When I came into the family business (at the time a taxi firm), one of my fathers ventures had backfired due to business misconduct of a business partner causing the banks to pull out and leave us with 1,5 million euro in debt. For about four years, we (me,, my father and my brother) worked our asses off starting with crappy old taxi's, just trying to reach every customer we could, taking any work we could find and did everything in our power to handle that work and to always deliver on the product every single time, this was a time were 90 hour work weeks were common. The continuous rise in customers due to proper customer service and clear communications meant that in just four years, we found ourselves to be a healthy company without debt and a lot of customers (2 million revenue a year)
Unfortunately shortly after that there was a major shift in the market we were in and competition flared to impossible heights and this was also the time that people stopped looking at quality and became tunnelviewed by prices alone. Bad service from competitors however did not mean that customers came back to us, and we weren't willing to sell our services for prices we could not garantue quality with. So that meant that the market we were in mostly just collapsed, and the work that still remained (to this day) is done so extremely cheaply with crappy service. So in the same year (2006), we opened up other avenues for the company and started investing in two other markets. We now own two healthy branches and rolled through the crisis with little trouble, looking towards a bright future.
Moral of the story. Don't get too stuck on business plans and start to make things happen.
Know where and how to reach customers, grab and steal them from whereever you can.
Random general example. Don't think an email or a phonecall is going to cut it. Get out there and leave an impression. Leave the impression that you and your product is the best there is.
One example (if the product you sell is a service), when I devised how we would enter the 'touringcar'(travel busses) market, we bought just one and I photographed it in many places and photoshopped it together making it look like we had six instead and just went around to any and every secretary for business's I could find. Sending out emails, phonecalls, personal visists. At the same time making a very good looking and professional website and just making it look like we had hundreds of years of experience with busses. (although the family company is from 1887, this was the first time we ever went into this particular market) anyway, we got a lot of work right from the start, so much so that we had to work with competitors to get all the work that came our way done and had to outsource quite a lot of work in the beginning. Don't be afraid to do so. Don't say to a customer that you can't deliver because you're not available when they need you. Take the work and get someone else to do it. Make it happen. Sometimes you can earn a bit just from being the middle man, sometimes it may cost you money, but the point is that you, your company, needs to be in the mind of the customer as the one to go to to get things done.
I also found that when you sell a product, don't go around selling it as 'a new' product, being new and innovative sounds pretty cool but it doesn't sell, go around selling it as 'THE' product, as something that is already established, wether that's true or not. Make them believe!
