Small business and entrepreneurship: Where do you stand?
There are areas where small business and entrepreneurship cross over, but there are other areas where they diverge. If you are going into business for yourself, or if you already own a small business, it’s important to know where you stand on this topic. Put simply, virtually every entrepreneur starts as a small business owner. However, true entrepreneurs don’t stay there. But don’t misread me: There is nothing wrong with having the goal of simply owning and operating a successful small business in your community. For example, over the years I’ve met several people who dreamed of owning a local bookstore, probably combined with a coffee shop, where the locals could go to find literary gems and enjoy one another’s company. A place like that would be a great institution in a local community. However, the entrepreneur would be exploring ways to take that model further. In this case, small business and entrepreneurship are linked by an initial concept, but they diverge in purpose. The non-entrepreneur owner is pursuing a lifestyle and the ability to provide a service he or she thinks is important. The entrepreneur looks at the bookstore-coffee shop as something that people need almost everywhere and therefore works hard to find ways to scale up. The small business owner works hard to perfect the single location. Operating a single location is the main job for the local small business owner; finding, nurturing and exploiting funding sources for growth is probably the main job for the entrepreneur. Risks and rewards We can also look at small business and entrepreneurship in light of risks and rewards. It’s easy to conclude that the financial risks and potential rewards are far greater for the entrepreneur. The small business owner takes a smaller risk but certainly doesn’t eliminate risk. In fact, you could say that depending on one local business is “putting all your eggs in one basket.” If your local business flounders, that’s it. While a total failure for the entrepreneur would be far more costly, after a certain period of growth, the entrepreneur could absorb some isolated downturns and still be in a position to continue operations. For the small business owner, there may be lifestyle rewards that are especially appealing. Being an important and involved member of a close community can be a wonderfully rewarding experience. It could be the family lifestyle that a couple would prefer. Small business and entrepreneurship ideas There’s another interesting cross over between small business and entrepreneurship. Typically, an individual will start a small business around an area of personal interest, experience, or expertise. Let’s use a pet shop for an example. An expert topical fish hobbyist might open a local store. This is also true for many entrepreneurs. They take their expertise/passion and set out to build an empire rather than a local business. I think that many of the entrepreneurial tech leaders today are passionate about the place of technology in society. Mark Zuckerberg would be included in this group. However, there are also entrepreneurs who are passionate about building businesses and the specific area of any one business doesn’t matter so much. They recognize opportunities within business sectors and that excites them. I think Warren Buffet clearly fits into this category. So, what’s your vision? What’s your passion? Is it the...
read moreThis week in small business: A short list of articles long on good tips and inspiration
Our recommended reading list this week is a little light in its quantity of articles, but there are some gems here. If you need inspiration, skills, or marketing tips, we got ’em. Leadership, management, and productivity If you’re a visual learner and need convincing that small business is vulnerable to cyber attacks, you need to check out the infographics Dan Patterson posted on TechRepublic. Marketing and sales Don’t sell yourself short. That’s part of the message Vivian Nunez relays in this Women @Forbes article about creative Emma Ramos. Admittedly not a lot of my readers run farms, but for those of you who do, this Sara Schafer article about how to cash in with a well-written commodity marketing plan could pay off handsomely in 2017. You know how strongly I support online skills improvement, and the 37 free marketing and social classes listed here by Brian Peters is a good place to start. Are you a technical person who feels somewhat challenged when it comes to marketing? Mateusz Warcholinski’s article on Brainhub is a good place to start getting yourself up to speed on the basics. Don’t worry so much about your home page, but be certain to design killer landing pages. The top 10 tips in Andy Reese’s article will give you a good foundation. R.L. Adams delivers eight crucial rules for dominating Google’s search results. However, keep in mind Adams’ caution that “it won’t happen overnight.” Jason Unger takes a slightly different path with his “3 Things Every Website Needs for a Better SEO Ranking.” Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation How do entrepreneurs succeed? That’s how Stephanie Denning starts her review of Tracy Kidder’s “A Truck Full of Money,” which relates the story Kayak founder Paul English. Good inspiration...
read moreCan we bother you for a moment to help you get ready for #NoInteruptionsDay?
We interrupt this blog to bring you the annual No Interruptions Day! The last work day of each year has been designated No Interruptions Day and for some small business owners, it’s a very fitting special day. It seems like there are two types of businesses and/or business people: Those for whom the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is dead, and Those for whom the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is crazy busy. If you fall into that second category, Dec. 30 this year would be an excellent time to take No Interruptions Day to heart and turn off your phone, ignore your emails, lock the door shut and enjoy some undisturbed peace while you take care of the tasks that have to be completed before you can close out the year. What we’re really talking about here is productivity and maybe we should let this special day remind us of a discipline we should be practicing all year long: Focusing on the tasks before us until they are completed. Here are some more tips to help you maintain the concentration required to stay on task without interruptions: Toss the notion of multi-tasking into the dust bin. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that we don’t multi-task efficiently. Each time you switch between tasks you open the door to distractions and it always takes several moments to rev your brain up to speed on the new task. Crank up some instrumental music. Classical music in the style of Mozart gets our brains working at higher levels of efficiency. If you haven’t developed a taste for the classics, be sure to stick with instrumentals; the lyrics in vocal music engage the word processing parts of our brains, and unless you’re mopping the floor, you probably need to have 100 percent of those verbal skills available for the tasks you’re working on. Snack and hydrate between meals. Eat snacks balanced between protein and carbohydrates between your regular meals. You don’t want your mind to get lost wandering around the food groups when you’re trying to get some work done. With small, balanced snacks, and plenty of liquids (they’re important at work for several reasons, as Kaya Ismail points out here), you’ll keep your tummy under control and your energy level up. Work off campus. If you’re in a position where you can grab your laptop and work someplace away from the daily grind, go for it. You’ll separate yourself from some of your regular tormentors and a fresh scene can give you some extra energy as long as it doesn’t come with even more distractions! Clear your calendar. Since we’re giving you a few days notice, review your calendar and see if you really need to keep all of those appointments. If not, clear them off and get to work. These tips should give you a fighting chance to finish the year strong. And, if you have some strategies you use to maintain your focus, share them in the comments below and send them out into social media cyberspace with the hashtag...
read moreHave questions lost their power to engage?
Engage. Persuade. These are two things we are always trying to do with the people around us. And in business, when our livelihoods depend on engaging and persuading, the stakes are especially high. That’s why I wanted to share with you the results a recent A/B test as it was reported on the Behave website. Two versions of a simple sign-up form were tested against each other. The goal was to capture the prospect’s email address by offering a free three-part guide on investing. All the type and graphics were the same, except for a handful words at the very top of the signup form. Here’s how they differed: One version started with a question. (Do you trade shares?) The other version simply instructed the prospect how to sign up and get the guide. I was expecting the version that asked the question to produce more signups by a large margin – demonstrating the power of a question. However, in this case, the simple instructions beat out the question by 41 percent. The experts at Behave attributed the instructional copy’s win to the “Trend of Convenience.” I hate to say this, but the Internet is making us lazy. Instead of wanting to engage our minds and think for ourselves, we’re taking the attitude of “Just tell me what to do!” Further, I think it’s well documented that when we’re surfing the Internet, we won’t stand for anything that slows down our speed. If a page takes too long to load, we click to go somewhere else. If an e-commerce checkout system is too lengthy, we abandon our shopping carts. This is also, I believe, why one-page scrolling websites are all the rage today. We can’t get people’s brains to say, “That looks interesting, I think I’ll click on it” and navigate to a new page. I don’t want to give up on using questions to engage people, but today I’m less confident in its power. Sometimes a short and simple instruction is all that’s required to get prospects and customers to take...
read moreCreate a small business focus group for insights, loyalty, and profits
Would you take our online survey? How many times have you seen that question lately? It seems to pop up for me a few times a day and I virtually always click “NO” or simply navigate to another website. It’s unfortunate for the business because it’s not getting valuable information from me. But consider this alternate question: Would you join our online focus group? You use this question differently. It’s targeted mostly to your existing customers and you explain that joining the focus group will result in additional loyalty rewards. I know a major newspaper that asks subscribers to participate in its online focus group. Reward points are added for every focus group survey completed and these points eventually add up to an Amazon gift card. This focus group strategy has excellent benefits above and beyond what can be accomplished via a quick one-off customer survey: It keeps your business top of mind. Honestly, many of us get numb to receiving sales emails. We receive too many of them day in and day out. However, an email with the subject line, “Please join this week’s focus group survey!” will differentiate your business email from all the other email your customers or prospects receive. Participation is also boosted by the knowledge that there will be some kind of loyalty reward associated with participation. Focus groups give you actionable information. You can use these surveys to find out what you’re doing right, and better yet, what customer needs you aren’t yet fulfilling. The information you can gather is limited only by your imagination. Focus groups can influence your customers’ behavior. I mentioned the newspaper focus group survey above. There are certain questions or topics that it comes back to often. About every second survey asks focus group members if they saw the Sunday paper. If they did – and looked at it in some depth – they are given more questions to answer and they receive more reward points. It’s a true Pavlovian strategy: They are teaching subscribers than when they read the Sunday paper, they get rewarded. Is there an area of your website you would like to promote to your customers? If so, ask about it in your focus group surveys. We know that major corporations (and politicians!) have been using focus groups for years. Today, with all the online tools we have, even small business owners can pull together a focus group for little or no money that has the potential to increase sales and profits. One of the cheapest ways to do this is by using Google forms to create online surveys. Andy Wolber wrote an excellent “how-to” article on this over on the TechRepublic site. Give it a...
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