The Power of Focus, Remembering the Bell Curve, and Learning What Your Most Profitable Channels Are . . .
January 18th, 2007 | 12:53 pm
Happy New Year! Did you work on your goals from my first column? If not, don"t forget to go to www.504blog.com to review it while you"re still thinking about it. Best to start the New Year off on the right foot, and my free web-based gift to you is the perfect tool to help make 2007 your Best Year EVER.
As you may or may not realize, my company finances commercial real estate for owners of small and mid-sized businesses. We"re a licensed commercial mortgage lender, so we operate just like a bank, but we only offer 5 different loan products instead of 45 different products and services like ordinary lenders. We"re extremely focused at what we do, and we believe we do it better than anyone else around, but we"re still smart enough to keep striving to Better our Best.
The idea to start our niche lending firm came to me, because I believe in the power of focus. This is counter-intuitive for most businesses who usually strive to aggregate and dream of becoming conglomerates. Long ago, I gave up on trying to be "all things to all people." That"s a formula for disaster in just about anything. Our strategy from Day One goes against industry norms, but I"ve always thought just doing what everybody else does leads to mediocrity – a regression to the mean, just being "average." In starting a new business or making an existing one excel, you"ve got to stand-out from the clutter.
With our specialization, I knew we would either become the de facto experts or, quite candidly, go out of business (kind of the "burn the boats behind you" method of raiders striking from the sea). I won"t waste space here listing the awards and testimonials we"ve received since we started 47 months ago (visit www.504Experts.com to see for yourself), but we"ve accomplished a lot and are now rapidly growing outside of the Central Florida marketplace. We are still the only lender nationwide to LEAD with an under-utilized commercial loan product that provides the least expensive capital available to business owners wanting to purchase or construct commercial property.
What does any of this have to do with you? Well, recently in examining over 140 clients and 200 prospects, I noticed a normal bell curve forming. You remember what a bell curve is from school, don"t you? It"s the shape of a graph that indicates an even statistical distribution around the average.
This type of examination is something you might want to consider immediately in your business this year . . . at the beginning of this New Year. Where do your "best" prospects and clients come from? Have you charted the "channels" they arrive in? What does that tell you about your positioning and how you market your firm? How can you focus more of your efforts on the more profitable channels? Most businesses haven"t a clue about this . . . too busy "doing" the business to do it better, in a more strategic way. Most businesses waste a lot of resources and cause themselves more problems than necessary.
I"ll tell you our results of this exercise in a couple of weeks. In the mean time, if you"d like to sign-up to receive our monthly newsletter, join our monthly tele-seminars, and/or receive our FREE reports, simply call 407-786-5040 or email us at: info@mercantilecc.com. Let us know when we can help you or those you know finance commercial property . . . you won"t be sorry you did.
To Our (Yours and Our) Best Year EVER,
Chris
