4 Basic Marketing Principles

1. Targeting

It’s better to have a single, well targeted bullet than to spray randomly all over the place. It’s more efficient and less wasteful – of both resources and time.

In practice this means getting to know your market and what they want and need (which may not always be the same thing). Then it means designing or adjusting your products appropriately.

2. Focus on benefits, not features

People don’t care that a car has a state of the art alarm system, they care that the car isn’t going to get stolen. They don’t care if they website is W3C compatible or future proof, they want to know that it’s going to improve their bottom line and not be a money sink.

In summary, don’t focus on the features of your products and services, focus on the tangible benefits they bring to your customers.

3. Be consistent and specific

Don’t try to be all things to all people, a constantly changing chameleon. By spreading yourself too thin, you’ll end up appealing to nobody instead. It’s better to decide what your brand represents, whether that’s based on your own intrinsic principles or what you’ve ascertained your market wants, and stick with it.

4. Be in it for the long haul

Marketing works over time, and if you keep building on it, can go from strength to strength. It’s not something you can just do a short burst of and then leave it forevermore. It should also have a many pillared approach, rather than relying too much on a single ‘prong’. Look at all the alternatives that are available to you, including: social media, website promotion, direct mailing, print advertising, networking etc.

If you want to give your business the best chance of success, then contact Chelsea Singh, via his personal website or check out CS Investments.

More Entrepreneurship Quotes

”A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
– Winston Churchill, British Politician

”Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”
– Richard Branson, British Industrialist

”Some people dream of great accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them.”
– Anonymous

”The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake – you can’t learn anything from being perfect.”
– Adam Osborne, American Author

”Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”
– Henry Ford, American Industrialist

”The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
– Vince Lombardi, NFL Coach

”Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill, British Politician

”If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I would spend six hours sharpening my axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States

”The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities.”
– Michael Gerber, Author and Entrepreneur

”Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
– Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist

”Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”
– Chinese Proverb

”The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning – to create a product or service to make the world a better place.”
– Guy Kawasaki, Entrepreneur, Investor, Author

”Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
– Confucius , Thinker and Philosopher

Click here to read about Chelsea Singh.

What makes a millionaire?

The Director’s Centre, which aims to help businesses become more profitable and fun to run, ran a survey called the ‘Magic Million Survey’ to try to get to the bottom of what makes one person able to become a millionaire and another not.

They identified attributes, traits and characteristics of successful business people and discovered that the biggest difference between achievers and wannabes was the approach to success.

High achievers had a strong sense of self belief and a tendency to take responsibility for themselves and the factors around them. Whereas, those who got stuck in a rut and failed to progress and grow their businesses tended to blame external factors and have self-limiting beliefs.

Fear is often the main factor in a lack of success, as people are afraid to risk losing what they have, are afraid of failure or are afraid to relinquish control of any aspects of their business (critical for a truly scalable business).

On the other hand, successful entrepreneurs are usually more self-aware, and know that they are often the bottle neck, holding the business back from even more success.

The successful business owners who took part in the survey all presented the following traits in one combination or another: charismatic leadership, a ‘can do’ attitude, a fast-moving, exciting business environment, motivational rewards systems for staff, a good body of staff… and luck.

You can read the original article here.

Find out more about Chelsea Singh the Investor, here.

Principles for Strategy

To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail.

But having a strategy is no guarantee of success. External factors are always changing and new information becomes available and the environment changes.

So what makes a successful strategy? Below are three principles that underlie a good strategy.

Keep it Simple

A good strategy will have a very simple objective at its core, that can be described in a single sentence and instantly understood, such as Steve Jobs’s ‘1000 songs in your pocket’ for the iPad. By having a clear centre, the strategy will be solidly grounded and anchored to this concept.

Avoid assumptions

The biggest pitfall of strategies is making incorrect assumptions. When developing a strategy, you should question everything you think you know and make sure you get solid facts. Even better, make sure your strategy relies on as few assumptions as possible – that way it will be as strong as it can be. For more on this, look up ‘Occam’s Razor’.

Be flexible

It’s a tricky balance to know when to stick to your guns and when to change tactics. But this is one of the most important skills you can have as a strategist, as no plans survive first contact intact. The strategy should have flexibility built into it, with some of the most likely changes in scenario accounted for.

Click here to visit CS Investments

Doctor Xpress Launches!

CS Investments is pleased to announce the launch of Chelsea Singh’s latest business: Doctor Xpress, providing medical services to your home, hotel or place of work.

Doctor Xpress is a new concept in medical care, aimed at providing convenience and efficiency that matches the needs of today’s demanding modern society.

When you’re feeling poorly, the last thing you want to be doing is traipsing over to your GP, and it’s probably one of the worst things you could be doing. Not only are you putting yourself at risk of the elements and exertion, but if you’re contagious, you’re putting others at risk as well. And once you get to the surgery, you’re exposing yourself to all kinds of other illnesses – whilst in your weakened state!

Doctor Xpress addresses these problems and offers a unique new service, where medical services and experts are mobile, travelling to where they’re needed most.

Services include flu vaccinations, travel clinics, sexual health consultations and private GPs. All our staff are professionally trained and registered with the General Medical Council.

The service is available 24/7, every day of the year, so emergency medical help can be with you as soon as possible, when you need it most.

Check out our new website to find out more about the service and what it can offer you.

Starting a Business

In the current climate with even long established businesses going to the wall and many companies struggling to stay afloat there are increasing number of people being made redundant and many of those people consider starting their own business with their redundancy package.

But most businesses fail within the first year – why is that?

Unrealistic expectations

Some people think that running your own business means being able to do what you want to do all the time. That it means waking up at whatever time, staying in your pyjamas all day and taking days off willy nilly. Unfortunately this is pretty much the opposite of the reality of running your own business.

People who start businesses usually work longer hours than those who do 9 – 5 , and  a lot of entrepreneurs are naturally workaholics. If you’re choosing starting a business because it’ll be an easy option, it’s the road to disaster.

Lack of Planning

Many startups think they’ve got a good idea, but fail to do the nitty gritty maths and calculations that are required to work out whether it is actually a viable business or not. Sure, projections of new startups are notoriously difficult and can be wildly wrong, but if it’s going to be literally impossible to make it add up, it’s better to see it from abstract calcultaions than a year later in your bank balance.

Another area where inexperienced people fail is by not checking out the competition properly and assuming customers will be battering down their door. Knowing what you’re up against and having a clear reason for people to buy from you instead of them is critical and you don’t want to be discovering your nemesis later down the line.

Lack of adequate funds      

Businesses need funds to get started. Even starting on a shoestring means having at least a few hundred or thousand. The minimum a business needs to start is a phone, a business card and a website. But most successful business people know that to make a business a success you need to start off by investing.

With the right funding for marketing and giving a professional impression, trust is built quickly and customer bases can be expanded quickly, turning the company into a profit maker rather than having it creep along without breaking even for years.

If you want to give your business the best chance of success, then why not contact Chelsea Singh, via his personal website or check out CS Investments.

Chelsea Singh’s latest Business Quotes

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
Bruce Lee

“There is only one boss. The customer.  And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
Sam Walton

“Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.”
Thomas A. Edison

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
Colin Powell

“Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.”
Henry R. Luce

“Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.”
Napoleon Hill

“The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.”
Albert Einstein

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
Bill Cosby

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
Steve Jobs

For more information about Chelsea Singh as an business investor, visit his website.

More quotes about making it in business, from Chelsea Singh

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
Steve Jobs

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Mark Twain

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
Dale Carnegie

“No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.”
Niccolo Machiavelli

“Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.”
Thomas A. Edison

“A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.”
William Feather

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Adam Smith

“All lasting business is built on friendship.”
Alfred A. Montapert

Click here to read about Chelsea Singh.

Could you run your own business? Part Three: Determination

This is the third of three articles exploring what sort of personality traits it takes to run your own business.

You can read the first part of the article here, or, read the second part here.

If you’re considering leaving employment and starting your own business, there must be something that sparked that desire. Perhaps you’re unhappy with your job, or maybe you’re tempted by the advantages of not having a boss, or perhaps (and this is becoming more and more common in the current economic climate) you’ve been made redundant and have a lump sum of money that is inspiring this idea.

But not everybody has what it takes to be an entrepreneur and run their own business. We’ve already looked at how important discipline and a thick skin are – this week we’ll look at perhaps the most important trait of all – determination.

Determination

Determination runs underneath discipline and a thick skin – it is the core of everything. All business owners get plenty of knocks along the way, and everybody has some failures. The difference between those that make it as success and those that don’t is determination.

Some people will wobble at the first bad news and throw the towel in. Others will see that as a challenge to relish and will find a way round, over or through the issue. Then, if they’re faced with another, they do it over, and over again.

Running your own business does not allow a lot of room for complacency, if you want an easy life, without stress or uncertainty, then you should probably stick to employment.

But if you’ve got what it takes to keep fighting against the odds, just because it’s in your bones to succeed, then you may have what it takes to become a successful business owner.

Click here to visit CS  Investments.

Could you run your own business? Part Two: Thick Skin.

If you haven’t read part one of this article, go here.

Some business owners, like Chelsea Singh, always knew they were going to run their own business. There was simply no question about it, it was an itch that had to be scratched and was just waiting for the right moment.

Others start out in normal employment and just consider running a business as a possible alternative, thinking about the benefits of freedom and potential wealth it could bring.

So if you’ve got the itch, how do you know if you’ve got what it takes to actually make a success of your own business?

Thick Skin

You’ll need resilience and a thick skin to make it on your own in the business world. Criticism can come from all sides, including well-meaning friends and family who think you’re making a mistake and it’s all going to end in tears.

Then you’ll meet other business owners who criticize your ideas or methods or might be deliberately malicious if they think you’re infringing on their territory.

Also, not all customers are reasonable, and every business owner has their share of rants directed at them, no matter how unreasonable, or how much they’ve bent over backwards to try to keep the client happy.

If you already know that you’re sensitive to criticism, and every time anyone disapproves of anything you do, you spend weeks brooding about it, then it might be worth reconsidering running your own business, and the benefits may not be worth the anxiety that will also come along.

If you’re a bit sensitive, but think you can take it, then prepare yourself for a bumpy ride and hang in there!

Read the next part of the article here.

For more about Chelsea Singh, click here.