When Less Is More…

photo by muha….’s 

If you’re a small business owner interested in growing your business, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ve been overwhelmed with all of the things you could do with your business.

You could create a blog. 

You could revamp your website (or create one if you don’t have one). 

You could evaluate your target market and refine it down to your top customers.

You could run a direct mail campaign and test out your top 3 messages to evaluate which one works best.

You could attend a seminar (www.linkedinkc.com )  Actually this one you should do…!  😉

You could create an operations manual and document all of the processes in your business.

In fact there are literally hundreds of things you could start doing, so many that it’s really easy to get overwhelmed, burnt out or just plain old tired. 

Sometimes the simple things are best

I saw a great post from Stephen Shapiro on recognizing that his website wasn’t very effective:  My Website’s Signal to Noise Ratio

Essentially he did analysis on his website using Google Analytics and discovered that 82% of visitors we’re leaving immediately (abandon rate) – that’s not uncommon, but it’s also not very good.

We hypothesized that there could be two main reasons for this: 1) we had the wrong visitors (so they left), or 2) our visitors were confused and did not know what to do.  Assuming the latter to be true, my web guru (Ariel Coro) tried some experiments.  When he removed half of the options on the home page (fewer menu items, less content, and reduced clickable images) we reduced the abandonment rate to 58% in a matter of days.  42% of the people now interact with the site.  This mean I have tripled the number of active participants…by giving them fewer options.

Essentially by streamlining the site, he greatly improved the overall response rate.

Could this apply to your business?

Instead of offering 60 menu items what if you were like Chris Cakes and only offered a couple?

Instead of spending a lot of time and effort doing your own payroll, maybe you should outsource it.  It will cost some money, but isn’t your time better spent looking at the long term picture?

Maybe you could or should cut your low performing products or even your low margin or low paying customers.  How much time could you save if you didn’t spend the time on those customers that just don’t fit your mold?

What could you cut out that would make you or your business more effective?  Share it here, I’d love to hear it.

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.com

2 thoughts on “When Less Is More…”

  1. Little Guy says:

    I could fire myself… that might help. Once again I love the picture in your post!

  2. Brad – actually for a small business owner that’s the ultimate goal. Setup people and processes so that you become the ‘Chairman of the Board’, get paid lots of profits and don’t work in your business anymore!

    You’re probably ready for that…

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