This Week in Small Business: Will Your Next Small Biz Loan Come From a Hedgefund?
Leadership, management and productivity Everything in your small business needs to be in order if you want to get into the big box stores. Dun & Bradstreet’s Amber Colley lays down the fundamentals. Money management Choices! Choices! How to find the right lending alternative for your small business. And to take the options even further: The next small business loan you get may not come from a bank, but from a hedge fund or private equity fund. If you’re considering a small business loan, check out these Sageworks figures on which banks – both large and small – are the biggest lenders. Red Dress Boutique owners explain how they believe “Login and Pay with Amazon” has helped them grow their business. No small business owner ever wants to need a collection agency, but there are times when it’s absolutely necessary. But did you know that most collection agencies are themselves small businesses? Customer service Without a doubt there are lessons to be learned by watching the Netflix series, House of Cards. Here are 10 that apply to customer service. Review these six ways to transform your small business by dramatically upgrading your customer service. There’s probably at least one you can implement now. Small Business Marketing and sales Principles and Strategies The mobile-first design has never been more crucial as consumers all over the world increasingly prefer using mobile devices, with smartphones topping the list. Here are five ways mobile can integrate online and offline marketing. You’ll find 10 to 12 fundamental principles of ecommerce SEO in this article. Don’t overlook a single one. Need help with B2B Marketing? Here are five ways to use LinkedIn. Your website should be all about conversion and here are five ways to boost your rates with zero investment. If you want to even out the down cycles in business, developing a strong community may prove to be your most important small business strategy. Digital, content, social media It’s easy to lose the human touch in the digital marketing world. One marketing Zen master is making a big push to keep things humanized. A major development today combines two important aspects of social media marketing: Influencers and Instagram. Don’t think “big data,” think “smart data” to boost your email and digital marketing campaigns. When James Carson took three months away from his consulting career to focus on a publishing startup, he learned more about content than he ever imagined. Ashley Zeckman from Top Rank shares four solid tips to save your brand’s content marketing strategy. Divide and conquer! The brains at Buffer share their tools and tips for team collaboration in your small business social media marketing program. Government, politics and the economy The advocacy group Public Citizen has accused the SBA of misapplying the law on small business set-asides. But wait, there’s more: Lawmakers love to talk about the little guy, but their policies routinely favor the big and powerful. House Ways and Means chairman Paul Ryan says passing trade promotion authority and free trade agreements will open new markets for small business. The National Federation of Independent Business’ small-business optimism index increased to 96.9 in April, up from 95.2 in March but below the 98.0 posted in February. On the other hand, in April the Wells Fargo small business optimism index suffered...
read moreUse Your Internet Security Skills To Protect Against Charity Scams
Sadly, scam artists always follow closely on the heels of a natural disaster. We know that when tornadoes hit the Midwest, all kinds of sketchy contractors descend on the area. Many do little more than collect deposits and move on to the next town. We are seeing the same thing happen with the recent devastating earthquake in Nepal. In the face of tragedies like this, the wonderful side of human nature emerges and many look for ways to help out. Unfortunately, fraudulent charities start making the rounds and many unsuspecting individuals get caught in their web. And in the Internet Age, the bad guys are discovering new ways to leverage global tragedy for personal gain. For example, you may be going through your email in-box some morning and find an email soliciting donations. Stay vigilant Because you want to help, you may let your guard down and click on a link or download an attachment that will put malware on your computer. Further, although you may be wary of other phishing strategies, when there is a “good cause” involved, you may be less careful. Making smaller donations via a text message is a popular way of fundraising today and these can be fraudulent as well. Although these are usually for small amounts, the scams can add up to a lot of money. It’s important to realize that any money channeled to a bogus charity is money that will not be collected by a real charity. Ultimately, the victims of the disaster are victimized a second time, along with the folks who are trying to do a good deed. All of the measures required to protect yourself from garden variety Internet scams must be maintained to guard against disaster-charity scams. There’s an additional step you should take: Check out any charity before donating. Vet all charities In a posting on the National Consumer Protection Week website, Colleen Tressler, a Consumer Education Specialist with the FTC, recommends checking the legitimacy of any charity on one of these sites: Better Business Bureau’s (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Navigator, Charity Watch, or GuideStar. Telephone solicitations are another possibility. It is very difficult to determine the legitimacy of any caller. Further, experience shows that many of the “charities” that depend on cold calls for raising money end up spending very little on the causes they claim to support. Most of it is sucked up by overhead. Keeping your team current on scams and Internet security issues is probably the best thing you can do to protect your business and the individuals who work for you. Use the issues that I’ve discussed here as a way to reinforce procedures with your employees. Finally, do some homework and connect with a legitimate charity that puts 80-plus percent of the money it raises to actually help people in...
read moreThree Keys to a Killer Elevator Pitch
After badly hitting a golf shot one day, comedian Tommy Smothers said, “I’m going to write a golf book: The 99 Things To Remember at the Point of Impact.” Duffing your elevator pitch can put your head in a similar place. There were so many things you wanted to say, but you had so little time. Before you knew it, you were in the weeds, out of bounds. Just like a good golf swing coach would do, let’s try to simplify the elevator pitch, because if you can do that you can achieve the single most important element of the pitch: confidence. The first step is to understand the goal, which is clearly articulating what your company, product or service does and what sets it apart from its competition. You aren’t going to close a sale, or convince an investor. Your hope is to create enough understanding and interest to get to the next step in developing the relationship. Let’s look at the essentials and point out a few stumbling blocks you need to avoid. Express your most important benefits. This can be something like, “On average, we cut accounting costs in half for our clients.” Note that this is different than saying, “We offer an easy-to-use, web-based dashboard that anyone in the company can access 24-7.” As in sales, cast your “benefits” in the leading role. The “features” merely play supporting roles and in an elevator pitch, they are usually not mentioned at all. The caveat I want to give you here is this: In some situations you may have to “set up” your benefits by first describing the problem you are solving. If your audience is somewhat unfamiliar with your industry, you might have to lay a little groundwork. Set yourself apart from the crowd. Explain in one sentence why people should go with you instead of the competition. Are your benefits greater? Is your cost lower? Do you have offices in every major city? Do you hold a patent? Avoid clichés like “we’re customer-centric,” “we’re the industry leaders,” or “we were the first to market.” No one cares. The call to action. Despite the brevity of this encounter, you do want to get something from it. It could be a meeting or a planned phone conversation. Know what you need and have the confidence to ask for it and ask specifically, saying something like, “Is there sometime tomorrow we can talk?” If you develop a strong elevator pitch, it might lead immediately to more dialog, so be prepared for questions. If there is serious interest from an investor or a prospective new buyer, the person will have specific concerns and you need to be ready to follow up with answers on the spot. At the top I said that confidence is the most important element of an elevator pitch. This is doubly true when you are making a pitch to investors. Honestly, investors are putting their money on you even more than your idea for a business. In this podcast noted venture capitalist Chris Sacca expertly dissects an elevator pitch, exposing all its weaknesses, and demonstrates how it should be done. While you may not have a Chris Sacca to lean on, test and hone your pitch to as many listeners as you can drum up....
read moreNew Ways to Look at Employee Reviews
Most – if not all – employee review processes seem to work as well as the rating system in Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. At Intel, they found that almost everyone was being rated as “successful” each year, which was merely one step above “needs improvement” on the company’s internal scale of competence. This exposes a cruel love-hate relationship with the “yearly review.” When evaluations get almost “standardized” like this, they become a rote exercise that delivers little to no incentive for employee growth. But at the same time, in most companies employees know that their raise is tied to their review, so they circle their anniversary day on their calendars each year looking forward to a bump in their “take home.” An institution with no fans A big problem is caused by the fact that we typically give yearly evaluations. Honestly, can you really reflect an entire year of work in a single evaluation? Do you keep notes throughout the year? What sticks best in your memory, the good or the bad? The system is really as unfair to supervisors as it is to those being reviewed. One possible improvement is to separate the discussion of competence and professional growth from the pay raise discussion and touch bases with employees twice a year. This allows you to put the focus where it should be at each session. Of course, it also puts an extra meeting on your calendar for every employee who answers to you. The separate compensation-based meeting would be more straightforward and shouldn’t take much time. However, you might see some of your employees making a more earnest attempt to grow professionally when they realize their “pay talk” is just six months away. Peer reviews are another variation some companies are trying. Perhaps in today’s vernacular we should call these “crowd-sourced” performance reviews. They aren’t new; they’ve been around for decades in some companies. Of course you need to be certain that those providing input on an employee’s review and raise are familiar with his or her work. Keeping the status quo Despite the problems inherent in reviews, I suspect most of you will stick to traditional formats. I urge you to approach the process with the future of your business and the future of each employee in mind. Encourage both parties of the review to consider this question before the meeting: “What can the company and employee each do to improve the business and further the career of the employee in the coming months?” You can answer this question by touching on various categories, such as: Training, Continuing education, Advancement, Process improvements, and others. Some employees in your business will be eager to do things to build your business and advance their careers. Some others will be pretty happy just doing what they’ve always done. Your goal should be to recognize those who have aspirations for advancement and help them to the best of your ability. At the same time, some people who are happy with theirs jobs and not looking for significant advancement can be extremely dedicated to your company and very dependable employees. You don’t want to upset that balance either. Recognize their value and be sure...
read moreGoogle Plus: Going…going…gone?
Dear Google+, I’m just not that into you. Kind Regards, Google Recently, Google announced that the social media platform previously known as Google+ was kinda sorta getting dropped, ignored, put out to pasture or maybe just not emphasized so much any more. The company said it was putting Bradley Horowitz in charge of “Google’s Photos and Streams” products, and this seemed to be essentially cannibalizing Google+. Horowitz is a Google VP who has been one of the main architects of Google+. He made the announcement, ironically, on his Google+ page. It’s unclear what this will mean – if anything – for your Google+ business pages. Stream and photos What it does mean is that Google is going to start handling photos and “the stream” (posts, news, updates) separately from the generic Google+. Imagine if Facebook started treating its news feed and photo albums differently than the rest of the platform. As many of you know, establishing your small business Google+ presence has been viewed as important. A business page on the Google+ platform has been a ticket to getting your local business properly listed on Google maps and in directories or citations. Frankly, I think Google+ will maintain business pages. After all, it recently announced a major project that creates city and town pages that have at their heart, the local businesses located there. What about Hangouts? No one from Google has yet directly addressed the fate of Google Hangouts. It looks like another internal group has been put in charge of the Hangouts, so they shouldn’t disappear. They may merely “disconnect” from Google+ exclusivity. Some observers believe that Google+ will cease being the “product” that Google promotes and evolve into just a platform upon which other products are launched, live and are marketed. The importance of diversification No matter how all of this ends up a year or more from now, there is one important lesson that small businesses should learn from this wrangling: Don’t allow your social media marketing to depend on one platform. Any of the social media platforms can change policies at a moment’s notice and upend your social media marketing strategy. Have at least two social media outlets in your program that you really work at everyday and perhaps a third that you emphasize less, but could ramp up if conditions change. Most of us see these as free marketing channels and whenever something is free, it can go away at any time....
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