What are you doing to innovate how you market and sell your products and services? If you are trying to survive and even thrive at today’s oil prices, these two functions are the key to competing and staying profitable.
If you are unprepared or desperate, entering a new market can kill your business. Deep pockets won’t always save you either.
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Remember Target expanding into Canada back in 2013? They had deep pockets and resources. Then after a series of missteps, they pulled out roughly two years later, incurring financial losses in the billions.
Target Canada made a lot of mistakes starting with […]
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Many men have lost their place in the bigger story. We bought into one narrative that has not worked out and are now struggling to find a new one as the world rapidly shifts underneath us. Some are looking for a hero, and some are seeking to become one again. We […]
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I don’t usually mention this, but I initially studied to be an engineer before circumstances sent me off on a different path. Maybe that training causes me to notice things or maybe seeing patterns is just a part of me.
Quite a few years ago, I observed something about Calgary road designs. It seems like every major intersection project was an […]
When times are tough it is tempting to play a safe game. You might want to reconsider that strategy to win in business.
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In tough times, it is tempting to tighten the belt and keep doing what you do.
Our natural inclination is to reduce the bigger risk by taking fewer risks at all; to seemingly play it safe. If you are the sole breadwinner it feels like every business mistake is taking food out of your family’s mouth.
So we get paralyzed with […]
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What happens when you are building an expensive new polar research vessel, and you want to generate some visibility for the project? Why of course, you hold a public naming contest on the Internet.
This is exactly what the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) did.
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The new ship, […]
Your ability to invest and leverage resources determines your success in business. How do you measure up?
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The Internet has taught us we can be experts in anything we choose. So we try to be experts in everything. Or worse, we learn just enough to fool ourselves into thinking we are experts because we don’t have the time or passion for achieving mastery.
I see this a lot with small business owners.
For example, they figure out how to build their website and do online marketing because […]
Back in the dark ages, villagers and townspeople would often react to a rumor and then take action swiftly to bring justice upon the presumed guilty party without waiting for the authorities to resolve it. The more emotionally attached people were to the crime, the less real or confirmed information they needed to follow the crowd and exact revenge.
Unfortunately two things were often true:
As per the last two posts (The Value of a New Customer and Marketing Budget 101) I talked about one way of determining your marketing/sales budget.
If you want a simpler method, allocate a percentage of total revenue.
Now the question is where to spend your money for maximum effect.
There are basically four sources of future sales:
You will want to allocate funding (or effort) to […]
One of things you need to do for your business is to determine the lifetime value of a customer or client. This is the lifetime income from that customer to your business and should include factors such as:
Now determine the fixed and variable costs in delivery your product or service. Fixed costs are those that you have regardless […]