Are your gatekeepers costing your company money? Most businesses have them, especially if the company has more than 10 employees. A gatekeeper is defined as the person who is responsible for a certain task or job (or the person you need to go through to get to the decision maker).
Gatekeepers are pretty much needed. They are there to ensure that employees and owners of the company follow the established company protocol of procedures and systems. They usually get credit for running a tight ship. It is great when your gatekeeper is doing his or her job and then some.
What I would like to discuss is when your gatekeepers are actually costing you more money than you realize in lost sales and business opportunities.
Consider these scenarios:
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I was speaking to an old friend who recently has closed his business down. This really got me thinking about why some ecommerce businesses succeed and why others don’t. I compiled the top 7 reasons why I believe businesses — whether they are ecommerce or bricks-and-mortar — fail.
- No plan or poor planning - Due to lack of planning, business owners fail to include all the necessary components of running a business. More time is needed to do a thorough due-diligence process (customer research, competitor research, product demand). It needs to be as comprehensive as possible and include as many expenses and revenues that may or may not apply, but if you put it down on paper, you’ve at least thought of it and hopefully did a full-on research. Not having a clear target market or customer base is a the result of poor planning. If a business is planned carefully, then the entrepreneur can be laser focus on what needs to be done and followed, thus not get easily distracted by the many opportunities of shiny pennies of there.
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In 2007, the year of our so-called “great success,” my team was working themselves into the ground. Not because we didn’t have enough sales, but because they simply weren’t as profitable. By constantly adding and inventing new products to sell, we gobbled up storage space, ran up our expenses and ran our team ragged. We were operating under the illusion that by selling more, we were making more. And no matter how you sliced it, increasing sales alone did not suddenly make us more profitable.
Victims of the Marketing Guru’s : Increase Sales = Increase Profitability
When we continued to add new products without considering the toll it was taking on the business, it strained our resources. More sales only increased cash flow for a few months, and might have made it seem like we were doing better.
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With more than 20 years retail/wholesale & e-commerce experience, Shirley Tan educates eCommerce business owners to be profitable while maintaining their sanity!
