slightly in the short term but getting the right systems and processes in place is what is going to allow you to make the jump to a much bigger business in the future. Kind of like short term pain for long term gain.

If you would like us to assess your business and help you determine how you can make more money whilst doing less of the donkey work yourself then please contact us now.

If you need to check whether a VAT number that has been provided to you is genuine then you can very quickly chek it using this Free handy online tool:

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/vieshome.do?selectedLanguage=EN

By now just about every business owner should be aware of the opportunity to promote their business using search engine pay per click advertising. Of these by far the largest and well known is the Adwords service from Google.

Knowing about it is one thing actually doing it is another, and doing it really well is a whole different ball game. All too often I see pay per click advertisers pretty much throwing away good money. They may be feeling good about having gotten themselves set up with pay per click but they should have taken the time to really master the service.

The number one mistake I see people making is having their pay per click adverts simply linking to the homepage of their website. Google provides so much analytical information that doing this is a real waste of money. To really maximise your chances of getting a good return on investment you need to design specific targetted pages which match very closely with what your target market are searching for.

For example lets say that you own a DIY hardware shop and one of the things you do is sell drills. A lot of business owners would make the mistake of setting up an adwords campaign using keywords such as “drills”, “drilling” etc and then linking the advert to the main homepage of their website.

This is the equivalent of someone coming into the DIY shop,asking if you sell drills and telling them to go back to the front of the store and find it themselves. You wouldn’t do it offline so why do it online? What you would do would be to at least take them to the power tool section or better still to the drill subsection.

You should therefore do the same on the web. If someone has searched for a specific term then the closer the page you send them to matches their search criteria the greater the chances of converting them will be. So in this instance you would have a specific page (known as a landing page) which would give full details on drills and which would keep the tight focus that they had in their original search.

Knowing exactly what keywords that people have searched on to then click on your pay per click adverts is one of the most helpful pieces of information you could ever hope to know when marketing your business online. Don’t waste the opportunity by sending your customers back to the front door!

I am starting “Matt Eve’s Grow Your Business Network” we will be meeting in Maynooth, Co. Kildare every month starting on Wed 27th Feb at 8pm. You can find more details at http://smallbiz.meetup.com/863/
 
Each month I will be covering a topic about marketing or business growth and discuss ways you can use this in your business. There will be a nominal charge of €15 per head to cover our costs.
 
If you are interested please RSVP at http://smallbiz.meetup.com/863/

I wish you and your family all the best for the New Year!

I hope you have made a resolution to make things happen this year!

I would strongly suggest you,

1) Set Your Goal,
2) Put a time frame on it,
3) Make a list of what you need to do to accomplish it
4) Make a plan
5) Take Action!

This is THE receipe for success!

If you would like some help taking your business to the next level this year please contact us now on 01 4433830.

Are you thinking about starting your own business?

If so you are in good company. In 2006 there were almost 20,000 new companies started in Ireland, and many more smaller sole traders and partnerships. All businesses have one thing in common, you need the germ of an idea and then a plan to execute it.

Business Opportunities Ireland provides ideas and insights into all sorts of business ideas and opportunities.

If you are considering starting your own business but not sure exactly which business to start you might be interested to know that we have just launched a new website which will give lots of tips and ideas . You can find the site here Business Opportunities Ireland

Enjoy!

I’m always interested in trying out new technology that can make my life easier. Having never learned to type properly, other than using one finger, I often find that my brain is going faster than I can type!

I’m now trying out a new speech recognition software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, it allows you to dictate what you want to say into a microphone, and then miraculously, it appears on screen. I’m hoping that I can use it in my business to speed up posting on this blog and creating articles, products and also for letter writing and other day to day things that I would normally type.

I’m very proud of myself, for the last 8 weeks or so I have managed to go to the gym twice a week. It was painful at first and I tried to come up with excuses not to do it. Now I feel much better and actually can’t wait until it is a ‘gym day’.

But what does this have to do with business growth and marketing? Well apart from giving me energy to get things done it occurred to me there are a lot of similarities with the results you get from taking regular exercise as there are with doing regular marketing.

I think it is human nature for us to want things and want them now. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can achieve long term.

Take a look at any gym in the first 2 or 3 weeks of January and you will see it is a hive of activity. Everyone is fresh with the new years resolutions and good intentions. People set themselves impossible goals of training for 1.5 hours per session 3 times a week. very quickly it all becomes too much and they give up too soon not getting to see any results.

The best approach, and the one I am taking with the gym, is to go only twice a week for 30 minutes at a time. This is enough time to give me an effective workout, but not so long that it takes a big chunk out of my day.

The same goes with marketing. If you try and do too much in one go it becomes overwhelming and you end up giving up, before achieving any real results. Instead you need to just do a little on a regular basis.

What if you were to send out 20 sales letters every day? Once the letter is written, printing and putting 20 into envelopes each day isn’t going to take any longer than 30 minutes. If you did this for a year then that could be 5000 letters out there helping promote your services. A 1% response would give you 50 new customers over the year. Customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Getting fit and keeping in shape doesn’t have to be difficult, neither does steadily growing your business. What we all struggle with is being consistent. But little and often is going to leave you both fitter and better off.

I was at the farmers market last week at the Liffey Valley shopping centre and as we passed by the fruit and vegetable stall the owner was offering everyone within ear shot free samples of fruit slices. We were lured over and before we know it we had purchased €15 worth of fruit that we had not originally set out to buy!

This reminded me of the power of offering a free sample, which works on an number of different levels. First of all the law of reciprocity where we tend to feel obligated to someone once they have given something to us.

Secondly by allowing your prospects to try your products or services for nothing you are eliminating the uncertainty and risk of them trying you out, which means one less barrier to them becoming your customer.

Finally by offering a free sample this allows you to engage with your customers and determine exactly what they might need so that you can help them.

What free sample can you give your prospective customers?

At the beginning of this year we couldn’t decide whether to move house or simply convert the attic. With two young children we needed more space. In the end we decided to apply for planning permission for the loft conversion (we needed to change the roof line to make it viable so needed permission) so that if we decided to stay then we had it or if we moved then it was something extra of value to offer a prospective purchaser.

In the end we decided to move but something interesting happened when we got our planning permission approved.

I started to receive direct mail in the post from builders and engineering companies offering their services. As a marketing expert I was pleased to see that these companies had taken the initiative to at least send me something, this puts them well ahead of the pack compared with most business owners. However in every single case each of these companies only ever sent one mailing piece. There was no multi step marketing campaign and no follow up by phone or anything.

I thought that this was disappointing, after all they had gone to the trouble of adding me to the list and sending me one piece. Clearly they don’t know that it takes on average 7 contacts between a business and a prospect before they agree to do business. How much more effort would it have taken to send out a sequence of mail pieces and perhaps follow up with a phone call.

Also most of the mailing pieces were weak with no real offer than call us for a free quote, no reason why I should pick them, and no testimonials, guarantee or other reason to compel me to call them.

Most of the companies concerned were offering services that would generate thousands of Euro worth of business but hadn’t bothered to spend anything more than what looked like 30 mins to knock up a basic letter and sometimes a brochure. If you have gone to the trouble of finding a lead then why not go the extra mile and craft a really good sales piece and multi step follow up campaign?