To continually help our customers in the most effective way possible, Scorpion recently launched a new theme, “Run your best business.” You’ll likely see it all over Scorpion’s website, advertising, and more. For small businesses, running your best business is everything. Your business is your passion, your lifeblood, and your money maker.
Run your best business is vague, and for good reason, because no two businesses are the same. An HVAC technician in Utah has a different business than someone in Florida, and the way they each run their business also has to be unique. If you’re a law firm, your focus changes how you run your business too. Estate planning is leaps and bounds different than personal injury, and your marketing, operations, and everything in between need to reflect that.
But what does a theme like “Run your best business” mean for business owners? Great question, let’s figure it out.
Running a business is personal
The most important thing about running a business, and running it to the best of your ability, is that your business is inherently yours. Every business owner focuses on different priorities, and each founder has different skills they provide to the company.
If you know your business best, how can you make sure that your employees and vendors are representing you well?
Understand your brand and train your stakeholders
This may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to communicate your vision for the business and how you want it to be run. When you first started your company, you likely had a hand in every aspect, but as you’ve grown, you’ve had to bring in help. You need to make sure every person you bring into the organization understands what’s important to you. Running your best business means setting a standard for all of your employees and the vendors with whom you work.
How do you set that standard? Initially, and most importantly, you need to be able to communicate your mission and vision for the business. Now, this doesn’t need to be as fancy as a Fortune 500 presentation, but you should be able to tell your employees, customers, and the community why you love doing what you do. Your ability to communicate this with your team will directly affect how each of those team members treats your customers. As a business owner, you set the standard for customer service and beyond.
Know your customer
Not only is your business personal for you as the owner, but it is also personal for your customers. In order to attract the best customers for your business, you need to understand what is important to them, what they value the most, and how they find your services. You don’t have to do all the work to figure it out either, organizations like Scorpion are always surveying customers and providing useful data for your business.
For example, Scorpion conducted a study to understand how consumers determine who to hire when looking for a home service or legal professional.
Home Services Customers
In the survey mentioned above, home service customers were asked, “What do you prioritize when looking for a home improvement business?” Respondents were asked to rank the following from most important to least important:
- Cost
- Quality
- Customer service
- Speed
- Reviews
Respondents said that cost and quality are the two most important factors when hiring a home services business.
- 46% of respondents said cost is their first priority
- 41% of respondents said quality is their first priority
The survey also showed that home service customers value customer service and overall experience highly as well. Speed was the least important factor for respondents.
Law Firm Clients
We also asked consumers about hiring a law firm and what they deem as most important in that process. We asked survey takers, “What do you prioritize when looking for a law firm?”
Cost and reputation were the two most important factors to consider when looking for counsel.
Respondents were also asked to rank the following based on importance:
- Cost
- Reputation
- Client service
- Speed / timelines
- Cases won
How to use customer data to run your best business
When you run across survey results like this, what can you do to incorporate the findings into your current business? As discussed earlier, your business is unique, and you know it best, so you should evaluate these results based on your target client or customer. That being said, the survey results showed that people care about cost and quality overwhelmingly over other priorities.
From that data, you can look at your marketing efforts, customer onboarding, and customer experience to see if you can highlight those areas more. Can you and your team be more upfront about cost? How can you ensure quality for your customers?
By highlighting those areas, your potential customers will be able to see that your business lines up with their priorities. The survey also showed that when hiring a law firm, potential clients spend a significant amount of time researching the firm before contacting them.
- 44% said they take at least two days researching
- 33% said they spend 1-2 hours
Survey results also showed that both home service and legal customers are finding companies almost exclusively from Google or other search engines. And they emphasized the importance of having a quality website. Sixty-five percent of respondents said that a law firm having a quality website makes them more inclined to request its services.
Your best business is determined by you
While your customers play a significant role in how you run your business, you get to navigate where your business goes in the future. You should use customer feedback and insights to help understand how to connect with your customer in your marketing, customer service, and more.
Ultimately, it is up to you to run your best business. And it’s also up to you to determine what your “best” business really is. Scorpion chose ‘Run your best business” as our focus so that we can help our clients understand their best, and help them achieve it too.
