RaiseAUM.com - Practical Tools to Increase your Assets Under Management (AUM)

Rule #1: Do Things Today

Focus on quarterly goals, not yearly.  Move fast. Execute.  How are you investing your time, and what is the hurdle rate that you employ when gauging the return on an activity?  Always ask yourself, “what is the best use of my time right now?”  Time is money.     

Rule #2: Strategically Use Time and Money 

Strategic time and money management involves investing resources in ways that promote your business’s competitive advantage and helps develop new or existing core competencies.  Cut non-strategic costs to the bone, and outspend the competition on strategic costs.  Do the same for time spent on strategic vs. non-strategic projects or initiatives.  Constantly re-invest excess profits in areas that produce the largest strategic returns.  Overhead is not an investment!  The enjoyment of the overhead “perks” or norms that employees take for granted should be overshadowed by the greater financial rewards for those same individuals and other shareholders.  (1)

Rule #3: Never Compete on Price 

Focus on what the customer gets out of what you are selling, not what you put into it (Benefits vs. Features).

·         Competitive, but not lower prices.

·         Over-delivery.

·         Robust advertising.

·         A high level of quality and service. 

·         Challenge and change your internal metrics or the assumptions that your business runs on. (2)

 

Rule #4:  Carefully Differentiate

Ensure that your company has a unique offering that customers are willing to pay for. In the March 2005 Harvard Business Review article “Market Busting,” Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan discuss how many companies have successfully changed themselves to take market share and increase their sales effectiveness. 

The areas they suggest considering when deciding how to differentiate include:

• Transforming your customers experience.
• Transforming your offerings.
• Redefining your business’s profit drivers.
• Anticipating and exploiting industry changes.
• Creating a radically new offering. (3)

“Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.”

                                                            - John Barton

 

  

References

Fifer, Bob “Double Your Profits” Copyright © 1995 Collins Publishing.