Eight tips for small businesses to survive and thrive

In the fiercely competitive business world, how small businesses can survive and continue to develop is an eternal topic. From strict cost control to identifying target customers, from exploring the true value of products to improving management efficiency, each secret is designed to help small businesses stand out in the market and achieve long-term and stable growth.

Helping others to climb is to add ladders

In today's business era full of challenges and opportunities, the road to survival and development of enterprises can be described as "step by step". For many small businesses, how can they survive and survive for a long time in the fierce market competition? Today, I will share 8 practical tips for small businesses to survive and develop.

1. Strictly control costs: Make good use of free modernization resources

When we embark on the entrepreneurial journey, cost control is the top priority.

If you don't hire anyone, I believe that in this era, you can have at least 4 free assistants. They can be: Kimi, Doubao, Tiangong, and Tongyi. At least after these "four secretaries" gather together, you can ask them to create content for you, and then you can evaluate the content produced by these four employees for you, and they are available at any time, 24 hours a day.

If you feel that the content produced by these tools is not easy to use, it doesn’t matter. You should learn to use them more often and output more clear instructions. You will find that they will be "tuned" differently in the hands of different people. Generally speaking, they will "become better and better with use". We and AI also need patience to run in.

In the early stages of a business, why spend a lot of money to hire people for matters that can be solved with the help of these smart tools? This is undoubtedly a wise move to save costs.

The picture comes from the Internet

2. Strictly control costs: flexibly choose working methods

Don’t think that when you start a company, you must rent an office, find a spacious place, and do all the programmed and action-based things first.

uncertain!

Offline office work requires long commuting time for employees, which not only consumes energy but also reduces work efficiency. In fact, many companies have switched to a purely online office model, or only arrange offline centralized office work one day a week. In addition to the continuous outflow of funds, renting office space will also involve a lot of management energy. For enterprises, it is a heavy burden in terms of mentality, management and finance. Therefore, when it comes to office space, we should judge the situation and avoid over-investment.

3. Strictly control costs: cautiously start large-scale investment

In the initial stage of a project, if the research and planning are not clear, please do not act rashly. Please keep it running in a one-person way, do testing in a collaborative way, and do not start a large-scale team, raise funds, hold back goods, etc. and invest too much budget.

I have seen many entrepreneurs eagerly start large-scale investment mode before they have a thorough understanding of market demand and business direction in the early stage, and eventually fall into the cost quagmire and cannot extricate themselves. The correct approach is to start with a streamlined personal operation mode, test the market through flexible cooperation, and then gradually expand the scale after the direction is clear and the time is ripe.

If you do the above three points in the early stages of your business, you will have avoided a lot of burdens caused by costs. At this time, you have no extra cost losses, so you can go into battle lightly, so it is not difficult for the company to survive.

4. Clearly identify and accurately segment target customers

Today, no business, especially a startup, can make money by facing all customers! You must ask yourself, which customers are you facing and what are you doing?

"Senior middle class, anxious middle class, sophisticated mothers" are equivalent to all users and are poison to the company. You must focus on and be able to list in detail at least 10 to 20 distinctive characteristics of this customer group. If you have no clear picture of the target customer and you rush to start the project, it is undoubtedly a blind man riding a blind horse, and every penny invested may be wasted.

5. Discover the true value of your product

What is the value of what you are going to do?

Some people say that if I sell a drink, then my value is to quench thirst. If I sell a food, then my value is to quench hunger. Wrong, this is still a lazy value. Don't use lazy values ​​to summarize your business. The true value of a product should be measured by the customer's actual purchasing behavior and willingness to repurchase.

In the early stages of product development, a minimum viable product is launched first, which is then put into an unfamiliar market for testing to observe customer reactions. If customers are not only willing to make their first purchase, but also to repurchase multiple times, or even to give high praise and actively recommend the product to others, then it means that the product has truly hit the customer's pain points and its value has been recognized by the market.

Please note that the group you test must not be your relatives and friends, because no one will say your product is rubbish for the sake of face. When I was investing, I met a large number of entrepreneurs whose products could only be given a score of 60, but they firmly believed that they had so-called loyal users, and their loyal users were all made up of their relatives and friends.

You must develop your loyal users among strangers, and make sure that your loyal users continue to pay because of your product, not because of their friendship with you.

6. Pay attention to repeat purchases and referrals

When we are doing revenue management, don't be greedy and don't look at your GMV, so-called sales volume, and marketing amount. These are meaningless!

What to look at? Look at repeat purchases!

In today's society, whether you are doing ToB or ToC, there is a repurchase indicator. For ToC, your repurchase indicator is of course that people buy this thing repeatedly. For ToB, repurchase means referral, that is, whether others can refer you to a second customer after completing the project, and introduce you to others. If your project is not referred during the process, I'm sorry, it means that others do not recognize the value of your project, and they just haven't come to you to ask for a refund.

One is repeat purchase, and the other is referral. These two indicators are enough to prove whether the value of your product has satisfied customers.

When the value is not yet met, don't rush to do marketing. Don't think that marketing is a good thing. Sometimes marketing is arsenic. You are used to the dividends of traffic, and always think that you can grab another one after grabbing one, but the traffic will always end! Focus on the deep cultivation of product value, and let customers' repurchase and referral become a strong engine for the development of the company.

7. Improve management efficiency

For small businesses, management efficiency is like the lifeline of the enterprise.

Many people say, hey, my company is small and doesn’t need much management. I just need to sell good products.

The smaller the company, the easier it is to widen the gap in management efficiency. Let me give you an example. Company A has five people, but each of them treats the company's affairs as their own. Company B also has five people, and four of them think of themselves as employees, and often work together to drain the boss's resources. So which of these two companies has higher management efficiency?

In the early days, if you have people working together like a husband and wife store, your management efficiency is very high, and this efficiency itself is the basis for your survival. If you open a convenience store with your wife, will you treat your wife as a beast of burden? Will you treat your wife as an employee? Will he treat you as a boss and himself as a beast of burden? No. Why not? Because you are equal, many interests, many interpretations, and many words between you are equal, and you support and motivate each other.

Many small companies today must move forward with the attitude of a mom-and-pop shop. When team members all have this "own business" mentality, the company's management efficiency will naturally rise, providing a solid guarantee for the company's survival and development.

8. Management is not a guessing game

In management, we must strive to be clear!

There is no office politics in a small company, nor is there a need for office politics. Don’t play guessing games. What you need to do is to be concise and to the point, and assign responsibilities to people. Therefore, in a small company, “speaking clearly” becomes very important. How can you use speaking clearly to convey your inner thoughts, how can you use speaking clearly to improve the efficiency of the team, and how can you use speaking clearly to maximize the goodwill of others. This is the second magic weapon that small teams and small companies must use to improve management efficiency.

Small businesses face numerous challenges in their efforts to survive and develop in today's fiercely competitive era. But as long as we firmly grasp the three key elements of cost control, value creation and efficient management, and implement the eight tips mentioned above in every aspect of business operations, I believe that no matter how fierce the market is, we can have our own ecological niche and write our own business legend!