So often, businesses chase new business by going out of their way and spending lots of $$ to attract new customers. Yet, they don’t look after what they already have. So how do you give great service … and have your customers become advocates for your business?

At the heart of it all, we would say it boils down to just one thing – Caring! So many businesses only see the mighty dollar. Yet if you take time to stop and treat you customers as real people with real needs, and you go out of your way to help them with their needs, you will build yourself a loyal fan club who will tell all their friends about your business.

Is it as simple as that? Unfortunately, run headlong into this and you may just live to regret it. The romantic notion that you will spend time in your restaurant surrounded by good food, great wine and chocolate desserts (for the chocoholics) couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, running a restaurant is hard work.  It requires creativity, business acumen, perseverence, sheer guts … and a love for long working hours.  And if you haven’t got all those, then you must have a restaurant business plan so that you know where you have to compensate.

The movie Julie and Julia romanticises the food industry … but running a successful restaurant is all about planning, execution and a very small pinch of luck. The folklore in the industry suggests that up to 80% of a restaurant’s success is sealed before the doors are even opened. So – before you jump in feet first, make sure you plan properly or you WILL be planning to fail!

After all, that is what it’s all about when we say that we get so busy working IN our business that we haven’t got the time to get round to doing all that “non-essential” tasks such as working ON our business.

Unless we can learn to leverage our time and become more of a catalyst for our businesses, we will only continue to “earn a living”. But if that is all that we desire, perhaps we would be better off becoming an employee … a job that encroaches on our time only from 8.30 am – 5 pm Mondays to Fridays.

Large “projects” never get started as it requires too much time … and we never have any to spare as it is. Marketing that has to be done will always be done tomorrow – after you’ve cleared the in-tray that keeps piling up.

One way to manage time effectively is to dissect the project into its smallest base components and work on each component part as if they were projects in their own right. Reduce everything you have to do inot a seires of little logical progressive steps. Don’t try to attack the big picture all at once. Most people focus on the end result but fail to “stair-step” their way to it. Consequently everything stays in a developmental stage.

Without organisation you can’t get things accomplished. By procrastinating, you allow the opportunity to pass you by. And the cost of doing nothing is enormous. You need to set aside just half an hour a day (or even 15 minutes if you just can’t afford to take that half hour) every day to work on your business.

Consider this … if you are prepared to go to the bank to borrow to buy the goodwill of a business (and at this stage you’re not even sure what is IN the goodwill), why not borrow the equivalent of say, an administrator’s salary for a year so that you can spend 100% of your time on marketing? All it requires is a belief in yourself tht the “free” time you release can be used efficiently to market and grow your business.

Comment: Originally published in our Gardner Pope Success newsletter in June 1996 … and apart from the fact that it is probably now much harder to obtain finance from your bank, not much else has changed.