Synergizing Products and Services

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
© Copyright. October 10, 2007

Many entrepreneurs I know are never short of business ideas. I am not exaggerating
but they can literally come up with new product or service ideas everyday if not
every minute! However, I think this is a frightening phenomenon as I see a lot of the
ideas are very demanding for resources in order to develop market opportunities and
they cannot leverage with each other at all.

One very basic theory I want to share here is products and services must
synergize with each other in a same business in order to maximize your return on
investments. Otherwise, you will have a big chance of wasting unnecessary
resources (time, money and labor) and duplicating your effort to grow your products
or services market(s). If you can really synergize your products and services, you
may also experience an exponential rate of growth.

Below are some of very useful synergizing techniques on how to synergize your
products and services that I learnt throughout my sales & marketing career:

1. Door Opener Product

2. Multiplying Effect
3. Packaging
4. Consumable & Repurchase
　

1. Door Opener Product – In order to lower the barrier of your customers’

buying action, you must choose a “Door Opener Product” among all of your
products and services. This Door Opener Product must be very attractive both in
terms of features and pricing. You have to be very aggressive about your pricing
strategy of this product in order to win over your competition. As long as you are not
loosing money in real term, do not worry too much about your profit, yet! You will be
surprised on how much more of other business you can get through this Door
Opener Product.
　
 • Example: A not so famous Shanghais restaurant is offering $1 for half a
dozen dumplings. People are queuing outside for a long time in order to eat in
such restaurant and of course I was one of them. When I observed such
interesting scene, nobody in the restaurant was actually ordering just $1
dumplings but a table full of food and I mean nobody! By now, you should get
what I mean. Though the other food is just average, the Door Opener
Dumplings are bringing huge Profit to the Shanghais restaurant.

　
• Comments: You must ensure the perceived value of the Door Opener
Product is at high cost and it can achieve good customer satisfaction.
Otherwise, the door will never be opened!

2. Multiplying Effect – When all of your products and services are inter-
related or inter-dependent, your customers are likely to buy from you the second
product/service than your neighboring shop in order to minimize risks and
complication. Also, Convenience is a big governing factor for customer buying
behavior. A supermarket is a very good example of convenience buying. You maybe
buying a pack of gum in the beginning but you may end up buying a trolley of items!
Therefore, even you maybe selling something with a small value in the beginning,
the Multiplying Effect can be huge for potential or future sales from the same
customer if you can build up the Trust. Trust is very important in business and it will
eventually turn into “Brand Preference” or “Customer Loyalty”
　

• Example: Beauty and Hair Salons are often using such multiplying effect to
increase their sales. You may originally ask for a simple treatment but you
may end up spending a huge sum of money you would never thought of when
you first walk into the shop!

　
• Comments: Multiplying Effect may only happen if products and services are
related which can be “Cross-Selling”. Otherwise, the buying desire of your
customers may not be so easily influenced as you would with the same
product category.
　

3. Packaging – there are 2 ways of Packaging your products and services that
you can consider. First, you can put different but related products to produce a
Package for sale and sell for a higher value though it is still discounted. The
advantage of this is that you are actually helping customers to mix and match ideas
that they may not think of at the time of buying without the packages.
Automatically, you are creating a Multiplying Effect. Second, you can Package the
same raw materials to produce multiple combinations of products. The advantage of
this is that you can ensure your raw materials will not be constraint by certain
products when demands are not reaching their goals. In both cases, you can
increase sales of the slow moving items as well as expand your overall sales per
purchase.
 • Example: Set lunches or set dinners are classic examples for Packaging in
sales and marketing terms. Diners maybe given a couple of choices for
appetizer and main entrée but they do not need to choose a la carte. The
restaurant is actually selling more food at a lower price but sales amount is
higher than just selling the main entrée!
　
• Example: A very popular dessert shop, there must be over 30 different kinds
of drinks and sweet soaps they are selling. When I look carefully on their
menu, no matter hot or cold, more than half of their offerings are merely
different combinations of the same ingredients. This is a great example on
how to Package your offerings!
　
• Comments: You have to be very creative when you come to do Packaging.
You will be surprised by how much your customers may enjoy by your
Packages! You just need to follow your own desire in imaging how would you
like to see the Packages if you are a customer.

4. Consumables & Repurchase – Repeatable business is a key success

model to many businesses. If you can make your products or services to become re-
purchasable or with recurrence payments, this will bring you not only growth but
compounded growth. The classic example is ink or toner for printers. The selling
price for printers are decreasingly lower than the early days but ink and toners are
still significantly expansive when compared with the price drop of printers. Other
examples can be paper towel mops, staples & staplers, paid channels on Broadband
TV services.

• Comments: Not every product and service may use this kind of synergizing
technique. However, my recommendation is to be open to your business.
Sometime, you just need to take a simple action in order to create your
repeatable business.
　

Summary
Synergizing your products and services are very important if you want to grow your
sales with highest Return On Investment (ROI). If you can master these techniques
even you are a new comer to the market, you can still create a very competitive
position for yourself! So, Get Synergized!

2007/07/23

Cash Flow is Everything for SME

 By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
© Copyright. July 12, 2007

Many entrepreneurs and small business owners have great business ideas and this is
reflected in their products and services. These great business ideas are mostly sound
but lack one very important element of good business strategy -- Cash Flow. Many
businesses fail not because their ideas are flawed but they just could not maintain
their Cash Flow well.

Any good business plan must provide you with a reasonable forecast (or estimation)
of the breakeven point. Even it may take time before breakeven point can be met
you should at least ensure that you have available cash on hand to sustain the
business throughout its life. Cash Flow must be maintained at a comfortable level at
all times. By comfortable, I mean it should be at least more than 2 to 3 months of
your total expenses and sales costs.

If you are coming from a finance background, this is definitely nothing new to you
but if you are not, then here are some simple steps that you can take in order to
start managing your Cash Flow with your business plan:

1. Set a period of 24 months as your scope of planning. If you can not

breakeven within 24 months, I would recommend you to really reconsider
whether you want to proceed with the business idea.
2. Forecast your monthly regular expenses with enough headroom for all
unforeseeable items. You may just include an item called "Miscellaneous" if
you do not have a clue for the time being.
3. Forecast your monthly sales with a progressive growth rate. You need to be
extremely conservative in order to ensure you are not over promising yourself
the sales revenue before you have real data to support these forecasts. You
can always revise it up and evaluate when the plan seems to be working or
after running the business for a period of time. One thing to note is that even
you have sales orders in each month; you may only receive payment after 30
days (or more) depending on credit terms you give to your customers.
Accounts Payables always tests a company's finances.
4. Forecast your monthly sales cost in relation to the forecast sales. You have to
bear in mind that sometimes higher sales volume means you have to increase
labor; so labor costs or salaries have to rise proportionately.
 5. Calculate monthly profit (or loss) by totaling up sales and subtract expenses
and sales costs. You will instantly see on which month you start making
profits. The initial months will mostly be negative figures (i.e. losses) until
total sales are higher than the sum of expenses and sales costs (including
cost of goods).

After doing the above steps, you now can probably answer the most important
question before you start any new business. That is, how much cash or capital
should you invest in order keeping your business running until profit starts to build
up? It is a relatively simple calculation as you just need to add all your losses in the
initial months together plus two to three months of regular expenses (and sales
costs) to make up the total capital required for your new business investment.

For example, you estimate it will take eight months before you can make a profit
from your new business and the total loss is $700,000 during this period. You also
calculate your monthly expenses and sales costs to total $100,000. Then your
minimum cash required to invest at the beginning should be no less than $700,000
+ ($100,000 x 3) or $1,000,000.

It may sound very simple but as others will tell you, business is very dynamic and no
two companies will experience exactly the same conditions. What is certain though is
that dynamics of the market are the same and so be prepared for uncertainties. Still,
it is extremely useful to do such exercise in order to have a quick reality check of
your business idea. This is the very reason why I did not start up my business early
in the process as I could not shorten the loss period to minimize my investment risk!

I have prepared a sample of cash flow template and it can be downloaded from this
link here: http://www.adamshk.com/download/SampleCashFlow.xls. You may have
to adjust the key items to reflect the nature of your business but it should be
intuitive enough to show you the idea.

Enjoy and be mindful with your Cash Flow!

2007/05/14

Magical Top Three Things – Priority

Setting for SME

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
© Copyright. May 14, 2007
Managing time and priority in SMEs is extremely challenging as it is largely due to
the fact that resources are limited and things have to do are so many. SMEs have no
exemption from doing Sales & Marketing, keeping Accounts, managing Personnel and
Office Administrations and yet at the same time keeping all Operations running
smoothly.

One very simple way of priority setting I learnt during my Intel days is to always ask
ourselves which are the most important Top Three Things (I call it as 3T from here
on) at any given moment. Why it is so magical about 3T is once you ask this
question, then you don’t have many choices in setting your priorities. Naming your
top 3T does not mean you need to ignore all other important things you have to do,
but rather keeping yourself stayed above the water with all the things needed to be
accomplished in a timely fashion.

I understand that every opportunity is important to SMEs but if we cannot even

handle 3 things at a time, we just have to simply “say no” or push out things to allow
enough time and resources to deal with 3 things first.

Before I go in details, there are some rules that we may follow when we are using
this 3T approach:

We only select the most important 3 things at a given moment; hence the list will
change subject to the change of moment.
The given moment can be within next hour, next day, next week, next month, next
year and so forth…
Before we can decide which are the most important 3 things, we should have a clear
idea in mind what are things are required to complete by when across the board
including Sales & Marketing, Accounting, Personnel & Admin and Operations…etc
Deadline is a good indicator for setting priorities of things but I would rather use
“Impact of failure” to decide the priorities. The bigger the impact, the higher the
priority it should be!

With the above rules in mind, now I want to list a few sample questions that we may
ask ourselves when choosing our 3T in different aspects of our business affair. I am
sure you can add other relevant questions to the list!

Sales
- Which top 3 customers or market segments that will bring majority of our revenue?
- Which are the top 3 deals in this moment can bring higher income to the company?
- Who are our top 3 competitors in the market in the specific product segments?

Marketing
- Which top 3 products/services of our company have higher growth potential?
- Which top 3 media are most cost effective to support our sales?
- Which top 3 marketing channels can help our products/services get more
awareness in the market?

Finance & Accounting

- What are the top 3 accounting gaps that our company is facing most challenges?
- What are the top 3 financial issues in our company may hinder our growth most?
- What are the top 3 areas that we can improve our accounting accuracy?
Personnel & Office Administrations
- What are the top 3 requirements we want most in an opening job position?
- What are the top 3 problems that may deteriorate our working environment?
- What are the top 3 areas that can motivate our workforce?

Operations
- Which top 3 top 3 processes may need attention in order to improve efficiency?
- What are the top 3 issues that may hinder our overall productivity?
- What are the top 3 areas may need to increase resources?

Summary
The ability of identifying our 3T is not difficult to learn but whether we can master
this art is a matter of discipline. It is so easy to make a plan without any desire of
execution. I have experienced this fact myself and witness many other fellow SMEs
failing in doing so very often! Therefore, my advice is making your 3T list as open as
possible to your stakeholders including employees, business partners and to certain
extends your customers. In such case, we may ask our stakeholders help and safe
guard our 3T as well as to avoid false expectation or false understanding of our
priorities. 3T may not solve all our priority conflicts but it should give us a good
guideline when to distinguish our top 3 priorities when we are so buried in our work
with confusion!
　

2007/03/29

Effective target marketing skills for SMEs

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
© Copyright. March 29, 2007

No matter companies big or small, marketing is always not cheap. Not only money
you have to spend, but also resources to execute. Moreover, it is extremely hard to
measure your success and return-on-investments (ROI). Therefore, it is very
important for SMEs to have very clear ideas in mind what they need to do with
marketing in order to remain competitive and yet maximizing their return with
limited money and resources.

Here, I am summarizing the most important areas that SMEs should consider when
they plan and do any marketing in an effective and target way:

Alliances – run marketing activities with your partners and maximize costs &
resources
Benefits – always highlight your product/service’s benefits and values
Concentrate – focus 80% effort on the most strategic 20% of products/services
Dynamics – leverage your products/services strength to gain the maximum return
Environment – ready to adapt changes of business environment and ecosystem

Alliances
It is so easy for anyone to think and act in silo. However, with SMEs money and
resources are limited, we really need to look out and find partners that are
complementary to our business and do co-marketing activities with them. Not only it
is a cost-effective thing to do but also it creates synergy and excitement to our
customers as they may get better and more complete solutions to fulfill their needs.
With combined forces,
　

• We have much stronger bargaining power with the advertising agencies &
channels
• We present a much more prominent presence and image to our customers
• We may broaden our reach to potential customers that are previously covered
only by our partners

If you do not know where to start, just try to work with some professional
organizations, chambers of commerce and some other associations that your
potential customers may belong to.

Benefits
Too often we market our products/services with functions and features without really
telling our potential customers the benefits and values of our products/services.
Customer buying behavior typically is based on how fulfilling is the product/service to
their immediate needs. Any good product/service need to address the needs of the
customers by their values and not the functions or features. Customers are generally
willing to even pay more if they get the perceived values and benefits they want.
One simple way to check your marketing message to see whether it is addressing
the benefits and values is to ask if the customer would miss anything for not buying
your products/services. Some examples of the answers should be:
　

• The customers are missing the opportunity to solve their problem or address
their needs
• The customers are missing the chance to save money or to earn time
• The customers are missing the wave to catch up with the season or the trend

It is not easy at first when you try to write your marketing message and addressing
your customers’ needs but it is absolutely essential if you want to differentiate your
products/services with so many competitors out there!

Concentrate
Many of us have learned about the 80-20 rule but always do not know how to apply
in real lives. I have seen many cases with SME’s they are trying so hard to get every
possible income for the company but losing their focus to get maximum return from
their core competency. Let me be a little bit more elaborate on this, we should really
focus 80% of our effort/ money/ resources on top 20% of our products or services
that are helping us to gain 80% return of our income. Obviously, it is just an
indication but not an absolute rule, some may use 65% effort to gain 80% return….
etc. However, when we find ourselves using 50% effort in dealing with or promoting
the bottom 20% of products/services, there must be something wrong with our time
and resources management. It is a very loud alarm that we should be alert! So some
basic questions to ask are:
　

• What are our top 20% strategic products/services that are generating 80%
revenue? How much time, money, man power are we spending in promoting
this 20%?
• What are the bottom 20% products/services we can put aside and not market
now?

If we can master this 80-20 rule well in our business both sales and marketing, I am
sure we can progress our business at a faster rate than we can imagine!

Dynamics
When we market our products and services, we should really try to leverage the
strengths of all different products and services, so that our customers can relate
them easily without thinking. It is very expansive to build individual brands for
different products and it is an art to manage brands well. My recommendation to
SMEs is to avoid as much as possible of introducing new brands unless absolutely
required. However, the whole process should start when product/service managers
and research & development managers decide which products/services to be
launched to the market. Hence, when we launch new products and services, we
should ask ourselves that:
　

• Whether the new products/services are complementing the existing

products/services? Can we do bundled sales?
• Can we use an overall umbrella brand to cover both existing and new
products/services?
• Do the new products/services differentiate themselves well enough that
customers will not be confused?

I can guaranteed you that creating dynamics for your products/services is very
exciting especially when you see they are really helping each other to sell and grow.

Environment
Business world changes every second, we have to be ready and adapt changes as
soon as required. We cannot blindly repeat what we have been doing in the past. We
should be willing to change according to the environmental changes. The ecosystem
of the environment changes so fast, our customers, competitors, channels,
complementors may not be there forever. We have to keep our eyes open and keep
reviewing our marketing strategy by challenging ourselves to see if our marketing
strategy really fitting to the real world! Here are some of the principles:
　
 • We should stop using the same advertisement or we should make changes to
the advertisement if there is no response from customers for a period of time
• We should use different marketing channels to test out the best responses
and cost-effectiveness
• We should pay extra attention if there are seasonal effect to customer buying
behavior…e.g. beginning and end of fiscal year, major holiday seasons…etc

The business environment is so volatile, no one can completely grasp the real
situation but if we are diligent enough to notice, monitor and apply changes
accordingly, we can make crisis to opportunities!

In summary, we must be ready to adapt changes in our business environment and

willing to work with other alliances to create the maximum effect in marketing of
highlighting the benefit/values of our most strategic products/services with most of
our effort by leveraging the strengths of different products and services. It is a very
exciting and interesting game we are in!

2007/02/21

The 5C’s of Business Planning – Essentials

for SME

By Matthew Kwan
Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
© Copyright. February 21, 2007

After having talked to many SME owners, I found a cruel phenomenon is that a lot of
them are often ignorant for not going through any structured business planning
process at all even having started their businesses for sometime. I am compelled to
share this article as it is dear to my heart and I hope it may help SME owners in
general.

As SME, you just cannot take chance to waste your limited capital on any undesirable
investments. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to go through your business
planning in a structured fashion in order to ensure you are making the right business
decisions.

The 5C’s of Business Planning is actually a model that I combined from different
business planning ideas and models. I think it is simple and easy enough to any SME
owner to use without much effort. You just need to follow the steps and answer the
questions honestly. Even you do not know the answers for the time being, you may
just put “ACTION TO FIND OUT!” to continue and follow up later.

So, what are the 5C’s, they are Customers, Competitors, Complementors,
Channels and Costs.

1. CUSTOMERS – It is not surprised to see this to be the first on the list but
questions you should really ask are:

• What are the industries or business segments that identify your customers?
• What age, gender, education and income level that identify your customers or
do it matter at all?
• What countries and national boundaries that your customers operate?
• What are the common characteristics that identify your customers? e.g. size
of business, years of operation, number of employees…etc.
• How big is the Total Available Market (TAM)? i.e. How many potential
customers are there in your targeted market across the board?

COMMENTS: You should spend as much time as possible to go through this analysis
of your customers as it will help you to uniquely identify your desired customers. Any
future sales and marketing effort and resources should only be spent on your desired
customers but not any customers.

2. COMPETITORS – As stated in Sun Tzu’s Art of War, “You will win every
battle by knowing your enemies as well as yourself!” Just knowing the names of your
competitors are not good enough, you should also ask:

• Who are your direct competitors? i.e. they have similar products/services to
your offerings?
• Who are your indirect competitors? i.e. they have substitute products/services
to your offerings?
• What is the price ranges of your direct and indirect competitors?
• What are the success factors of your direct and indirect competitors?
• What additional product features or services areas that your competitors are
offering over yours?
• What marketing or promotion are your competitors doing?

COMMENTS: You should focus on those direct and indirect competitors of your
desired customer segment. Some companies maybe doing similar business of yours
but not necessarily are your competitors at all as they maybe focusing on very
different customer segments.

3. COMPLEMENTORS – Alliances is a topic getting more and more attention

in the business world. The way Steven Covey’s “Seven habits of highly effective
people” put it is “To Think Win-Win”. For example, a digital camera company is a
complementor to battery cell companies as well as digital memory companies. So the
basic questions to ask are:
 • Who are the companies or organizations that your products/services will
benefit from the sales/growth of their products/services?
• Who are the companies or organizations that their products/services will
benefit from the sales/growth of your products/services?
• COMMENTS: Working with other companies requires a lot of effort and
sometime you may even have to give in for relationship building but strong
alliances will definitely help you to grow your business in a faster rate than
you could do it on your own. So it is worth spending time and effort in finding
and building your complementors!

4. CHANNELS – Without properly identifying your channel players even you

have great products and services, they can only be sold in a contained environment!
The idea of channels is very abstract and you have to have a clear mind when
answering these questions:
　

• Who else can help you to sell your products/services to your desired customer
segment? (Typically, these are your resellers but sometimes your customers
can be a very effective selling channel of yours!)
• Who may already have strong relationship to your desired customer segment
that they can market your products/services for you? (Very often, your
complementors and your field workers are your very strong marketing
channels!)

COMMENTS: You need to build a very good framework and sales kits in order to
manage your channels well as channels are very often opportunistic as your business
is not necessary their primary priority!

5. COSTS – Pricing is an art and it governs everything about your profit and loss
accounts in your books before you sell any product/service to your desired
customers. You really have to be extremely sensitive to this topic and careful to take
a balance to ensure your success in sales. So you should ask:

• How much is the maximum can your customers afford to pay for your
products/services?
b. How much is the minimum you are willing to selling your products/services
to your customers?
• How much more/less you want to charge over your competition and why is
so?
• What discount rate are you willing to give to your customers if they are
buying in quantity?
• What margin or percentage discount are you prepared to give to your channel
resellers?
　

COMMENTS: Cash flows should be your topmost concern. Under this consideration,
you should really be aggressive enough to establish a good size of customer base by
offering an attractive pricing over your competitions if you are new to the market. A
good pricing strategy with channel support should help you to reach your goals in a
faster pace.

In summary, the 5C’s of Business Planning is just a model for you to go through your
business planning in a structured way. You should use it to ratify your business
decisions. There are no model answers to the questions being raised above but
definitely the answers will change over time as your business progresses. Therefore,
constant review of your business using this model is re

Maximizing dollars on Web marketing –

SME primer
　

By Matthew Kwan © Copyright. All rights reserved.

Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
　
January 26, 2007

　
　

With the advance of Internet and broadband connection, shopping behavior of most people
nowadays has changed dramatically over the last decade. Suddenly, your company’s Web
presence has become the gauging factor to the success of your company, SME is no exception!

So how can you maximize your dollars on Web marketing to get the best return on investment?
Is there any ways that you can ensure the money is right spent? I am going to share here an
“IDEAL” model that you may consider to follow:

• I – Identify Your Customers

• D – Decide Your Budget
• E – Experiment Your Options
• A – Assess Your Results
• L – Leverage Others

1. Identify Your Customers

Any marketing books will tell you this same thing - first and foremost, you need to know who
your customers are. That may seem obvious but sometimes we are just missing the target
without really thinking through the process. It is not so much who exactly your customers are
but what are their shopping behaviors and desires on prices, trends, attributes of
products/services, other complementary products/services that will help your sales…etc You
really have to spend time to analyze your customers, even getting market data to support your
analysis. Without these data, I can guaranteed you that you will waste money on your
marketing effort!

2. Decide Your Budget

Your marketing budget should not be fixed and it should be as dynamic as possible. Deciding
your budget should be a process with reference to the return of sales enquiries through the use
of the budget. For new start up companies I suggest to go a little bit more aggressive for the
initial period until you are comfortable with the good sales pipeline. By aggressive, I do not
mean to spend a lot but allow good amount of money for you to use with caution. The right
amount should be relative to your company cash flow, you just should not spend more than you
can afford. My hint to this is to include your marketing budget of your initial period to be part
of your initial capital investment and the subsequent budgets to be part of your sales expense.
In this way, you do not have to worry too much of you initial marketing budget becoming a
burden to your expense in your overall cash flow planning.

3. Experiment Your Options

There are just too many options for Web marketing. You need to list them down and give them
some priority and assign budget according to their priorities. However, with SME’s, I suggest to
spend your dollars on proactive searching rather than mass advertising as it is too expensive to
do. So here are some of the proactive searching options for your reference:

• Search Engines: Yahoo and Google is the most widely used search engine these days in
Hong Kong. Actually, you do not have to pay a lot in order to get started. For example,
you just need to deposit HK$240 to Yahoo and start your keyword search sponsor link
instantly. However, deciding which keywords to be used does required some good
thought. My personal experience tells me that you are better off by including your city
and product/service category in a phrase to avoid paying unnecessary amount of money
to compete with the big company with tons of marketing budget. In such a way, the
charge will be a lot cheaper than a standalone keyword. E.g. “cheap business service in
Hong Kong” This actually makes a lot of sense as more and more people are searching
by phrase rather than simply a keyword. Do remember that the keyword list must be
revised constantly to get the best results.
　
• Web Directories: most portal sites would have business directory sections that you can
post your company information on them. A lot of these sites are still free of charge and
welcome your postings. E.g. Yahoo, Timway, Trade Development Council,
SMEcare.com…etc. However, it may take longer time to get your company information
posted depending on each portal’s schedule.
　
• Auction Sites: Yahoo, eBay, Red-dots, Go2HK are some of the popular auction sites in
Hong Kong. Some SME companies are actually operating entirely using these sites to
generate their sales. You may just need to pay very little per transaction to start
selling.
　
• Blogs/Discussion Groups: Blogs are getting very popular and if you can identify your
customer interests, you should try to become members of their Blogs and Discussion
Groups communities. After joining, you can post messages and point people to your
websites for product/service information and etc. Most of these communities are free
to join. On the other hand, setting up a blog of your own is very easy and it takes no
time. By doing so, you are setting up a community of your own. The only matter is to
maintain the content and keep it alive. It is very labor intensive to keep it living if you
 are not good at sharing thoughts!
　
• YouTube: YouTube is a video broadcasting website and it has become so popular that
you should consider using it as part of your web marketing strategy. There are actually
SME companies using it as a mean of product introduction, training and even customer
service due to its popularity and free of charge nature.

4. Assess Your Results

As mentioned above, you should spend your marketing budget wisely by assessing the results
regularly. Most Search Engines will have tools to help you to generate reports for your analysis.
However, these reports are only meaningful if you are tracking in parallel how your sales and
enquires are being done through which web channel. It takes good discipline in doing so! To
start with, I suggest to do daily and weekly review to ensure money is wisely spent.

5. Leverage Others
No matter your business is selling products or providing services, you will always have
companies which may complement your products/services. My recommendation is that you
should try your best in getting these companies to list and link your company website in their
website as partner or show in related links. You should also do the same thing for them vice
versa. In this way, you are building a network of alliances and I find it a very effective way to
build both awareness and credibility.

Summary

Web marketing is an art and it takes time and effort to perfect. In this Internet age, we just do
not have an option of opting out of Web marketing. However, if you are willing to try, practice
will make perfect and you will certainly find reward f

2007/01/12

Starting a business in 3 days

　

By Matthew Kwan (c) Copyrights. All Rights Reserved.

Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited
January 12, 2007

Being an entrepreneur may sound a challenging thing to do. However, starting a business is not
as difficult as you may think. There are actually ways that you can start a business up and
running in 3 days. Before we go into details, I would like to share some basic rules that one
may consider before starting any business:

1. Cash flow is everything: a good business plan must provide you a reasonable forecast of
the breakeven point. Even it may take time before breakeven point can be met, you
should at least ensure the cash on hand should maintain a comfortable level at all
times. E.g. cash should be more than 2 to 3 months of total expenses and running
costs.
　
2. Focus on your core competencies: small business owners are often side-tracked by
spending too much time on doing administrative tasks without really spending time to
focus on selling products or services of their core competencies. In many cases, you can
just spend very little money by getting services from service providers to handle those
small tasks for you, which you can save a lot of time to focus on the higher priority
tasks.
　
3. Simple is beautiful: sometimes we are all so fond of our business ideas and may go too
far into very complicated business models. No matter you are a startup company or a
well established company, my reminder to everyone is simple is beautiful! We should
try our best to keep our business model as simple as possible.

So with the above recommendations in mind, I am going to show you some tips and tricks in
starting a business in just 3 days.

Day 1 – A company is born!

This is certainly the most exciting day in the first 3 days of your company. Planning and market
research on which service providers maybe the better choices for your case is required in order
go smoothly with your business plan!

1. Registering your company – you may have thought of a very good name for your own
company but one of the ways to avoid all the waiting required for government company
registrations processes is to buy a ready-to-use company, or otherwise known as “shell
company” from a business service agency. Most Business Centers and Accounting firms
do offer such service in helping you to buy Shell Companies which can be more or less
ready instantly. The price of a Shell Company (Limited Company) may vary from
HK$1000 to $2000 plus government fee of HK$4,330.
　
2. Getting your company address - You don’t need to sacrifice your privacy even you are
working from home as your office when you start your business. The easiest way to do
is to register your company under a Business Centre or Accounting Firm which mails
from government and any business correspondences can be sent to such address. Most
Business Centers should offer such service less than HK$100 per month if you are not
particular about the areas of the address. Personally, I think it is optional to subscribe
a secretarial phone service but it is always nice for your customers to hear a real
person to answer the calls when you are busy than a voice mail recording!
　
3. Setting up your company website and email domain - Having gotten a company name
from the pre-registered Shell Company, you are now ready to apply for a website and
email domain for your company. It is actually cheaper, easier and faster to apply for an
international (US) domain, i.e. “.com” domain through a Web Hosting company which
they can apply the domain on your behalf and set up a default website including email
addresses (POP3) ready to use within hours. My fastest experience only took 6 hours
before everything was up and running. The prices of the most basic package may vary
 from HK$450 to HK$800 including domain registration and web hosting for 12 months
depending on the storage size and other additional features required.
　
4. Getting an appointment with a commercial banker - It actually takes a couple of weeks
before you can complete all the procedures. However, it only takes a few days before
you may start depositing money into the accounts.

Day 2 – Getting Ready for Business

With a new company registered and website/emails setup, the next important thing is to setup
a commercial bank account and start marketing your business.

1. Setting up a commercial bank account – the process of setting up a commercial bank

account is not very difficult but you should consider applying Credit Cards, getting
insurance for your employees and registering mandatory provident funds all at once to
save you a lot of time to deal with them individually later. A number of banks actually
do have such services under the same roof. So for the sake of making it simple, you
should consider those banks can provide one stop shop!
　
2. Refining your company website ready for marketing – even your company website
domain is ready to use, a lot more effort is required in order to make it perfect.
However, my personal opinion is that you do not need a perfect website before you can
start selling your services and products. The most basic information you really need is
to tell your customers what are your Products and Services and how to contact you if
they are interested. The simplest way to start is to create your first draft by using
some existing templates provided in Microsoft Office (Word or PowerPoint). The
advantage of using these templates is that you can actually use it as briefing document
to your website designers. Professional website designers can deliver basic 5 pages
websites with flash graphics in 2 days with prices between HK$2500 to HK$5000.
　

Day 3 – Doing Business for Real

Unless you have existing customers on hand, otherwise, marketing your company is the
mandatory action you need to do before you can get any business.

1. Registering your company website on Internet Search Engines – customers nowadays use
Internet to search their desired products and services become a mandatory action.
Therefore, registering your company website on Internet Search Engines is extremely
important. Though you maybe listed for free if you go and register under the web
directories of Internet Search Engines, it might take a very long while before your
company could be appeared. My recommendation is you should in parallel go and do
sponsor links on some popular Search Engines like Yahoo, the minimum requirement is
to deposit HK$240. Then more or less instantly within an hour, your company website
and description can be listed as sponsored links on Yahoo when matching keywords are
searched. Obviously, it takes time to learn and get yourself familiar with the tool but
you will get it if you are willing to learn. My personal experience it only took 45mins
after my initial posting to get the first sales enquiry call. That was impressive!
However, this can be a very expensive act. So do it with care!
　

In summary, I have only shown you some best know methods and they are not the only way to
start a business. Everyone knows entrepreneurship requires a lot of energy and risk taking. The
beauty of it is you will get the positive reward if you are willing to trade off your time and
effort with the right methods. There is no short-cut and we just need to continue to learn and
change according to