7 easy stages to make your business thrive

Business and marketing strategist Judy Celmins explains the seven stages that can develop the heart of your business and grow it.

If blood flow is restricted to your heart, you’re straight off to the specialist – it needs urgent attention to keep you alive! Your business heart is no different, and a timely diagnosis can be a life-saver. Especially as we navigate the tough times.

Essential Fuel: First, you have to understand what’s driving the heart of your business. And the easiest way to identify that is to ask yourself, what can’t the business do without? And I’m pretty confident most of us would agree it’s customers. You can always find a new product or service to satisfy your customers, but you don’t have a business without them.

Create a Customer: Now, it’s the role of marketing, above all else, to create a customer. Which places marketing directly at the heart of your business. Customers are your lifeblood, but many businesses don’t understand what that really means. So here’s a hint, it’s more than advertising and promotion.

Balancing Act: For the past 30 years, we’ve owned businesses and helped countless others around the globe. When the heart rate drops, we’re called in as the specialist, and they’re looking for a miracle. That easy pill they can take to bring them back to normal. The problem is that the heart is a complex organ. Its survival depends on the right balance of blood and oxygen, communicated through a web of nerve tissue, which conducts the complex signals it receives.

Influencers: The 7 Stages of healing act like the heart’s nerves in your body and closely work together as one and greatly influence each other. Getting just one right doesn’t guarantee your heart will bounce back to its optimal pace. Boosting a social media post won’t fix a problem if there’s a wrong message blocking customer engagement.

Take the Tour

• Stage 1 is understanding where marketing fits into your business. It’s everything you do to create a customer. Your products, financial forecasting, operations, as well as brand positioning, advertising, and promotion.
• The power of the New Mindset comes in at Stage 2– how you mentally approach your tasks. We’ve experienced both a business failure and an overnight success. The main difference between them was mindset.

Stress inhibits our ability to think clearly and to hear our inner intuition. And mindset feeds off itself . Once you overcome negativity and positive momentum kicks in, there’s no stopping you.

• At Stage 3 we Assume Nothing, Challenge Everything. This is about questioning. When you stop asking Why? and What If?, you stop living. You’re in a vegetative state, just hanging on, doing the same old thing.
• Stage 4 brings in The Art of Building Relationships. Business is no different to your personal life. If you don’t keep in touch, and understand how someone is feeling, the relationship withers and dies.

It’s also how you communicate. Too often, we think we have to speak in a formal way or impress with technical jargon. But that doesn’t build the emotional connection you need to keep your heart pumping.

• We Gather Insights, Not Just Facts at Stage 5. Insights are more than someone’s age or where they live – it’s understanding the real needs that you can satisfy. People don’t buy your product, they buy what they can do with it. The heart only exists to keep you alive so you can achieve everything you aspire to.
• Stage 6 is where you get Creative With Your Customers. There’s no point in dreaming up a bunch of ideas if the heart doesn’t need them. Once you focus your creativity, and yes, we are all creative, that’s when you can seize a well-targeted opportunity identified in your insights.
• And Stage 7 pulls all the elements together as your unique Story. There’s a magic to the tale that brings customers along on your journey.

That in your advertising and content clearly communicates your reason for being, and what you do for people. Because, until they understand how you’ll make their life better, the rest is abstract.

Let’s Dance

The 7 Stages are a continuous, twirling dance that is engaging, fun, adventurous,and bonding. We’ve been doing the moves so often, they’ve become instinctive. Which largely comes from our media and entertainment background, where you have to create something new and exciting 24/7. One bad show, and heart attack!

Heart Starter

So, how’s your heart, does it need a defibrillator? You can kick in with a copy of our new book Marketing = Customers + Heart. Not only will you learn and support your family, you’ll directly help a Ukrainian family. We’re donating 100% of the gross profits from book sales to ReliefAid, a charity operated mainly by volunteers who are doing amazing work on the ground in Ukraine.

All the best for your good health, and a long and thriveable business life!

Judy Celmins is a business and marketing strategist. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected]