The 4 Action Principles of Sustained Business Success
September 30th, 2021 // 11:06 am @ Scott Manning
There is nothing that attributes towards the long-term success of your business more so than your commitment to these four key areas…
Acquiring new customers.
Keeping existing customers.
Selling as a priority.
And looking for new opportunity.
Yes, I know this sounds like common sense. But you’d be surprised how many business owners waste so much of their time doing anything that doesn’t fit into these four areas.
Certainly, depending on the organization type, size, objective, and industry, I could throw another item in there about taking care of your people, team, culture, organizational development.
That would be true, none the less that ultimately ties back to these four items because I have seen a lot of organizations have amazing cultures where everyone is happy but the organization is stagnant and isn’t making any money.
They’ve taken their eye off the ball and instead of being focused on the things that matter they’ve replaced it with trying to keep everyone happy whose getting paid instead of everyone happy who’s paying (i.e. the customer).
Our theme last week was stay hungry, focused, and humble.
The most important business strategies of them all are to stay hungry for new growth, profit, and opportunity.
Stay focused on new customers, existing customers, and increasing value.
And finally, always remain humble in what you do and how you operate your business meaning everything from the CEO shouldn’t walk by trash on the floor or be unwillingly to hear feedback from the trenches.
If you keep your edge on these three traits, then you will be amazed at the level of sustained success you will experience.
It is very easy to get consumed with all the negatives or setbacks or bright shiny objects or criticism or ‘putting out fires.’
Don’t. This is NOT your business. This is NOT what you are there to do.
You must have an organization that is fireproof.
What you focus on you get more of. You know that but do you operate and lead like that?
What you allow time for you will have more time for. You know that but do you take control over how your time is invested in your business and what is allowed into it?
If you are laser focused and undeterred by anything and anyone getting in the way of your objectives then you will have a business that is built to sustain growth over the long term.
When business owners take their eye off the ball they are often oblivious to decreasing customer flow or diminishing value or negative retention numbers – until it’s too late.
This is why I built an entire business management mentality around “future banking” for my Doctors in dentistry. It is all about how to create, on purpose, leveraged growth in their business that could grow by fifty percent or even double or triple (and do even more than that with profit) without increasing any other factors in time, overhead, effort, and people – all from executing a future focused, sustainable practice growth model.
If you know your numbers and you work the math problem of your business, you will find there’s no time for anything else.
Operate with the principle of “An object in motion stays in motion.” And the best part about it is you could take all the Newton’s Laws and apply them directly to your business.
Get it in motion on getting new customers, taking care of existing customers, increasing value, and taking advantage of new opportunity. You will build a business that will have sustained success and withstand any and all forces in the market place.
Let’s dive down into each of these quickly.
We’ll apply hungry, focused, and humble to the core four together.
Getting new customers is an obvious lifeblood of any business because it ultimately leads to one of the most common growth factors. It is, however, not the only way and definitely not the most important way to grow and expand your business – we cover those things here in this place we come together to work every week.
All that said, no business lasts without new customers. Here are some things to think about…
Stay hungry for the highest value customers and creating the best experience possible for these people; that matches with what they want and that takes control over making them better for you.
Stay focused on quality over quantity. They all aren’t created equal and you are the one who chooses the customers that you attract.
Stay humble in that your ego should only be tied to your customer results and the fact that they are voting with their dollars. If you aren’t getting the votes then you aren’t that good no matter how you feel about yourself or your business. Customers decide.
When it comes to taking care of existing customers this is really the magic of a great business organization and it’s one of the most powerful characteristics of a great business.
They prioritize and constantly reinvest in making the relationship better with existing customers and work on increasing their value in every way…to them and for you.
I know of very few businesses that work on this enough.
In every business those customers they already have is more by a multiple than those that they are getting in real time and their attention should be paid accordingly.
Stay hungry for new ways to grow your value with existing customers, retain them longer, make them happier, and worth more.
Stay focused on this area of your business development and be as deliberate as possible with it.
Stay humble in your approach; it’s not about your ego, it’s about their reality.
When a business starts to neglect getting new customers, it’s a business dying a slow death. When a business starts neglecting its existing customers, the death is swift.
Now when it comes to selling you would think that to be obvious because getting and keeping customers is by definition ‘selling’ but you’d be wrong. A whole lot of businesses confuse activity with accomplishment in this regard.
It’s very simple. Sales wins out. Ultimately nothing else matters if we aren’t generating revenue and profit.
A business can be very busy without making selling a priority. Soon enough, the harsh reality will reveal itself.
You want an organization that is hungry for the results selling produces, focused on selling as a priority, and humble in that selling is not beneath anyone.
The magic is of course not thinking about it in terms of dollars or transactions alone and instead tying it back to the people which is why this is the third core principle of sustainability, not the first or second. Without the first two you have no one to sell.
Businesses get focused on a lot of things that distract them from selling. And there’s nothing more humbling than revenue down and sales decreasing. That’s the truth telling, the score keeping of your business.
Finally, opportunity is both actual and conceptual in your business.
I’m the very first person to say ‘play your game’ and do not be a feather in the wind with your business from a vision perspective. You want to be rock solid on foundational beliefs and principles.
That said, I have never met a long-term sustainably successful business owner who was not always operating with their antennas up and receptive to new opportunities.
In fact, it’s very simple… if you don’t capture opportunity then someone else will. Opportunity waits for no one, as they say.
The best entrepreneurs are always hungry for new opportunities. They are always focused on what they can do more, better, faster that fits in with the first core principles. They are humble in that they are open minded to anyone and anything that might be beneficial to their business.
This could be the most important of all of the core principles of sustainability because this is what leads to breakthroughs, innovation, and profitable leverage that would otherwise have been missed.
There you go. Sustainable success in your business to stand the test of time and whatever comes your way.
There is a lot of noise out there and a lot of things, people, circumstances that make it easy to lose sight of what really matters.
At the end of the day and at the beginning of the day, business is not that difficult to figure out. It’s the discipline to stay focused, hungry, and humble on all the right things to build a healthy business on stable ground.
Now, ask yourself what are you doing to attract more customers, increase the value of existing customers, expand selling in all directions, and discover new opportunities for growth. With each one of these you are building your profitable future and sustainable business one action at a time.
Category : Blog
