Innovate and Prosper
By Peter Switzer

Introducing and developing innovative ideas into your business can help your business grow. Here are some ideas:

Systemise your selling approach
When you introduce systems into your sales processes, everyone in your team is selling from the same sales system. Don’t know how to do this? Start off by writing down a sales script that your sales team follows. They can adapt their own particular style to the script but the written information gives uniformity to your sales style.

Write down a list of ways to overcome any objection that a person raises about your services or products. This arms your sales team with some good answers about why people should consider your products or services. Having a written script makes people comfortable with countering these objections. If you operate alone, still write down a script and give it your personality.

Keep things small
Anyone who grows a business knows that things can get out of hand when a business starts getting big. Develop individual businesses within your business and collect the combined efficiencies of many businesses working within one operation. Small teams can often work more effectively and everyone in the team feels more accountable to one another. Appoint a manager or team leader for each unit who is accountable for the work produced by their team.

You need systems to monitor your business
Let specialists do what they do best. Establish systems in order to make growing your business easier. Fully commit to your plan to build systems. Systemising your business helps if you want to franchise or license your operation. It is particularly important to create systems for problem areas – when you write how to do things down in an orderly way then you have an operating system. This saves time because you don’t have to repeat each task to anyone who is new to your workplace – it’s all written down for them in the system. But keep the systems updated.

Requests for better performance in the delivery of products and services from big business to small business result in the smaller supplier learning to rigorously test their systems. In fact, it often forces small players to set up systems and become professional, sowing the seeds for sensational success.

Partnering with big business, and responding to their delivery goals - cost and quality - can make your operation professional enough to court the biggest companies in this global village in which we operate.

Produce a policy and procedural manual
This includes your own mission statement as well as policies on sexual harassment, discrimination, workplace safety, etc. You have legal responsibilities in these areas.

Seek experts to develop a winning business plan
Have a great business plan that will even make a banker smile. A plan gives a structure to your business. It can even be written down on one page so it is like the dashboard of a car, giving you an update on where you want to take your business.

It is also important that you believe in your business to make it work. A well thought out business plan and time saving strategies are also crucial.

Your business plan contains your idea to make money and documents the results from all your hard work. Keep it confidential and make sure anyone you show it to knows this. Specify a time to achieve your goals and reward yourself when you reach steps along the way to achieving them. Small win satisfaction drives you on for big wins.

Pay for help
Be willing to pay for help. Too many people see paying for help from a coach, a lawyer or an accountant as an expense that brings no return. Paying money to get things right should be seen as an investment in the health of your business that brings a return. Wherever you have weak spots in your business, bring in experts who can fix up these problem areas. Even if you’re good at, say, bookkeeping, if it takes you away from your strengths, (say marketing your business) then doing the bookkeeping yourself might be false economy.

Take time out to look around and discover time saving ways to improve your business efficiency. If you can’t spare the time, find someone who can explain what developments in technology can assist you in your business. Pay for this advice if you must.

Analyse all your businesses methods to see if you can do things better. Smart small operators look to the three Ss - systems, software and staff - to be a professional player in the big business league. And guess what? They grow bigger. Always keep yourself open to new tricks because it’s innovation that will keep your business alive and prospering.