Turbo Strategy - A Book Summary

Businesses are run mostly on auto-pilot and any problem areas are only dealt with when they are already critical, but by then it may already be too late. Most business managers are too busy with the day-to-day work to sit back and look at the business critically in terms of its context and the direction it is going. Brian Tracey's Turbo Strategy provides a checklist of areas that should be regularly examined by all businesses to ensure that it remains on the right path towards success and profitability.

In the book, the author introduces practical techniques that will help you come up with strategies and more importantly turn up profit quickly:

1. The answers have changed ? most businesses operate the way they do because they are "tried" strategies, not because it is efficient and profitable.

2. Flexibility is essential ? from time to time, it is important to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, then do something about it.

3. The one true measure ? two basic questions you need to ask everyday "What is working?" and "What is not working?"

Conduct a Basic Business Analysis

Whenever you go in for a complete medical exam, the doctors and nurses follow a set procedure. In the same way, there are basic business examination questions that you need to ask and answer continuously to determine the overall health of your organization. Remember the following:

a. The Customer as Centerpiece.

b. Determine What You Sell.

c. Define Your Competitor.

d. Set Clear Goals.

Design Your Ideal Future

Practice Idealization. To do this you must think of what your company would look like five years from now if everything were perfect. Then think in terms of possibilities. Are the goals you set achievable in five years?

Create a Mission Statement and Determine Your Values

A mission statement is essential to an organization because it gives meaning and purpose to the people in their daily activities and work. It inspires loyalty, commitment and become a key factor when making business decisions and when you are clear then you can easily revisit your mission statement and follow its guidelines.

Select the Right People

The two key qualities in finding the best people are that they can be counted on to get the job done well and to get it done on time. Another quality is that they should be good team players.

Market More Effectively

The four essential elements of marketing are: specialization, differentiation, segmentation, and concentration. All marketing elements are important but you should constantly evaluate what you are doing. Remember that the market is changing and changing fast! You may have to change one of your strategies or more than one at the same time.

Analyze Your Competition

You have to know your competition. You have to find out why the customers buy from them, what values and benefits do they get from buying from them. The biggest mistake you can make is to belittle your customers. You have to study them and learn from them.

Three Potential Areas of Superiority

1. Operational Excellence

2. Lead the Field

3. Be Close to the Customer

Change your Marketing Mix

1. Product ? define your product or service in terms of what it "does" for your customers.

2. Price ? be open to the possibility that you may have priced your products or services wrong.

3. Promotion ? this encompasses everything you do in the process of marketing, advertising and sales.

4. Place ? this is the location where the sale of your product takes place.

Position Your Company for Success

Social proof is a major influencing factor to determine whether or not people buy your products or services. Your reputation is the value that people will pay for. Building a brand trust requires personal experiences by people with your products or services. It is very much like a personal reputation that takes a long time to build but can be damaged or destroyed overnight with bad decisions.

Develop Strategic Business Units

The strategic business unit concept revolutionized multi-product or multi-service businesses; each of the products is grouped with similar products or services in different ways. The starting point of implementation is to have someone specifically responsible for the operations and results of the unit. To make this work, you begin by drawing up a complete business plan that would include sales revenue, costs and profitability.

Sell More Effectively The fact is that 80 percent of your markets have not yet been approached by your salespeople. No one has told them about you. Your business could be probably being selling twice as much if you could just find out how to sell it to them.

Eliminate the Bottlenecks

There are two important steps that you need to take. First, decide on your specific business goals; make them clear, measurable and time-bounded. The next step is asking the question: "why am not in that goal already?"

Reengineer Your Company

To simplify and streamline your operations so that it is more efficient, faster and more effective and therefore more profitable, you have to reduce the number of steps in each process. You have to simplify the processes and make faster and better decision.

Pump Up Your Profits Conduct a complete profit analysis on every product. You must also remember that labor has a real "opportunity" cost along with other use of other resources especially in a multi-product or multi-services business.

Focus on Results

All your customers care about is results. They do not care much about your problems with your people, products, processes or any other aspects of your business.

There are four questions that customers answer before buying the product or service. These are:

What does it cost?

What do I get for the money?

How fast do I get the benefits you promise?

How sure can I be that I will get those benefits?

Seven Steps to Personal Performance

Step 1: Set clear, specific, written goals for each important area of your business. Make them measurable and time-bound.

Step 2: Make a list of activities before you begin a day, put it on paper. The best time to do this is before you go to bed so the subconscious mind can work on your list as you sleep.

Step 3: Set priorities on the list you made. Apply the 80/20 rule and select the top 20 percent of your tasks to work on.

Step 4: Practice creative procrastination. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, decide in advance which of those tasks have little value or importance can you do away with.

Step 5: Select the one most important job and have the discipline to accomplish that first thing.

Step 6: Practice single-handling with the most important task you have identified. Resolve to work on it until it is resolved.

Step 7: Develop a sense of urgency. The faster you move, the more work you get done and the better you feel. This will create momentum.

By: Regine P. Azurin and Yvette Pantilla
Regine Azurin is the President of BusinessSummaries.com, a company that provides business book summaries of the latest bestsellers for busy executives and entrepreneurs.

http://www.bizsum.com
"A Lot Of Great Books....Too Little Time To Read" Free Book Summaries Of Latest Bestsellers for Busy Executives and Entrepreneurs

Mailto: mailto:freearticle@bizsum.com
BusinessSummaries is a BusinessSummaries.com service.

(c) Copyright 2001- 2005, BusinessSummaries.com - Wisdom In A Nutshell

---

Book Summary: What Is The Emperor Wearing?

This article is based on the following book:What Is The Emperor Wearing? Truth-Telling In Business Relationships Butterworth-Heinneman ISBN 0-7506-9872-1 217 pagesThis book is inspired by the popular tale "The Emperor's New Clothes". It... Read More

Are You Using Both Sides of the GoogleCoin?

By now most of you realise that Google can give our websites the ability to appear within their results pages using a Pay Per Click model (PPC). This is called Google Adwords Hopefully,... Read More

Los Angeles City Re-writes Free Car Wash Fundraiser E-Book

The City of Los Angeles Storm Water Program has recently re-written the Detail Guy's Founder's Car Wash Fundraiser book to promote non-polluting fundraising events. The run-off from car wash fundraisers can hurt the... Read More

The Rich Jerk Review: New Agressive and Effective Internet Marketing Methods for All

The Rich Jerk "Making Money on the internet is Easy" e-book Review1)The value proposition The Rich Jerk claims:* To reveal the unorthodox marketing methods that brought him million dollars each year* That most... Read More

For Fans of Seinfeld-like Coincidences

Isn't That Bigamy (c) 2005, ISBN 1411634241, Mike Vogel, Lulu PressYou have just broken up with your girlfriend who leaves you in a busy restaurant with no way home, a tough waitress dumps... Read More

Book review on Finite Capacity Scheduling, Part III

With this all possible the price could be lowered to a back breaking competitive level giving lower prices to consumers who voted with their dollars while retaining a huge number of proficient hours... Read More

Book Summary: The 17 Indisputable Laws Of Teamwork

To achieve great things, you need a team. Building a winning team requires understanding of these principles. Whatever your goal or project, you need to add value and invest in your team so... Read More

Fading Towards Enlightenment - Book Review

Fading Toward Enlightenment by Wayne Wirs is definitely a well made book of excellent quality ? it will certainly endure multiple readings. I loved the feel of the pages as I turned them.... Read More

The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, by Gordon Grice

The black widow spider is notorious for eating her mate as they copulate, but how many of us know much more than that about this beautiful, mysterious, spider?Grice collects black widows and keeps... Read More

Your Flight Questions Answered

Whether you are an experienced air traveler or a novice, John Cronin's book, "Your Flight Questions Answered," has a little bit of something for everyone.Written more as a reference guide, Cronin's book covers... Read More

Headlong Into Quicksand: The Tale of Today in America

America?s 220 years of Democracy (of its 400 years) is longer than the Greek 100 (of 1000), the Roman 150 (of 1000), or the British 180 (of 1600.) These European democracies are the... Read More

Hard Candy, Nobody Ever Flies over the Cuckoo?s Nest; Book Review

HARD CANDY: Nobody Ever Flies over the Cuckoo's Nest; Written by Charles A. Carroll is a must read.This book should be sitting on the desk of every governor, senator, representative, every director, educator... Read More

The Demon Plague - Book Review

"The Demon Plague by Joreid McFate is a fantastic paranormal suspense science-fiction novel, involving time-travel and mysticism. This 424 page book is also available in e-book format.Due to the volume of books I... Read More

Book review on Finite Capacity Scheduling, Part I

Finite Capacity Scheduling by Gerhard Plenert PhD and Bill KirchmeirI met Gerhard and talked with him for an hour at a customers office of one of our franchisees in Reno NV, which specializes... Read More

Turbo Strategy - A Book Summary

Businesses are run mostly on auto-pilot and any problem areas are only dealt with when they are already critical, but by then it may already be too late. Most business managers are too... Read More

Bury My Heart at Redtree

Title: Bury My Heart at Redtree Author: Patrick Chalfant Genre: Suspense/Thriller ISBN: 1-930709-53-6Patrick Chalfant weaves a tale that is a mixture of psychological suspense, Native American mysticism and revenge in his sophomore novel... Read More

Enron Debacle: Review Of Kurt Eichenwalds Conspiracy Of Fools A True Story

Title: Conspiracy Of Fools: A True Story Author: Kurt Eichenwald Publisher: Broadway Books (A division of Random House) ISBN: 0767911784As I reached the end of the 675 - pages of Kurt Eichenwald's saga... Read More

Jason Seeleys War - Book Review

"Jason Seeley's War" is centered in the heart of a small American town where two youth are deeply in love, and have been since high-school. Jason and Natalie's love runs with a flexible... Read More

Inspiration for the Fired Soul

You're Fired! is a book that tackles the real story's behind these two little words that pack so much punch.This is an Ebook that gets people motivated and inspired to take a different... Read More

Entrepreneurs Reach Record Income Levels Using New EBook on Adsense and Adword Techniques

The "Rich Jerk" has created quite a stir on the Internet about his new ebook revealing secrets on how to use use Google Adwords and Adsense for big profits. He has recently sold... Read More

Book Summary: Networking For Professional Success

Book Summary:This article is based on the following book: Effective Networking for Professional Success: "How to Make the Most of Your Personal Contacts" by Rupert Hart, Stirling Books, 1997 ISBN 0... Read More

The Southwest Airlines Way - AchieveMax? Top Ten Book Review

Over the years, several books and countless magazine and newspaper articles have been written about Southwest Airlines. Numerous MBA programs highlight the Southwest structure, its culture, its CEO, its low fares and other... Read More

Book Review: What Color Is Your Parachute?

What Color is Your Parachute? Reviewed by: Matt Keegan ? 2003, Matthew C. Keegan, LLCFinding a job today presents unique challenges that did not exist five years ago. That is why Richard Nelson... Read More

Erasure and the Othering of Texts

Percival Everett's Erasure takes a look at how racism affects various aspects of our lives that we may be unaware of. An excellent example of this is when Ellison ventures into the bookstore... Read More

Review for Broken Angel, by SW Vaughn

Broken Angel, by SW Vaughn, breathes with an insistent life of its own, pulling readers along through the dark underworld of barbaric fight clubs and prostitution.The story unfolds as twenty-two year old Gabriel... Read More

Health Is Internal Beauty

Excerpted from the book "Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You" by Tonya Zavasta. The book is available at: http://www.beautifulonraw.comJean Kerr, American... Read More

Book Review: Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands {How To Do Business In Sixty Countries}

Kiss, Bow, Or Shake Hands: How To Do Business In Sixty Countries By Terri Morrison, Wayne A. Conaway, George A. Borden, and Hans Koehler? While in Germany, on business, you meet with your... Read More

Young, Fabulous and Broke? Suze Orman Has Debt Relief & Financial Freedom Advice Books for You!

Are you a parent that has all the financial responsibility in the world on your shoulders and living paycheck to paycheck? Does it seem like there is no way out of this endless... Read More

Men of Extreme Action - Book Review

"Action, thriller and humor ? this book has it all! Men of Extreme Action by Joseph Kochanoff is one of the better books I have reviewed this year. Based in the action movie... Read More