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Business is a game, or is it!

If it is a game where is your score card? Are you winning or losing? Are you operating your business because it is a passion and wait until the end of the financial year to find out if you've won or lost? Maybe that's how you started, but things probably changed when the bills came in. In fact I guarantee you've wondered more than once 'Where is all the money going?'

You see, business is about filling a need in the market place and being profitable while doing that. But to retain the passion and the excitement, it is very important to be highly profitable. The old idea of 'You make your money when you sell the business' is just that, old. In today's world it is about cash flow, making a profit every month. Buyers don't want a business that runs at a loss every month. Unless they have money to burn or you've got something they really want. In most cases the price of the business is dictated by the cash flow generated.

So, if cash flow is so important, why do business owners hire sales representatives and rely on them to generate the sales to support the business. I've seen business owners completely neglect the marketing of their business, thinking that because they have hired a sales representative, everything is taken care of? Very scary, especially if the sales representative decides to jump ship.

In any business whatsoever, marketing generates the enquiries, which generates the sales, which generates the cash flow, which generates the growth in the business.

Marketing is incredibly important!

Marketing is the seed that grows into the tree. It doesn't make sense to delegate the marketing. It's a high priority task? In fact, if marketing is the seed that the tree grows from, doesn't it make sense that the business owner takes on this task and learns to market their service or product effectively.

It makes so much sense. Business is a game and your competitor is the opposing team. Their mission is to make sure that the score card is in their favor. But a score card is not only effective in maintaining your lead over your opponents. It's also useful to use as a benchmark for improvement within your business.

Can you answer these questions with accuracy (no guessing allowed):

• How many enquiries did you have last month?
• How many of those enquiries converted to sales?
• How do those figures compare with last year?
• How often did the average customer come back to repurchase in one year?
• What is your average transaction size?

What if you knew the answers to all those questions and as the business owner made it your goal to improve all the benchmark numbers by 10%?

Improve enquiries by 10%, improve conversions by 10%, improve your average transaction size by 10% and improve your average number of customer transactions by 10% will compound and potentially quadruple your business.

To win the business game you need to keep the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly score and keep winning by constantly improving the score!