Wim GE De Vos

Small businesses with a BIG impact

Simplify 🟡 & Triumph 🥇

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Simplify something for your customer and you may have a viable business.

If not, you won´t. It is that simple 😉.

Your consumer wants to have as little complexity as possible. And will pay and reward you with loyalty if you do it for them.

Forget image, forget positioning, forget marketing for now. These are secondary.

❶ Answer the following 5 questions:

  • What portion of your business (people and process) faces the customer?
  • How can you make each element of your business less complex for your customer?
  • What can you reduce from 3 steps down to just ONE?
  • What can you do for your customer so that they don’t have to do it themselves?
  • How can you save time, hassle, headaches, stress for your customer?

❷ Now get your team together and list small improvements for each of these 5 topics.

❸ Give full autonomy to each and every one and act daily to make life simpler for your customer.

Making things simple is a craft. Simplicity is art.

Simplify something for your customer and you may have a viable business.

Simplify something every day for your customer and you will become a Small Giant.

more on the power 💪🏻 of simplicity 🟡:
There is beauty in simplicity

Simplify. Everything. Always. Everywhere.

My small business morning routine ☕️

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brain time…

Every morning I spend about 45 minutes on the following small business activities: working ON the business and monitoring.
It has helped me and our business greatly to make consistent progress. No quick fixes or magic bullet. Rather continuous development or kaizen.

My Morning “Working ON the Business Activities”
about 30 minutes before “chaos takes over”: I Pick ONE of the following activities and alternate during the week

  • Business Development: Stuff we are working on that grows the business. What new products or solutions with big potential are in the works? What strategic partnerships are we working on that can really bring a part of our business forward?
  • Offer Development: This is about using existing resources in a new way. Can I create a sale, a launch event, a new offer or bring best practices from one person/market to another to generate attention of our customers and income?
  • Fixing long-standing problems (big and small): This is about problems/friction we have started to work around instead of solving directly. Instead of ignoring or accepting these things, I use these 30 minutes to deal with the root of the problem. “fixing a 100 small problems” (and maybe a few big ones) needs “free brain time”. Kaizen.
  • Margin review: Where do we need to review pricing and margins upwards. Were can we up-sell, cross-sell or find new income generating offers.
  • Partner communication: This is not answering emails and messages, but about initiating communication with partners by giving updates or asking questions (social, email, messages, partnerzone updates, newsletters,…).

My Morning Dashboard Monitoring activities:
max 10 minutes to get a grasp of the “cruise speed” of the business – this is looking back of course. Activity is what drives success.

  • PartnerZone (=our digital workplace with partners) visitors – more than 40/day is a “good day”
  • PartnerZone projects (including drafts) – more than 10 projects and a total value of over 100K is a “good day”. Sometimes I also have a quick “deep dive” into projects per salesperson to see the dynamic of different “markets” (we have 6 right now but growing).
  • PartnerZone “Accepted”+”In Process” projects = our confirmed pipeline – more than 1 month sales is “good”
  • Xero – YTD Sales compared with last 2 years to get perspective and compensate for daily rush of good&bad news.

And then it is 9.00 AM :rocket: and the day starts…time to make WOW the standard. Together.

Every single day I have invested these early morning 45 minutes for more than 10 years now. I believe it has helped to build Genesis Home Technology Architects into what it is today.

Maybe some of these elements of my morning business routine can help you too.

Atomic habits with an exponential impact 👊🏼.

person first

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One night a father was relaxing with his newspaper after a long day at the office. His son, who wanted to play, kept on pestering him.

Finally, fed up, the father ripped out a picture of the globe that was in the newspaper and tore it into a hundred tiny pieces. “Here son, go ahead and try to put this back together,” he said, hoping that this would keep his little boy busy long enough for him to finish his newspaper.

To his amazement, his son returned after only one minute with the globe perfectly back together.

When the startled father asked how he achieved this feat, the son smiled gently and replied

“Dad, on the other side of the globe there was a picture of a person, and once I got the person together, the world was okay.”*

Next time we are faced with a challenge or opportunity. Let´s think about this. Focus on putting the person together first. Because once we do – the rest will be OK.

Personal Kaizen works wonders.

*From “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”.

The importance of Demos

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wow-moment

Most of what we sell is too hard to understand without a demo.

If a picture is worth a thousand words,

a demonstration is probably worth a million.*

Steve Blank in The 4 steps to the epiphany.

So let´s ask ourselves the following 6 questions:

  • Do you have a demo script?
  • Do you have a demo space?
  • Do you have a demo strategy?
  • Does your demo create a WOW moment?
  • Who does the demo?
  • How often do you demo?

There is a direct correlation between:

the amount of WOW moments you create

&

the growth of your business… *

*YOU, once you got your demo-act together.

Contracts: handshakes 🤝 vs fine-print 🖋

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As a small business (and certainly in B2B) it makes sense to have a well defined contract strategy.

But did you verify if your contract strategy is in line with your business strategy?

So the basis of your business is trust and relationships. It means you want your customers to be delighted and to come back for more delight.

Translating this into a contract strategy looks like this:

  • a 🤝 handshake agreement beats fine print.
  • agree on not being an asshole – it is not a legal term but covers many contract clauses and saves legal fees.
  • be transparent what each wants our of the agreement – expectation management
  • seal the deal with 3 key things:
    • a positive, energetic conversation over a meal to celebrate the start and get to know each personally.
    • a brief bullet point email (with both teams in cc to avoid misunderstandings)
    • announcement of the reasons for entering the agreement with your team and to the world (commitment).

 

Handshakes are about the future, about the stuff you can do together.

Fine print is about the past. The stuff that did not work out and nobody fixed.