This goes two ways.
The first way to consider is that you can’t service or sell your product to everyone. It’s just not good business and takes away focus from creating a service/product focused on market that truly values your business.
Consider this, never undercharge for what you do. Not only is it not financially sustainable, but also drives down the value (in this sense is defined as value perceived by your market) of what you are delivering.
When it comes to running a feasible business, your asking price is one of the drivers driving your profitability. To be profitable you need to consider both the costs of making the sale and the costs delivering your offering. Be that rent, license fees, salaries, and marketing as examples. Many business owners try and under charge with the intention of generating more sales by appealing to a broader market. What this tends to do in drive down the perception of value/ quality and instead push away the market you’re targeting. By trying to please a broader market you risk not focusing on you target market and therefore not reaching them.
The second way of this hard learnt lesson is to consider the people you employ. Many business owners fall into the trapped of hiring friends, family, or people in need to help them at a particular moment in their lives. While commendable, this could be detrimental to your business – read more about our hard learnt lesson on loyalty – especially when clear roles and KPIs are not defined to drive performance and delivery of expected functions within your business. This again could lead to your business becoming unsustainable and not shifting your or your teams focus on growth and progress to correctly and guiding employees unfit for a particular position.
Consider this, if you don’t trust your people at some point, your business is going to struggle. As important as it is to be as involved in the beginning of launching a small business and building your processes and value propositions, once things are up and running it’ll be important to take a step back, especially when it comes to the more menial stuff. If the people appointed to delivery on these are performing and therefore can’t be trusted, you’ll be needed to jump back in and take control of this. The result, you’ll get stuck fixing rather than building and growing.
As a final thought, many lessons are best learnt through experience and sometime multiple occurrences. That doesn’t always have to be case. From our experience, we found many business owners don’t ask for help and rather muscle and power through obstacles. This can result in years of minimal growth, frustration and ultimately the feeling of being stuck in your business.
Why not let an objective Business Confidant help you avoid or find your way through the complexities business will certainly bring about? Why not give yourself the best chance of scaling and finding Freedom in your business?
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do this on your own.
Reach and connect with our team at OptiGrowth and see how we can take on your business ambitions with you and see you too success