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You will also need to put an extreme focus on profitability. This may mean scaling back your plans for 20 locations nationwide to ten locations that run on higher profit margins. Now is not necessarily the time to overstretch. In fact, doing so and getting caught short of cash and/or human capital, is death for any business.

Read more on Back to Business Basics- Part 2…

As a small-to-medium sized company grows, it becomes harder to effectively communicate across the organization. Whether within or between departments communications must be optimized for organizations to execute at their peak. The key is to recognize each employee’s preferred style of information exchange.

Read more on The Secret to Better Communication in Your Organization…

Every business, small or big, advertises in the hope of finding new customers, yet at the same time most view their advertising as an expense rather than an investment.

As any business owner knows, you get returns from investments, not from expenses, so understanding that you’re investing your advertising dollar in the hope that it will bring you a return is the only way looking at your marketing and advertising that makes sense.

Read more on Every Advertising Dollar Spent is an Investment…

One of the most common mistakes businesses make when they first start writing advertising copy is trying to impress people with their ability to write humorous or “clever” copy, rather than simply getting the sales message across.

Read more on Stop Being Clever With Your Advertising…

To give you an idea of how writing a proper headline works, consider these two, for the same fish and chip shop trying to advertise a 2 for 1 fillet of fish promotion in a newspaper.

Read more on Who Are Your Ads Speaking To? Part Four…

One of the most common mistakes people make when they first start writing advertising copy, is being too “clever”.

They try to impress people with their ability to write funny or inventive advertising copy, rather than simply getting the message across.

Read more on Who Are Your Ads Speaking To? Part Three…

In my last post we talked about the importance of tailoring your ad to the market you desire, now let’s take an example.

Say a local butcher wants to place an ad. Not being the smartest businessman, he simply writes his name at the top and his phone number at the bottom. He sits back, looking over his ad – this will bring in heaps of customers’ he mistakenly thinks. Of course, nobody bothers to look at his ad because it’s completely uninteresting.

Read more on Who Are Your Ads Speaking To? Part Two…

Most people wrongly believe that good ads have to be funny, well written or visually dramatic.

The truth is, the very best ads work because of the strategy behind them.

Think about it this way, if you’ve prepared a delicious meal and your dinner guests are hungry, they probably won’t care what kind of plates you serve the meal on. Put another way, if your message and offer appeals to the people you’re writing to, it barely matters how you present it.

Read more on Who Are Your Ads Speaking To? Part One…

Ask the average business owner and they’ll tell you that advertising is an expense, just another bill which needs to be paid at the end of the month. But when you stop and think about it, advertising is really an investment that can give you unequalled returns if you go about it the right way.

Read more on Do you view Advertising as an Investment?…

By Brad Sugars

Here’s a little known secret about business.

It doesn’t matter what your turnover is, or how many employees you have, or how many customers you’ve got.

It doesn’t matter how many offices you own or if you’ve got a cool company logo.

Read more on Profit is the new black…