Whether you’re thinking about starting a new business or growing an existing one, Ready, Fire, Aim has what you need to succeed in your entrepreneurial endeavors. In it, self-made multimillionaire and bestselling author Masterson shares the knowledge he has gained from creating and expanding numerous businesses and outlines a focused strategy for guiding a small business through the four stages of entrepreneurial growth. Along the way, Masterson teaches you the different skills needed in order to excel in this dynamic environment.

Success in Small Business

Develop Strategy, Control Execution and Manage People

Reduced to essentials, small business success involves developing an effective marketing strategy, controlling its execution and motivating people. Each of these key tasks involves many detailed tasks. You will get better results if you maintain an overall focus on these key tasks even while attending to all the details. If you lose this perspective, it is easy to get bogged down in the details and lose your way to success.

Marketing Strategy Development

The most practical approach to develop your marketing strategy is to identify your competitors and observe their strategies. Check the product benefits they emphasize, the media they select for spreading their sales messages, promotional methods they use to attract customers and the way they distribute their products. To do this, you would have to identify your customers first.

You would also have to identify your customers and develop customer profiles. Determine whether they are young people or seniors, male or female or both, high spenders or budget-minded and so on. You would then have a better idea of how to create sales messages that appeal to this group.

With clear ideas about your customers and competitors, try to find a gap in customer satisfaction. Are the customers, or some particular groups of customers, dissatisfied in some way with existing products or offers? If you find such a gap, you can probably develop a strategy that fills it. Competing would be easier then.

By the time you have completed the above exercise, you would have a good idea of the kinds of marketing strategies you can use. Select one that you can afford and can generate best results for the money you spend. It is the preparatory exercises that produces an effective marketing strategy. Without the insights gained through these exercises, your strategy can prove a flop, or at best, a wasteful one.

Controlling Strategy Execution

If you know what you have to do, doing it is easy. The more specific your idea of what to do, the more easily and quickly you can do it. In essence, this is the principle underlying management control in business, with one added dimension. Monitoring actual results against expected results and taking appropriate action is the added dimension.

In practice, control starts with the development of detailed programs and schedules, with specific goals in terms of time targets, quality specifications and quantity of output. Control also involves putting in place a system to record actual performance and compare it with the planned goals. Was the project completed in time? Did the quality come up to specified standards? Did the quantity produced or sold meet planned levels?

A cycle of control is complete when appropriate action is taken based on the findings reported after comparing performance against plans. If the progress of the project is lagging, additional resources can be allocated to it to speed up work. Quality problems can trigger an investigation into existing practices. Factors behind low levels of production or sales would be analyzed and remedial steps initiated.

The marketing strategy would thus be crystallized in terms of specific action programs and target results. An information system that accumulates business transactions and monitors results would be installed. Managers would be trained to review reports generated by the system and take necessary actions.

Even if yours is a one-person business, the above steps can be taken, in a simpler form. The essential elements should be present, however.

Develop actionable plans, programs and schedules to execute the strategy
Install an information sytem to record transactions and results, compare performance with plans, and generate reports
Review the reports and take needed actions

Managing Business Involves Managing People

Executive actions typically involve dealing with people. Even if you don't have any employees, you would still have to deal with bankers and other lenders, government officials, customers and suppliers. In all these cases, you could achieve better results if you have sufficient skills in working with people.

Customer relations usually determine whether you will continue to receive a steady flow of orders. Satisfied customers might come again for repeat purchases and tell their friends and acquaintances about the splendid customer experience they had.

If you have employees, a new dimension is added to people management. You have to keep their morale high to bring out the best performance. You might also have to deal with problem employees along lines allowed by employment laws.

People management is thus an essential ingredient of success in your small business.

Seek Competent Help

We are primarily human persons and not businesspersons. It is rare that a new businessperson would have acquired the strategy development, operations control and people management skills needed for small business success. You should seek outside help from competent persons or agencies in areas where you lack skills. Success in small business also depends on the ability to identify sources for competent help and get it.

SmallBusiness-Start.com Is Being Revamped

The revamp seeks to:

Cover a wider range of topics of value to small businesspersons
Write pages that are more focused on each topic
Make the explanations more lucid, and
Remove some redundant pages.

Till the revamp is complete, you will see both old and new pages, distinguished by the clearly different page layouts.