The Way To Wealth, with the sub-title Success Strategies Of The Wealthy Entrepreneur, is a new book from the business guru himself, Brian Tracy. In this book, Brian revealed his proven formula for starting, building, managing and growing a business successfully, and in the process creating enormous wealth.
If you are an entrepreneur, or you are thinking of going into business some day, this book is for you. You have to read it and discover business success strategies, ideas and tools that will put your business on the path of success.
Success in business in achieved when you do certain things right, it doesn’t happen by chance. You will discover what you need to do, and how you need to do them to make your business successful, even if your business is presently lying flat on its belle.
Here is just a tip of the ice berg – an excerpt from the book – which gives you a clue of what to expect:
Systematize Your Business Activities
Your business will be successful, generating steady, predictable sales and cash flow, to the exact degree to which you develop systems that put as much of your business on autopilot as possible.
A system is a step-by-step process, from beginning to end, that you use to ensure consistency and dependable performance in every area.
Every new business or business activity requires tremendous time, effort, expense, and even “genius†to learn and develop for the first time.
But once the system has been developed, through trial and error, it can eventually be systematized to the point where the business activities can be carried out by ordinary people. Until a business activity is systematized, it exists largely in the mind of the individual who knows how to do it.
As a result, it cannot be duplicated or replicated. If the person who knows how to do the job is not there, the business can eventually grind to a halt.
The Systems You Need
1. Lead Generation. You need a proven system of marketing, advertising, and promotion that generates a steady steam of qualified leads, whether phoning your place of business, responding on the Internet, or personally coming into your store to buy your product or service.
Without this continuous and predictable stream of leads, your sales and revenues will dry up and your cash flow will slow to a trickle, threatening the survival of your business.
2. Lead Conversion. You need a proven sales system to convert interested prospects into buying customers. This system begins with a sales script that every customer service representative and salesperson uses from the first contact with the prospect through to the completed sales.
The use of a preplanned sales script can triple your sales almost overnight. By using a sales script, each person who answers the phone, calls on a customer, or greets a customer walking in the door knows exactly what to say from the first greeting through to the final purchase.
Your sales system will be developed as the result of trial and error. As you evaluate your sales process, you will find that there are things that you do and say that are effective and others that are not.
Over time, you will smooth out the rough spots in your sales process, machining and polishing the words and actions so that you turn interested prospects into buying customers over and over again.
3. Production of the Product or Service. You need a proven system, from beginning to end, for producing the product or service that you have sold to the customer. This proven system will ensure consistency of quality, ease of operation, efficiency of activity, and continually lower costs of production and delivery as the system improves.
4. Delivery System. You need a step-by-step system to fulfil orders and deliver the product or service to the customer in a timely fashion. This system enables you to get your product or service to the customer quickly and efficiently with minimum delays and with a high level of quality.
5. Service Systems. You need written policies and procedures for follow-up service to each of your customers, including established ways to handle customer needs and complaints, to generate additional sales, to keep in regular customer contact, to elicit referrals and recommendations from satisfied customers to new customers, and to alert your customers of new products and services that they may be interested in buying.
6. Accounting Systems. You need smoothly functioning accounting systems that track every penny of revenue and expense coming into or moving out of the business.
Fortunately, there are computer programs for small and large businesses that you can use to keep track of all financial flows in your business so you will always know your proper financial status.
7. Hiring, Training, and Personnel Systems. You need written systems that clearly describe each job and how it is to be done. In addition, you need systems for training, development, and personnel relations.
Each person who works for you must know exactly what he or she is expected to do and to what standard of quality. Your employees must understand the terms and conditions of their jobs, what is deemed unsatisfactory performance, and what are grounds for termination.
They must know exactly what they are entitled to in terms of medical insurance, sick pay, vacation days, and other key elements of the work experience.
System Development
The way you develop systems is quite simple. You take a piece of paper and describe the job, step by step, from the first function to the last. List every task that must be completed to do the job well. You then review the job description with the people who are doing it to “debug†the process and ensure that it is accurate.
Once you have developed a complete description of a particular job or activity, it should be so clear that a new person can learn the job by simply following the system until he or she has memorized it and can do it automatically.
What is most important is that the details of the job are put down on paper rather than left in the mind and memory of the individual doing that job. The most important word in systems development is the word “replicability.â€
Every job must be systematized and documented so that an ordinary person can replicate it by simply following the steps that you have written down.
Critical Success Factors, Benchmarks, and Metrics
The final part of business planning and setting up business systems is for you to determine measures, metrics and scorecards for every job and for every part of every job.
These are often called key success measures or critical success indicators. These are numbers that you can attach to any activity to determine whether or not that activity has been carried out satisfactorily.
We often refer to key result areas, those specific results that must be achieved by each person in his or her particular job. Attached to each key result area is a standard of performance, a measure that tells the individual and the superior exactly how well that job has been done.
Your Economic Denominator
In every business, there is a critical number that is the key to the success or failure of the enterprise. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, calls this the “economic denominator.†The economic denominator in a business is the number that most accurately measures and determines the success of that business.
In some businesses, the economic denominator is the number of prospects who phone for further information as the result of advertising and promotion activities. In other businesses, it is the number of prospective customers who walk in the door seeking information in order to decide whether or not to buy the product or service being offered.
The economic denominator can be the number of sales that the company makes each day or the average size of the sales that are made on a daily basis.
The Measure of Success
Some years ago I built a shopping center, and I was seeking a restaurant as a tenant in a 6,000-square-foot part of the shopping center next to the supermarket and facing the parking lot.
It was a prime location, and I soon found a successful pizza restaurateur, Peter, who was operating three successful restaurants in other communities.
Peter invited me to come with him one evening while he did his market research among the other pizza restaurants in the town.
What I learned was that, whenever a pizza restaurant took an order, in person or over the phone, it would place the order stub on a spike on top of the cash register.
When Peter did his market research, he simply walked into the restaurant, went up to the cash register, and did a quick count of the number of orders on the spike at 8 o’clock in the evening.
After we had visited three pizza restaurants on a Wednesday night, all with their spikes almost full of orders, he turned to me and said, “It’s a deal. We can sign the lease agreements tomorrow.†He subsequently built and opened a new restaurant in that location that became a tremendous success.
I never forgot that “market research†experience. What is the equivalent of “orders on a spike†for your business?
What is your economic denominator? This is like the bull’s eye in the target that you are aiming at. What is the one number that more than anything else indicates the financial health of your business?
Personal Standards and Goals
Each person in your business should have an economic denominator as well. He or she should have a key success indicator or metric to determine whether or not he or she is doing the job in an excellent fashion.
This number should be clear, visible, and objective. Everyone should know what it is and be able to determine whether or not he or she is reaching that number regularly. This is the answer to the question, “How do I measure success at my job?
Remember the Basics
In business, there are three basic activities: market and sell the product or service, produce and deliver the product or service that you have sold, and manage and administer the money and activities of your business. Whenever a company runs into trouble, it is because of a problem in one or more of these three critical areas.
At the beginning of this chapter, I said that the highest paid work in business is thinking. Your ability to gather the information necessary to create a complete business plan and to think through the critical issues of your business will have greater consequences in determining your success or failure than any other factor.
This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, entrepreneur, or business owner, and you need ideas and strategies to make your business a success and create wealth for yourself.
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