Four Courses on Business Strategy

Did you know that 30% of all new businesses shut down within the first two years? Survival rate after 5 years is less than half. Think about it. These ventures were started with so much excitement, and promise, and maybe a viable product, and yet, half of them folded within the first 5 years. And what about the companies that survived? How are they doing? Are they really thriving? Have their founders made billions and are they traveling all over the world in a private jet? Not really. More than 80% of these are so-called mom ‘n pop operators of small businesses. They are operational, because they can pay the bills, and bring some money home. But they’re not making enough to hire employees. The day they stop, the business ends. This is their harsh reality. They’ve just learned how to survive.

Did you know that 75% of businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, and when they’re confronted with a crisis, more than half of them do not have the means to open their doors again?

If you’re fortunate enough to have a steady operation, and have customers coming through your doors, or to your website, do you know how many of them may never come back? Here is the customer churn rate for different industries. Staggering, right?

Let’s keep going. Before these customers eventually go elsewhere, they’re coming to you on a regular basis. That’s great! But did you know that $458 billion worth of goods are returned to the merchants every year. That is 10% of the total sales. This figure jumps to 30% for online sales.

Add to these the increasing cost of operations, regulatory pressures, competitive forces, fear of disruption, employee issues, supply chain challenges, and an increasingly finicky and temperamental customer base. The odds are definitely stacked against business owners. Why would anyone want to take this bold step? This sure seems like a death wish, doesn’t it?

No, it’s not a death wish. We strongly believe you have an excellent chance of success, if you have the right guidance, and if you have a plan for each challenge that would come your way. You are bold — you’ve already proven that. That’s the first thing going for you. You are action-oriented. That’s another trait you absolutely need to succeed. In addition, you have shown that you have a high tolerance for risk. You just need to find a way now to channelize your energy and move in the right direction.

This is where we come in. We’re launching this series to help business owners and managers navigate through every day’s maze. We’ll provide detailed education — fundamentals, basic principles and detailed checklists — and will help you setup an operation that is entirely focused on being prepared, on customers and their engagement, on setting up center of excellence. On making sure that all your processes are tightly integrated. On developing a culture where your customers are your raving fans, where your employees have a sense of ownership, and where your suppliers are invested in your success and in a win-win relationship. On each step of your journey, we’ll tell you what questions you should be asking, and how to figure out which options may be the best ones for you.

Introducing the first batch of four courses that are available today. And we’re inviting you to sign up for the new courses that are going to be launched in the next few weeks.

In this batch, you’ll get training in these areas:

Seven Stages of Customer Journey. In this course, we take you through the entire journey of your customer, as they come from the state of knowing nothing about you, to establishing the first contact. Then, once they like what they see, they become regular. We’ll teach you how to enhance every point of interaction. And then, there inevitably comes the stage when their level of engagement starts going down. You’re going to learn the most critical steps for each stage, and what you must do, to not just retain your customers, but to convert them into your most vocal admirers.

In What’s Holding you back from exponential growth, we identify twenty areas that are used as excuses to explain why a company may be satisfied with meager growth. We provide detailed guidelines on how to remove those obstacles. And we motivate you to set very lofty targets for your future growth.

We mentioned earlier that half a trillion dollars worth of products are returned every year. In the next course, we dissect the reasons why this happens. And yes, we realize that many of us may have resigned to the fact that it’s a cost of doing business, and that there’s nothing we can do about it. Not true. There’s a lot we can do. Watch us unfold these possibilities. Learn some techniques and strategies you can start adopting tomorrow.

And finally, we present to you an Introduction to Crisis Management. This is really the hallmark of our research — the fact that organizations, we believe, are ill-prepared to deal with an unexpected event. We saw the FEMA stats earlier that nearly half the companies cannot get back to their firm footings. The key about dealing with a crisis is to recover quickly, even if we need temporary solutions to hold us over. And then to figure out what you can do to prevent such a setback from setting you back again. We provide detailed checklists and guide you on how to communicate with all parties. And how to conduct these fact-finding workshops. And more importantly, how to empower your employees and how to develop a culture that allows you to catch early signs of an impending threat and line up your resources to work on a prevention.

There’s definitely a lot to absorb here. We invite you to check out these guidebooks, and learn the detailed steps of what you should be doing at the tactical level. But when you zoom out, and take a big picture view, you’d see where we’re taking you with these discussions: to a place where you’re no longer at the mercy of the elements, but rather, where you control your destiny. Where you’re the one in charge. This is a position of strength.

This is a long journey … the entire runway is ahead of us. We’re trying to boil the ocean, we know, but let’s try to do it one drop at a time, one slide at a time!

We’re delighted to have you along for the ride.

Thank you for your time.