Do You Have This Critical Success Trait for Small Business Success?
If you’ve been around entrepreneurs and startups for a while, you begin to compile a list of reasons why some are successful and others are not and you have to scratch beneath the surface. For example, some failed entrepreneurs might say they were undercapitalized. That’s more of a symptom than a cause. Why were they undercapitalized? Many success stories can be directly connected to the attitude that the entrepreneur brings into the project at the very onset. Is the neo-small business owner merely trying to create a job, or is he or she pursuing a bigger goal? Wisdom gained from answering these questions is applicable no matter what kind of startup you are going to pursue, whether it’s technology based, service based or a traditional business of some kind. Success traits EMyth (business coaches, online education and coach training) looked at these questions from the perspective of the traits found in seasoned entrepreneurs. And, if you re-read that last sentence, I want you to note the word “seasoned.” In the EMyth study, it turned out that having one failure under your belt goes a long way to establishing the traits that it takes to launch a successful startup. “There were a number of surprising findings,” says EMyth’s Chief Brand Officer, Jonathan Raymond, “but none more so than that a second-time business owner is overwhelmingly more likely to succeed than a first-time owner, even if that first time owner has been in business for 30 years.“ (Emphasis mine.) “The seasoned entrepreneurs were sustaining a five-year rate of growth over three times that of first-time owners. And, what’s more, it didn’t matter if they’d owned two, three, or even more businesses before. The magic factor was getting past the first one,” Raymond continues. Put growth center stage It turns out that some of an entrepreneur’s strongest points—passion and commitment—can be huge liabilities. These same qualities may prevent them from building a truly growth-oriented team, the study found. How you hire the people you surround yourself with usually ends up being your most important decision. You don’t just want to plug in people who are good at a particular task; you want people around you who have a vision for growth. Too often new small business owners try to maintain a tight-fisted control over where the company is going. It’s hard to let go. Operations and even goals get compartmentalized. Talented co-works wilt in that environment. You must be willing to let others flourish within the environment (leadership) you provide. Let’s be honest: Every startup is hard work. But do you want that hard work to be invested in a growing, flourishing business, or do will you merely allow it to keep you busy until you drop from exhaustion? You can get a deeper look at what the study found in a webinar and slides available at State of the...
read moreOrdering by Hashtag and Packages Falling From the Sky
Retail strategies to snare the impulse buyer have been a major part of the shopping experience since forever and a recent pact between Twitter and Amazon is pushing impulse buys deeply into the virtual world of social media. Imagine this scenario: You’re perusing your Twitter feed and you come across a sponsored tweet featuring a cool new pair of headphones. You gotta have ‘em but don’t have the time or energy to go through the drudgery of full-blown online shopping. What’s a guy or gal to do? Simple, merely reply to the tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart and the item immediately goes into your shopping cart at Amazon.com. Later, perhaps after a quick two-shot iced-caramel-macchiato pick-me-up, you muster the strength to complete the checkout process. Finally—and within hours—a drone will drop your package from the sky. (BTW, I just made up that last part.) Simply make shopping simple Will this prove successful for either Amazon or (more importantly) Twitter? I don’t know, but I doubt that it will revolutionize the e-commerce world. However, it does re-emphasize an important concept if you depend on web sales in your business: Make the process as fast and seamless as possible. If you do e-commerce, as Amazon and Twitter are hashing out the details of their hashtag buying scheme, take a little time to review the purchasing process on your website. To do this, your first step should be to analyze your competitors. Go through every step of finding and evaluating products on your competitors’ sites and then test out their shopping cart and checkout systems. Do the same for your site. In fact, have friends go through your site and your competitors’ sites and give you an honest evaluation and comparison. By aligning itself with Twitter, Amazon is again telling us how important it is to remove any barrier that stands between your shoppers and the final “make purchase” button. If Internet retailers can knock just a few percentage points off their abandoned shopping cart rate, the revenue (minus cost) goes straight to the bottom line; they’ve already consumed their share of the overhead. Assess site navigation Pay attention to navigation links and buttons. Are they always clear? Are they always located “above the fold”? Even today I find Internet retailers who make editing a shopping cart difficult, or make going back to do more shopping almost impossible, which brings us back to the subject of impulse buying. Sometimes, as I’m getting ready to check out, I remember “one more thing” I could use. Often I can’t figure out how to get back, do another search, and add another item. If there’s no clear way to do it, I either throw in the towel and just checkout without the additional item or head to another site. The retailer loses money either way. Keep an eye on the Twitter-Amazon experiment, but look even more closely at how you’re doing...
read moreSmall Biz Healthcare Marketplaces Delayed, Unpopular
You know the saying that “nothing’s certain but death and taxes.” I think one more thing can be added to that short list: delays in rolling out Affordable Care Act small business health insurance exchanges. States were supposed to have these exchanges up by November 2014, but when that seemed impossible, the administration granted a one-year reprieve, pushing the deadline off until November 2015. Recently, officials tacked on another one-year delay. Now, the drop-dead deadline is November 2016 and at least 18 states have made that their target date. Another 14 states will be going with the federal government’s exchange in 2015. Further, in Washington, D.C., which is way ahead of the curve and already has its small biz health insurance exchange up and running, the reception by businesses has been tepid, at best. According to the Washington Post, although some 13,000 individuals have signed up via the small business marketplace, only 600 of those actually own or work for a small business. Due to an odd provision in the law, the other 12,400 are Congressional staffers who are allowed to use the site to get health insurance. To say that the small business health insurance exchanges are a crazy quilt of implementation strategies would be an insult to crazy quilts. And no matter what one’s personal position is on the Affordable Care Act, such disparity in its rollout and ad hoc delays makes business planning—including hiring—difficult, at best. Coming up with reasonable estimates of future costs is virtually impossible. Here’s an issue where I’d like to know what you think. How are you handling health insurance for your employees? There are, of course, strategies ranging from not providing any health insurance to going with an insurer outside of the exchange marketplace. Also, has the uncertainty around health insurance costs prompted you to delay or abandon plans to expand and hire additional employees? Sometimes the best way to grasp these situations is to hear stories from the trenches. What’s...
read moreSmall Biz Cash Advances Made Easy
As we’ve noted before, the lending world is changing. A topic that gets considerable attention in the media is the reluctance of traditional lenders to make small business loans, so it really caught my attention when I heard about a new program from Square. Square makes the über-cool Square Reader that lets you use your smartphone or tablet to accept credit cards. If ever there was a “disruptive” technology, this is it. (I’m waiting for some innovative charity to start issuing them to the homeless, so folks can have a better idea how their money is being spent and donate with greater confidence.) Growth funds Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is the driving force behind Square and now he wants to empower the small businesses that use the device and help them fuel future growth. Although Dorsey isn’t calling this new Square program a lending service, the result is the same for businesses. Here’s the deal. A merchant is fronted a lump sum of cash from Square at a certain cost. For example, Square might advance you $10,000 and you agree to pay back $11,000. Then, each time you make a transaction using the Square Reader, a percentage of the transaction goes to the $11,000 you agreed to pay back. Each time you run someone’s credit card, you would be paying down the debt. I like the idea because it allows small businesses to be good “borrowers” through the busy season and the slower times throughout the year. The way the deal works, the debt doesn’t have to be repaid within any specific time frame. Paperwork reduction It also relieves the small business owner from having to deal with yet another monthly bill. Anything that reduces the paperwork avalanche business owners face all the time is a major benefit in my book. It also reduces—or almost eliminates—the amount of paperwork a small business owner needs to do to get a loan, or “cash advance.” Because Square knows how much volume your business does, it knows exactly how much cash the company is willing to advance your business. Back in the day, local bankers had this kind of feel for merchants in the community, and were able to tailor loans accordingly. With the Square cash advance program, technology is taking the place of that “personal touch”—and doing so quite ably, it seems. Painless payback Darren Scott, who runs the art clothing store Zero Friends, has used the program twice. “It was much easier to get than a traditional loan. Everything was straightforward and easy to understand. Also it was hassle free when it came to paying back the advance…every day a small percentage of our credit card sales were taken out of our account to pay back the advance. We barely noticed it was even happening,” Scott told TechCrunch. If you take credit cards, and haven’t yet explored ways Square could benefit your business, you need to check out the technology. And if you’re using the device, see if you could benefit from an advance. It looks like a pretty square deal to me....
read moreProudly Made in America…Again!
No, not a sleek vase from the Martha Stewart collection. It’s the sleek new Mac Pro, made in the USA. Back in the 1950s, an urban legend circulated in the United States that Japan renamed one of its cities Usa, so they could stamp items “Made in USA.” At that time, Japan’s manufacturing was in trouble and the whole world looked to the United States for top quality products. Of course, since then Japan has become known for high quality manufacturing—just ask any American automaker. Other Asian nations have followed suit and for many years “outsourcing” took manufacturing jobs overseas where quality was high and wages were low. However, these economic trends aren’t always one-way streets; sometimes they’re cul-de-sacs and traffic eventually begins to flow in the opposite direction. We’ve seen this with a distinct “Made in America” trend in recent years. Here are the basic reasons behind this reversal: Quality of US goods is on par with the best manufacturers in the world, Wages are evening out between Asia and the US, Higher fuel prices have made shipping more expensive, and Social responsibility pressures are causing some public relations problems. Everyone from Apple Computer to Walmart to Martha Stewart are getting in on the “Made in America” movement. You can’t cobble together a much more unlikely trio than that, can you? In the long run, it will be good for small businesses. Let’s look at some specifics. Apple Computer Apple Computer has often found itself on the wrong side of news stories about the working conditions in China’s Foxconn plants, where iPhones are assembled. It balanced that out a little when it announced that it would build its most sophisticated computers, the Mac Pro, in Austin, Texas. And while industry watchers were glad to see a high-tech assembly operation come back stateside, some Apple adherents weren’t happy to see iMacs on the Austin assembly line running Windows in a photo Apple CEO Tim Cook recently tweeted, but that’s another story… Walmart Walmart is aiming to stock $50 billion more US-made products over the next decade. To get this drive off to a fast start, the mega-retailer held a “manufacturing summit” last year hoping to encourage suppliers to participate. Of course, it was Walmart that in large part fueled much of the drive to source low-cost products in China in the first place. And while $50 billion over 10 years isn’t a major chunk of the company’s business, it may at least represent a new attitude or awareness. Martha Stewart Here’s where creative small business owners have an opportunity to really strut their stuff. This year the maven of American food, crafts, style, design and fashion will be holding her third “Martha Stewart American Made” competition. You can nominate yourself or someone else in either of these four categories: Crafts, design, food, or style. A wide variety of products are included in each of these broad categories, so check out the website to see exactly how you might fit in. Martha Stewart isn’t just handing out plaques and participant ribbons, she is also featuring great American Made products in her eBay Martha Stewart American Made store. From our brief recap, you can see that everything from some of the highest powered personal computers at Apple to bottles of boutique...
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