Neil Spivack is the president of Direct Sales Force Inc., which was recently acquired by Pareto Corporation.
DSF was founded with the idea of providing our clients with a more accurate ROI on advertising campaigns and to provide sales agents with an opportunity to learn and grow their sales skills. Throughout their period of growth, the company has been committed to providing its clients with quality sales.
Listed below are three important steps Spivack took to grow his business:
1. Entrepreneurs must wear multiple hats. You are the CEO, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, etc. You will not be able to afford a senior management team, nor will you be able to afford additional staff to level off the work load. You are the leader of your organization and you must be an expert in all aspects of your business in order for it to be a success. This approach will pay off because, when you can finally afford to hire staff, you'll bee able to train them effectively and with a deeper level of knowledge.
2. Research each territory prior to entering it. A great deal of planning and research needs to take place if you are building a business that will have operations outside of your local area. DSF was launched inside of Toronto. When we started to expand our services into additional territories, including Alberta in 2006, we had no idea that the province was going through a job boom - in other words, companies were having difficulties finding and retaining staff. We tried to hire staff to work for the same rates we paid in Toronto and quickly realized we could not find any quality staff members. In turn, we had to offer a higher compensation package to attract the top tier talent and were forced to dip well into our margin. Eventually we started running at a loss and had to explained to our clients that we needed to charge a premium to have staff in the Alberta market. If we had done more research prior to launching our service in that market, we would have charged our clients a premium from the outset.
3. Identify your company's competitive advantage. When building your business, it's important that you identify what your company does best, and how you're different from your competitors. Customers are always looking for a better alternative and it's your job to find it.
Special to The Globe and Mail