Two Minute Business Wisdom

Lack of sales and interest for your product can come from a bevy of factors, but a simple one to rule out is on the look of your product. Is the marketing, packaging, or the product itself not appealing, or is there actually something wrong with the product itself.

The key to higher profit margins it not to buy extremely low quality supplies to keep your costs artificially low. You should look for peace of mind and steady profits, and that means paying what it takes to ensure quality of your product.

The simpler you make your processes and procedures, the better the chance your employees will follow them.

It’s a hard fact to come to terms with, but if you are now making sales you are failing at a simple formula. Whenever you present your sales pitch to the right audience in the right form on the right platform, you will make a sale.

Adding paperwork to any process slows it down, allowing you to get a handle on orders that need delivery and making customers with a habit of skipping out on the bill think twice before creating a paper trail to find them.

Running your online presence on social media platforms like Facebook is akin to choosing to do physical business at a flea market as opposed to leasing space in a strip mall, figuratively raising a building you own outright on someone else’s private land.

What happens to workers who receive little feedback on the work they produce? You foster an extremely unmotivated workforce.

The days of using 'pin-up girls' to bring in a crowd are over, for a bevy of reasons.

The greatest strategy in the world is useless if you do not have the manpower to pull it off.

Your sales team is at a disadvantage if they don’t understand the value (and the final deliverables) of the items that are on your company’s menu.

Use the most basic and simple language possible to explain yourself and what your business does.

Running a business is better when you don’t have to do everything in the business all by yourself.

Your value is what people will pay for you, but how much is that? How do you determine the prices you can (and should) charge your customers?

It is not a path to business specialization, but a plan for sanity and stability for maintaining your business.

You can get lucky once but a business needs a consistent effort. If you can’t repeat your process for delivering a product or service, you can't sustain a business.

It is not old school. A business card is still a great way to promo yourself and your business.

This is not a trick question. Some people have the ability to tune out the world and let their business run completely on autopilot (and the hard work of properly trained employees) for a while. Many do not.

Be a little selfish and ask yourself why you creating your own business or choosing to help someone operate theirs is beneficial to the world around you. Study your answers. If your answers seem dull and mundane, then you are getting the right answers.

Working for a specific specialization does eliminate many from your pool of potential customers. by design. Having a well-established specialty will attract those in need of your specific services and will make up for any unqualified potential customer that could wander by in theory.

Many busy business people get most of their 'mentorships' from books and videos. The real lessons you learn, and a surprising amount of lessons you will teach, come from live interactions with people, whether titans of industry or interns learning the ropes of the business.

You started your business or non-profit to achieve some sort of goal. It might be along the lines of making a dent in the universe or carving out a piece of the prosperity pie for your personal use. If you are doing well and working towards your goal, there is no need to apologize to anyone. If you are being a jerk about it, then you do need to apologize and change your ways now.

While your goal to succeed in business is to sell you goods at a higher price than your acquisition expenses, there is some merit to using loss-leader pricing. That assumes you have a real loss leader strategy and are not just lowballing to make up for lack of customers.

You can take your business to great heights. But in the beginning, you need to temper your expectations to more realistic--and really basic--goals.

Give all your business expenses a test and give them a letter grade. Then, just like college, figure out whether the failing expenses are worth extra credit work to improve, or if you should just drop them.

Before you work hard to overdo the options you want to make available to your customers, make sure your customers have a need, or at least a general want, for the items in the first place.