If you are serious about starting a small solo business, there is no greater lesson to learn than how to apply the principle of maximum leverage to everything you do in your business operation.
Your survival, and ultimately your success, will hinge on how well you grasp the concept and make it your slave.
It's a difficult lesson for many, partly because most of us rarely practice applying leverage in our own personal lives. We tend to get complacent and accept low output and/or maintaining the status quo as our daily M.O.
It's also sometimes hard for entrepreneurial types to embrace the idea since they, of all people, are the ones that typically prefer to just push ahead and get things done on their own.
Such an attitude will cripple your business.
There are a million and one tasks that need to be accomplished in most small businesses. You need to actively seek ways and tools that will leverage your time and skills.
Leverage is positional advantage. Leverage is the power to act effectively. Leverage is getting more done than one person is capable of. Leverage is harnessing the power of many to accomplish great things by oneself.
When you leverage your time, you get 8 hours of work accomplished in 4 hours, or 2 hours.
When you leverage your knowledge, you think as a group of 4 or 6 people, yet you are alone.
When you leverage your sales force, you automate your message and send it out to 100 prospects simultaneously.
In essence, leverage replaces employees. You handle all the tasks and chores of the daily grind by leveraging everything you do to multiply your own effectiveness.
Here are a few examples of maximum leverage:
1. You automate your web site with interactivity so that your customers guide themselves to the areas of their interest. You provide answers to their questions in a FAQs page by anticipating what questions will be on their minds. You give them the financial transaction system they need to order your products without any human intervention.
2. You set up a self-subscribing form to capture the names and email addresses of your web site visitors into your database. You also automate the process of sending them regular information in a series of auto responder email communications over time so that you and your business stay in front of the prospect.
3. You develop a delivery mechanism to enable customers to purchase from you online and receive immediate download of their products along with a receipt and order confirmation. If you're really on the ball, you'll also include an up sell product at the same time or a further discount if they purchase a companion product. All this takes place without your presence.
4. You develop or buy a tool that allows you to notify your customers and prospects of new products, special sales, and one-time promotions - automatically. You write the message once and you're good to go.
5. You want to send a press release to alert others that your product won an award recently. So you purchase software that automatically designs and formats your release and sends it to a pre-selected list of media outlets. You make 100 contacts by pushing the "send" button once.
All of these ideas (and there are many, many more) are designed to allow you to accomplish more in the daily operation of your business. Leverage is the key to increasing your productivity and keeping as much of the business profit for yourself as possible.
And of course, the Internet is the tool we use to do our communication in a leveraged way. Now wouldn't it be a real disadvantage to do business "the old way?"
