Rethink Your Business: How To Be Bigger, Better And Different

Struggle with setting your prices?? Let’s make your pricing as simple, stress-free and profitable as possible!

Book A Pricing Strategy Session

If there’s one thing entrepreneurs can be relied upon to do, it’s overthink.

We excel at it.

Once we have a business idea, the cogs start turning, and there’s no stopping them.

We….

Think things through.
Plan everything out.
Have another idea.
Wander off on a tangent.
Come back to the original plan.
Plan some more.
Finally get started.
Then obsess over every tiny detail of our business.

You may be:

Obsessed with ‘the numbers’.
Fixated on ‘the message’.
Or utterly dedicated to ‘the brand’.

In one way or another, once you had your very own business baby, you thought about it… A lot!

You’re still thinking about it.

All. The. Time.

So the notion of rethinking your business is going to elicit one of two reactions in you:

Unadulterated joy that you are being encouraged to indulge in your favourite guilty pleasure;
Or a cold, sinking feeling of dread starting in the pit of your stomach and leaving you with the nagging sensation you’re going to pass out.

But there’s a HUGE difference between over-thinking and rethinking.

Over-thinking sees you running in circles, mulling over the same things repeatedly, making little progress, and generally driving yourself a little crazy.

Rethinking is all about finding new thoughts, new ways, new directions.

Not the same old over and over again, but rethinking your business to make it bigger and more profitable, better – both for you and your clients – and different, to the point it rises above your competition and becomes a dominant force for innovation in your niche.

Sound good?

It should. The most successful businesses do not follow the norms. They do not bend to conventional wisdom, they break the mould.

The most successful entrepreneurs aren’t content to blend in, and follow the herd.

They’re trail blazers.

Whatever stage you’re at in your business now’s the time to take a good look at what you’re doing and ask yourself, “Am I blending in, or am I scorching my own path?”

Rethink Your Business For Growth

The name of the game for every business is growth.

We all want to become as successful as we can possibly be. To achieve that big, huge dream, the one that might seem completely impossible, yet you really desperately want to achieve it.

Growth is magical.

But it doesn’t happen spontaneously. It takes thought, planning, and careful execution.

It also frequently requires a considerable amount of out-of-the-box thinking, especially when your business model involves selling time-for-money by offering a service.

So the first thing to rethink is exactly how you make money, and the elements of your business that you most want to grow.

The odds are, two things at the top of that list are profits and clients.

You want more money, and in order to gain more money you need more clients.

But this is rather in-the-box thinking. And while there’s nothing wrong with it, you might want to try something a little different…

Rethinking Your Money Model

This can be a difficult one to wrap your head around, but give it a moment to settle in your mind.

Is the way you charge for your services really the best way of doing it?

Or is it simply the way it’s done?

Here’s an example – Blockbuster used to be the biggest movie-rental business in the world. They had more the 9000 stores worldwide in 2004 and seemed to be unstoppable. People went in, picked a movie, paid a one-off fee, watched and returned it.

Simple.

Everyone loved it.

Then Netflix happened and totally transformed the way we perceived movie rentals.

No more one-off fees, no limits on how much we could watch, just a low monthly price and whatever you want delivered directly to you.

No muss, no fuss, no waiting.

So simple.

And the world of entertainment hasn’t been the same since.

Netflix is now worth over $61 Billion and ranks 111th on Forbes’ list of Growth Champions.

All because they rethought their money model.

Rethinking Your Pricing

In a similar vein you may also want to rethink your pricing structure. If you’re looking to increase your revenue and profits, raising your prices is a no-brainer. But while you’re at it, really think about it.

Don’t just bump your prices up, consider how you set your prices, and the perceptions people have of your brand as a result of your pricing.

Are you charging by the hour?

By the project?

Do you have fixed pricing for packages available?

Tiers?

Are your clients paying for things they don’t actually need, use, or want, simply because it’s standard to offer them?

Are you missing out on revenue by not offering a complementary or obvious extra option that everyone needs, but nobody else in your niche offers?

For more help on changing your pricing download my FREE eBook, The Abundance Equation, and check out my post on How To Price Your Services For Perfect Perceptions Of Your Business.

Rethinking Your Niche

One of the biggest elements of your business you need to rethink for growth can be your niche.

Is it specific enough to ensure powerful marketing?

Is it broad enough to ensure you’re maximising profits and reaching your potential?

When you’ve been operating in a specific niche for a while it can be really tough to imagine breaking out of it, either by expanding to include something else, or abandoning it completely because it’s no longer working for you.

Here’s another example of change that came about as the result of the digital revolution: paper.

Businesses selling paper as a commodity ran into real trouble when digital workplaces rose to the fore, and paperless offices became a huge trend. Add to this growing environmental concerns and global obsession with reducing waste and you can see that a previously lucrative niche had become obsolete.

Once company, Mohawk Fine Papers, were advised to shut down in the face of customers abandoning paper in favour of digital alternatives. Rather than follow this advice, Mohawk rethought their niche and launched a new digital enterprise in personalised stationery and coffee table books.

They were still trading in paper, but expanded their niche to include a new ‘superfine’ range, used by customers to design their own stuff. The rethink boosted their profits by 17% in 2013, and they have gone from strength to strength ever since.

Rethink Your Business For Improvement

If overthinking is the hallmark of the entrepreneur, perfectionism is the trademark.

We all want our businesses to not only thrive, but be the best they can possibly be.

It’s super-easy to fall into the trap of believing that ‘doing better’ requires ‘working harder’. But sometimes the best way to improve your business is to work smarter, not harder.

One way to do this is to rethink some of the core elements of your business. By reframing things we take for granted, it’s often possible to find a much better way of doing things.

A way that greatly impacts the quality of your business and the services it provides, without requiring you to work yourself to death to achieve it.

In fact, you can often think of new approaches that make everything a lot more efficient at the same time.

Rethink Your Marketing

Marketing is arguably the most exhausting aspect of any business. It never stops, it never slows down. It’s the one thing you absolutely, categorically, have to do at all times, or everything grinds to a halt.

So, how are you marketing your business?

Are you using the best tactics for your business, niche, and audience, or are you simply doing what everyone else does?

Before the internet there were set ways of marketing your business, from direct advertising and ads on TV and in print, to cold calling and the Yellow Pages.

Then digital marketing happened and suddenly there were a million new ways to market your business:

Email Marketing
Content Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Pay Per Click Advertising

The list goes on, but you get the point.

Running an online business has made entrepreneurship easier than ever before. But we have very quickly settled into routine methods that are used by pretty much everyone online.

We threw out the rules created by pre-internet marketing, and came up with new ones for the digital age.

Have a good hard look at your marketing strategies.

What’s working? Really working? Not just, ‘working better than everything else I’m trying’, but genuinely getting amazing results?

What’s not working?

You’d be surprised how many businesses continue with marketing strategies that are going nowhere, either because they don’t think there’s an alternative, or they feel they have to do them, even if they’re not working, because it’s expected.

Social Media is a great example. If your ideal clients are on social media, engaged, and happy to convert from your Twitter or Instagram account, great. But if they really aren’t social media people, or they only hang out on SnapChat and you’re on Facebook and Pinterest, you’re never going to get anywhere.

Yet there’s a huge pressure to have a ‘social media presence’, even if that presence has no tangible benefits for your business.