Get the most from people: Don’t make them ‘major in the minors’
“I like to bang my head against the wall because it feels so good when I stop!” A friend’s mom used to say that (along with a lot of other colorful adages) and I used to think that it was just a warning against doing things that frustrate you, but now I think the way the saying ends is just as important: It feels good when you stop. In other words, when you eliminate a frustration it not only takes a “negative” out of your experience, it delivers a “positive.” Let me tell you how I think this applies to many small business owners and the way they manage themselves and their workforce. We spend countless hours and a lot of money to improve the areas where we are weak. That’s logical, right? Much of the work our elementary and high schools do is to strengthen students in their weak areas. That may be a reason so many of our young students hate school and drop-out rates are so high. It’s probably also the reason why college students often detest “general education” courses, but have no problem with courses within their majors. I’m not against a well-rounded education and I think that our youth need to study areas that may not be of interest to them at the moment, but will make them better citizens and help them as adults. What I want to point out is that it’s human nature to rebel when you’re forced to do things that don’t interest you or in which you have little natural ability. And while schools probably need to force students into some of these areas, if you’re a small business owner, you need to think twice about it – for yourself and for your employees. If either you or anyone on your team are responsible for areas where you have no interest and/or no talent, you’re wasting your time. Further, if you think you can solve the problem by some extra training, you’re probably kidding yourself. Let’s say you or an employee is on the 50th percentile in terms of ability to sell. If you raise that 10 percent through training, it bumps up to the 55th percentile. Big whoop. However, say you or an employee is on the 85th percentile in ability to create marketing materials. If you raise that 10 percent through training, it goes up to nearly the 94th percentile. In my example one training investment delivers a 5 percent increase, while the other delivers an 8.5 percent increase. This illustrates how investing to build on strengths gives you a greater ROI than trying to boost your naturally weak areas. There can be exceptions, of course, but the principle of matching jobs to natural strengths and working to improve those areas is a critical one to understand and put into practice in your business. You see, “it feels so good” when people stop fighting their weaknesses and start to run with their...
read moreScaling success and failure: A conversation and infographic
How to scale up? When to scale up? Every ambitious business owner and entrepreneur asks these four-word questions. But coming up with the right answers isn’t nearly as easy or simple as asking the questions. First, you need to have a business that lends itself to scaling, and that’s a topic I’ve discussed in other articles. Even with a scalable business, there are plenty of ways your scaling strategy can go bad. Today I want to share an infographic I recently received from Matt Zajechowski over at Digital Third Coast. It’s a project he pulled together with Alligatortek, a company that specializes in building custom enterprise applications for the web and mobile devices. Usually we publish these infographics as a guest post with a short introduction. However, this content intrigued me and prompted me to launch an “email conversation” with Matt to dig a little deeper on what they learned about scaling successes and failures. Ultimately, I don’t think we found any magic formula that will guarantee the success of every scaling strategy, but there are certainly a number of good lessons you can get by considering the examples in the infographic and in our conversation. First, I want to give you the “back and forth” I had with Matt. Then I’m going to make a quick observation or two and finally I encourage you to study the infographic and see what strikes you as notable. The Q&A The infographic uses Kodak as a scaling failure and Slack as a success. Here’s what I asked Matt: Question: I don’t think you can say that Kodak, which was a hugely successful company for nearly 100 years, scaled up too quickly, or wrongly. Do you think Slack will survive as long as Kodak did, especially given the fact that it hasn’t yet made any money? Answer: From 1962 – 1966 Kodak’s sales went from $1 Billion to $4 Billion. They certainly scaled fast in periods of time, especially when they focused on personal camera use in the 60s. I personally can’t say that Slack, or any tech company will be around as long as Kodak given the technology industry’s light-speed pace of advancements. The camera/film industry was a slow-paced behemoth, and Kodak was privy to having time to innovate. Question: I don’t see how “scaling” is the problem very often, isn’t “having a clear plan on how to make money” the issue, and ultimately whether or not there is a market for the product or service? Answer: Scaling is an issue many businesses face, including smaller businesses that are looking to expand to make more money. The plan for one operation, office, truck, etc. isn’t often a great plan when you want to expand given that many aspects become twice as complicated. I think the stat that 74 percent of startups fail because of premature scaling is one that speaks volumes to how many businesses struggle with scaling. The infographic, as you will see, also uses Blockbuster as an example of a scaling failure. This prompted my last question for Matt. Question: Didn’t Blockbuster perform wonderfully until it allowed itself to get passed by others who understood how to leverage new technology better? When it was aggressively adding stores, it was doing quite well. Answer: The point for including Blockbuster wasn’t...
read more2017 Guide to the top free small business budget templates
If it weren’t for spreadsheets, the personal computer would never have gained such rapid popularity, and budgeting is one of the tasks that is ideally suited for spreadsheets. At the same time, budgeting is one perhaps the most important tasks for small business owners. These two facts give us the perfect marriage of software and task, and fortunately there are many excellent – and free – small business budget spreadsheet templates. Tip: Ultimately you’ll want to track your budget via cloud-based accounting software, but for testing and comparing budget scenarios, there really isn’t any tool that tops a personal computer running a spreadsheet program loaded with a detailed small business budget template. Here’s a quick overview of the best free small business budget templates currently available for download. I’ve provided thumbnail images to give you a feel for each one. For some people, aesthetics matter; others don’t care. Further, be sure to visit the websites of the ones that look like they would best fit your needs because sometimes the providers have other handy free small business templates available. Note: I have not included expense or “startup” templates, and there are many good ones. I’ve focused on templates that force you to forecast income as well as expenses. At the end, I provide links to sites that have a good inventory of free small business spreadsheet templates, but where I couldn’t find an income and expense budget spreadsheet. Scott’s Marketplace Not only does Scott’s Marketplace offer a good free small business budget template, the accompanying article by Dwight Fujimoto walks you through its features and the best ways to use them to your advantage. The template itself uses three tabs within Excel: Budget Detail, Budget Summary, and Expense Summary. It breaks down categories into an extensive number of line items. Smartsheet The designers at Smartsheet put a lot of effort into making their small business budget spreadsheet look great as well as cover all the categories you’re likely to need…and some that look more like personal expenses than business expenses, such as souvenirs and pet boarding under the category of Vacation/Holiday. But it’s better to be more inclusive than leave things out, right? Although Smartsheet provides an excellent free budget spreadsheet, the company markets paid services built around online collaboration, work management, and automation. You can create your budget spreadsheet on their website, for a price. Capterra Andrew Marder does a good job explaining how to use the Capterra small business budget spreadsheet in his article that accompanies the download. For an example, he uses the company John’s Ping Pong Balls…which, by the way, is posting great revenue figures for a local ping pong ball company! The sheet is self is extremely detailed. It employs five tabs, the first of which is instructions. The others are YearlyBudget, MonthlyBudget, MonthlyActuals, and Overview. Vertex Vertex offers separate monthly and yearly small business budget spreadsheet templates. Expense categories aren’t quite as extensive as some others, however Vertex does something the others don’t: it provides separate tabs for product-based and service-based businesses. In fact, other sheets often do not include “cost of goods sold” as a budgeted expense item. Other useful small business spreadsheet providers Tidyform has several free business budget templates, but they require an email address prior to download. The others...
read moreThis week in small business: Stirring up the chocolate industry…
Will this be the longest recovery on record? Can social responsibility sweeten up the chocolate industry? Is it possible to rank above Wikipedia on Google? These and other important questions are addressed head-on in this week’s collection of curated content. Leadership, management, and productivity Get the insights required to be a master at giving workplace feedback in this MasterCard-sponsored article. John Hall delivers a good roundup of the latest Small Business Marketing Trends Report in his Forbes article. The chocolate industry has been around almost forever. See how Emily Stone is changing things up in this profile by Megan Giller. Better. Cheaper. Faster. Jeff Charles outlines how the automation wave will help small business. Writing for the Infusionsoft knowledge center, Jessica Thiefels takes holistic look at contract vs. full-time employment for small businesses. Marketing and sales Need to relaunch your site someday and you’re concerned about your SEO? Joydeep Bhattacharya tells you how to do it in seven steps. You’ll find 11 solid ideas for beginning to build your brand’s social media presence in this piece by the Forbes Agency Council. In this podcast, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss whether or not it’s important to become Google certified. It’s spring cleaning time again, so why don’t you take Amanda Brinkman’s advice and try her four simple ways to spruce up your marketing? If you sell on the Interweb, you’ll want to check out Blair Nicole Nastasi’s seven tips for increasing e-commerce revenue next quarter. Katherine Sullivan covers four unknown Facebook tools she says can take your marketing to the next level. Trying to elbow out Wikipedia in search rankings is a major task. Steven Olenski chronicles what the founders of Everpedia learned about SEO. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Mary C. Long gives us a list of 25 socially strong entrepreneurs she believes we should follow and emulate. Check out mother-daughter duo Ashlee Ammons and Kerry Schrader in this article by Lelia Gowland. These are two black women entrepreneurs who won’t allow themselves to become “hidden figures.” And related to that story is Andrew Medal’s profiles of eight women leaders who are disrupting entrepreneurship. In this video, Bryan Elliott sits down with venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and bestselling author James Altucher to see why he does what he wants – not what he’s told to do. Politics, government, and the economy Writing for CNBC, Patti Domm discusses how Goldman Sachs economists lay 2-to-1 odds that this will be the longest recovery on...
read moreSocial Jukebox review: Don’t just schedule, automate evergreen posts
Twitter seemed like it was on its way to soon becoming the next Yahoo! It looked it might end up as a social media “also ran.” But recent positive and surprising financial results and acquisition interest from Mark Cuban have changed the atmosphere, so it’s time to review your commitment to your presence on Twitter and see if you might be able squeeze some more utility from it. I want to take a couple minutes to share with you my Social Jukebox review. And, while Social Jukebox started out as a Twitter tool (originally it was Tweet Jukebox) it has greatly evolved since the early days and now integrates with Facebook and LinkedIn as well. However, because we typically post more often to Twitter, posting there is still one of its biggest selling points. Social Jukebox allows you to repost to these social media accounts on a scheduled basis. It’s great for evergreen posts or posts that you want to be sure to present to your audience at different times on different days. There are several free, built-in jukeboxes you can use and I’ll pick one of these as an example. If you want to send out notable quotes for #MondayMotivation, you can grab a Jukebox that will perform this function for you every Monday. Then you don’t have to waste time over the weekend finding quotes and setting them up to go out at different times using Tweet Deck, Hootsuite, Buffer, or whatever. Another good feature is that you can set up a jukebox to function over a date range. If you had a contest going, for example, that had an end date, you could schedule your posts to stop on the right day. You can also control how many days the jukebox must give before repeating a post. Let me also note that jukeboxes seem to randomly publish posts – they don’t start at number one, go to the end and then start over at number one again. Social jukebox will also send out automated thank-you messages to your top interactors and has a nice “targeted posts” feature. These targeted posts are sent out on a specific date or frequency. If you need to note an important day each year, for example, you could use a targeted post. If you want to get a feel for what you can do, Social jukebox offers a limited free account that allows you to use two jukeboxes, 300 stored posts, five targeted posts, one social media account, and 50 branded thank-you tweets. Paid accounts run from about $200 a year to $1,000 a year. Monthly pricing is a bit higher. Take advantage of the free plan, see what you think, and if you have some strong feelings or observations, post your own Social Jukebox review in the comments and share your...
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