Why Do Small Businessess Fail!!

 

Breaks my heart.
According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. A whopping 80% crash and burn. But why? What can we learn from the colossal amount of failure with small business that we can apply to our own business aspirations? At surface level the primary reason businesses fail is they simply run out of cash. But trust me — the cracks in the foundation start well before the brutal day of financial collapse. Thus I give you 5 reasons for failure and more importantly, what you can do to avoid it happening to you:

Reason #1:
Not really in touch with customers through deep dialogue. An amazing thing happens when an entrepreneur sees a potential opportunity in the market, or dreams up a new idea for a product/service: they retreat to a cave. This is the worst move an entrepreneur can make because complete understanding of your customer is imperative to your success. Listen — in my mind entrepreneurs must walk 1,000 miles in the shoes of their customers. Not 10. Not 100. One thousand.
Your customer holds the key to your success deep in their pain, behaviour, dreams, values and the jobs they are trying to accomplish.

Your Solution: In 1999, four smart guys wrote a book called ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’. Although the book is a tough read in my opinion, there is one silver bullet piece of wisdom shouting from the pages. Markets are conversations.Dialogue is key. And 140 character tweets don’t count. Real dialogue with real customers (via whatever channel is best for them).Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom, co-authors of the book ‘Nail It, Then Scale It’, said it best:“ Which would you rather do — talk to customers now and find out you were wrong or talk to customers a year and thousands of dollars down the road and still find out you were wrong?”

Reason #2:
No real differentiation in the market (read: lack of unique value propositions)
Entrepreneur.com did put out a story entitled “Why Everyone Will Have To Become An Entrepreneur”. If this holds true (and I think it will), instead of your competition being 5,000 other Tom, Dick and Harrys, it will soon be 50,000 of these guys.Meaning? Plenty of noise and chaos for those without uniqueness fighting for the bottom scraps. Most times this is a slow killer of businesses. Barely hanging on, entrepreneurs with some customers and some revenue skimp along for months or even years. Every painful inch wondering to themselves if this is all there really is.
Your Solution: First, agree with me right now this is a core element which must be addressed. Entrepreneurs who take this lightly end up in trouble. Grab a tool like Alex Osterwalder’s ‘Value Proposition Canvas’, stick it on your wall and work it. Dig in. Figure out the true value you bring to the table which is unique and different than others in the marketplace.
Now go uncover yours.

Reason #3:
Failure to communicate value propositions in clear, concise and compelling fashion.
Next up is the debilitating disease called ‘failure to communicate’. For those old enough to remember the classic 1967 Paul Newman movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’, seared on the brain is a key line spoken by the prison warden to Newman who plays the maddeningly defiant inmate named Luke. “What we have here is a failure to communicate…”, upon which Newman is shot in the neck and on his way to exsanguination (aka bleeding to death). Many entrepreneurs work hard to discover a point of differentiation then blow it because they do not communicate their message in a clear, concise and compelling manner. I watch many entrepreneurs bleed to death through their failure to communicate.

Your Solution:
It’s pretty simple. Learn how to communicate better. Again, I reference point #1 above. If an entrepreneur is truly engaged in conversation (read: dialogue, not monologue), then you’ll learn the
language of your customer. If they speak Russian, then please stop trying to speak French to them. Listen to the words they use and then use them right back at them. Do so through focus on these 3 points:
•Be clear (are your customers unclear about who you are and what value you bring to them?).
•Be concise (are you somewhat clear but go on and on and on in your messaging?).
•Be compelling (do the words you use persuade your customers to take the action you want them to?)

Reason #4:
 Leadership breakdown at the top (yes — founder dysfunction).You see it all the time in the media. Right off the deep end goes another athlete with unbelievable talent. Painful to watch the self-sabotage of the likes of a Lance Armstrong, Mike Tyson or Aaron Hernandez, all of which fell short
from truly remarkable success because of their poor decisions. Now startup entrepreneurs who go down hard might not have their names splashed across the headlines of tomorrow’s
Newspaper Posts, but I submit to you their reason for failure is sometimes the same. Self-sabotage through extremely poor decision making and weak leadership skills.

Your Solution:
Wake up to realize it’s your baby. You’re the founder. Which makes you the leader. Matters not if
you’re a business of one, or 1,000. Lack the ability to strongly relate with people? Gain the skills necessary to do so. Struggle with anger issues? Solve it with anger management. Entrepreneurs who succeed spend time with personal development. I have never once met an angel or venture capital investor who doesn’t investigate the character of a founder and his/her team before whipping out their checkbook. It still amazes me how many business owners who actually have good ideas with the ability to execute them — crash and burn because of their own dysfunction. Please don’t be one of them.

Reason #5:
Inability to nail a profitable business model with proven revenue streams.
In the end, this is the sum total. Fail to accurately achieve product/market fit where money gets made, and you’re sunk. Entrepreneurs can actually have each of the four above reasons solved, but still miss the business model boat. Twitter is a perfect example of this (although 2013 may be the year they finally turn black in the profit/loss column).

Your Solution:
 Startups need to move swiftly without spending tons of cash to figure out their secret sauce. Using tools and methodologies such as Minimum Viable Products, Lean Marketing and Experimentation is critical. A perfect example of this comes from Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness’, wherein he describes the early days of Zappos. He and his co-founders weren’t even sure back in the late 90’s that people would dare order shoes over the Internet. So they ran a quick test: Up goes a website with shoe images taken from manufacturers’ websites, some buy now buttons and watch to see what happens.Cha-ching. Order comes through, one of the guys sprints to the local shoe store, buys the requested shoes at full retail, and then scurries home to ship them out. Did they lose money on every pair of shoes shipped? Yes they did. But did they quickly ascertain whether they had a potentially viable business idea? Yes again. All with zero inventoryor fulfillment capabilities.
Think and move quickly, ‘fail fast’ if you’re going to fail at all, and nail your business model.

Best Build Your Business
DWD Solutions
073-996-4696
info@dwdsolutions.co.za

9 Prime Rules For Running A Successful Online Business

1 – Keep Your Website Design Simple and Well-Organized

People have a tendency to want to over-design their website in an effort to make it stand out or look cool. They may add flash animation, sound in the background, and load the site up with large graphics. This is a huge mistake, especially for business-oriented websites. It is much more important to make sure your design is organized in a way that visitors can easily find what they are looking for at a glance. Music blaring out is actually a pet peeve of many internet shoppers, especially if they are surfing at work as many do. You also want to make sure that the text is easy to read. Dark text on a simple light background is the safest way to go.
Apple.com is the perfect example of a well designed website. Apple.com has some of the best web designers in the world who develop their website, check them out and also other big company sites for ideas if need be.

2 – Respond To Your Visitors Promptly

When a visitor, a potential customer, emails you or fills out your contact form, it is imperative that you get back to them as soon as possible. People always take mental note of how long it takes an online business to get back to them. Even if you are on vacation, you should either have an employee answering the emails in your absence or take your laptop along and answer the emails while your out-of-town.
There is way too much competition out there now for you to let potential clients slip through the cracks because you weren’t diligent enough to follow through.

3 – Engage Your Visitors

If you can turn your visitors into active participants on your website, you will increase loyalty and sales. The simplest way to do this is to add a blog and open it up for comments from your visitors. Advertise your posts in your newsletter and ask for comments. For larger sites, you may want to add a discussion board where your visitors can create their own topics.
Set yourself up on a number of Social Media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn and conversate/share/inform your customers with high quality answers and content. Also make sure that you have a follow, Fan Page ‘Like” widget or a Pinterest badge on your website so that people can follow you through their favorite social media platform and stay in tune with your progress and updates.
Checkout Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice on growing your business using social media, Gary is an Ace! and definitely someone you should look up to in the Online Business world.

4 – Give Your Visitors a Reason To Come Back

Repeat visitors to your online business will increase sales for sure. You can give your visitors a reason to come back in many ways. For example, you can let them know that once a month you post a one-day only sale. Another example might be to write an article and let the readers know there will be a follow-up next month. Make the topic of the follow-up something that people really want to know.
Just adding quality content on a regular basis is a good way to get repeat visitors.

5 – Do Not Over-Sell To Your Visitors

No one likes a pushy salesperson in a brick and mortar business. Online business are no different in this aspect. People hate to feel like they are being overly pressured to buy something. You can point out the advantages of your product or service but try not to over-sell. Watch out for superlative spammy language too. It will usually backfire on you!

6 – Do Not Over Optimize Your Website

You have probably heard of the term, “search engine optimization” or SEO. This is where people design their webpages with the intent of ranking higher in the search engines, particularly Google. Many online businesses push this way too far. Their sites end up being demoted or even banned from the search results because the search engines view their efforts as spam. Over optimizing pages also makes them less likeable and readable by real human beings.

7 – Do Not List Your Website In Bad Neighbourhoods

For a long time, it has been well-known that Google and other search engines look at how many links there are to a website as one important factor in determining how to rank that website in the search engine results. This has prompted online business owners to want to get as many links as they can. Sometimes they even pay for links in directories and blogs. However, in most cases, these paid links are sites that are known as bad neighborhoods by the search engines. In other words, they are spammy sites and having your website listed in them can actually hurt you, not help you!

8 – Maintain a High Quality Mailing List

Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter when they come to your online business site. Give them an incentive to do so such as a free report or free e-course on a topic related to your business. Having said this, respect your visitors and their time. Be sure not to send out your newsletter too often, perhaps once a month and occasionally send a special announcement. Also, make sure to put quality content in your newsletter and give your subscribers an easy way to opt out.

9 – Remember At The End Of The Day Your Customers Are STILL Real People

A lot of people forget this, they are not treating their customers as real human beings and are not putting themselves in the customers shoes. Customer service will always be around, that’s why we need to stay good at looking after our clients. If you can’t help them with their request, get back to them and let them know that you have exhausted every avenue to find a way and maybe even refer them onto someone who can help them. Even though you may not be able to help them at that very point in time, they WILL remember you went the extra mile for them and will tell their friends via word of mouth or by social media (which would be great promotion for you), either way, you can rest your head at night knowing that you are doing everything you can to hold a good name for your business and that every one that deals with you is satisfied.
This is how you secure yourself as the “go to guy in your industry”, and as time goes by and all these “short attention span, new comers” are so use to ONLY dealing with their customers over a keyboard and text conversation, they will be skimming over life long customers and potentially huge clients for the future.

Let's see your business on "London Stock Exchange"!!!

DWD Solutions
073 996 4696 / 079 822 4959
info@dwdsolutions.co.za
www.dwdsolutions.co.za

Choose the Best Design, for half the Price

How To Start an Online Business

There is a proven sequence of steps you can follow to guarantee your success when you're starting a small business online. I've seen thousands of people start and grow successful businesses by doing the following:

1. Find a need and fill it.
2. Write copy that sells.
3. Design and build an easy-to-use website.
4. Use search engines to drive traffic to your site.
5. Establish an expert reputation for yourself.
6. Follow up with your customers and subscribers with e-mail.
7. Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling.

Step 1: Find a need and fill it

Most people who are just starting out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second.
To boost your chances of success, start with a market. The trick is to find a group of people who are searching for a solution to a problem, but not finding many results. The internet makes this kind of market research easy:

• Visit online forums to see what questions people ask and what problems they're trying to solve.
• Do keyword research to find keywords that a lot of people are searching, but for which not many sites are competing.
• Check out your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of what they're doing to fill the demand. Then you can use what you've learned and create a product for a market that already exists--and do it better than the competition.

Step 2: Write copy that sells

There's a proven sales copy formula that takes visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive to the moment they make a purchase:

1. Arouse interest with a compelling headline.
2. Describe the problem your product solves.
3. Establish your credibility as a solver of this problem.
4. Add testimonials from people who have used your product.
5. Talk about the product and how it benefits the user.
6. Make an offer.
7. Make a strong guarantee.
8. Create urgency.
9. Ask for the sale.

Throughout your copy, you need to focus on how your product or service is uniquely able solve people's problems or make their lives better. Think like a customer and ask "What's in it for me?"

Step 3: Design and build your website

Once you've got your market and product, and you've nailed down your selling process, now you're ready for your small-business web design. Remember to keep it simple. You have fewer than five seconds to grab someone's attention--otherwise they're gone, never to be seen again. Some important tips to keep in mind:

• Choose one or two plain fonts on a white background.
• Make your navigation clear and simple, and the same on every page.
• Only use graphics, audio or video if they enhance your message.
• Include an opt-in offer so you can collect e-mail addresses.
• Make it easy to buy--no more than two clicks between potential customer and checkout.
• Your website is your online storefront, so make it customer-friendly.

Step 4: Use search engines to drive targeted buyers to your site

Pay-per-click advertising is the easiest way to get traffic to a brand-new site. It has two advantages over waiting for the traffic to come to you organically. First, PPC ads show up on the search pages immediately, and second, PPC ads allow you to test different keywords, as well as headlines, prices and selling approaches. Not only do you get immediate traffic, but you can also use PPC ads to discover your best, highest-converting keywords. Then you can distribute the keywords throughout your site in your copy and code, which will help your rankings in the organic search results.

Step 5: Establish an expert reputation for yourself

People use the internet to find information. Provide that information for free to other sites, and you'll see more traffic and better search engine rankings. The secret is to always include a link to your site with each tidbit of information.

• Give away free, expert content. Create articles, videos or any other content that people will find useful. Distribute that content through online article directories or social media sites.
• Include "send to a friend" links on valuable content on your website.
• Become an active expert in industry forums and social networking sites where your target market hangs out.

You'll reach new readers. But even better, every site that posts your content will link back to yours. Search engines love links from relevant sites and will reward you in the rankings.

Step 6: Use the power of e-mail marketing to turn visitors into buyers.

When you build an opt-in list, you're creating one of the most valuable assets of your online business. Your customers and subscribers have given you permission to send them e-mail. That means:

• You're giving them something they've asked for.
• You're developing lifetime relationships with them.
• The response is 100 percent measurable.
• E-mail marketing is cheaper and more effective than print, TV or radio because it's highly targeted.

Anyone who visits your site and opts in to your list is a very hot lead. And there's no better tool than e-mail for following up with those leads.

Step 7: Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling 

One of the most important internet marketing strategies is to develop every customer's lifetime value. At least 36 percent of people who have purchased from you once will buy from you again if you follow up with them. Closing that first sale is by far the most difficult part--not to mention the most expensive. So use back-end selling and upselling to get them to buy again:

• Offer products that complement their original purchase.
• Send out electronic loyalty coupons they can redeem on their next visit.
• Offer related products on your "Thank You" page after they purchase.

Reward your customers for their loyalty and they'll become even more loyal.
The internet changes so fast that one year online equals about five years in the real world. But the principles of how to start and grow a successful online business haven't changed at all. If you're just starting a small business online, stick to this sequence. If you've been online awhile, do a quick review and see if there's a step you're neglecting, or never got around to doing in the first place. You can't go wrong with the basics.
Hope this information will help to anyone who is willing to take that risk to open an Online Business, it's worth it.

Best Regards,
DWD Solutions
073-996-4696

DWD Solutions

DWD Solutions
073-996-4696
info@dwdsolutions.co.za

How Can A Website Help Your Small Business!!

Six years ago, the thought of owning a website seemed unimportant to me.  I remember thinking to myself, what can a website do that a telephone or the yellow pages can’t? It seemed like a waste of time to put his information online, especially since the only people who visited his site were in our group of friends, and knew the extremely long web address needed to even find it. I had discussed with my best friend whether or not a website was a good idea, and the only answer he could give me was, ‘shut up, it’s cool’. This didn’t really answer the question, but got us into one of many fights in our younger days.

I’m sure many small business owners ask themselves the same question. What can a website do that the telephone or the yellow pages can’t? Being old fashioned, it may seem hard to realize that besides the television, the internet is now the second largest form of advertising. It has become the new yellow pages. (In fact, the Yellow Pages even has a website now) Some small businesses may not be able to keep up with more business, being booked solid off of a few calls a month from people who saw them in their local yellow pages. But this shouldn’t matter.

There are a number of advantages to putting your business online, even if you have no desire to grow as a company. As more and more people look to the internet for their information, the phone calls to your small business will dwindle off to an occasional ring. Why call a number and a name to fire off ten questions about the business, when you can read one or two pages online and in less time come to a conclusion about the company. As a small business owner, do you have the time to sit there answering phones, answering repetitive questions about yourself? Below, I’ve detailed the six major reasons how having a website can benefit your small business, no matter how small your company is.

 
• Get more business! Use your website as a 24 hour marketing tool. It’s fast, easy, and doesn’t require an employee to sit and answer phones.
 
• Who we are. Use your website to tell people who you are, and what you do. People form their own conclusions about you, so why not give them some solid information to base this conclusion on.
 
• Show off. Whether you sell a product or a service, no one is going to pay you money without first seeing what you are capable of. The old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” never fit better.
 
• Professionals. Having an attractive website helps to convey to customers that you are a professional business, and gives them more confidence in your capabilities.
 
• Contact us! Answering phones, although direct, takes time. Having a contact us form on your website allows interested people to inquire about your services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can get as descriptive as you want with a contact us form, ensuring that required fields are filled in before they can submit any requests.

DWD Solutions
073-996-4694
info@dwdsolutions.co.za

DWD Solutions................www.dwdsolutios.co.za

www.dwdsolutions.co.za