If your prospects don’t believe you, you won’t make the sale.
This is where the power of testimonials and case studies comes in. It’s praise from your existing customers, the media, other experts or even a celebrity. They are extremely powerful.
You must have systems to collect them and then leverage the power of them by using them in all your marketing materials.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbleon & London.
The customer is the most important person in the world, right? If there were two people left in the world and one has to die, you or the customer, who would it be?
Now, we’re agreed you are the most important person in the world.
The problem is that the customer thinks they are and that’s why you have to treat them that way if your business is to be successful.
Would you believe that if your customers are satisfied, you’re in trouble? That’s right, you read it correctly…
Let’s say you have a 95% customer satisfaction rating. Sounds great, but what it means is that you have 5% going round telling everyone how awful you are. The other 95% felt ok about you so they may shop with you but they could shop anywhere – they don’t have any special loyalty to you.
What’s more, a dissatisfied customer is 20 times more likely to tell someone. So if 95% of your customers are happy, you’ll have more negative than positive message out in the market place.
It’s loyalty you should be after, not just satisfaction. For example, the typical customer satisfaction question may ask “did you enjoy your stay?” or “were we friendly?” The only answers these give are ones of satisfaction, not designed to find out if the customer felt great and had a memorable experience that creates loyalty. You must use questions designed to find out how loyal your customers are.
Here are typical examples of how most businesses treat their customers and why their customers will never be anything more than just satisfied…
“We’ve done all we can…”
“You’ll have to…”
“That’s not my job…”
“The person who deals with that is on holiday”
“Our policy says…”
“We’re out of stock, I don’t know when we’ll have some more”
“What seems to be the problem”
“Let me transfer you”
“I’ll have to check if that’s OK”
“Sorry, that offer ended yesterday”
“Why didn’t you…”
An insincere “Sorry about that”
“You don’t have to be rude about it”
“I’m just doing my job”
And aren’t those computerised phone systems great for customer service, not!
The list is endless. So many people seem to act like they’re doing the customer a favour.
The best rule to follow is…
If you wouldn’t like it done to you, don’t do it to someone else.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
Using the right fonts in your marketing materials will dramatically increase results. You need to select the fonts you are going to use and use them consistently in everything you do. You must understand where to use serif fonts and where to use sans serif fonts and all the formatting tricks you can use in marketing materials. You don’t need an ad agency to do any of this.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
There are only 2 ways to increase profits. Either you increase sales or you reduce costs. It’s that simple!
However, the amount you can reduce costs by is limited but the amount you can increase sales by is unlimited. So there is far more potential in increasing sales.
There are only 3 ways to generate more sales…
More importantly, if you do all 3 together, you can achieve far higher growth.
For example, lets look at the following scenario…
Therefore the annual profit is presently as follows:
Sales 100 x £100 x 10 100,000
Cost of Sales 100 x £30 x 10 30,000
Gross Profit 70,000
Fixed Overheads 20,000
Net Profit 50,000
If we now increase all three sales generators by 10%, we get the following results.
Sales 110 x £110 x 11 133,100
Cost of Sales 110 x £30 x 11 36,300
Gross Profit 96,800
Fixed Overheads 20,000
Net Profit 76,800
So profits have now risen by £26,800, a 53.6% increase as result of improving all 3 generators by just 10%. This shows the power of working on all 3 areas at the same time to achieve maximum results.
The marketing tools you can use to get growth in all three of these areas can be categorised in the following areas.
An overriding factor in all these is outstanding customer service, particularly in re-selling to existing customers. Increasing your number of customers is a factor of both how many you gain and how many you don’t lose.
Remember never to sacrifice profit for growth. There is the saying “turnover is for vanity, profit is for sanity”.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
Marketing is often the difference between success and failure of a start up business…
Customer Dedication
Successful businesses all have an understanding of their customers needs or rather perceived needs and a total dedication to their customers.
Their marketing strategy is built around the customer – “what must the business be for the customer to choose us?”
Everything they do is focused on the customer and they are continuously improving how they do it.
In order to do this they need to understand the demographics (who they are) and the psychographics (why they buy) of their customers. Only then can you build your business to serve them.
Adding Value
Customers buy perceived value, which is the difference between the perceived benefits and the price. The more you increase the difference the more value that is added to the customer. The benefits are unlimited but there’s only so low the price can go which is why it’s often better not to work on the basis of price-cutting.
Explaining that a pair of shoes are made of leather, why they are more comfortable, shock absorbing, will last, etc will make their perceived value higher than the same shoes that are not so described.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
When you take on your first employee, you move into an area of additional obligations and a lot of red tape. You have to make sure you have the money to pay the wages, perhaps before your customers pay you.
You have to operate a PAYE scheme to deal with the tax and national insurance on their wages.
The national insurance includes the employees national insurance which is deducted from their wages but the additional cost to you is employers national insurance which you have to bear.
You will also find you have other obligations…
With all this you may be tempted to do away with employees and just use self-employed contractors to work for you. However, you need to ensure they are properly self-employed. Just because you say they are does not make them self-employed and the Revenue are wise to this. There are ways of improving your chances but if you get it wrong, the consequences can be substantial including the Revenue demanding from you all the tax and national insurance that you should have deducted and your chance of now reclaiming it from your employee may be minimal.
You can create a system that your employees are capable of following but only if the employees are motivated to do so, will they actually do so. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
You must create an environment in which the employees want to follow the rules and are motivated to achieve their full potential. People work harder when they are motivated. Just imagine the impact you can make if you change the attitude of your employees from “I have to go to work “ to “I get to go to work”. You don’t want people whose spirit dies as they enter the office door.
People’s basic needs have to be met first which comes from the cash you pay them. However after that, it’s all down to motivation.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
VAT for most entrepreneurs is a real time consuming administrative burden they rather do without and get on with their business. We understand this. We can help you ease this burden. As part of Global Enterprise Week we are pleased to support entrepreneurs with their VAT obligations.
To help you we have teamed up with Southside Accountants to support and guide you on VAT. Southside Accountants are based in our Generator Business Centre in Mitcham.
Southside Accountants will help you answer the following key questions on you VAT responsibilities:
FREE ONE HOUR CONSULTATION WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED
Southside Accountants will provide free one hour consultation on your VAT affairs. This is in line with the ethos of The Generator Business Centre -nurture new and existing businesses..
Please make your request through The Generator Business Centre Mitcham –020 8408 1501.
Southside Accountants have agreed to provide this consultation without any commitment on your part. The aim of this consultation is to support you with your VAT obligations. They promise not to sell their services or ask you to become their client. This would not be the purpose of the meeting. All they will ask is in your own time leave them an honest testimonial.
WHO WILL YOU SEE?
You will meet the Aziz Sattar founder of Southside Accountants. He has vast experience in advising start-ups and small businesses on their VAT obligations.
Aziz earned a Bachelors of Honours in Accountancy from 
University College Cardiff. He then went on to become a Chartered Certified Accountant. He further sharpened his business skills and gained a Masters in Business Administration from the Open University.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
Southside Accountants are pleased to offer free one hour consultation to anyone requests this through The Generator Business Centre Mitcham –020 8408 1501. This is in line with the ethos of The Generator Business Centre -nurture new and existing businesses.
Furthermore, we are pleased to provide this consultation without any commitment on your part. The aim of this consultation is to support you with your business plans. We promise not to sell our services or ask you to become our client. This would not be the purpose of the meeting. All we ask is in your own time leave us on an honest testimonial.
Here are some areas that we can help you on:
Who will you see?
You will meet the Aziz Sattar founder of Southside Accountants. He has vast experience in advising start-ups and small businesses.
Aziz earned a Bachelors of Honours in Accountancy from University College Cardiff. He then went on to become a Chartered Certified Accountant. He further sharpened his business skills and gained a Masters in Business Administration from the Open University.
Aziz Sattar MBA, FCCA, BSc (Hons)
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
A frequently asked question by sole traders and partnerships is about basis period (the dates their self assessment returns should cover). They are clear laid down rules on this area under tax law. This is best explained by an example:Pauline starts to trade on 1/08/2009 making up the accounts to 31 July 2010.
First tax year
The basis period for first tax year runs from the date trade starts to the next 5/4. So in Pauline’s example, the first basis period will be from 1/08/2009 to 31/03/2010 or 5/4/2010. This would be for the tax year 2009/10.
Second tax year – You need to ask a series of questions
Here I am responding to these questions by using Pauline’s example.
Is there a period of accounting ending in tax year 2010/11?
Yes – The accounting year end is 31/07/2010.
How long is this period of account?
12 months or more? In Pauline case it is 12 months exactly to 1/08/2009 to 31/07/2010.
So in tax year 2010/11 Pauline will be tax on the profits of 12 months to 31/07/2010.
The third tax year (2011/12)
This will be the period of account ending in the third tax year. In Pauline’s case this would be 1/08/2010 to 31/07/2011.
Later tax years
The basis period would be the period of account ending in the tax year. This is known as current year basis of assessment. In Pauline’s case the fourth tax year would be 2012/13. This would cover her accounting period 1/08/2011 to 31/07/2012 and so on.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
We are accountants in Southfields. To go straight to our Home page please click https://www.southsideaccountants.co.uk/index.html.
To see how we can help each other, just call us for an informal meeting on 020 8785 3314. We never put any pressure on clients to join us. The informal meeting would be over a drink discussing your business and looking at whether we would be a worthwhile investment for you– not much point otherwise.
Further even if you have signed on with us and we do not live up to your expectations, talk to us and even after this you feel dissatisfied – we will refund your fees without any quibbles.
We genuinely want to make sure you only take us on only if our fees will be a worthwhile investment. Otherwise we will part company with a handshake and a smile – no hard feelings.
The following links give key information about us.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.
