The Facts of Business Life by Bill McBean Read Free Book Online Page B

there is no business. And if you don’t know your customers, you will never be able to reach them to tell them that you exist and are ready to fill their needs.
    Once you know who your customers are, assigning and developing a marketing budget should become your focus. Like employee salaries, marketing and advertising can be a major expense, so your estimate of its cost has to be realistic. It also has to include the cost of getting the word out about your business as well as keeping it in front of your potential customers. Marketing is one of those expenses owners tend to minimize, especially at this level, and my suggestion would be to first determine what you consider a realistic budget, and then add a certain percentage to cover unforeseen marketing opportunities.
    Marketing experts often describe marketing and advertising as an investment in your business, and for a good reason—it is. But before you begin that marketing effort, it is essential that you know where your customers go for information and/or how to reach them, what their important buying motivations are, how to drive them to your business, and what it will cost. This is one of those aspects of business you have to get right from the beginning because if you don’t, nothing else is going to matter. You can be wrong in some other areas and survive until it gets fixed, but if you’re wrong in the marketing and customer area, failure can happen so quickly that you won’t even have time to make corrections.
Level 2: Creating Your Company’s DNA
    Creating a company’s DNA is essentially about determining and mapping out how the business will operate on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis. This is done by establishing procedures and processes that will enable you to realize the results you forecasted at Level 1. These range from determining how cash sales are recorded to how customers are handled and treated, from developing an internal code of conduct to how job descriptions are written, and from how training is conducted to how salaries are paid out. In other words, DNA includes any task that requires some kind of procedure in order to make sure that your business operates in a manner consistent with your definition of quality.
    Establishing processes like these is extraordinarily important for several reasons. First, it enables owners to show their employees how they want the business to be operated. This is essential because, as I noted earlier, it is ultimately these processes that operate the business. In addition, processes by definition demand accountability, which in turn results in job expectation and performance standards, and makes it easy to evaluate an employee’s performance. Finally, when there are processes in place, it is much easier to spot problems and to fix them before they become serious. Unfortunately, establishing these processes—creating a company’s DNA—is perhaps the least understood and most underappreciated macro concept for business owners. It is also, though, one of the most essential.
Leadership at Level 2
    A good leader has to have a toolbox full of skills, but at Level 2 the predominant skill required is vision, that is, the ability to look into the future. An owner has to be able to visualize how the company will operate in order to exploit the opportunity to its fullest and achieve the success forecasted. What that means is that you have to visualize what tasks must be accomplished, determine those areas in which processes must be established, assign accountability for them, and develop means of determining whether the processes are working the way they should be. This is the first step in creating a company’s DNA.
    If as an owner you cannot do this, your company will essentially be operating on the philosophy “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” And those roads lead to failure. However, by defining what needs