Business health checklist

Reading time: 4 min

Money

The most common mistake is to take out a loan for a business without a clear understanding of how to repay it. It’s like piloting a drone: never fly one that you can’t afford to lose right now. It’s just that with a flying drone there is a certain small chance that it will not return, but with a business it’s the other way around: a small chance that everything will work out.

Three business plans

The first, pessimistic, should be drawn up in case everything goes wrong. It can take into account the closure of the metro station near your point or something else bad. If you clearly go below the pessimistic plan, then it’s too late to edit something, you need to quickly close the project. Emergency responses like “minimum personnel, minimum non-core spending” should be included in a month. The second plan is normal. The third, optimistic plan, as motivation.

Read more: Features characteristic of billions. Ask if you have them?

Taxes

Here are the real reasons to pay taxes: the risk of getting caught in a tax crime, blackmail (including from subordinates), the risk of losing goods, the risk that a partner or manager will “throw” you.

System Marketing

It begins with an answer to the question of who needs the product and why. It should be asked to yourself and to people until you become perfectly clear to yourself. And until you can sincerely recommend your product to a friend without fear that he will be at least a little upset.

Customer care

Customer focus does not begin at all with improving something, but with removing everything that infuriates people. Make a list of things that might annoy you. For example, this is loud music in the store, intrusive advertising or employees who help without joy. Go through the companies of your competitors, analyze what you don’t like about them and immediately check if it’s the same for you?

Contact points

These are places where you interact with the client in one way or another. When an unshaven courier knocks on the buyer’s apartment at 6 in the morning, this is also the face of the company. But much more often these are letters, calls, a complaint book, reading your papers, a website and communicating with your team. You need to think through all the moments when you will be in contact with people. Let’s start with a very short definition of yourself. Literally five words. And continue to make it the mainstream brand.

Client base

Right after you got the first working channels to attract people, you need to think about creating and accumulating a client base. Those people with whom you can work are not like new ones. They are easier to attract to a second deal. A large database makes it possible to launch new products well, resell something, and so on. Assets can be: customer profiles, mailing list, social media followers, discount card holders, regular event attendees.

Website

The site must be. It is needed as a presentation at negotiations, as a place to attract traffic. He is generally needed. People want to read about you somewhere.

Social proof

Sometimes we assume that others are more familiar with the situation and consider their behavior to be preferable. For example, when there are a lot of people in one cafe, and no one in another, we choose the first one. Or when famous people post photos with a new thing on social networks, we want to get the same one. Product reviews are also social proof. And also what your friends say. And what the seller you trust thinks.

Intelligent employees

Look for people where they learn the skills that matter to you, not where it’s easier. For a couple of years, tough media people came from the book industry. Sellers for “Mosigra” were found by other sellers, simply throwing a leaflet into a package for young people with a twinkle in their eyes. The “gold mine” of animators was the forums of counselors, who had nothing to do in the off-season. Try not to take those who are “not yours” in spirit. When choosing between two roughly equivalent candidates, pay attention to the learning rate.

Working with freelancers

Everything that can be obtained with excellent quality from external contractors (in fact, freelancers and small contractors) must be given to external contractors and by piecework. Pay for test tasks, negotiate not at the end of the project, but in the middle of the term, pay on time, do not hide the names of those with whom you worked.

Employee motivation

In addition to material motivation, there are also a few important things. People love to do something meaningful (to see the result of their actions), the freedom of action when the company makes the world a better place, to know what happens when their creativity, children and grandchildren are paid attention.

Delegation

The head of the company needs to move away from micromanagement. When you don’t trust employees or are afraid that the work will be done by someone worse than you, you start to “help”. Basically, you are doing the work for the person. The result – and you wasted time, and he lost confidence in himself. The second situation is when a person himself does not know how to solve something. And comes with a question to you. If a question really needs your attention, answer it. If the person can answer it himself, invite him to solve it himself. Two or three such situations – and he will stop asking.

Experiments

Business is a constant experiment. We know little in advance, there are always white spots in the calculations. We must learn, try, get new data and rebuild the model. If you have a thesis like: “I think tourists will buy ice cream on the beaches”, there is nothing easier than testing it in practice.

Just buy ice cream in a regular store, rent a refrigerator or dry ice bag for a day and try to sell the product.

Rules

What you don’t step over. For example, it could be “any relative passes a general interview; receives as much as anyone else in his place would receive, and can be fired at any time without scandal”, “you need to pay all taxes”, “the principle of customer orientation lies above marketing”.

Development

By watching successful people, you become more successful too. Often business starts with cloning past work, reading books, attending industry conferences, asking those who are one step ahead and learning from competitors.