4 steps small business owners must take to retire worry-free
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” – Lao Tzu I don’t know if the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu ever retired – or even if “retirement” was a concept in his day or in his culture – but I know that the small business owner’s journey to retirement is definitely in the thousand-mile-plus range. And that critical first step is the most important. Today let’s look at the first step and the few that follow, while we keep our eyes focused on the final goal. Start planning early Early planning is the only way to be in a position to deal with the various bumps in the road that you will encounter. With early planning, you have time to recover from the down times and you can be more flexible on your exit dates. It’s a wise person who learns from the mistakes of others and believe me, there are many small business owners today who are unprepared for their retirement. Demonstrate wisdom and don’t repeat their mistakes. Make the big decisions Are you going to depend solely on the sale of your small business at retirement, or will you have other ways to establish a substantial retirement savings? Diversification is always smart advice, but I know that in some instances, it is difficult for small business owners to adequately diversify their financial lives. However, if you take my first recommendation and start early, it increases your ability to diversify. One of the big decisions you need to make in your retirement plan is what will happen to your business at retirement. If it will fund the majority of your retirement, there are a lot of questions you need to answer, such as: Will you sell it to a current employee? Will you sell it on the open market? Will a family member take it over? Each of these paths will lead to different actions on your part. If you plan to sell to an employee, you need to be sure of the employee’s commitment and you need to be grooming that employee. If a family member is going to take over your business at retirement, that person needs to be prepared. Further, your financial agreement with a family member may differ from what you would negotiate with someone else. When a straight sale on the open market is at the heart of your plan to fund your retirement savings, it leads you down a long road where you’ll need to make many smart decisions. Small business owners in this position must make smart choices that maximize the value of their companies and minimize the risk to potential buyers. A well conceived and executed exit strategy can boost the value of your business by 50 percent. Translate your retirement plan into action The path you choose will dictate many of your next steps. If you plan to fund your retirement through investments rather than through the value of your business, you might operate your business as a cash cow to pump money into a retirement account or real estate investments, for example. However, if you want to grow your business and perhaps expand into other markets, it’s more likely that you will plow a lot of that cash back into your company to get a...
read more5 tips and tools to boost your digital prowess and productivity
See that thing in front of you that your hands rest on for a good portion of the day? You know what I’m talking about. It’s called a keyboard. The way most work is today, if you can figure out a few ways to use your keyboard and computer more efficiently, you can boost your productivity substantially and at the same time decrease your frustration. So here are five tips and tools to supercharge your time sitting in front of your computer. 1. Google canned response. If you use Google mail, you’re going to kick yourself for not having discovered this little jewel of a shortcut. If you find yourself sending the same responses to a variety of emails you receive, you can have your email already composed and ready to send with just a few mouse clicks. In Gmail: Go to the setting menu in the little gear icon on the right side of the web page. Select “Labs” from the selections you get across the top of the window. Look down through the various “Labs” and select “Canned Response.” Click “Enable.” Select “Compose” in Gmail and type a standard response you often send. Select the little triangle in the bottom right corner and click on “Canned response.” Create a new canned response and save it with a name you’ll remember. 2. Search smarter. Tired of scrolling through pages of search results to find the best match for your query? Make Google narrow it down for you instead of wasting your time. There are many “operators” that allow you to better focus your searches. Sometimes I’m looking for a specific thing on a specific site and I can do that by typing “thing I need to find site:www.anysite.com.” This operator – site: – narrows my search to one website. If I need an exact match, I put my search item in quotation marks. Here is a rundown on Google search operators. While you’re on that page, go through all the Google search help pages. With just a half hour of study, you’ll be an expert. 3. Timewarp. This is an extension for the Chrome browser that steps in when you spend too much time on productivity-sapping websites, like Facebook. You tell Timewarp your weaknesses and what you would like it to do when you’re spending too much time there. It will automatically take you to a different site you specify, give you an inspirational quote, or show you a timer indicating how much time you’ve lost. 4. Rescue Time. While Timewarp is like a drill sergeant, Rescue Time is like your friendly personal advisor. It will tell you how much time you have spent in various activities so you can really take control of your workday. It also allows you to block certain sites for given periods of time and set goals for yourself. You can use it to help you adopt strategies like the Pomodoro system. (If you think an online time clock system would boost your small business productivity, or help you keep track of freelancers, check out this comparison article by Chad Brooks.) 5. Textexpander. Not all of your writing is done in Google mail and that’s where Textexpander comes to the rescue. If you have snippets or blocks of text that you input repeatedly,...
read moreThis week in small business: Expert advice on travel, Instagram marketing, women entrepreneurs and more
The experts speak in this week’s collection of curated content. The topics are many and varied: Travel tips, Instagram marketing tips, the importance of women entrepreneurs, and many more. Don’t put off reading through this…and if you tend to procrastinate, skip down to the advice from Jayson DeMers. Leadership, management, and productivity Small business owners and entrepreneurs worry about spending time away, but a new type of vacation brings work and play together. In related news: Travel and money writer Kristin Wong speaks from experience when she describes how to get work done while traveling. In this Q&A session, Vanita Pandey, VP of strategy and product marketing at ThreatMetrix, discusses everything from work-life balance to the “third industrial revolution.” Do you procrastinate when you have decisions to make? Jayson DeMers looks at the problems and delivers four valuable strategies. Eight things successful people do that lazy people do not. See how you score! Marketing and sales Check out these tips for enterprise companies on how to scale their local marketing, and you’ll pick up some great advice for your small business along the way. Here’s advice from five top notch marketers on how to avoid some major fails when trying to reach millennials. Check out Matt Mansfield’s 30 tips for promoting your blog on the Internet. Chris Gadek, head of growth and marketing at Doorman, delivers seven hacks to grow brand awareness and unlock revenue growth. How do you market a solution people don’t know exists to solve a problem they potentially don’t yet realize they have? Entrepreneur and PR expert Cheryl Conner answers the question. Live and semi-live strategies are at the forefront of marketing. Discover what you can do with the new Instagram Stories. And while we’re on the topic, here are Instagram marketing tips from the world’s top experts. Everybody and their brother is doing digital marketing. Catherine Monson thinks it’s time to take your marketing outside, literally. Saleforce’s CEO of Marketing Cloud and Chief Analytics Officer, Bob Stutz, says that machine learning is the next big thing for marketers. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men, world-wide, yet they are very underrepresented in the media. See why this is important. Get another take in this article: More women in startups means more female CEOs down the line. Hey entrepreneur! Feel some negativity starting to creep in? Here are 30 tips to keep you in a positive frame of mind. Should a startup hire an HR professional? And if so, when? Here’s some great encouragement from McKinzie Bean: How Being a Stay-at-Home Mom Helped Me Become an Entrepreneur. Ex-Vogue executive and serial entrepreneur, Nancy Cruickshank, shares her passion for brands and beauty. 30-year old Joel Holland, founder of VideoBlocks, has created a $20-million business…from his...
read more11 ways to be a better leader
Oct. 17 is Bosses Day and we’re in the middle of fall, but I want to skip ahead a season to talk about leadership: What can you learn about small business leadership from an old Christmas movie? Quite a lot, if you stop and think about it. See if you agree. For many families, watching some of the classic Christmas movies around the holidays is a tradition, and “White Christmas” is often on that list of must-see movies. The story spans World War II through the period following the war and one of the main plot points of the movie centers around the loyalty soldiers have for their former commanding general. Here’s the song lyric that expresses that feeling: We’ll follow the old man wherever he wants to go… This highlights the first point I want to make. All of the following pieces of advice depend on understanding and appreciating this critical fact: People follow leaders. We all need to understand that there is a profound difference between the attitudes of managers and leaders. Managers see the people and systems under their authority as chess pieces to be moved around the chess board as they see fit. However, there is a big difference between inanimate chess pieces and people. Chess pieces can’t move off their squares, or change their qualities if they don’t like the square that has been assigned to them. People have reactions to the moves they have been forced to make. If their reaction is negative, that can have a profound effect on your business. I’ve heard some small business owners express the attitude that since they’re paying the employees’ wages, the employees should be willing to do whatever is asked of them. While you can make a logical argument for that, before you head down that road you need to ask yourself a simple question: Do you want your employees to be carrying out their duties with a satisfied and pleasant attitude or do you want them to be working under duress? With this understanding, let’s get into some specifics and I want to start by pulling another lyric from the same song I mentioned above. It will give us our first two specific points: Why are the soldiers willing to follow their leader anywhere? Because we love him, we love him, Especially when he keeps us on the ball. Build loyalty. In all your actions, ask yourself if what you are planning to do will build loyalty or reduce loyalty. And if you suspect an action of yours may reduce loyalty, but you feel it must be done, be sure you aren’t acting in haste. Pause, rethink what you’re about to do and try to find ways to get people on board. Find a way to get buy-in, which is point number three below. Develop your talent. The soldiers sang, “Especially when he keeps us on the ball.” They were expressing the fact that they appreciated how the general brought out the best in them. Recognize the potential in your employees and their aspirations. If they sense you are invested in their future, they will invest in the future of your company. Give leave time for classes. Send employees to conferences. Let them develop new skills on the job. Get buy in. When you...
read moreRobots to the rescue: Tapping Artificial Intelligence to power your small business
Are you one of the many small business owners who could use some help, but can’t afford it? Maybe you’ve run the numbers and concluded that: Bringing someone on part time would bust your budget, and Hiring an overseas virtual assistant would siphon away cash that you need to invest in other areas. What can you do? Bring a robot on board. The rise of ‘bots’ Remember when robots started doing jobs in manufacturing? We have all probably seen the pictures of robotic arms painting new cars at the major car manufacturers’ assembly plants. Today, even those of us who don’t need mechanical robots can take advantage of “robotics” by using online “bots.” Instead of gears, bearings, and sensors, these bots use digital code and “artificial intelligence” (AI) to perform tasks for us. You may have seen articles about Facebook messenger bots. Many businesses and even individuals have developed bots that interact with friends and fans who message them through the Facebook messaging system. For some inspiration on how these might work for you, look over the great Facebook Messenger bots described in this PC magazine article by Eric Griffith. Meet GrowthBot I want to introduce you to a bot that Hubspot has created and is free right now, although I can certainly imagine them charging for this someday soon. It’s of special interest to any small business that does digital marketing. They call it GrowthBot and you’ll find it at GrowthBot.io. Let me show you how Hubspot’s GrowthBot can do some of the work you might hire someone to do, or pile onto the workload of an existing team member. In many ways, you can think of GrowthBot as being an online expert that’s available to you via chat. (I need to mention that GrowthBot integrates with the business communication/messaging app Slack.) For example, if I were a real estate professional, I might want information to inspire a blog or just information for my benefit. I could ask GrowthBot something like, “What’s the top article in mortgages?” and I’d get the five top articles by social shares. More jobs you can give GrowthBot Other specific requests or questions Hubspot lists that you can ask are: Tell me about [Person’s email] Company Info on [Company website domain] Show me the top articles on [blog or website] What tech does [website] use? Show me something funny Further, GrowthBot says that it’s “learning to do more” every day, so the kinds of questions you ask should be getting broader all the time. This is the heart of real AI: it’s pool of understanding grows through interactions. GrowthBot’s other powerful feature involves website analytics. With Google Analytics installed on your website, you can have GrowthBot report back to you on statistics such as page views. You can set triggers that will prompt GrowthBot to message you via Slack. For example, if you want to know when the hottest page on your website starts to lose traffic, you can create some settings that would notify you when views of that page go down by 10 percent week-to-week. GrowthBot is quite flexible in this kind of analytical reporting. You can use percentages or absolute numbers. You can specify certain pages or your domain as a whole. If you have an AdWords campaign going on, you can...
read more