Table of Contents

• The Foundation of Business Success
• Understanding Value Creation
• Mastering Marketing
• The Art of Selling
• Delivering Value to Customers
• Understanding Finance

Starting a business is not an easy thing, you have to focus on many areas before starting any business. Without proper knowledge, you can’t build a successful business. Building a successful business is hard, however, if you have proper knowledge about what you going to build and how you going to do it, then you will get much more clarity about building a successful business.

In these articles am going to share some major fundamental areas you have to focus on before building any business. Once you acquire the knowledge about the key fundamental areas it will be much more easy to build a successful business. You don’t need to focus on many things, which will be overwhelming for your brain, and high chance of quitting your dream business.

Many times you may have experienced that you have an idea but you don’t know what to do further and you get demotivated. These are happening because your brain doesn’t have the proper data to do what next. Because of that, you can’t move further. So educating yourself is very important. That education will lead your brain to give proper data to you, according to the situation.

The Five Pillars of Building a Successful Business

Value Creation

For any business you start the first step is value creation. Without proper value creation, you can’t build any businesses. This value creation area you must have to focus and you should have to know how to create value.

What is Value creation?

Value creation is the process of producing products or services that are more valuable than the resources used to create them. It’s a key part of a business’s success, as it shows how well the company manages its resources to generate profits. It’s the act of putting something out in the world that has some level of usefulness for other people.

When a company inspires customer loyalty, profits increase. When stakeholders receive high returns on their investments, they’re willing to contribute more capital.

Your first and most important priority should be creating something valuable which will help people to come and buy your product. You have to identify what is required for people or your target customers and build the product.

There are eight key areas you have to look after before building any products. There are eight core human drives:

• Money
• Power
• Love
• Knowledge
• Status
• Protection
• Pleasure
• Entertainment

You can check any companies in these worlds, they all build their billion-dollar companies through these eight core human drives. Google, Meta, Tesla, Amazon, Netflix any business you take, every business satisfied among these eight one or two core human drives.

Certainly, if you want to build a product or service you have to satisfy any one or two of the core human drives. This way you can bring a product or service into the market.

Once you identified your value-creating product now comes the second step “Marketing”.

Marketing

Now you have a product, which doesn’t mean that customers will come and buy. Without marketing people don’t know what you have, so the marketing part is very important.

What is marketing?

Marketing is a key component of business management and commerce. It’s a way to: Attract new customers, Retain existing customers, Promote brand awareness, and Create leads that can become sales. The term “marketing” comes from the Latin word mercatus, which means “marketplace” or “merchant”. Examples of marketing include Billboards, TV commercials, Magazine advertisements, Brand posts on social media, and Optimized content on a website.

If you want to sell your products, definitely you have to get people’s attention. If you want to get people’s attention you must have to market it in a proper channel and use all tricks and hacks to get attention.

Marketing is all about planning and executing the development, pricing, distribution and promotion of products and services to satisfy the needs of your customers. The main role of marketing is to deliver customer value by attracting new customers and keeping existing ones.

STP in Marketing

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) is a marketing model that redefines whom you market your products to, and how. It makes your marketing communications more focused, relevant, and personalised for your customers.

The father of Marketing

Philip Kotler is known around the world as the “father of modern marketing.” For over 50 years he has taught at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Kotler’s book Marketing Management is the most widely used textbook in marketing around the world.

There are many ways you can Market your product, in today’s world there are many tools you can use for marketing with the help of AI.

Here are some examples:

• Jasper

An AI writing generator that integrates with a knowledge base to create authentic marketing materials.

• Surfer SEO

An AI-driven tool that analyzes and optimizes on-page SEO elements to improve search rankings and organic traffic.

• Anyword

An AI writing assistant that can create copy based on a URL, industry, and type of copy.

• Merlin

A Chrome extension that uses ChatGPT to summarize web pages, write emails, and generate Excel formulas and codes.

You can use any of the AI tools to market your products. Which will help you to sell your products as fast as it can.

Once you start doing Marketing most probably customers will start to observe your product. Here comes another important step which is “Sales.”

Sales

Sales is a skill you must learn without knowing how to sell you will fail in these steps.

What is sales?

Sales is the exchange of money or value for a product or service or the activities involved in promoting and selling a product or service. If your prospective client wants to pay you, certainly, you should have to learn how to sell.

The best definition of sales is the exchange of money for goods or services. However, in business, it is defined as a set of activities a business does to help customers buy their product. These actions vary from company to company but often include Prospecting and generating new leads.

Here are some sales tips and tricks:

• Understand your customers

Research your customers and their needs, pain points, and preferences. Once you know about the customers in these areas you will get a clear idea about how the prospect is, and according to that, you can prepare.

• Build rapport

Making a positive first impression and finding a connection with your potential customers. Your first impression is one of the keys use it well.

• Use active listening

Speak less than your customer and use active listening skills like making eye contact and nodding. Many salespeople make mistakes and don’t listen to the prospects, they start talking like there is no tomorrow. Which will give a very bad impression. As a salesman, your job is to listen, don’t forget that.

• Empathize

Show that you care about solving your customer’s problems by tailoring your approach and recommendations to their specific situation.

• Prepare for objections

Practice what you’re going to say in response to negative responses like “I’m too busy” or “This isn’t a good time.” Always practice what you have to tell even if the prospective client gives a backout.

• Be efficient

Use your sales presentation time efficiently and focus on the most important information your prospect needs to understand.

• Use a sales script

Use a sales script as a starting point, but be prepared to go off-script as needed. I will prefer to learn the script but use your way of presenting in a crystal clear way.

Once you completed your sales process, your next step is to “Value Delivery.” Without Value Delivery, you can’t sustain the business. Getting to the Value Delivery.

Value Delivery

What you offer to the customer that you have to deliver, without delivering you can’t build a successful business.

What is Value Delivery?

Value delivery is the process of providing customers with solutions that meet or exceed their expectations. It’s about ensuring that customers are happy with the return on their investment.

Customers purchased your product because you created some value for the customer. Now your job is to deliver that value in a proper way. If you can’t deliver what you offer, it will affect your business.

For example, when a consumer purchases a laptop, value delivery may entail giving them free software updates and longer warranties. A business strategy that consistently works to provide its existing and potential customers extra value frequently benefits from more income, faster growth, and better loyalty. Value delivery involves everything necessary to ensure every paying customer is a happy customer: order processing, inventory management, delivery/fulfilment, troubleshooting, customer support, etc. Without Value-Delivery, you don’t have a business.

Use these tips to maximize the value of your products and services:

• Improve the buying process
• Focus on brand perception
• Get customer feedback
• Provide a positive experience.
• Prioritize quality over price.

Focus on these areas and make your customers happy, which will help you to get more sales from the existing customers and to get referrals.

Once you complete the “value delivery” part, then get into “Finance.”

Finace

Finance is an important part of any business. If you can’t bring good revenue or profit to your business eventually you will give up. So learning the finance part is very important.

What is “Finance”?

Finance in business is the management of a company’s financial resources to achieve its goals. It’s a vital part of a business’s operations and is considered the lifeblood of any business.

Finance in business includes:

• Raising capital: Acquiring money from shareholders or loans from banks
• Managing cash flow: Preparing budgets and deciding how much to spend in each department
• Investing: Allocating resources to new products, marketing campaigns, or other growth initiatives
• Managing risk: Avoiding taking on too much risk at once
• Meeting demand: Dealing with cash fluctuations and demand-supply issues
• Purchasing assets: Buying goods, raw materials, and equipment

Finance is a broad discipline that includes personal finance and public finance.

You should know how much profit margin you taking from each product and what is the markup. These are all areas you should have to focus on.

What does a 30% profit margin mean?

Profit margin is the amount by which revenue from sales exceeds costs in a business, usually expressed as a percentage. It can also be calculated as net income divided by revenue or net profit divided by sales. For instance, a 30% profit margin means there is $30 of net income for every $100 of revenue. Generally speaking, a good profit margin is 10 percent but can vary across industries. To determine the gross profit margin, divide the gross profit by the total revenue for the year and then multiply by 100. To determine the net profit margin, divide the net income by the total revenue for the year and then multiply by 100.

According to NYU’s report on U.S. margins, the average net profit margin is 7.71% across different industries. But that doesn’t mean your ideal profit margin will align with this number. As a rule of thumb, 5% is a low margin, 10% is a healthy margin, and 20% is a high margin.

What is Markup?

In business, markup is the difference between the selling price of a product or service and the cost to produce it. It’s usually expressed as a percentage of the cost. Markup is added to the cost of production to cover business expenses and generate a profit. For example, if a product sells for $125 and costs $100, the additional price increase is ($125 – $100) / $100) x 100 = 25%.

There are basic levels of gross profit margin which are considered low, average, or good. Generally, a gross profit margin of between 50–70% is good and anything above that is very good.

How to Calculate Markup?

Simply take the sales price minus the unit cost, and divide that number by the unit cost. Then, multiply by 100 to determine the markup percentage. For example, if your product costs $50 to make and the selling price is $75, then the markup percentage would be 50%: ( $75 – $50) / $50 = . 50 x 100 = 50%.

The main difference between markup and profit margin is that markup is the amount added to the cost of a product to reach the selling price, while profit margin is the percentage of revenue that results in a profit.

If you focus on a healthy profit margin then you can sell in a good markup.

These are the Five-step process for any business. If you want to build any businesses go through these five steps and learn each step in depth. Through your learning process, you will find many good ideas to build a business. All the best for your business success.

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