Supercharge Your Business Today: The Six Secrets of the GROWTH™ Technique

By Karl Tettmann

In Supercharge Your Business Today, veteran marketing expert Karl Tettmann transforms the proven business-building strategies of the Fortune 100 into easy to understand success strategies for every business regardless of size. Whether you are a CEO, company president, business owner or manager, this book is for you.

Most companies don’t even know what information they have on hand. In this book, you’ll learn what data is most important and how to transform it into insightful, readable analyses so that even the most “creative” people in the room will use it to make smart business decisions. Plus, you’ll be able to use that data to avoid one of the biggest mistakes a business executive, owner or manager can make — the kind of mistake that can bankrupt a company!

There’s more, much more. The unique GROWTH™ Technique gives you the blueprint for making your own business more profitable, evaluating the true potential of marketing and advertising plans and preparing your company for the steady expansion every CEO and manager dreams of.

After reading this book, you will see your business dynamics in an entirely new way. You’ll literally know what to expect from every sales promotion and new product launch. You’ll be ready to expand your business based on sound decisions, have more control over cash flow and control rising material and overhead costs.

In addition, Supercharge Your Business Today will show you how to energize and unite the people who work for you while instilling loyalty and dedication to a job best done.

Plus, you’ll find the GROWTH™ Technique instrumental in making your business more efficient, thereby increasing the bottom line profitability while also increasing sales.

Don’t make another business decision before reading this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927677308

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

DID YOU HEAR THE ONE about the brilliant businessman who made a better widget, built a profitable company around that widget, then ran a fantastic marketing campaign that doubled the sales of that widget … and then went bankrupt?

No, it’s not a joke. And of course it isn’t funny. But, unfortunately, it happens more often than you think. As a principal in an advertising and marketing company, I see it all the time. It breaks my heart (and sometimes my pocketbook) because when a client runs out of money — or worse, has to declare bankruptcy — the ad agency among others is usually the last to get paid. That is if it gets paid at all.

I can hear you asking, How the heck does that happen? You said the businessman was brilliant and that the marketing produced incredible results. Well, the businessman and the marketing can both be brilliant, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the full business proposition is sound.

Here’s an example of what tends to happen from the he said/we said point of view:

A client comes to us and says, We’ve got a budget of anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 to do this campaign, advertising program, new product launch or whatever. What can you do?

In turn, we get excited. We think, This is the ideal project for us. In fact, this is our ideal client. Then, like every traditional advertising and marketing company, we dive into the work and try to over-deliver to really satisfy our client.

As part of our discussions about the goals and strategies associated with the project, one of the executives or the product manager of the client tells us that he or she wants to get at least a 7% increase in sales.

We think this is a big idea. We want to do better for them. We say, What if we got you 10%?

Wow, we’d be ecstatic. Our whole department, our bosses and their bosses would be ecstatic!

We say, Great. So, we’ll focus on 10% as our goal; you expect 7% and we’ll go from there. We then create marketing plans based on the higher goal and explain to the client that they must complete all the components of the plan in the recommended combination if they want to get that 10% increase.

They say, Great, go ahead and do it.

We do it and get the 10% increase in sales. We’re ecstatic, the client is ecstatic and their bosses are ecstatic. Everyone tells us that we are doing amazing work until, all of a sudden, the client calls up one day and says, You know what, I can’t continue. I’ve run out of cash. Yes, the sales have increased, but I didn’t foresee this and that. I didn’t know we would have to (you fill in the blank).

Worse still, the client doesn’t even tell us that their cash flow is shot. They just don’t pay us. They put us in the position of having to call and remind them about outstanding invoices, again and again. They may continue to say, Great, great job. You’ve gotten us 10%. We’re excited, but they don’t pay us because they can’t.

Like every other good story this one has a moral — don’t ever forget to validate your business proposition.

See, the thing is increasing gross sales comes with a price. Every advertising campaign, direct marketing effort, sales promotion and new product launch will have an impact on the bottom line, and not always in a good way.

You need to be sure that your ‘big idea’ will be valuable to the bottom line after all the ‘what ifs’ are considered. First, you have to analyze a project for its return on investment. That is, can you reasonably (i.e., based on sales history, expected new customer acquisition rates, or even potential cannibalization of an original product by a new formula, flavor or scent) expect a new product or marketing effort to at least make back the costs associated with bringing it to fruition.

The biggest mistake a business can make is not determining in advance if a project will cost more to execute than it will add to the bottom line. Of course, the first thing you’ll do is look at the big picture numbers, but don’t forget to consider the cost of a customer acquisition. Forecasting the number of new customers (or purchases) without also determining the cost of getting each of those customers isn’t enough to properly validate a project. It is critical that you know how much money you’ll be spending to gain one new customer so you can compare it with the profit you will make off that first sale. It is frightening to me that so many companies do not take this step, especially when validating marketing or sales promotion programs. After all, you wouldn’t spend $2.50 to make $1.00, would you?

Plus, selling more product means making and shipping more product. What about those costs? If the company is already producing at close to optimum speed and capacity, selling more product means hiring more staff, buying more equipment and components or adding sales and customer support staff?

The other question you must ask yourself is, Can I afford to do this project now? If you don’t have sufficient cash flow to cover all the additional expenses until the sales come rolling in, reallocate your budget by department or borrow it. Don’t leave your company in the lurch.

I know, it sounds complicated — but it’s not. The problem, until now, has been that only the largest corporations in the world have had the expertise and resources to validate every business proposition; that is, to take a business scenario from point A to point Z, analyzing all the factors that will be affected by an increase in sales.

It’s time to change that. No matter the size of a business, every manager and entrepreneur needs to be able to evaluate the true potential — good or bad — of even the smallest business decision. (Yes, I used quote marks around the word smallest because once you understand the principles behind validation, you will never think of a decision as small again.)

Launching a product or project is a bit like walking a tight rope. You have to — very carefully — put one foot in front of the other. The tighter the margins the more critical it is to have safety net validation. Fortune 100 corporations can