Planning For Profit

Leon Brown provides a no-nonsense perspective for growing a digital creative business that can embrace emerging economic changes, trends and opportunities for better profitability

- Leon Brown

For the most part, successful businesses emerge as an outcome of a thoroughly planned and well-executed strategy. While luck may be a small factor, success is always primarily ‘engineered’ through successfully defining and following a path that embraces profitable opportunities. The question isn’t about who or why people are successful but how can success be crafted?

What is success?

Success can be defined by many factors but, from a strictly business perspective, it’s all about the money. Making profit is the name of the game – or at least breaking even. If the primary objective isn’t making a profit, it’s not a business. At best it’s a social enterprise or charity; at worst it’s merely a hobby.

Creatives are often guilty of wanting to use their passion to run a business but actually treating it as a hobby. It probably doesn’t help that many, if not most, academic courses in computing and design don’t teach how to apply technical theory to real business situations. Growing your business requires you to sidestep any technical rules that are in contrast to the needs of the business. That is, all technical implementation needs to be executed with a focus on being profitable – even at the expense of breaking technical principles if required.

Growth options

All options for growing a business can be boiled down to three areas:

- Sell more of what you already do.

- Charge more for what you already do.

- Sell things you don’t already sell.

Each of these options has clear benefits that are applicable to different situations and ambitions. For people who are happy with how their business already operates, the answer is simple; sell more or charge more. The answer to which of these is most suitable is defined by two factors: the characteristics of customers and delivery processes.