In the competitive business world, how small businesses survive and continue to thrive is a constant topic. From strict cost control to clear target customers, from mining the true value of products to improving management efficiency, each cheat is designed to help small businesses stand out in the market and achieve long-term stable growth.
Helping others climb to the top is to add ladders
In today's business era full of challenges and opportunities, the road to survival and development of enterprises can be described as "frightening step by step". For many small enterprises, how to survive and survive in the fierce market competition? Today, I'm going to share 8 practical tips for small businesses to survive and thrive.
1. Strictly control costs: make good use of free modern resources
When we embark on the journey of entrepreneurship, cost control is the first priority.
If you don't hire any of them, I'm sure you can have at least 24 free assistants in this day and age. They can be: Kimi, Bean Bao, Tiangong, Tongyi. At least after the "Big Four" get together, you can ask them to do the content for you, and then you can evaluate the content that the four employees are giving you and be on call, 0 hours a day.
If you think that the content generated by these tools is not very easy to use, it doesn't matter, you have to learn to use more, output more clear instructions, you will find that they will be "tuned" differently in the hands of different people, in general, it will be "the more you use it, the better it will be", we and Ai also need to be patient running-in.
In the early days of your business, why spend a lot of money hiring people for things that can be solved with the help of these smart tools? This is undoubtedly a smart move to save costs.
The picture comes from the Internet
Don't easily think that I have to rent an office to start a company, I must find a spacious place, and I must get up and do those procedural, action-oriented things first.
Not necessarily!
Offline office and long commuting time for employees not only consume energy, but also reduce work efficiency. In fact, many companies have shifted to an online-only model, or only one day a week in person. In addition to the continuous outflow of funds, leasing office space will also involve a lot of management energy, which is a heavy burden on enterprises, whether it is mental, management or financial. Therefore, when it comes to workplaces, we should assess the situation and avoid over-investing.
In the initial stages of the project, if the research and planning of things are not clear, please do not act rashly. Stay on the ground in a one-man way, test collaboratively, and don't overbudget for a large team, financing, overstocking, etc.
I have witnessed many entrepreneurs who rush to start a large-scale investment model before they have a thorough grasp of market demand and business direction in the early stage, and eventually get stuck in the cost quagmire and find it difficult to extricate themselves. The right approach is to start with a streamlined individual operation model, test the market through flexible cooperation, and then gradually expand the scale when the direction is clear and the time is ripe.
In the early stage of your business, if you do the above three points, you have avoided a lot of drag caused by costs, at this time you have no excess cost loss, that is, travel lightly, so it is not difficult for the company to survive.
Today, there is no business, especially a start-up company, that can make money for all its customers! You have to ask yourself, which part of the customer are you facing and what are you doing?
"Senior middle class, anxious middle class, exquisite mother" are the words equivalent to all users and are the poison of the enterprise. You have to focus on and be able to detail at least 20 to 0 distinct characteristics of this customer segment. If you start a project in a hurry because you don't even have a clear portrait of your target customer, you are a blind man, and every penny invested may be wasted.
What's the value of what you're going to do?
Some people say that if I sell a drink, then my value is to quench my thirst. I sell a piece of food, and my value is to quench hunger. Wrong, this is still a lazy value, don't use lazy value to summarize your business. The real value of the product should be measured by the customer's actual purchase behavior and repurchase intention.
In the early stages of product development, we first launch a minimum viable product, test it in an unfamiliar market, and observe the customer's reaction. If customers are not only willing to buy for the first time, but also repurchase many times, and even praise and recommend to others, then it means that the product has really hit the customer's demand pain points, and its value has been recognized by the market.
Please note that the group you are testing must not be your friends or family, because for the sake of face, no one will say that your stuff is rubbish. When I was investing, I saw a large number of entrepreneurs who could only barely give 60 points for their stuff, but they were very convinced that they had so-called loyal users, and their loyal users were all made up of their family and friends.
Be sure to develop your loyal users among strangers, and know with certainty that your loyal users are paying for the product and not because of their friendship.
When we are doing revenue, don't be greedy, we must not look at your GMV, so-called sales volume, marketing volume, these are meaningless!
What to see? See repurchase!
In today's society, whether you do ToB or ToC, it has an indicator of repurchase. In the case of ToC, your repurchase indicator is, of course, that people buy this thing repeatedly. In the case of ToB, repurchase is a referral, that is, whether someone else can transfer you to a second customer after completing the project, and introduce you to others. If your project is being done and not referred, I'm sorry, it means that the value of your project is not recognized by others, and people just didn't come to you to return the money.
One is repurchase, the other is referral, these two indicators are enough to prove whether the value of your matter has satisfied the customer.
When the value is not met, don't rush to do marketing. Don't think that marketing is a good thing, marketing is sometimes arsenic, you are used to the dividends of traffic, and you always feel that you will go to another handful after finishing this handful, but there is always a time when traffic comes to an end! Focus on the deep cultivation of product value, so that customer repurchase and referral become a strong engine for enterprise development.
For small businesses, management efficiency is like the lifeblood of the enterprise.
A lot of people say, heck, I'm a small company, I don't need a lot of management, I just need to sell good things.
The smaller the company, the easier it is to widen the gap between the management efficiency. I'll give you an example, Company A has five people, but everyone takes the company's affairs as their own. Company B also has five people, and four of these five people feel that they are workers, and they are constantly trying to hollow out the boss's resources. So who is more efficient in the management of these two companies?
In the early days, if you have people who work together like a mom-and-pop shop, your management efficiency is very high, and this efficiency itself is the basis for your survival. You run a convenience store with your wife, will you treat your wife like a cow or a horse? Would you treat your wife as an employee? Will he treat you as a boss, will he treat himself as a cow or a horse? No. Why not? Because you are equal, many interests, many interpretations, and many words between you are equal, and you support each other and motivate each other.
Today's many small companies, we must take out the posture of the husband and wife shop to move forward, when the team members have this "own business" mentality, the management efficiency of the enterprise will naturally rise, providing a solid guarantee for the survival and development of the enterprise.
In management, we must strive to be clear!
Small companies do not have office politics, and they don't need office politics, don't play guessing games, what they need to do is to be concise and to the point, and the rights and responsibilities are assigned to the people. So it's very important to "make it clear" in a small company. How can you use clarity to convey what you think in your heart, how can you use clarity to explain the efficiency of the Laqi team, and how can you use clarity to maximize the goodwill of others. This is the second magic weapon that small teams and small companies must do to improve management efficiency.
Small enterprises in today's fierce competition in the era of survival, development, challenges, but as long as we firmly grasp the three key elements of cost control, value shaping and efficient management, the aforementioned 8 tips and tricks to effectively implement every aspect of enterprise operations, I believe that regardless of the wind and waves of the market, we can also have our own ecological niche and write our own business legend!
This article is written by the author of the operation faction [Li Qian said the brand], WeChat public account: [Li Qian said the brand], original / authorized to publish in the operation faction, without permission, it is forbidden to reprint.
The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0.