Line Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Why a Great Storefront Is Vital to Your Company’s Bottom Line

Great commercial real estate can be hard to find, but rest assured it is well worth the wait. Retail real estate that is well set up, in a favorable location, and affordable can drastically increase your store’s bottom line. The more profitable your company is, the better it is for not only yourself, but also your employees and the local economy.

“Well Set Up” Storefront

A well set up storefront is one which is clean and well organized. It should be large enough for the wares you plan on selling, or (alternatively) offer enough office space for those you plan to employee. Stores which are crowded or dirty are instantly off-putting to potential customers, and they will often leave without purchasing anything – sometimes even if they really need it.

A good display in the front window, which shows the best of your merchandise or relevant materials pertaining to your services, will help to draw customers in. It also helps to keep the area well-lit and inviting. The exception to this rule may be when less light appeals better to your target demographic, like Hot Topic stores.

Favorable Location

Commercial real estate which is in a favorable location can be even harder to find than one which offers your company enough room to do business. Patience is key here, however, because there is nothing more important than location. You may have the best products in the world, but it will not matter a bit if nobody can see them.

The best location will be one which is centralized to your target audience. It should be located near a well-traveled road, or in a shopping center which sees a lot of patronage. For your convenience, it helps if the store is not too far from where you live. Keeping traveling distance to within an hour will make the building more accessible for you.

Affordable

What is considered affordable for your company will depend on your unique situation. As a rule, however, you want the mortgage or rent on your retail real estate to be as far below your potential income as possible. The higher your building costs, the less profit your company will end up making. If you can purchase or rent a property for less than fifty percent of your overall projected income, you’ve done well.

When making your calculations, be sure you have taken into consideration other business expenses, such as materials, products, pay roll, and utilities. If these, added with the possible store cost, are more than 80% of your projected income, than you will not be turning any substantial profit. Without a substantial profit, your company will be unable to succeed.

Finding the perfect commercial real estate for your company can take a lot of time, patience, and energy, but it is undoubtedly worth it. The potential to make a higher profit yield is crucial to success, and a great storefront will allow your company just that. Simply remember you need a well set up storefront in a favorable location, which is affordable for your unique financial situation.

Tag Line or USP – What’s the Difference?

There’s a lot of confusing rhetoric in the market as to what is a ‘Tag Line’ and what is a ‘Unique Selling Proposition’. The point of this post is to clarify both and the major difference between them. Unfortunately even amongst the ranks of ‘Marketing Professionals’ there are those who don’t understand that difference and as a consequence they miss out on what could be pure marketing gold for their clients.

Let’s start with the USP, in an earlier article of mine I described a USP for a cafe and gave an example of how the USP could be arrived at, essentially it is a process of researching your competition, listing what it is that they offer the market and uncovering what it is that they don’t do.

The ‘don’t do’ items represent the gap and the opportunity that exists for you and your business, you have discovered USPs based on your competitive research. In fact, in that earlier post we listed a number of USPs that we identified as a result of the work we did.

The whole basis of a USP is that it is something that others don’t, won’t or can’t do and you can only uncover your USPs as a result of research.

Now for the ‘Tag Line’, think of this as the words that you wrap around your USPs, if, for example, you own a souvenir shop in a special location overlooking the Blue Mountains. You do the research and you find that yours is in fact the only souvenir shop that has the clear mountain and valley views, those are unique to your shop.

Now lets look at the USP associated with your research, you have amazing views and no other souvenir shop has them. Your task is to associate the views to what you sell and importantly what it is that your customer takes away with them.

Here’s one suggested Tag line for this Souvenir business:

Unmatched Views… Unmatched memories…

The USP is the location, the stunning views over the Blue Mountains, we have associated it strongly by comparison with the occasion that the customer visits the shop and makes a purchase, they actually bought a ‘memory’ of their visit to the Blue Mountains, both of which are unmatched by your competition.

That particular tag line has 4 words, that’s acceptable and it looks and sounds quite good. Another tag line that you could use has just two words and very fewer words hold more power and can be more memorable:

‘Incomparable memories’

In the image at the top of this post on my blog, Larry Nelson has done his research, he knows that people looking for his kind of services are tired of agents offering to move the world but not delivering. By default they wanted results and they did not want excuses. Larry capitalised on that knowledge very effectively.

To simply create a tag line without research and clearly identified unique aspects of your business demonstrates a shallowness and a wasted opportunity. The ‘Tag Line’ is as important to your business or marketing plan as the USPs that you uncover and can only come from them. Both will show a potential lender or investor that you have done the research and you have thought about how you can present your business to your customers on the best possible way.

There are other techniques that you can use to help create your Tag line and that will be the subject of another article.

Blur the Line Between Work and Play

Make your vocation your vacation. I think that’s one of the smartest business concepts that I’ve ever run across. I learned it from a book called Work is My Play by Wallace E. Johnson, one of the founders of Holiday Inn.

One of the things that Johnson says in his book that I like so much is this: the secret of success is to work half a day. It doesn’t matter which half you work; just make sure you work half a day. Now, you have to take that in its proper context, because he isn’t talking about a standard eight-hour workday. He’s talking about a day, the full 24-hour period from sunrise to sunrise, which means your “half-day” is 12 hours long. If that just shuts you down flat, consider this: when you study all the great business successes, you’ll see that they were not accomplished by people who punched time clocks like most people do. Average workers put in their 40 or 50 hours, but their real life exists beyond what they do for a living.

Well, folks, the secret here is to throw your whole heart and soul into your business. Just put it all out there. My best analogy for that is the farmer. Farming isn’t really a job that people do for money. Farming is a lifestyle. It’s a part of who they are, and it’s every cell in their bodies. It’s what they live for; it’s their whole identity.

When I think about blurring the line between your work and play, I can’t help but think about the standard job mentality. It’s all about the money for most of us, isn’t it? Most people just naturally assume that that’s what I’m all about, too, because during the past two decades I’ve been “successful.” But they’re wrong. For me, it’s all about the game. It’s about the excitement. It’s about the freedom. It’s about the fun, the adventure of competing.

I’ve successfully blurred the line between work and play, and you should too. Find out what you’re really good at and run with it, putting your whole passion into the things that you really enjoy and do well. I often get up at five AM and start working immediately. Noon rolls around, and I think, “Wow, seven hours just went by — and it happened so quickly!” Sometimes that shocks me, and I wonder, What did I do? Simple enough: I got absorbed in my work. It became as enjoyable for me as any play. The flow of it makes me feel alive. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s interesting.

I have a little sign on the treadmill where I work out, and it says, “Do whatever makes you feel totally alive.” That’s what a business should be about. It’s not only about making money; that’s just a necessity, like breathing, and to me there’s nothing more boring. Whenever you focus on the money alone, or any other single thing, as far as I’m concerned you’re going to make the wrong decisions. That’s why you focus on the game of it, in its totality, and revel in the excitement, the adventure, of trying to build something substantial.

Try to do something that makes you feel passionate, and just fall in love with your work. Do what makes you feel most fulfilled, and spend as much of your life as you can in those areas, playing with whatever gives you the greatest sense of joy and fulfillment. For me it’s marketing, writing, communication. It’s anything that has to do with selling and developing business plans and strategies. Just don’t take it too seriously, or you’ll lose track of what really matters.

Now, does that mean you should laugh at all your problems and just skate by them? Of course not! But this whole idea that being in business is like a prison sentence, where you have to keep your nose to the grindstone and it’s wrong to get loose and to relax and have fun… that’s an old, worthless idea that you need to set aside right now.

Consider professional athletes, who offer the ideal example of blurring the line between work and play. They get paid to play games… though it’s a lot of work, too. It’s no easy job to be, say, a baseball player who plays 160 games a year from April all the way through September. That doesn’t account for all the training and the playoffs, either. They work incredibly hard on it; these athletes are very fit, because they stay active and train all the time. But they’re playing.

Even more amazing, they’re basically playing a kid’s game. Pick-up games of baseball are being played every day across the U.S. and all around the world in their thousands. These guys are doing it for a living… and some are making millions at it. That’s a classic example of getting paid to have fun. Their play is their work, and vice versa. They work hard at it, just like us entrepreneurs.

Now, don’t take this attitude too far, because in order to be successful in business, you’ve got to take it seriously at some level. That doesn’t mean you have to let it give you a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Don’t take it so seriously that you’re exhausted all the time, either. It’s okay to be exhausted occasionally, in the same way that a good play session or a good workout exhausts you. In fact, that’s a great way to think of it: it’s hard work while you’re doing it, but you like the results that come from doing it.

Even if you lose sight of the enjoyment in the heat of the moment, you like seeing what you’ve gained from it, and you like keeping score. You like going to the scale to see how much weight you’ve lost or how much muscle tone you’re gaining. It’s challenging, but it’s fun.

Business should be like that. Take it seriously and play to win, but remember that it’s just a game, and have fun playing.