Managing Your Business with a flight deck

 

Now that you have your business plan in place you need to focus on meeting your aims, objectives and sales targets. There is absolutely nothing like regularly recording and measuring your progress to ensure that targets are met.  The more frequently you do this, the more successful you will be. In the past I have been very undisciplined in doing this, and it has reflected in our profit and loss.  We now religiously sit down on Monday morning to focus on the previous week and can test and measure the effects and successes we have had of marketing campaigns, e-news, special offers etc. This allows us to make very informed decisions about what activities to repeat and which to ditch.

You absolutely must know who your customers are and how they have found you. The flight deck below will help record all this.

You should conduct you monitoring through the following tool or something similar (the categories are suggestions only):

 

Your Company Flight Deck 

Quarter _      Month _            Week _

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Financials

Sales          Target sales    Measure against previous year        Break even point reached

Sales made  £
Therapy
Products
Workshops

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Income         Banked         Target

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Marketing        No. Enquiries    Enquiries to booking ratio    Length of time from enquiry to booking

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Marketing                    No. Enquiries

___________________________________________________________________________________

Conversions    Promotion 1    Demonstration/talk    Open day    Offers    Use of coupons

___________________________________________________________________________________

Web Traffic visitors:    Av minutes:    Red Flags    Amber flags 
Page views:                  Bounce:

___________________________________________________________________________________

E-mail                    unique opens        links clicked on        bounces        unsubscribes

Email campaigns

Autoresponders

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

How to use the flight deck

Prior to creating the flight deck, you need to think about your target income and sales and how many enquiries you need and how many of these to convert into bookings. How to do all this is covered in the steps and Guiding Principles.

Complete the flight deck at the end of your business week. If you do this every week, you will soon start to see patterns emerging that will give you huge clues on how to leverage your business. The financials are the sales for the week, and you could list whatever services and products you provide.

List your marketing activities. Have them coded so that you can measure their effectiveness. For example you may have a special offer called spring 2011 and the customer must give that code on booking. You can then test and measure that campaigns effectiveness.

You do need to have a web presence and to monitor the effectiveness of you website. We will go into details in step 28. For now you should be looking at how many visitors you are getting. If bookings go down, you may also see for example a corresponding decline in web visitors and that becomes a red flag and something to take some action on.

In your working week, you should allocate some time on business growth activities to ensure that you continue to succeed.

In fact you need to divide your work up into:

Black, red and green activities

Black – business growth – vision, market research, developing market position, new product development, joint ventures, incensing

Red non revenue generating - admin, finance, HR, IT, marketing, PR

Green - Your therapy!

How is your week divided and are your prices reflecting the amount of non paid black and green work that you are doing?

Finally, to ensure you have completed all that you need to do for your business plan here is a Checklist

Have you:

1/ Establishing the product including:

Decided your pricing including course of treatments, special offers?
Established customer buying patterns?
Defined your niche?
Decided a location?
Conducted market research to assess supply and demand?
Decided your USP?

2/Finalising marketing including:

Logo, brand, name?
Completed website?
Got your website listed on established referring sites?
Established a sales funnel?
Got flyers written?
Campaigns?

3/Financials

Set up costs?
Breakevens?
Cash flow forecast?
Sales projections?
Book keeping?
Profit and loss?

4/ Legalities

Health and Safety at Work Act?
License to practice?
Registered with HMRC?
Insurance?
Data protection?
Equipment and Building regulations?

5/Social media

Developed a presence on facebook, linkedin and twitter?

6/Sales

Developed a sales strategy?
Developed a sales pitch?
Made the sales calls?
Money back guarantees?
Made the sale?

7/ PR

Written articles?
Written a press release?
Researched exhibitions and shows?
Developed your reputation?
Become an expert?

8/Developing referrals

Networked with other therapists?
Got clients to come back and refer?

9/Completing the business plan

An executive summary?
Got a short description of the business - services, products and location?
Defined the market with market research?
Completed your marketing and sales strategy?
Competitor analysis?
Your management team and personnel and their credentials?
Your operations?
SWOT analysis?
Your unique selling point?
Financial forecasts?

10/Developing customer care and after service sales

Treatment evaluation?
Client happy sheets?
Sourced Products?
Managed stock?

 

It has been an absolute pleasure for me to be a part of your business journey and I wish you huge success. If you would like to continue having me on your team, then consider engaging me as your business mentor. I provide telephone mentoring for 20 minute blocks of time and charge £33 plus VAT. Call (0)203 553 1060 to arrange an appointment. Best wishes Gill

 

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