In all my years of lessons learnt in retail, one in particular always used to stay at the front of my mind, kindly passed on to me by one of my first store managers, Kenny Donaldson.

How often have you been tempted in business to change its focus, try diversifying with extra products (that are not related to your core products), add additional services or maybe open another site in a different city, all because times are a little hard at the moment?

In my travels as a business mentor and coach, all too often I come across great businesses of all sizes doing what they do really well but barely being able to keep control of their team.  More often than not, they do not use Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

Ever since the “dot com” revolution the emphasis on “back to basics” marketing has been lost.  For many years there was a general thought that if you had a business and didn’t have a web site, your business wasn’t real.