For business clients looking for ways to boost their profit, I use a strategy that brings quick results. This strategy consists of three key elements:
- Who are your best customers?
- What are your best sellers?
- What are the market growth prospects for the coming 3–5 years?
The #1 thing you need to be able to answer this question is data.
This includes sales records and information about customers.
Who are your customers?
Using this business owner’s sales records, we determined that he has a wide variety of customers. They include non-profit organisations, schools, private individuals, and government agencies.
We divided his customers into four categories:
- VIP
- Great
- Good
- Not so good
This showed us what kind of customers to focus on.
Then we looked at why these customers choose this business.
The business provides web-based services. His downtime is 0%, meaning that his customers can always depend on this particular service being available.
Customers prefer to do business with him because he is reliable. They are also willing to pay a higher price because reliability is very important to them.
One of the main reasons why this business is successful is because it delivers consistent quality.
What are your best sellers?
We also used his sales records to determine which products and services were the highest performers.
Note that this is not just based on sales. Best sellers are usually the products that contribute the highest amount to your profit. To determine this, we looked at his profit margins and sales lead time.
From this, we selected those products and services that made the highest contribution to his profit.
Market growth prospects
In developing countries, it can be difficult to find trusted information about growth prospects. Sometimes, the national Chamber of Commerce or a ministry collects this information.
But even without official data, most business owners will be able to sense how the market is doing.
Business owners often have an intuitive sense about market developments.
For this company, the business owner was able to collect some official data and add his own insights so that we could determine which parts of the market had the best growth prospects.
The strategy to double profit in 6 months
We then put together all the information to develop a customised business strategy that would enable him to double his profits quickly.
We also created a marketing action plan, using what we had learned from his business data:
- Focus on a particular kind of customer
- Focus on the reasons this customer chooses this business
- Make them an offer they can’t refuse
The results
Today, less than six months after he contacted me, this entrepreneur is seeing a surge of new customers, including from geographical areas that he had never before considered.
He has been able to increase his profits by almost 15% and is expecting to see an increase of almost 40% before the end of this year.
While he may not be able to double his profit in 6 months’ time, his profit is steadily increasing with little additional effort. He is just listening closely to what his business is telling him.
He has now started expanding his business so that he can take on more customers. He has also been able to invest in additional services to add to what he is already offering.
As a result, his business is started to once again get ahead of the competitors.
Moral of the story
It is possible to double your profit, even within 6 months. But you need to know where to look and what to do. Your business already holds all the information that you need to increase profits and grow your business along the path of least resistance.
