5 Cheap or Free Tools That Will Magnify Your Small Business
Big business managers can do something small business owners can’t afford to do: They can throw money at a problem or project until they’re satisfied with the results. Small business owners have to be smarter and today you are blessed with a wide variety of technology-based solutions that allow you compete with bigger businesses without draining your bank account. In fact, many of the most clever solutions are geared to the small business market; the big guys can’t really take advantage of them. Social Media Hootsuite. A great way to boost productivity is to accomplish two things at one time. If you spend time on the Internet doing research of any kind, why not also use that time to line up your social media posts? Hootsuite (free) allows you to post to all of your social media accounts from any webpage. When you find great content, share it with your followers. With its “autoschedule” function it will even optimize the best time for your posts to go live. It’s like having a fully staffed social media department. Organization and Ideas Evernote. We’re doing business today in the information and idea age. Your ability to succeed correlates directly to your ability to have and find ideas, and keep them organized and ready to use. Evernote is designed to capture and organize your ideas from virtually any medium and have them ready for you when you – or others on your team – need them. Text, web clippings, photos, audio, URLs, and almost anything else can be pulled into Evernote and organized and tagged to meet your needs. Share lists and notebooks with whoever you want, or keep some private. Free and paid plans. Phone Service Cloudphone. Your small business can seem like a big business to callers with a service like Cloudphone. It automates answering and gives callers a menu to properly route their calls – even if they all end up going to you in your spare bedroom home office. eVoice is a similar service. There are other options in this realm from the bigger players, such as AT&T’s “RingCentral Office@Hand” cloud-based service. Various pricing options. Customer Relationship Management Zoho CRM. There are a lot of good CRM tools today. I singled out Zoho because there of fewer users and there is a free option. If your business has a web presence, you can easily create forms to capture user information and pull them into your marketing campaigns. It also integrates well with Google products, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google tasks. Email marketing Constant Contact. You know I work with and use Constant Contact and I believe they do a great job making it easy for the busy small business owner to mount professional and highly effective email marketing and branding campaigns. Pricing starts at $15 a month. With excellent and easy-to-use list management and analytic tools, small businesses can always be on top of what works best with their customer base. I confess that this is a closely curated list; there are many other excellent choices and I hope you share some of your favorites as comments below. The beauty of these is they that they turbocharge the productivity of any small business. Even the solopreneur operating off the kitchen table can use these services and...
read moreLearn from the Best: Psychoanalyzing the Top CEOs
If you steal ideas from one person, it’s called plagiarism. If you steal ideas from a lot of people, it’s called research. So let’s do some “research” and crawl into the brains of a few Inc 500 CEOs to dig up some nuggets of business and marketing wisdom that we can apply to our own small businesses. The Inc 500, by the way, is a compendium of the fastest growing companies of the year. Fuhu What better place is there to start than with Jim Mitchell, the CEO of the number one Inc 500 company, Fuhu? Mitchell’s company makes “Nabi” tablets specially designed for children. “We were tired of giving our kids the iPad when it first came out, and there really wasn’t anything else,” Mitchell told the LA Times. “They wanted to play with all the games on the iPad, and it would come back all smudged, or if they dropped it, for heaven’s sakes, it would shatter.” Lesson: If a product is designed for a certain market segment, how can it be modified to make it better suited for a different market segment? Can you tweak your product or service and start selling to a different group of people? Simplified cellphones with larger keyboards marketed to older people is a similar idea. Quest Nutrition Tom Bilyeu is co-founder, president and CEO of Quest Nutrition, number two on the Inc 500 list for 2014. Quest Nutrition makes snack foods and sweets that appeal to the health, fitness and weight loss markets. You can find quite a few blogs that Bilyeu has written in the last few years, but the central theme of one is advice we should all take: Excuses are your one true enemy. Bilyeu makes a compelling case that we are our own worst enemies. We are the only ones who can prevent us from achieving our goals and if we allow ourselves to make excuses, we are hiding this fact from ourselves. This is powerful business and personal advice. Take it. (By the way both Fuhu and Quest Nutrition are located in El Segundo, California. So maybe another big lesson we learn here is if you’re planning a startup, El Segundo is a primo location.) Reliant Asset Management Barry Roman and Michael Roman are cofounders of Reliant Asset Management (RAM), a company that designs, leases and sells modular buildings. The pair have a long history in this market. Back in 1986 they started Resun Leasing, which also operated in this area. Two big lessons are worth noting with RAM. First, when they left Resun, Barry and Michael Roman had to wait out a long “no compete” period. Second, RAM’s success can be attributed in large part to the fact that it leases and sells modular buildings in the areas experiencing the oil shale boom. Let’s quickly look at these two lessons. Despite being “out of the game” for a while, Barry and Michael Roman kept their focus on what they knew best and as soon as their “time out” was over, they jumped back in. Know your strengths and don’t let any temporary setback keep you from applying your strengths to your business. Next, it’s often said that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and that’s why it’s smart to get involved when you see a...
read moreSave Money, Engage Customers with Bitcoins
It seems like there is more news about currencies today than ever before. The US dollar is being challenged as the global currency of record and at the same time Bitcoin is mounting an increasingly serious challenge to all national currencies. Recently Dell announced that it would accept Bitcoins as payment. The computer-making behemoth joins a group that includes Overstock, Newegg, Expedia, Dish Networks and CheapAir. For web retailers, offering a Bitcoin payment option is another way to enhance the customer experience. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency which purports to be secure and low-risk. For merchants it has the added advantage of offering very low or even no transaction charges. Try finding that with a standard credit card processor. Although it is certainly gaining popularity among merchants, Bitcoin is even more popular as an investment. Many individuals are buying Bitcoins and holding on to them just as they would gold. Bitcoins hit a high of nearly $1,150 in 2011 and today are hovering above $600. Merchant payment options If you’re a merchant and would like to give your customers the option of paying in Bitcoin, there are really two ways to do it and these essentially correspond to whether you’re an online or brick-and-mortar merchant. We’ll start with a physical store location. Last year on an ESPN College Game Day broadcast, a fan held up a sign that read, “Hi Mom Send” followed by a Bitcoin graphic and the QR code for his Bitcoin account. He netted $24,000 from people who saw him on TV and transferred Bitcoins to his account. That illustrates all a store needs to get started with Bitcoins: an account and a QR code for the account. With those two things, your customers who want to use Bitcoins would scan the QR code with their smartphones, transfer their Bitcoins to your account and they show up immediately. Processing fees: zero. That’s a very rudimentary system. For more integrated solutions, companies such as Coin of Sale offer systems and charge fees well under one percent. Bitcoins in e-commerce For Internet transactions, you absolutely need a third party processor to facilitate the transaction. You’ll find fees of one percent and less when you shop around as well as the ability to immediately transfer the Bitcoin value to your traditional bank account in a standard currency. You can also find flat-fee plans. Players include BitPay, Coinbase, BitcoinPay, BIPS and Polycoin. You’ll need to know a lot more to establish your comfort level and decide when, if and how you want to enable Bitcoin transaction, but even traditional payment processors are taking note. In a recent blog, San Francisco-based Stripe – which is in a Bitcoin beta – concluded: “We’re still in the very early days, but we can already start to see the shape of the potential impact of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If we get things right, life is going to be much better for billions of people.” Image: “Bitcoin banknote” by CASASCIUS – CASASCIUS. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 via Wikimedia...
read moreSmall Biz Startup Grants and Other Tall Tales
If you received a robo-call one evening around dinner time and the recorded voice on the other end of the line boasted that there was “free money” available, what would you do? Most would hang up the phone and go back to the dinner table. The simple fact is that there really isn’t such a thing as free money. However, as I talk to budding entrepreneurs, I occasionally run into some who tell me they plan to start their businesses with grant money. These conversations always occur before they have actually tried to find and apply for these wonderful grants of free money. Somewhere between 500,000 and a million new businesses get started each year in the United States, so you can see what the competition would be for free money. But what about… I know that some of you will protest a little because you know there are businesses that received grants to startup or for expansion. This is true, but the number is very small and the niches within which these grants are divvied out are very narrow. Let me give you a quote directly from the Small Business Administration’s website: The federal government does NOT provide grants for starting and expanding a business. So cross that possible source off your list. There are some state economic development agencies that will occasionally have some money for special purposes. However, you’ll find that loan programs are overwhelmingly more abundant than grant programs – and even the loans can be difficult to obtain. Further, grant programs generally require matching funds so they aren’t really “free money” either. The BusinessUSA website has an excellent “financing finder tool” that will give you a very fast idea if you have any chance at grant money. As you work your way through the questions, you’ll quickly realize that only a very narrowly defined group of people and purposes have any chance at grant money. Access to loan guarantees is somewhat more common. Risk-worthy ideas There is a very good economic reason for the dearth of small business grants: If your idea is a good one that will turn a profit in the marketplace, there should be someone willing to give you a loan to start your business – or you should be willing to risk your own money. If neither you, nor a venture capitalist, nor a bank believes your idea is worth taking a risk on, why should taxpayers pony up the money? I don’t offer this perspective to discourage anyone. In fact, I hope to do the opposite: Develop your business idea so much that its potential for commercial success is undeniable. Then you shouldn’t have any trouble finding money to get you...
read moreNow Is the Time To Act on App Threats
Not a day goes by that we aren’t warned about threats to our privacy online. As I’m writing this, the current dustup is over the Facebook messenger app, which apparently knows everything about you down to the color of your unmentionables. For small businesses the threat posed by the panoply of apps employees carry around on their mobile devices is quite real. Appthority just released its Summer 2014 App Reputation Report that surveys the threats posed by free and paid apps. In a world where everyone is commingling personal apps and apps intended for business use on their own devices, small business owners need to understand the stakes and implement appropriate policies. First, let me say that both iOS and Android apps pose problems and while both free and paid apps are problematic, free apps are the bigger problem – essentially all free apps pose risks. The figure is between 80 and 90 percent for paid apps. Pernicious data collection When you and your employees “agree” to the conditions that allow an app to be installed on your device, here’s what you’re agreeing to that puts you at some risk: Allowing the app to track your location, Allowing the app access to your contacts, Allowing the app access to your calendar, Allowing the app to connect the unique device ID to the user, and Allowing in-app purchases. The data that is gathered by allowing your apps to access this information goes to a variety of places. Most is sold to advertisers so they can better target the ads you see. The privacy concerns you might have as an individual are somewhat different than those you have as a small business owner, and probably the biggest single concern is access to contacts. Mixing business and pleasure If you and your employees sync your devises with software such as Outlook, you are undoubtedly carrying around contact information that includes both personal and business data. By allowing your apps to access this data, you are exposing business contacts to third parties and perhaps increasing the risk for corporate espionage and theft of valuable contacts, according to the Appthority report. You are certainly exposing your business contacts to increased spam. Also, not to get overly Jack Bauer-ish about it, the report points out that location reporting could allow corporate executives to be tracked. Even if this seems unlikely today, it’s best to be aware of the potential and account for it in your mobile device policy and training. There is no way around the fact that you need to do a risk assessment for your business, consult with your IT team and formulate a policy and strategy. It should include training your employees, controlling company data and instilling good online habits in your team, such as logging out of apps and changing passwords. Image: Image: Mobile Apps & Games, © 2011 methodshop, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
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