8 small business hacks for growth and productivity
I view small business hacks as falling into two categories: strategies and habits. And, whether it’s a strategy or a habit, I think that what makes a hack a hack is the ease at which it can be implemented. Following through on a small business hack is more about taking Nike’s advice of “Just do it” than having to follow a complicated formula designed by a rocket scientist. So as you scan my list of small business hacks, pick a few and move on them today. I’m suggesting hacks in two areas: growth and productivity. Taken together, these boost your profits from both directions: increasing the top line and lowering your relative overhead expenses. Small business growth hacks Use Craig’s List. Are you offering your product or service on Craig’s List? With just a couple of exceptions, it’s totally free advertising. You can also use it to find talent and even ideas for new businesses. I scoured Craig’s List to come up with several of the 80 home-based business ideas that I published in this list. Learn from others’ big wins. It is a wise person indeed who learns from others’ successes and failures. That is the beauty of Behave.org. This site publishes the results of A/B testing various companies have conducted. See what has worked for others. Take their quizzes and become an expert in predicting what is likely to succeed for you. Use the velvet rope psychology. Invite customers to an exclusive future event or special offer. There must be an attribute that gives it this sense of exclusivity: limited number of spots, time limit, loyalty program enrollment required, etc. Promote a two-way loyalty offer. One of the cable or satellite TV service providers has had success with a “$100 for you and $100 for the new referral” promotion. You can easily do this with an email coupon. Small business productivity hacks Cue the background noise. Whether you prefer soft environmental noise or a little classical music in the background, covering up auditory distractions boosts productivity. Carly Stec has published a great Hubspot article on “6 Science-Backed Playlists for Improving Your Productivity” that you should check out. At least of the playlists she details is certain to fit your company’s style. Get an answering service. If you’re fielding all your incoming calls, it’s time to offload that burden. With Cloud-based phone systems today, this is easier and less expensive than ever. And, if you’re still using an old-fashioned land line system, investigate systems like Grasshopper and its competitors; they can be extremely powerful tools for small businesses and startups. Make full use of contractors. I’ve long advocated using contractors for the functions at which you have less talent or desire, and for functions for which you don’t want to create a full-time position. However, as you grow, I want you to also consider using contractors for functions you’re good at, then you can focus more on new opportunities. Control your virtual world. Beat down your social media viewing – and that of your team members – with a stick, namely a stick like the free Chrome extension TimeWarp. In the same way, take control of your email. This article details nine excellent apps that will boost your email productivity. My final word of advice: Start hacking...
read more‘Unexpected’ advice you can use to get the winning edge
A friend remembers working at home on his computer one day casually looking out his front window when he saw an elderly woman walking down the sidewalk, past his house, completely naked from head to toe. He called 911 and it turned out that his wasn’t the first call reporting the woman. That was 20 years ago. He still remembers the incident as if it happened yesterday. We’re wired to notice and remember the unexpected. Early on in human evolution, this attribute probably helped prevent us from being eaten by saber-tooth tigers or crushed by wooly mammoths. Early humans would hear an unexpected sound or notice an unusual shape in the distance and react appropriately. Today, this element of human nature prevents us from overloading our brains with data that is less important. And, you can use our reaction to the unexpected to win and keep customers. I want to examine two general strategies to make this work for you. 1. Another way to be different I’ve written a lot about differentiation; what sets you apart from your competitors. A major part of differentiation is to deliver special value or provide a unique twist with your product or service. Usually, the discussion centers around making your business the only place a person can go to get exactly what you provide. However, there is another aspect to differentiation. When you do something differently than everyone else, you are doing something unexpected. This makes you memorable and you want to be the business that “comes to mind” when people are in the market for your product or service. This also means that you can differentiate in ways that aren’t always obvious. For example, have you eaten at a Chick-fil-a fast food restaurant? If you thank workers there, they will, invariably reply, “My pleasure.” They are specifically trained to respond this way. At first, you might merely think that they are trained to be polite. I’m sure that’s part of it, but replying, “You’re welcome,” would be sufficiently polite. However, “You’re welcome” is expected. By saying, “My pleasure,” Chick-fil-a makes an unforgettable imprint on its customers. Frankly, there may be other fast food restaurants whose employees are trained to be equally polite, but if there are, I can’t remember them! Score one for saying “You’re welcome” differently. Lesson: Find ways to put an unexpected twist on otherwise routine processes. 2. A different kind of loyalty reward You can also make good use of this quality in your customer loyalty program. Most loyalty programs give rewards after the customer has spent a certain amount of money or made a certain number of purchases. These are fine, but they do not make your loyalty program memorable! Find ways to occasionally deliver an unexpected reward and it will make your business shine! If you communicate with members of your loyalty program via email, find some excuse to occasionally give them a special benefit. Celebrate William Henry Harrison’s birthday with a “Lesser-Appreciated Presidents Day Sale” that is only for members of your loyalty program. If you’re a retailer, allow your sales associates to randomly give a discount coupon to one or two loyalty program members each day. Use your imagination. Bring those “random acts of kindness” to your business. Make them a little off beat and totally...
read moreGuard against 13 top small business failures and their causes
I recently published a collection of the single best startup business advice from a group of small business influencers. Follow that advice, and you have a good shot at success. Now I want to look at the other side of the coin: What to do if you want to fail. Okay, I know that no one sets out to fail, but when you’re walking the crazy road of founding a business, it’s easy to fall into a number of holes. Familiarize yourself with this list, and you improve your odds against being caught unaware. I was tempted to put one item on this list of small business failures and their causes – bad management – and be done with it, because they all trace back to management. And, that’s a big concept I want you to get before you jump into the specifics: Business failure is always a management failure. Don’t try to blame others. You may run into some market conditions beyond your control, but with cost cutting and modifying the vision for your business, you should be able to survive those. With that preface, let’s jump into the list. Profit margins slim to none. Like home remodeling projects, the cost of running a business always significantly exceeds estimates. People go in with high hopes and rosy projections. Make sure you’re the one to take the shine off that rose – don’t wait for reality to do it for you. Unprepared for growth. Do you know what you’re going to do if your business really takes off? Or how you’re going to handle that initial influx of customers excited to give you a chance who won’t come back if you bumble your first encounter? Operating in the dark. You can’t take your eyes off your financials. If you don’t know the numbers – the real numbers – you can’t make the right decisions. Don’t mistake busy for profitable. Not enough cash. There are two times when you need a good cushion of cash in reserve: when you’re starting up and when you’re beyond your startup period. Don’t kick off your project if you can’t survive for at least six months without any income. Further, that same reserve will get you through the economic downturns, which are sure to occur. This often happens when owners implement one “quick fix” after another. Soon they have a patchwork of systems and procedures that saps their efficiency. Going back and fixing everything right becomes too costly. Live by the axiom: Do it right the first time. Conflicts between partners. It’s sad to say that a lot of partners who have started out as good friends, end up bankrupt and enemies. Sometimes one warring partner buys out the other, but that can be an unsatisfactory resolution for both individuals. Owner tries to manage at arms length. We certainly like to create businesses that are organized well enough to run without too much direct intervention from ownership. However, when owners stop paying attention to what’s going on, businesses can go south fast. Further, even in large corporations, when the founders stay active and involved, it sets the tone, improves working conditions, and inspires others on the team. Failure to modernize or lack capital to do so. The Grand Canyon got to be such a...
read moreHow to use Twitter analytics to find the best times to tweet
I like how easy it is to get to Twitter analytics and get some quick overviews of what has worked and what has bombed. Discovering your top tweets, top mentions, top followers, top media tweets, and the like is all summed up for you. However, I’ve always wanted to know the most productive time of day to tweet and that’s not so easy to get to. If you want to find out when the most people see your tweets, or click on them, you need to download your analytic data and plug it into a spreadsheet. It’s easy to do, but there are a couple of hoops you need to jump through, so let’s look at the process. Navigate to your Twitter Analytics page. If you’re already on Twitter, start typing “analytics” in the address bar and your browser will probably fill in the rest for you. If not, here’s the formula for the URL: https://analytics.twitter.com/user/your_twitter-handle/home Select “View all Tweet activity.” The date range defaults to “Last 28 Days.” Click on that and you can select a custom date range. Then press “Export Data.” This creates a CVS file that you can open in Excel. Open the file in Excel and scan the “impressions” column for any outliers. Sometimes a tweet or two will do far better than all the others and these need to be noted and then deleted from the data. You’re going to do a graph to visualize the information and if these were allowed to stay in, the scale of the graph would be odd, making it difficult to see what’s happening with all the rest of your tweets. You need to isolate the time of day using the “Mid” text folmula as shown below. Create a new column for this that references the Time column you downloaded. This will become your new “time” column. Copy the new “time” and “impressions” columns to a new sheet. Delete the labels at the top of the columns when you do this, just for convenience. Replace all the colons with decimals (Replace All). Select that column and change the date type from “General” to “Numbers.” Sort these two columns by the “time” column. From the Excel “Insert” toolbar, select Scatter Graph. You’ll get something like the graph below. Right click the graph and set the axises so the time values are the X asis and the impressions are the Y Axis. If you have more than 255 values, you may have to divide your data and do more than one graph. I’ve put in the arrow to note the general trend. It’s important to find the “offset” between your time zone and the one used in the time you have downloaded from Twitter. You can do this by grabbing one of the permalinks from the data you downloaded, paste it into a browser and then see when you posted the tweet in your time zone. I have a six-hour offset so it seems that more people are viewing my tweets around 3 p.m. Central Time. When I looked at my data, I was a little surprised that mid-afternoon turned out to be the time when more of my followers see my tweets. I might be a little cynical here, but it could be that people work hard in...
read moreEasy loyalty hacks to wow your customers
Get on the mailing list at Just Bundt Cakes and they’ll send you a coupon for a free Bundtlet on your birthday. (Don’t say I never did anything for you!) But my point here isn’t to add calories to your diet. I want to point out some of the easiest and most productive hacks to build your relationship with your customers: Recognize customer landmark events and dates in your email marketing. Examples of these are: Customer birthdays, Referral acknowledgments, Anniversaries of first purchase or email signup date recognition, and Follow-ups on purchases. You can probably think of more special days or events to add to the list. A friend of mine just received a one-year thank-you and follow-up email from Carvana. He patronized the virtual used car “lot” to buy a Chevy last year. I think we’re hard-wired to appreciate these kinds of courtesies and they naturally build our relationships with the people who offer them. Think about yourself, your family, and your friends. I know some people, who, if you miss marking their birthday will be terribly hurt. In the same way, when you take the time to do something special on their birthdays, they really appreciate – and remember – it. Customers won’t hate you if you don’t send a special little something on their birthdays, but they will take note of it if you do make the effort. Also, if it’s a customer you haven’t seen in a while, amp up the offering a bit; that will probably breathe new life into the relationship. Let me reemphasize how easy and inexpensive it is to do these things. They are the quintessential “no brainer.” And finally, if you’re competing with another provider, extending courtesies like these will make your business stand out. Don’t miss these simple...
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