Handing over your business to an expert carte blanche is scary. It’s hard to let go of control, but there are good reasons to do so and seek expert help. When you’re treading water financially, putting your business in the hands of an expert could save your business.
It seems like anyone can successfully run every aspect of their business. It’s a do-it-yourself world, at least online. In the real world, you might get decent results if you do everything yourself; however, you won’t see growth. If you want your business to grow, you need an expert or a team of experts managing the following aspects of your business:
1. Inventory
How do you manage your inventory? Or do you manage it at all? If you’re like 46% of small businesses, you either don’t track inventory or use a manual, unreliable method.
It seems many companies do address the need to optimize inventory management during meetings, but nobody knows how to implement a strategy. Money goes into a black hole when you’ve lost control of your inventory.
The expert you need is an inventory attack team that connects with your buyers, team leaders, and uses advanced analytics to direct daily operations toward the most impactful actions possible. Organizing an inventory attack team is easiest when done in stages. LeanDNA recommends starting simple by focusing on ten key actions per day or week per site. Scale up or down depending on the size of your organization. Your primary goal is to make it easy for your team to identify the most important actions for the day/week. The rest – including accountability – will come in stages.
One example provided by LeanDNA is to establish a regular meeting to review inventory management actions based on their value. For instance, the corporate supply chain leader might start the week connecting with the site reps to review the top ten actions across the organization. Each site rep would discuss the status and results of the actions they’re accountable for. Part of being accountable includes discussing what their next step is.
As you establish your inventory attack team, the responsibilities will get more complex, and the number of actions required will grow. When your team is in place, you’ll have better accuracy and results.
2. Marketing
Everyone wants to be an expert in marketing because it seems so easy. There are courses available for free on YouTube, and under $100 in other places. These courses might be useful when you’re unfamiliar with marketing, but the harsh reality is DIY marketing courses don’t teach high-level strategies. They teach the basics that appear to be high-level simply because it’s unfamiliar.
A millionaire internet entrepreneur isn’t going to spill their coveted marketing strategies to the world. If you want to launch a marketing campaign as successful as big brands like Pepsi or Dr. Pepper, you need an expert running your team.
3. Direct sales
Sales is an art form that takes years to master. You need a seasoned expert leading your sales team. Your sales team needs a fearless leader they can count on to help them improve their strategies, and develop their skills.
4. Copywriting
Copywriting is part of marketing, but it’s often misunderstood and deserves to be discussed separately. Every business should have an in-house copywriter creating all sales letters, emails, and other communications. Copywriting is persuasive, not creative. Content writing is creative.
Copywriting isn’t about creating copy your English teacher would be proud of. The best copy is often messy, grammatically incorrect, and conversational. It’s intentional and speaks directly to a market through their specific listening filters.
Business owners tend to write copy describing how cool their product is, which doesn’t work. Copywriters pull their readers into a compelling story that makes them feel like they must buy the product. For example, a sales letter discussing the features and benefits of a new electric wheelchair isn’t going to sell. On the other hand, a story that promises buyers their independence will sell wheelchairs like crazy.
Let the experts do the work
Whatever experts you hire to run your departments, make sure you let them do the work. Don’t make the mistake of hiring experts to give you advice. Asking for advice means you have the option to reject ideas you don’t like. When you need the advice of an expert, you’re not in a position to reject their advice. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can pick and choose how to implement their advice. It’s better to give up control to your hired experts. If you’re really drowning, you have nothing to lose and a better business to gain.
