synergizing products and services

8/8/2019 Synergizing Products and Services

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Synergizing Products and Services

By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant, Adams Company Limited© Copyright. October 10, 2007

Many entrepreneurs I know are never short of business ideas. I am not exaggeratingbut they can literally come up with new product or service ideas everyday if notevery minute! However, I think this is a frightening phenomenon as I see a lot of theideas are very demanding for resources in order to develop market opportunities andthey cannot leverage with each other at all.

One very basic theory I want to share here is products and services mustsynergize with each other in a same business in order to maximize your return oninvestments. Otherwise, you will have a big chance of wasting unnecessaryresources (time, money and labor) and duplicating your effort to grow your productsor services market(s). If you can really synergize your products and services, you

may also experience an exponential rate of growth.

Below are some of very useful synergizing techniques on how to synergize yourproducts and services that I learnt throughout my sales & marketing career:

1. Door Opener Product

2. Multiplying Effect

3. Packaging

4. Consumable & Repurchase

1. Door Opener Product – In order to lower the barrier of your customers’

buying action, you must choose a “Door Opener Product” among all of yourproducts and services. This Door Opener Product must be very attractive both interms of features and pricing. You have to be very aggressive about your pricingstrategy of this product in order to win over your competition. As long as you are notloosing money in real term, do not worry too much about your profit, yet! You will besurprised on how much more of other business you can get through this DoorOpener Product.

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• Example: A not so famous Shanghais restaurant is offering $1 for half adozen dumplings. People are queuing outside for a long time in order to eat insuch restaurant and of course I was one of them. When I observed suchinteresting scene, nobody in the restaurant was actually ordering just $1dumplings but a table full of food and I mean nobody! By now, you should getwhat I mean. Though the other food is just average, the Door Opener

Dumplings are bringing huge Profit to the Shanghais restaurant.

• Comments: You must ensure the perceived value of the Door Opener

Product is at high cost and it can achieve good customer satisfaction.Otherwise, the door will never be opened!

2. Multiplying Effect – When all of your products and services are inter-

related or inter-dependent, your customers are likely to buy from you the secondproduct/service than your neighboring shop in order to minimize risks andcomplication. Also, Convenience is a big governing factor for customer buying

behavior. A supermarket is a very good example of convenience buying. You maybebuying a pack of gum in the beginning but you may end up buying a trolley of items!Therefore, even you maybe selling something with a small value in the beginning,the Multiplying Effect can be huge for potential or future sales from the samecustomer if you can build up the Trust. Trust is very important in business and it willeventually turn into “Brand Preference” or “Customer Loyalty”

• Example: Beauty and Hair Salons are often using such multiplying effect toincrease their sales. You may originally ask for a simple treatment but youmay end up spending a huge sum of money you would never thought of whenyou first walk into the shop!

• Comments: Multiplying Effect may only happen if products and services are

related which can be “Cross-Selling”. Otherwise, the buying desire of yourcustomers may not be so easily influenced as you would with the sameproduct category.

3. Packaging – there are 2 ways of Packaging your products and services that

you can consider. First, you can put different but related products to produce aPackage for sale and sell for a higher value though it is still discounted. Theadvantage of this is that you are actually helping customers to mix and match ideas

that they may not think of at the time of buying without the packages.Automatically, you are creating a Multiplying Effect. Second, you can Package thesame raw materials to produce multiple combinations of products. The advantage of this is that you can ensure your raw materials will not be constraint by certainproducts when demands are not reaching their goals. In both cases, you canincrease sales of the slow moving items as well as expand your overall sales perpurchase.



• Example: Set lunches or set dinners are classic examples for Packaging insales and marketing terms. Diners maybe given a couple of choices forappetizer and main entrée but they do not need to choose a la carte. Therestaurant is actually selling more food at a lower price but sales amount ishigher than just selling the main entrée!

• Example: A very popular dessert shop, there must be over 30 different kindsof drinks and sweet soaps they are selling. When I look carefully on theirmenu, no matter hot or cold, more than half of their offerings are merelydifferent combinations of the same ingredients. This is a great example onhow to Package your offerings!

• Comments: You have to be very creative when you come to do Packaging.You will be surprised by how much your customers may enjoy by yourPackages! You just need to follow your own desire in imaging how would youlike to see the Packages if you are a customer.

4. Consumables & Repurchase – Repeatable business is a key success

model to many businesses. If you can make your products or services to become re-purchasable or with recurrence payments, this will bring you not only growth butcompounded growth. The classic example is ink or toner for printers. The sellingprice for printers are decreasingly lower than the early days but ink and toners arestill significantly expansive when compared with the price drop of printers. Otherexamples can be paper towel mops, staples & staplers, paid channels on BroadbandTV services.

• Comments: Not every product and service may use this kind of synergizing

technique. However, my recommendation is to be open to your business.

Sometime, you just need to take a simple action in order to create yourrepeatable business.

SummarySynergizing your products and services are very important if you want to grow yoursales with highest Return On Investment (ROI). If you can master these techniqueseven you are a new comer to the market, you can still create a very competitiveposition for yourself! So, Get Synergized!

2007/07/23

Cash Flow is Everything for SME

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By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant, Adams Company Limited© Copyright. July 12, 2007

Many entrepreneurs and small business owners have great business ideas and this isreflected in their products and services. These great business ideas are mostly sound

but lack one very important element of good business strategy -- Cash Flow. Manybusinesses fail not because their ideas are flawed but they just could not maintaintheir Cash Flow well.

Any good business plan must provide you with a reasonable forecast (or estimation)of the breakeven point. Even it may take time before breakeven point can be metyou should at least ensure that you have available cash on hand to sustain thebusiness throughout its life. Cash Flow must be maintained at a comfortable level atall times. By comfortable, I mean it should be at least more than 2 to 3 months of your total expenses and sales costs.

If you are coming from a finance background, this is definitely nothing new to you

but if you are not, then here are some simple steps that you can take in order tostart managing your Cash Flow with your business plan:

1. Set a period of 24 months as your scope of planning. If you can notbreakeven within 24 months, I would recommend you to really reconsiderwhether you want to proceed with the business idea.

2. Forecast your monthly regular expenses with enough headroom for allunforeseeable items. You may just include an item called "Miscellaneous" if you do not have a clue for the time being.

3. Forecast your monthly sales with a progressive growth rate. You need to beextremely conservative in order to ensure you are not over promising yourself the sales revenue before you have real data to support these forecasts. You

can always revise it up and evaluate when the plan seems to be working orafter running the business for a period of time. One thing to note is that evenyou have sales orders in each month; you may only receive payment after 30days (or more) depending on credit terms you give to your customers.Accounts Payables always tests a company's finances.

4. Forecast your monthly sales cost in relation to the forecast sales. You have tobear in mind that sometimes higher sales volume means you have to increaselabor; so labor costs or salaries have to rise proportionately.

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5. Calculate monthly profit (or loss) by totaling up sales and subtract expensesand sales costs. You will instantly see on which month you start makingprofits. The initial months will mostly be negative figures (i.e. losses) untiltotal sales are higher than the sum of expenses and sales costs (includingcost of goods).

After doing the above steps, you now can probably answer the most importantquestion before you start any new business. That is, how much cash or capitalshould you invest in order keeping your business running until profit starts to buildup? It is a relatively simple calculation as you just need to add all your losses in theinitial months together plus two to three months of regular expenses (and salescosts) to make up the total capital required for your new business investment.

For example, you estimate it will take eight months before you can make a profitfrom your new business and the total loss is $700,000 during this period. You alsocalculate your monthly expenses and sales costs to total $100,000. Then yourminimum cash required to invest at the beginning should be no less than $700,000+ ($100,000 x 3) or $1,000,000.

It may sound very simple but as others will tell you, business is very dynamic and notwo companies will experience exactly the same conditions. What is certain though isthat dynamics of the market are the same and so be prepared for uncertainties. Still,it is extremely useful to do such exercise in order to have a quick reality check of your business idea. This is the very reason why I did not start up my business earlyin the process as I could not shorten the loss period to minimize my investment risk!

I have prepared a sample of cash flow template and it can be downloaded from thislink here: http://www.adamshk.com/download/SampleCashFlow.xls. You may haveto adjust the key items to reflect the nature of your business but it should beintuitive enough to show you the idea.

Enjoy and be mindful with your Cash Flow!

2007/05/14

Magical Top Three Things – PrioritySetting for SME

By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant, Adams Company Limited© Copyright. May 14, 2007

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Managing time and priority in SMEs is extremely challenging as it is largely due tothe fact that resources are limited and things have to do are so many. SMEs have noexemption from doing Sales & Marketing, keeping Accounts, managing Personnel andOffice Administrations and yet at the same time keeping all Operations runningsmoothly.

One very simple way of priority setting I learnt during my Intel days is to always askourselves which are the most important Top Three Things (I call it as 3T from hereon) at any given moment. Why it is so magical about 3T is once you ask thisquestion, then you don’t have many choices in setting your priorities. Naming yourtop 3T does not mean you need to ignore all other important things you have to do,but rather keeping yourself stayed above the water with all the things needed to beaccomplished in a timely fashion.

I understand that every opportunity is important to SMEs but if we cannot evenhandle 3 things at a time, we just have to simply “say no” or push out things to allowenough time and resources to deal with 3 things first.

Before I go in details, there are some rules that we may follow when we are usingthis 3T approach:

We only select the most important 3 things at a given moment; hence the list willchange subject to the change of moment.The given moment can be within next hour, next day, next week, next month, nextyear and so forth…Before we can decide which are the most important 3 things, we should have a clearidea in mind what are things are required to complete by when across the boardincluding Sales & Marketing, Accounting, Personnel & Admin and Operations…etcDeadline is a good indicator for setting priorities of things but I would rather use “Impact of failure” to decide the priorities. The bigger the impact, the higher the

priority it should be!

With the above rules in mind, now I want to list a few sample questions that we mayask ourselves when choosing our 3T in different aspects of our business affair. I amsure you can add other relevant questions to the list!

Sales

- Which top 3 customers or market segments that will bring majority of our revenue?- Which are the top 3 deals in this moment can bring higher income to the company?- Who are our top 3 competitors in the market in the specific product segments?

Marketing- Which top 3 products/services of our company have higher growth potential?

- Which top 3 media are most cost effective to support our sales?- Which top 3 marketing channels can help our products/services get moreawareness in the market?

Finance & Accounting- What are the top 3 accounting gaps that our company is facing most challenges?- What are the top 3 financial issues in our company may hinder our growth most?- What are the top 3 areas that we can improve our accounting accuracy?



Personnel & Office Administrations- What are the top 3 requirements we want most in an opening job position?- What are the top 3 problems that may deteriorate our working environment?- What are the top 3 areas that can motivate our workforce?

Operations

- Which top 3 top 3 processes may need attention in order to improve efficiency?- What are the top 3 issues that may hinder our overall productivity?- What are the top 3 areas may need to increase resources?

SummaryThe ability of identifying our 3T is not difficult to learn but whether we can masterthis art is a matter of discipline. It is so easy to make a plan without any desire of execution. I have experienced this fact myself and witness many other fellow SMEsfailing in doing so very often! Therefore, my advice is making your 3T list as open aspossible to your stakeholders including employees, business partners and to certainextends your customers. In such case, we may ask our stakeholders help and safeguard our 3T as well as to avoid false expectation or false understanding of ourpriorities. 3T may not solve all our priority conflicts but it should give us a good

guideline when to distinguish our top 3 priorities when we are so buried in our workwith confusion!

2007/03/29

Effective target marketing skills for SMEs

By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant, Adams Company Limited© Copyright. March 29, 2007

No matter companies big or small, marketing is always not cheap. Not only moneyyou have to spend, but also resources to execute. Moreover, it is extremely hard tomeasure your success and return-on-investments (ROI). Therefore, it is very

important for SMEs to have very clear ideas in mind what they need to do withmarketing in order to remain competitive and yet maximizing their return withlimited money and resources.

Here, I am summarizing the most important areas that SMEs should consider whenthey plan and do any marketing in an effective and target way:

Alliances – run marketing activities with your partners and maximize costs & resources

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Benefits – always highlight your product/service’s benefits and valuesConcentrate – focus 80% effort on the most strategic 20% of products/servicesDynamics – leverage your products/services strength to gain the maximum returnEnvironment – ready to adapt changes of business environment and ecosystem

AlliancesIt is so easy for anyone to think and act in silo. However, with SMEs money andresources are limited, we really need to look out and find partners that arecomplementary to our business and do co-marketing activities with them. Not only itis a cost-effective thing to do but also it creates synergy and excitement to ourcustomers as they may get better and more complete solutions to fulfill their needs.With combined forces,

• We have much stronger bargaining power with the advertising agencies & channels

• We present a much more prominent presence and image to our customers

• We may broaden our reach to potential customers that are previously coveredonly by our partners

If you do not know where to start, just try to work with some professionalorganizations, chambers of commerce and some other associations that yourpotential customers may belong to.

BenefitsToo often we market our products/services with functions and features without reallytelling our potential customers the benefits and values of our products/services.Customer buying behavior typically is based on how fulfilling is the product/service totheir immediate needs. Any good product/service need to address the needs of the

customers by their values and not the functions or features. Customers are generallywilling to even pay more if they get the perceived values and benefits they want.One simple way to check your marketing message to see whether it is addressingthe benefits and values is to ask if the customer would miss anything for not buyingyour products/services. Some examples of the answers should be:

• The customers are missing the opportunity to solve their problem or addresstheir needs

• The customers are missing the chance to save money or to earn time• The customers are missing the wave to catch up with the season or the trend

It is not easy at first when you try to write your marketing message and addressingyour customers’ needs but it is absolutely essential if you want to differentiate yourproducts/services with so many competitors out there!

ConcentrateMany of us have learned about the 80-20 rule but always do not know how to applyin real lives. I have seen many cases with SME’s they are trying so hard to get everypossible income for the company but losing their focus to get maximum return fromtheir core competency. Let me be a little bit more elaborate on this, we should really



focus 80% of our effort/ money/ resources on top 20% of our products or servicesthat are helping us to gain 80% return of our income. Obviously, it is just anindication but not an absolute rule, some may use 65% effort to gain 80% return….etc. However, when we find ourselves using 50% effort in dealing with or promotingthe bottom 20% of products/services, there must be something wrong with our timeand resources management. It is a very loud alarm that we should be alert! So some

basic questions to ask are: • What are our top 20% strategic products/services that are generating 80%

revenue? How much time, money, man power are we spending in promotingthis 20%?

• What are the bottom 20% products/services we can put aside and not marketnow?

If we can master this 80-20 rule well in our business both sales and marketing, I amsure we can progress our business at a faster rate than we can imagine!

DynamicsWhen we market our products and services, we should really try to leverage thestrengths of all different products and services, so that our customers can relatethem easily without thinking. It is very expansive to build individual brands fordifferent products and it is an art to manage brands well. My recommendation toSMEs is to avoid as much as possible of introducing new brands unless absolutelyrequired. However, the whole process should start when product/service managersand research & development managers decide which products/services to belaunched to the market. Hence, when we launch new products and services, weshould ask ourselves that:

• Whether the new products/services are complementing the existingproducts/services? Can we do bundled sales?

• Can we use an overall umbrella brand to cover both existing and newproducts/services?

• Do the new products/services differentiate themselves well enough thatcustomers will not be confused?

I can guaranteed you that creating dynamics for your products/services is veryexciting especially when you see they are really helping each other to sell and grow.

EnvironmentBusiness world changes every second, we have to be ready and adapt changes as

soon as required. We cannot blindly repeat what we have been doing in the past. Weshould be willing to change according to the environmental changes. The ecosystemof the environment changes so fast, our customers, competitors, channels,complementors may not be there forever. We have to keep our eyes open and keepreviewing our marketing strategy by challenging ourselves to see if our marketingstrategy really fitting to the real world! Here are some of the principles:



• We should stop using the same advertisement or we should make changes tothe advertisement if there is no response from customers for a period of time

• We should use different marketing channels to test out the best responsesand cost-effectiveness

• We should pay extra attention if there are seasonal effect to customer buyingbehavior…e.g. beginning and end of fiscal year, major holiday seasons…etc

The business environment is so volatile, no one can completely grasp the realsituation but if we are diligent enough to notice, monitor and apply changesaccordingly, we can make crisis to opportunities!

In summary, we must be ready to adapt changes in our business environment andwilling to work with other alliances to create the maximum effect in marketing of highlighting the benefit/values of our most strategic products/services with most of our effort by leveraging the strengths of different products and services. It is a veryexciting and interesting game we are in!

2007/02/21

The 5C’s of Business Planning – Essentialsfor SME

By Matthew KwanPrincipal Consultant, Adams Company Limited© Copyright. February 21, 2007

After having talked to many SME owners, I found a cruel phenomenon is that a lot of them are often ignorant for not going through any structured business planningprocess at all even having started their businesses for sometime. I am compelled toshare this article as it is dear to my heart and I hope it may help SME owners ingeneral.

As SME, you just cannot take chance to waste your limited capital on any undesirableinvestments. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to go through your businessplanning in a structured fashion in order to ensure you are making the right businessdecisions.

The 5C’s of Business Planning is actually a model that I combined from differentbusiness planning ideas and models. I think it is simple and easy enough to any SMEowner to use without much effort. You just need to follow the steps and answer the

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questions honestly. Even you do not know the answers for the time being, you may just put “ACTION TO FIND OUT!” to continue and follow up later.

So, what are the 5C’s, they are Customers, Competitors, Complementors,

Channels and Costs.

1. CUSTOMERS – It is not surprised to see this to be the first on the list butquestions you should really ask are:

• What are the industries or business segments that identify your customers?• What age, gender, education and income level that identify your customers or

do it matter at all?• What countries and national boundaries that your customers operate?• What are the common characteristics that identify your customers? e.g. size

of business, years of operation, number of employees…etc.• How big is the Total Available Market (TAM)? i.e. How many potential

customers are there in your targeted market across the board?

COMMENTS: You should spend as much time as possible to go through this analysisof your customers as it will help you to uniquely identify your desired customers. Anyfuture sales and marketing effort and resources should only be spent on your desiredcustomers but not any customers.

2. COMPETITORS – As stated in Sun Tzu’s Art of War, “You will win every

battle by knowing your enemies as well as yourself!” Just knowing the names of yourcompetitors are not good enough, you should also ask:

• Who are your direct competitors? i.e. they have similar products/services toyour offerings?

• Who are your indirect competitors? i.e. they have substitute products/servicesto your offerings?

• What is the price ranges of your direct and indirect competitors?• What are the success factors of your direct and indirect competitors?• What additional product features or services areas that your competitors are

offering over yours?• What marketing or promotion are your competitors doing?

COMMENTS: You should focus on those direct and indirect competitors of yourdesired customer segment. Some companies maybe doing similar business of yoursbut not necessarily are your competitors at all as they maybe focusing on verydifferent customer segments.

3. COMPLEMENTORS – Alliances is a topic getting more and more attention

in the business world. The way Steven Covey’s “Seven habits of highly effectivepeople” put it is “To Think Win-Win”. For example, a digital camera company is acomplementor to battery cell companies as well as digital memory companies. So thebasic questions to ask are:



• Who are the companies or organizations that your products/services willbenefit from the sales/growth of their products/services?

• Who are the companies or organizations that their products/services willbenefit from the sales/growth of your products/services?

• COMMENTS: Working with other companies requires a lot of effort andsometime you may even have to give in for relationship building but strong

alliances will definitely help you to grow your business in a faster rate thanyou could do it on your own. So it is worth spending time and effort in findingand building your complementors!

4. CHANNELS – Without properly identifying your channel players even you

have great products and services, they can only be sold in a contained environment!The idea of channels is very abstract and you have to have a clear mind whenanswering these questions:

• Who else can help you to sell your products/services to your desired customer

segment? (Typically, these are your resellers but sometimes your customerscan be a very effective selling channel of yours!)

• Who may already have strong relationship to your desired customer segmentthat they can market your products/services for you? (Very often, yourcomplementors and your field workers are your very strong marketingchannels!)

COMMENTS: You need to build a very good framework and sales kits in order tomanage your channels well as channels are very often opportunistic as your businessis not necessary their primary priority!

5. COSTS – Pricing is an art and it governs everything about your profit and lossaccounts in your books before you sell any product/service to your desiredcustomers. You really have to be extremely sensitive to this topic and careful to takea balance to ensure your success in sales. So you should ask:

• How much is the maximum can your customers afford to pay for yourproducts/services?b. How much is the minimum you are willing to selling your products/servicesto your customers?

• How much more/less you want to charge over your competition and why isso?

• What discount rate are you willing to give to your customers if they are

buying in quantity?• What margin or percentage discount are you prepared to give to your channel

resellers? COMMENTS: Cash flows should be your topmost concern. Under this consideration,you should really be aggressive enough to establish a good size of customer base byoffering an attractive pricing over your competitions if you are new to the market. Agood pricing strategy with channel support should help you to reach your goals in a



faster pace.

In summary, the 5C’s of Business Planning is just a model for you to go through yourbusiness planning in a structured way. You should use it to ratify your business

decisions. There are no model answers to the questions being raised above butdefinitely the answers will change over time as your business progresses. Therefore,constant review of your business using this model is re

Maximizing dollars on Web marketing –SME primer

By Matthew Kwan © Copyright. All rights reserved.Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited

January 26, 2007

With the advance of Internet and broadband connection, shopping behavior of most peoplenowadays has changed dramatically over the last decade. Suddenly, your company’s Webpresence has become the gauging factor to the success of your company, SME is no exception!

So how can you maximize your dollars on Web marketing to get the best return on investment?Is there any ways that you can ensure the money is right spent? I am going to share here an“IDEAL” model that you may consider to follow:

• I – Identify Your Customers

• D – Decide Your Budget• E – Experiment Your Options• A – Assess Your Results• L – Leverage Others

1. Identify Your CustomersAny marketing books will tell you this same thing - first and foremost, you need to know whoyour customers are. That may seem obvious but sometimes we are just missing the targetwithout really thinking through the process. It is not so much who exactly your customers are

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but what are their shopping behaviors and desires on prices, trends, attributes ofproducts/services, other complementary products/services that will help your sales…etc Youreally have to spend time to analyze your customers, even getting market data to support youranalysis. Without these data, I can guaranteed you that you will waste money on yourmarketing effort!

2. Decide Your BudgetYour marketing budget should not be fixed and it should be as dynamic as possible. Decidingyour budget should be a process with reference to the return of sales enquiries through the useof the budget. For new start up companies I suggest to go a little bit more aggressive for theinitial period until you are comfortable with the good sales pipeline. By aggressive, I do notmean to spend a lot but allow good amount of money for you to use with caution. The rightamount should be relative to your company cash flow, you just should not spend more than youcan afford. My hint to this is to include your marketing budget of your initial period to be partof your initial capital investment and the subsequent budgets to be part of your sales expense.In this way, you do not have to worry too much of you initial marketing budget becoming aburden to your expense in your overall cash flow planning.

3. Experiment Your OptionsThere are just too many options for Web marketing. You need to list them down and give themsome priority and assign budget according to their priorities. However, with SME’s, I suggest tospend your dollars on proactive searching rather than mass advertising as it is too expensive todo. So here are some of the proactive searching options for your reference:

• Search Engines: Yahoo and Google is the most widely used search engine these days inHong Kong. Actually, you do not have to pay a lot in order to get started. For example,you just need to deposit HK$240 to Yahoo and start your keyword search sponsor linkinstantly. However, deciding which keywords to be used does required some goodthought. My personal experience tells me that you are better off by including your cityand product/service category in a phrase to avoid paying unnecessary amount of moneyto compete with the big company with tons of marketing budget. In such a way, thecharge will be a lot cheaper than a standalone keyword. E.g. “cheap business service inHong Kong” This actually makes a lot of sense as more and more people are searchingby phrase rather than simply a keyword. Do remember that the keyword list must berevised constantly to get the best results.

• Web Directories: most portal sites would have business directory sections that you can

post your company information on them. A lot of these sites are still free of charge andwelcome your postings. E.g. Yahoo, Timway, Trade Development Council,SMEcare.com…etc. However, it may take longer time to get your company informationposted depending on each portal’s schedule.

• Auction Sites: Yahoo, eBay, Red-dots, Go2HK are some of the popular auction sites in

Hong Kong. Some SME companies are actually operating entirely using these sites togenerate their sales. You may just need to pay very little per transaction to start

selling. • Blogs/Discussion Groups: Blogs are getting very popular and if you can identify your

customer interests, you should try to become members of their Blogs and DiscussionGroups communities. After joining, you can post messages and point people to yourwebsites for product/service information and etc. Most of these communities are freeto join. On the other hand, setting up a blog of your own is very easy and it takes notime. By doing so, you are setting up a community of your own. The only matter is tomaintain the content and keep it alive. It is very labor intensive to keep it living if you



are not good at sharing thoughts!

• YouTube: YouTube is a video broadcasting website and it has become so popular that

you should consider using it as part of your web marketing strategy. There are actuallySME companies using it as a mean of product introduction, training and even customerservice due to its popularity and free of charge nature.

4. Assess Your ResultsAs mentioned above, you should spend your marketing budget wisely by assessing the resultsregularly. Most Search Engines will have tools to help you to generate reports for your analysis.However, these reports are only meaningful if you are tracking in parallel how your sales andenquires are being done through which web channel. It takes good discipline in doing so! Tostart with, I suggest to do daily and weekly review to ensure money is wisely spent.

5. Leverage OthersNo matter your business is selling products or providing services, you will always havecompanies which may complement your products/services. My recommendation is that youshould try your best in getting these companies to list and link your company website in theirwebsite as partner or show in related links. You should also do the same thing for them vice

versa. In this way, you are building a network of alliances and I find it a very effective way tobuild both awareness and credibility.

Summary

Web marketing is an art and it takes time and effort to perfect. In this Internet age, we just donot have an option of opting out of Web marketing. However, if you are willing to try, practicewill make perfect and you will certainly find reward f

2007/01/12

Starting a business in 3 days

By Matthew Kwan (c) Copyrights. All Rights Reserved.Principal Consultant, Adams Company LimitedJanuary 12, 2007

Being an entrepreneur may sound a challenging thing to do. However, starting a business is notas difficult as you may think. There are actually ways that you can start a business up and

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running in 3 days. Before we go into details, I would like to share some basic rules that onemay consider before starting any business:

1. Cash flow is everything: a good business plan must provide you a reasonable forecast ofthe breakeven point. Even it may take time before breakeven point can be met, youshould at least ensure the cash on hand should maintain a comfortable level at all

times. E.g. cash should be more than 2 to 3 months of total expenses and runningcosts.

2. Focus on your core competencies: small business owners are often side-tracked byspending too much time on doing administrative tasks without really spending time tofocus on selling products or services of their core competencies. In many cases, you canjust spend very little money by getting services from service providers to handle thosesmall tasks for you, which you can save a lot of time to focus on the higher prioritytasks.

3. Simple is beautiful: sometimes we are all so fond of our business ideas and may go too

far into very complicated business models. No matter you are a startup company or a

well established company, my reminder to everyone is simple is beautiful! We shouldtry our best to keep our business model as simple as possible.

So with the above recommendations in mind, I am going to show you some tips and tricks instarting a business in just 3 days.

Day 1 – A company is born!This is certainly the most exciting day in the first 3 days of your company. Planning and marketresearch on which service providers maybe the better choices for your case is required in ordergo smoothly with your business plan!

1. Registering your company – you may have thought of a very good name for your owncompany but one of the ways to avoid all the waiting required for government company

registrations processes is to buy a ready-to-use company, or otherwise known as “shellcompany” from a business service agency. Most Business Centers and Accounting firmsdo offer such service in helping you to buy Shell Companies which can be more or lessready instantly. The price of a Shell Company (Limited Company) may vary fromHK$1000 to $2000 plus government fee of HK$4,330.

2. Getting your company address - You don’t need to sacrifice your privacy even you areworking from home as your office when you start your business. The easiest way to dois to register your company under a Business Centre or Accounting Firm which mailsfrom government and any business correspondences can be sent to such address. MostBusiness Centers should offer such service less than HK$100 per month if you are notparticular about the areas of the address. Personally, I think it is optional to subscribea secretarial phone service but it is always nice for your customers to hear a real

person to answer the calls when you are busy than a voice mail recording!

3. Setting up your company website and email domain - Having gotten a company namefrom the pre-registered Shell Company, you are now ready to apply for a website andemail domain for your company. It is actually cheaper, easier and faster to apply for aninternational (US) domain, i.e. “.com” domain through a Web Hosting company whichthey can apply the domain on your behalf and set up a default website including emailaddresses (POP3) ready to use within hours. My fastest experience only took 6 hoursbefore everything was up and running. The prices of the most basic package may vary



from HK$450 to HK$800 including domain registration and web hosting for 12 monthsdepending on the storage size and other additional features required.

4. Getting an appointment with a commercial banker - It actually takes a couple of weeksbefore you can complete all the procedures. However, it only takes a few days beforeyou may start depositing money into the accounts.

Day 2 – Getting Ready for BusinessWith a new company registered and website/emails setup, the next important thing is to setupa commercial bank account and start marketing your business.

1. Setting up a commercial bank account – the process of setting up a commercial bankaccount is not very difficult but you should consider applying Credit Cards, gettinginsurance for your employees and registering mandatory provident funds all at once tosave you a lot of time to deal with them individually later. A number of banks actuallydo have such services under the same roof. So for the sake of making it simple, youshould consider those banks can provide one stop shop!

2. Refining your company website ready for marketing – even your company websitedomain is ready to use, a lot more effort is required in order to make it perfect.However, my personal opinion is that you do not need a perfect website before you canstart selling your services and products. The most basic information you really need isto tell your customers what are your Products and Services and how to contact you ifthey are interested. The simplest way to start is to create your first draft by usingsome existing templates provided in Microsoft Office (Word or PowerPoint). Theadvantage of using these templates is that you can actually use it as briefing documentto your website designers. Professional website designers can deliver basic 5 pageswebsites with flash graphics in 2 days with prices between HK$2500 to HK$5000.

Day 3 – Doing Business for Real

Unless you have existing customers on hand, otherwise, marketing your company is themandatory action you need to do before you can get any business.

1. Registering your company website on Internet Search Engines – customers nowadays useInternet to search their desired products and services become a mandatory action.Therefore, registering your company website on Internet Search Engines is extremelyimportant. Though you maybe listed for free if you go and register under the webdirectories of Internet Search Engines, it might take a very long while before yourcompany could be appeared. My recommendation is you should in parallel go and dosponsor links on some popular Search Engines like Yahoo, the minimum requirement isto deposit HK$240. Then more or less instantly within an hour, your company websiteand description can be listed as sponsored links on Yahoo when matching keywords aresearched. Obviously, it takes time to learn and get yourself familiar with the tool but

you will get it if you are willing to learn. My personal experience it only took 45minsafter my initial posting to get the first sales enquiry call. That was impressive!However, this can be a very expensive act. So do it with care!

In summary, I have only shown you some best know methods and they are not the only way tostart a business. Everyone knows entrepreneurship requires a lot of energy and risk taking. Thebeauty of it is you will get the positive reward if you are willing to trade off your time and



effort with the right methods. There is no short-cut and we just need to continue to learn andchange according to

synergizing products and services

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