Part 10 in a series of articles from Sales Through Service: How to make customers want to buy again and again and again (because you’re so ‘great’!) by Guy Arnold
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Access to Capital
This is a constant issue for small and medium businesses: it seems that banks will only lend to people who have plenty of collateral, whether or not their business plan is good. The only way to get a bank to lend to you is to be in a financial situation where you have enough collateral to probably see yourself through anyway!
And other sources of capital tend to be very risk averse … and interest greedy!
This is completely normal and very much an issue of the world today, particularly after the financial crash and meltdown of 2008 – 2011.
But don’t worry, the world is changing, and the answer is on the way.
There has been a continual rise, which will continue to grow, of direct investment through businesses such as ‘Crowd Cube’.
And who knows what the future will bring? There will definitely be lots more avenues of finance for businesses from all sorts of different areas that are not currently expected: the market is truly opening up, and the opportunities are legion.
But, why should someone lend to you or your business? The answer is they shouldn’t, unless you can prove you are worth investing in: how will you do this?
• By having a clear customer focused mission, and sticking to it.
• By filtering all of your systems and processes through the customer’s real needs, obsessively.
• By adopting the ‘go the extra inch’ philosophy and processes in your business.
• By encouraging innovation and feedback from your people and your customers, through this process, thereby releasing the huge latent power of these massive parts of your business that are usually massively under used, and undervalued.
• By having simple, clear, fantastic, lead and lag measures in your business (to which all people’s goals and targets are aligned) that give your business the true value that it is really worth.
There is massive value in customer loyalty, repeat business, and referrals: the only problem is that the old-fashioned, industrial age accounting policies find this very hard to value and therefore, result in poor investment decisions that have led to massive under-achievement by investments, and under resourcing of businesses that sorely need it, for all the right reasons.
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Next time: Issue No 10- Growing the business with limited resources
