Thursday, May 30, 2013

Three Reasons Why Businesses Fail

By Lisa Ballinger


Businesses fail for a lot of reasons. It can be due to lack of (or poor) customer service, poor leadership and vision and/or strategic planning. Often they don't happen in isolation. Whenever one of these things is not performing at its optimum level (or a sufficient level), business success is adversely affected.

Customer Service is of the utmost important as without it a business's ability to generate revenue is affected. You need to have staff members who can understand what your customer needs are. This encourages customers to return to your business. In addition, you need to have products/services that enhance customer loyalty and/or serve a particular market sector. Loyalty programs can help keep customers loyal up to a point. Any product/service that appeals to a particular customer niche can help increase customer retention. But it the combination of these that has a real impact on keeping customers within your business and adding new ones.

Leadership is important as they are the driving force within your business. They will determine how your vision is implemented within your business. This is because they are responsible for directing the employees and putting into effect ideas, processes and systems that will lead them to the vision of the organisation. Regular communication is important so it matches your own vision, ideas and processes otherwise you may end up at a different place than the one you anticipated.

Vision and Strategic Planning are the final cornerstone in this puzzle. This is because you can have all of the above but if you don't know where you are going you won't know where you will end up. Vision should be over arching, you should work out the end point you want to be at that correlates with your vision. Say for example, you want your business to focus on customer service (this is your niche) and that you want to have a five percent Return On Investment within five years (this is your end point). Your vision is related to customer service but your strategic plan is focused on the five percent Return on Investment, but your strategy will determine how you will get there. This in turn is related to your vision of being a customer service focused business.

Managing these three areas well will help make your business a success. Customer Service needs to be the focus of your organisation. This will help ensure your revenue continues to grow. Leadership and Vision are an integral part as well as they will make sure you are headed in the right direction. Keeping these three at the center of your business will help you and your business succeed.




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