The Right Clients

Someone recently asked me why I chose to capitalize the words ‘Client’ and ‘Customer’ in my texts. Well, the simple explanation is that I appreciate their business. As a sign of respect and acknowledgement of their importance to my company, I want to show my appreciation in every article that I write containing these words.

It’s wonderful to have successful, paying Clients but even better to do business with the right Clients. To start with, we are either big fans of our Clients or we become big fans as we get to know them better. I hear our employees and freelancers raving every week about some of the great things our Clients are doing to grow their businesses. I want to maintain this positive culture and have therefore decided that our sales teams will only target companies that we really want to do business with. I want to be selective with the people that we do business with so that the result is and continues to be a positive experience for all involved.

Today we have four business relationship guidelines that steer our Client acquisition decisions:
1. Essential elements of our Client’s business culture MUST match ours or at the very least, are similar to those that we value and respect on both an ethical and moral basis. We take pride in our reputation and credibility and wish to work with those with similar ideals.

2. The potential for success is reasonable to fantastic. We want to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and availability to deliver the project successfully and exceed our Client’s expectations. Should a prospect have what we determine to be unrealistic goals, we will gladly recommend a competitor. We will never try to convince a Client that an apple is an orange or that we can deliver something that we know we are not capable of delivering because we want to help each of our Clients solve their problem(s) and, as a consequence, recommend our services to others.

3. Profit = Fun. It is a simple equation and there is a ton of truth behind it. A project must be profitable and have the potential to be carried through to successful completion with high levels of motivation and contributions to our bottom line. In essence, we ask for a win-win deal. If our Client wins, we win as well and if our Client is not able to achieve their objectives, we reconsider our role and our efforts to provide the necessary ingredients for success. Competing on price has little merit in this equation since the team requires rewards for a job well done.

4. Bandwidth is an annoying topic for us because our product is based on people with specific skills and limited availability. We want to give our Client’s the best possible service and that means that we need to have a well rested, physically and mentally fit team ready to jump into action. Success brings with it some level of frustration as you learn that you simply can not please everyone all the time. Our people tend to be booked solid for 60 to 90 days out and that means that there is little available bandwidth to acquire new business unless we add additional people to the team. On some occasions this is exactly what we did because we were interviewing superb people at the same time as we acquired a new Client that required the type of services that these new people were capable of delivering. That was a lucky situation and in 10 years has only occurred twice. Most of the time, we are approached by prospects that were referred to us by Clients or read about a Client success story that we created. These prospects usually have some urgent needs and therein lies our challenge. We want to help such companies but only if we can put the right team together to increase the probability of success.

Naturally, there are exceptions to the above guidelines but truth be told, we learned our lessons in the past and such exceptions are rarely worth the time and effort when a win-win is simply not possible.

We count on people like you to understand our thought process and although it may seem in some ways to be rather exclusive given the way that we filter our opportunities, please know that we really appreciate new business opportunities, they are the lifeblood of our business model. BoxONline is currently undergoing some growing pains and thus further expansion is necessary to achieve our objectives so, if you know of people who may fit into and support this Client oriented model of exceeding expectations, please do get in touch with me directly using this form.

Grow or Die

There is much to be said about the plethora of business models but rather than bore you with details of things that simply don’t work or concepts that have become outdated in the online world of today, I thought I’d present a viewpoint based on innovation and direction.

Each firm we deal with has two possible outcomes in addition to stagnation – to grow or to die. It all depends on the choices made by executive management and their board. Some have said innovate or die but the truth is that innovation in and of itself is not a viable business strategy that delivers profits and thus an opportunity for growth.

I refer to innovation in the sense that you are trying to do something new without reinventing the wheel. When I use the term direction, I am referring to the executive management’s intention decision to move the company toward a specific goal – in a given direction. A dear colleague has provided me with a few graphics so that I don’t have to type 1000 words to present this concept.

Let’s begin with a definition so that you know where I am coming from…
A business model describes the value an organization offers to various Customers and portrays the capabilities and partners required for creating, marketing and delivering this value in addition to relationship capital with the goal of generalizing profitable and sustainable revenue streams. Whew, that is a mouthful! Here is a more visual representation of that text…

So, given that you have your infrastructure in place, a compelling offer with a solid value proposition, a relationship with your Customers either directly or via a partner and a mechanism ready to capture orders and convert them to revenue… you are in business. But is your model optimized for what you want to achieve? Obviously, application infrastructure and IT systems need to support the model on the back end.

But, what about direction? What course was plotted by those in command? There are a few directions to choose from, and at least one will make sense to executives wanting to grow their business – but in what direction might they want to grow? Here is a simple graphic to help understanding the available options.

In each of the four quadrants below there is an opportunity for growth. Each has an unique way to move the company forward so that the business model supports rather than hinders growth. By being innovative in your approach and testing what works on a consistent and frequent basis, you will be able to optimize your model for your market more effectively than 95% of your competitors.

Take a moment and think about the variables that drive your business – for a car it would be the gas pedal. The more pressure you put on the gas pedal, the faster your car is going to travel. You use a speedometer to measure this in your car so how do you measure success in your business? Well, for starters you need to select a variable that drives your business and find a way to measure the performance delta so that you know if putting pressure on this variable delivers a positive outcome or not.

At BoxOnline we have extensive experience in improving online business models and can literally guarantee that your company will increase revenues after you improve your conversion rates.

Most business process consulting firms make promises that they simply can not keep and still manage to invoice their Clients each month for unfulfilled objectives. At BoxOnline, one of our value propositions for helping our Clients increase online revenues is a success driven fee. If you do not succeed – neither do we.

If you need to grow your revenues and agree that an increase in your conversion rate might deliver the results that your board is after, we may be able to provide you with some innovative input that has already delivered results to hundreds of successful online businesses in the past year. What have you got to lose? Contact us right now..