Untapped Women’s Markets Hold Huge Potential for Startups, Small Biz and VC
Erin Andrew tossed out some interesting numbers on the SBA blog the other day, numbers that point to missed entrepreneurial opportunities: Women control $11.2 trillion, 39 percent of our country’s $28.6 trillion investable assets, Women angel investors accounted for only about 26 percent of all angel investments in 2014, and Women in venture capital and private equity firms are at the most only about 10 percent of top management. No one understands what women need or what women want better than other women. However, the figures I cited above show that the startup world isn’t tooled up to really provide the kinds of products and services that will nail the various women’s markets. Crowdfunding sites have been created that are starting to fill in this gap, but there’s a long way to go. Among these are Plum Alley, CrowdHelps and MoolaHoop, which I’ve written about here before. I think smart entrepreneurs and venture capitalists of either sex would be wise to bring women into decision-making positions and make a concerted effort to uncover missed opportunities. Another avenue that’s showing some potential is the SBA’s InnovateHER Business Challenge. This competition judges new products and services using the following criteria: Makes a measurable impact on the lives of women and families (30%), Has potential for commercialization (40%), and Fills a need in the marketplace (30%) The first challenge recently ended with the following top three winners: 1st place: Bethany Edwards, LIA Diagnostics, Philadelphia. LIA designed a pregnancy test to provide a better experience for women at a stressful moment in their lives. 2nd place: Lisa Crites, owner of The SHOWER SHIRT™, Cocoa Beach, Florida. Crites designed a post-surgical, patented, water-resistant garment designed to prevent post-surgical mastectomy drain sites from coming into contact with water while showering. 3rd place: Sophia Berman, designer at Trusst Lingerie in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Berman developed effective and attractive products aimed at eliminating the pain and discomforts experienced by women with cup size DDD+. Contestants compete for up to $70,000 in cash prizes and the event starts out with local competitions, ending with the top 10 finalists making pitches to a panel of experts. It doesn’t cost anything to enter. You can read all the fine print and get links to all the other official contest pages on the SBA website. Finally, although InnovateHER Business Challenge 2016 will only have three top winners, we know that there are far more commercially viable ideas for products and services that appeal to women. So even if you don’t win – or don’t even decide to enter – get busy developing something for this huge...
read moreFive Secrets of Mr. Fixit – the Turnaround Guy
A friend once worked in a promising division of a tech firm. The word “promising” is important here. The division had been born out of the company’s R&D department a few years earlier and just wasn’t fulfilling its promise. One morning after everyone was at work, the company’s “fixer” arrived. The old chief of the division was out and the guy whose business card read, “The SOB from the head office who thinks he knows it all” was in charge. This new manager was a turnaround expert. He took underperforming divisions and within a fairly short period of time, got them back on track. Once the dust settled, my friend was able to develop a pretty good professional relationship with the fixer. In fact, when he quit to join a startup a couple of years later, the fixer told him that he put a “rehire this guy note” in his personnel file. He learned many important lessons working under the fixer and I want to share some of those – along with some other critical concepts – with you in these five secrets of the turnaround artist, aka. the fixit guy. 1. Establish clarity After the fixer was on the job for a week or two, he pulled everyone who had any authority together in a meeting and told them what his vision was. As is the case with many startups and struggling small businesses, there is a tendency to go in several directions at the same time. The successful fixer finds where the greatest realistic potential is, jettisons the rest and focuses the team in the best direction. When my friend reflects on this he adds one more attribute. The fixer he worked with gave his team a lot of freedom to pursue the new goals. He didn’t punish people for failed initiatives as long as they were aligned with his goals. However, anyone who strayed from the goals would get in hot water. And that leads to the next principle. 2. Some people will have to go No fixer enjoys firing people, although that is the impression that many observers end up with. By the time a fixer takes over, the handwriting has been on the wall for a long time and frankly, the changes that need to be made aren’t big secrets. That means that existing managers have been ignoring the signs, or are so entrenched with old thinking that they cannot see what is obvious to fresh eyes. If they have their identities tied up in ways that won’t allow them to change, they need to go. However, fixers also usually find a cadre of individuals who have been eagerly waiting for changes – like the monkeys that attended the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.” 3. It’s all about the bottom line George Washington died because his doctor kept bleeding him until finally he bled the nation’s hero to death. When it’s time for Mr. or Ms. Fixer to take the reigns, the bloodletting must stop. Sometimes that’s a difficult message to get across to people working in the heady world of startups. (See the previous point.) My friend remembers his fixer very forcefully telling a roomful of managers once, “You can’t always control sales, but you should always be...
read moreDept. of Labor Coming After Business, Again
If you use independent contractors in your small business, you may find yourself being targeted by the Department of Labor, again. You’ll recall that the DOL recently started the process of redefining exempt and nonexempt employees in a way that would make employers liable for a boatload of new overtime payments. On the heels of that effort, the DOL issued a 15-page memo describing its standards for judging whether someone is an independent contractor or an employee. The DOL will now examine what it calls “economic realities” when making this determination. This basically means whether the worker is economically dependent on the employer or not. If the worker is economically dependent, then that person cannot be in business for him or herself; or so goes the DOL logic. The DOL will be asking questions like these to render its judgment: Is the person’s work an integral part of the company’s business? Does the person exercise managerial skills that contribute to the company’s profit or loss? How much control does the company have over the worker? Does the worker have a special skill? How permanent is the working relationship? Reviewing this situation for the Legal news website Lexology, the Foster Pepper law firm wrote, “The Interpretation signals DOL’s commitment to aggressively pursue companies that rely on independent contractors rather than treating workers as employees. These companies should carefully examine their relationship with workers under the Interpretation and under the tests applied by other courts and agencies.” The take-away here is that you need to look at how you are using contractors as well as the contractors themselves. If you have a staff of 11 – yourself and 10 contractors – and you are the sole client for each contractor, you may end up on the painful side of a DOL action. But before I leave the topic I want to make one more point and that’s how the federal government is always years behind the people it is entrusted to govern. For a variety of reasons, including the globalization of commerce, the Internet, the severe recession, the anemic recovery, poorly funded Baby Boomer retirement accounts, and the huge student debt burden, we are now in a growing “gig economy.” This is a fact everyone seems to know and accept – except federal regulators. You see, federal programs and the funding for federal programs are dependent on a 1960s style economy that just doesn’t exist any more. Unfortunately, rather than adjust regulations and programs to address the economy as it is and as it is evolving, the elected officials and bureaucratic regulators try to shoehorn business owners and workers into a model that no longer fits. In the case of the DOL’s review of contractors, this will likely cause pain for both employers and contractors. Washington D.C. needs to start looking beyond the Beltway to see how real business owners are managing their companies to stay profitable and grow in a hyper competitive global marketplace. Officials also need to see that the flexibility and opportunities afforded through contracting in the “gig economy” is a valuable asset for many workers, even though Uncle Sam hasn’t yet figured out a way to tax that asset! Image: Frances_Perkins_Building, by AgnosticPreachersKid (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons....
read moreThis Week in Small Business: ROI, SEO, PPC and Other Critical Acronyms Revealed!
In this week’s collection of the web’s best small business content, Empact co-founder Michael Simmons tells us how to add more hours to our day (Can I use them to catch up on my sleep?). In the world of marketing we have some great nuts-and-bolts articles on ROI, metrics, SEO and several other critical subjects. Leadership, management and productivity Grab some strategies on how a small business on a budget can offer attractive employee benefits. Keeping your wi-fi up and running smoothly is critical today. These five killer tips will keep you cruising in the fast lane and out of the pit area. Have you ever complained that there aren’t enough hours in the day? Yeah, me too. Here are five simple ways to add hours to your productive time. Marketing and sales Like they say “garbage in, garbage out.” Applied to marketing that means you need to calculate your ROI properly. Daniel Kehrer gives us the lowdown. It’s smart to occasionally rethink your marketing strategies. The three lessons in this article will give you some good ideas about how to rethink your content marketing. The questions everyone has on search and SEO are answered in this Constant Contact blog, which is a follow-up to a webinar they did. Paul Castain (“I never stop selling!”) explains how to take control of your prospect meetings. Good advice. If you haven’t promoted your small business with a blog yet, this piece by Catriona Pollard will lay the foundation for you. These eight tips for improving your value proposition will boost your marketing and increase your small business clarity. We’re being inundated with data so it’s more important than ever to focus on the relevant data. Andrew Davies looks at the metrics that matter in content marketing. You’re putting your money on the line if you’re investing in PPC advertising. Be sure you’re doing it wisely and follow the blogs suggested in this annotated and curated list of 10. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation This gallery combines pictures of award-winning entrepreneurs with some of their best advice. (The advice looks better than some of the executives!) Looking for investors? Steer clear of these six startup strategies that cause investors to run for the woods. Politics, government and the economy Los Angeles recently passed a law to raise the minimum wage there to $15 an hour over the next few years. It looks like the opinion of small business owners on this issue is evenly...
read moreGut Check Time: Are your Inefficiencies Institutionalized?
We are headed straight into the heart of summer vacation time and families all across the fruited plain will be loading up the SUV, tossing their 2.5 kids into car seats and heading out on road trips. For many, those adventures will take them across the heartland and through other agricultural areas where they’ll see silos lined up, ready to store the summer bounty. However, where you don’t want to see silos is in your business, but these silos aren’t so much seen as “sensed.” It’s very easy, even for a small business, to get into a silo mentality. This is when you have departments, or areas of responsibility, that take on their own identity and put up walls between themselves and other functional elements of your business. Break the communication barrier But communication between walls is difficult – if not impossible – and if this is happening in your business, you are losing opportunities. It’s time to start looking for and establishing “horizontal” connections within your small business organization. I can almost guarantee you that some of the walls people have built around their departments, even if it’s a one-person department, is making it hard for someone else to get things accomplished. We tend to create unnecessary paperwork and rules, and these slow down processes. Not long ago, we ran a piece written by Shep Hyken that discussed a restaurant that made up the rather silly rule of not allowing hamburger take out orders because a single customer had caused them problems by ordering too many burgers at one time. A school teacher friend once had a principal who would implement rules for all teachers to handle the problems she was having with just one teacher. These are bad enough, but they get even worse because they create rules and procedures that get written in stone. The inefficiencies become institutionalized. Let’s get together Bring your team together to discuss these kinds of issues. Work to find the walls, the barriers, the problems and then break down the walls and solve the problems. The days of building silos are gone, but it takes leadership to instill a small business culture that is built on cooperation, not turf protection. You will find all kinds of ways to be more profitable. For example, when you eliminate unnecessary processes, you free up people’s time and improve their attitude. You will have more satisfied employees with more time on their hands to accomplish the important things. Where it’s feasible, cross train employees. Have employees switch jobs for a spell so new eyes can get focused on the problems and a new appreciation for what each other does can be developed. Brand consistency Let me give you a simple example of what happens when every department acts independently. I have seen workgroups that create their own letterhead for correspondence, or order their own premiums to hand out to customers or vendors. Often the designs on these items are inconsistent with one another. In an age where image and branding are so important, these slip ups should not happen. If you start bringing people together, situations like this are easier to avoid. So encourage your employees to start using their peripheral vision. They need to see what their neighbors are doing and understand what impact...
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