Three Proven Strategies to Improve Profitability at your Startup

How do you improve the profitability of a small business? In this handy quick-read, we share some of the strategies we use to grow sales.

Here at Mango, we are all about entrepreneurship. One of our biggest inspirations for building our all-in-one customer management and billing solution was to help provide a simple tool to help small business owners improve productivity and to achieve profitability.

After all, isn't that the whole point- to make a living doing what you love to do? With that being said, here are three tips to help you extract monetary value out of what you do.

Focus on your message

Just like with all great politicians, an obsessive focus on message is super important. This is how you set yourself apart from the rest of the market. Identify the one or two things that make your products and services uniquely relevant to your audience and say it till you are blue I'm the face.

As a small business owner, you simply cannot afford to waste precious marketing dollars on pie-in-the-Any concepts and high-minded ideas. Tell folks what you do and how it matters to them. If you are the value option, don't be afraid or embarrassed to say it. " We are much cheaper than company XYZ". That strategy has worked out well for Wal-Mart.

Volume

I will be the first to admit, it is hard to take on the entrenched players in your industry. We cannot all be Netflix, successfully unseating Blockbuster. Or Google, taking Yahoo's lunch money. What we can do is increase output whenever we can.

I decided to become a bit of an author last year. Now I knew I would not have the time or, quite frankly the energy to go out and promote my book. I also knew I would not be able to do Michelle Obama, Becoming numbers.

I, however, wanted to sell books, so I decided to write relevant books and a whole bunch of them. That strategy worked pretty well. Today, I am able to, via Amazon, ship out a few Paperback units a week. How I was able to do so?: Volume!

Whatever your thing is, offer lots of it while maintaining a respectable level of quality. The Henry Ford way. The American way.

Quality

This is probably the next natural tip following the talk about volume. This point is pretty self-explanatory and most entrepreneurs understand this is one sure intrinsic way to build brand awareness and carve out a niche in your space.

Provide quality products and services and make this part of your brand promise. Quality and value. That's one heck of a combo.