Presently this web site contains over 400 free articles.  That’s a lot of value creation.  Thousands of people visit each day to receive some of that value.  Helping people grow is the business’ primary aim.

10.  Failing to optimize.

Although value creation is essential to a sustainable business, it’s equally naive to assume you can simply focus on creating value, and the rest will take care of itself.  You may build a business that provides good value but loses money.  As a business owner, you need to find a way to deliver your value in a cost effective manner.  Most likely your first attempt will be very suboptimal.  You’ll waste too much time, money, and resources trying to produce and deliver your value.  That’s OK though.  Many businesses start out that way.  Just don’t let yours stay that way.

Once you have a particular business process in place, pull it apart and re-optimize it from time to time.  Look for ways to make it more efficient.  Can you get it done in less time?  At less cost?  Can you do it less frequently?  Can you outsource it?  Can you dump the process altogether?

I used to process credit orders for my games business manually.  I started the business in 1994, and when I’d receive an order through the mail or via my web site, I’d use some software to input and run the orders by modem.  At the end of each month, I’d manually tally the sales.  That worked fine when sales were low, but it became burdensome as more products were released and sales increased.  Several years ago I upgraded the process such that online orders were fully automated, including instant delivery of the game download.  All orders are recorded in a database, and I can view real-time reports to see how sales are doing for each product.  It took some work to set this up, but it was well worth it.  That one optimization saved me a lot of time and effort, and I don’t have to pay high fees for a third-party order processing service.

Don’t fall into the trap of using archaic methods for doing routine tasks that could be automated, including inventory management, billing, accounting, order processing, communications, and marketing.  If you find yourself doing the same repetitive tasks month after month, make sure you put some effort into optimizing them.  Not optimizing is like throwing time and money down the drain.  It’s often much easier to save time and money than it is to create them.

An Internet business has abundant opportunities for optimization because it’s so easy to try new things and measure the results.  In the first year after launching this site, I experimented quite a bit with Google Adsense.  Many people don’t like the ad layout on this site, but it’s the most effective layout I’ve tried so far.  I use it because it works.  Adding the donations page was another optimization.  Some people click ads, some people donate, and some do both.  So even though value creation is the primary aim of the business, this is still a for-profit business and needs to generate income in order to be sustainable.  If I don’t eat, I don’t write.  More money means more resources for ongoing value creation.  So value creation and optimization go hand-in-hand.liuxuepaper.com