Simon Paul Thurston

If there is one hot topic with business owners at the moment, its making a profit.

I am constantly stressing the important of profit and today I’ll give you some different strategies that you can use in order to create improved profits.

Some of the basic concepts are:

• Increasing the prices of the products and services that you sell
• Sell more during each transaction – up sell, down sell or cross sell
• Monitor cash flow via payments terms – both in and out
• Ensure you track every marketing strategy for effectiveness and ROI

Number one is often something that business owners fully believe that they CANNOT do. They seem to believe that increasing prices, particularly at the moment is commercial suicide.

WRONG!

Clearly there needs to be a valid reason for doing this and so it is all in the positioning. You need to build up the value proposition so that your clients appreciate that prices are going up, but that they are getting back an appreciable improvement in return.

I discuss this in more detail in my book, and will elaborate on this is a future post, but you’ll be surprised at just how easy it is to increase your prices if it is done correctly.

Your Customers Like You, So Give Them More Reason To Do So

Bundling products and services together is a proven and effective way to increase the transaction value for each client (although of course it will not work for every client), and the best bit is – its FREE.

If you were able to up sell, down sell or cross sell to only ten per cent of your current clients, just imagine the effect that would have on your bottom line. And as these are already clients of yours, it has cost you ZERO marketing cost to gain more revenue.

The Life Blood Of Any Business

Ensuring that your cash flow of your business is healthy is absolutely critical to the success of it.

And this means watching what comes in, as well as what goes out. How many of your clients are on 90 day terms? Even if you got them down to 60 days this would have a positive effect on your business.

And its the same with payments going out. Can you negotiate increasing any 30 day terms to 60 days? Once again, the difference that this can make is huge.

What You Track You Can Improve – Or Bin!

How many of you are actually tracking every ounce of marketing that you do?

The sad reality is that in the vast majority of cases that I come across, I get a blank look from the business owner when I mention this.

The analogy that I use to represent what they’re doing is ‘throwing mud at a wall’ as this is quite literally what is happening.

Most businesses have NO idea what is working and what is not, but they just continue to run the same campaigns that they always have.

If you track what Return On Investment (ROI) you;re getting from each marketing method, you can then aim to improve it, maintain it, or get rid of it.

As some very famous Meerkats are currently saying on TV …. SIMPLES!