This Week in Small Business: Solve the Facebook riddle, manage for successful retirement, and more
Facebook marketing success seemed to dominate the conversation this week, so if you have a presence there, you should be able to mine some valuable nuggets of information from the links below. There’s also a lot of great “nuts-and-bolts” information on managing your small business. Marketing and sales Sometimes breaking the Facebook marketing mystery is like breaking a secret code. These tips should help. And if you do things right, you should be able to find success on Facebook. (It was a huge week for Facebook tips: Here are three more that resonated with readers.) Never wonder what that “expert” is talking about again with this dictionary of content marketing terms! You’ll never be successful if you keep making these six marketing mistakes. If you blog, be sure that you publish posts that search engines love. Leadership, management and productivity At the heart of every truly customer-centric product team is excellent customer feedback. Here are four easy ways to collect feedback. And here are five cool things to do with that feedback once you have it! Are you managing your small business with retirement in mind? Here’s a “how-to” on the subject. Have you been a little timid about hiring a virtual assistant? This quick guide will help. Make sure you’re including these two ingredients in your recipe for small business success. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Chef and entrepreneur Eduardo Garcia lost his forearm and almost his life. But he never lost his sense of humor, which helped make his company the success it is today. Are you looking to leverage the sharing economy? It could be the future of capitalism. If you’re on the fence about starting your own small business, this article should give you direction. To be successful in the future, it looks like you need to know how members of the gig economy think. Politics, government and the economy Politics, the Federal Reserve, and new payment options are all shaping small business...
read moreIt may be time to increase paid time off (PTO) and the reasons will surprise you
This may sound like one of those Zen koans – such as, “What’s the sound of one hand clapping” – but I assure you it’s not: What can you offer your employees as incentives not to work that are, in fact, incentives to make them work? In today’s highly competitive market for top talent, fast growing and innovative companies are offering employees what seem to be generous incentives to stay away from the workplace. Netflix, for example, is giving employees unlimited paid maternity and paternity leave. It covers births and adoptions. Further, when employees decide to come back, they can work part time or fulltime and even take additional time off if situations arise that warrant it. “This new policy, combined with our unlimited time off, allows employees to be supported during the changes in their lives and return to work more focused and dedicated,” says Tawni Cranz, the company’s chief talent officer. In similar moves, many companies are killing the old two-week vacation policy and giving employees unlimited vacation days. Paid time off (PTO) policies are going through a major evolution right now. Employers promote these generous perks as reasons to come work for them, and I think that’s great. However, there are a lot of upsides for the employers as well. The first of these is obvious, the flexible PTO policies may lure in some top talent. (By the way, I just heard a report concerning a large Silicon Valley firm that’s a major email provider. The company can’t find enough qualified people to move forward on several important projects; being unable to hire talent carries a huge, somewhat hidden, price tag.) But the actual cost of these generous time-off programs may not be as high as you would initially guess. I say this for two reasons. Career-mind individuals tend to not take very much time off, and Defined vacation benefits are a financial liability for a company. If your goal is to bring in the most qualified talent, these individuals put a high value on career advancement and generally that means they are dedicated to their work. I have seen many studies that say this and you probably know this from experience: top workers seldom use up all their vacation days. This leaves employers with a financial liability. When these workers move on, they have to be paid for their unused vacation. Currently, it looks like the undefined, flexible, approach to offering time off doesn’t give companies the same financial burden. So a benefit that seems altruistic on the surface, may be, in fact, much better for the bottom line as well. I haven’t seen studies on the unlimited maternity/paternity leave benefits; it’s probably too new and too rare. However, I don’t see very many reasons that the same principle wouldn’t apply. Highly motivated careerists won’t abuse the benefit. They’ll be back on the job fairly soon, or if they decide to take time off to raise their families, they’ll let their employers know. To go back to the pseudo-Zen koan I offered at the top: These benefits that look like incentives for people not to work, will actually turn out to be incentives to make more people work for the companies that offer them! I think they’ll result in a net increase in productive hours...
read moreRunning Your Business From the Road: Stay Productive, Stay Safe.
The global village – or at least the global workspace – is here and whether you consider yourself a road warrior or a digital nomad, you have more tools than ever to keep your business up and running smoothly while you maintain your health and the safety of your data. With mobile devices like Samsung’s Galaxy tablets and smartphones you can stay on top of your “to-do” list and keep everyone on your team moving in the same direction. By the way, a survey done by PC Housing showed that on average, business travelers check their smartphones 34 times a day, so I don’t think we can overestimate the value of a good smartphone. I want to pull one more number from that survey that really drives home the importance of being armed with great mobile devices when you’re on the road: 75 percent of business travelers are able to get more than six hours of sleep each night because of the productivity they achieve using their mobile technology. How can you even put a price on that? There are many specialized cloud-based apps and services you’ll find invaluable when you’re on the road, but many of them are industry or career-position specific. Let’s look at categories of apps and services that you can use no matter what you do in your small business. 1. Tethering and hot spot apps. Hackers are increasingly trolling public Wi-Fi providers to steal personal data from unsuspecting users. Unfortunately, many business travelers log onto the free Wi-Fi at hotels and coffee shops ambivalent to the danger. By using a tethering app installed on your smartphone that takes you to the Internet via your cellphone signal you can eliminate this security risk. Add Samsung Knox and you take security even further protecting your personal and business data on your mobile device. 2. Office 365 or Google Docs. You can achieve similar cloud-based document sharing and editing with these two heavyweights. The Microsoft product comes with a small monthly subscription fee, but each license also comes with the ability to download the Microsoft Office suite of familiar applications to five phones, five tablets, and five PCs or Macs. Outfit your tablet with a keyboard and you can work on all your documents, including spreadsheets and presentations. 3. Google video Hangouts. Despite the proliferation of email, instant messaging and text messages, there will always be business meetings. When you’re working with a team that is flung around the country or around the globe, consider using Google Hangouts for your business meetings. These are recording to your YouTube channel so if people miss the meeting, they can catch up. You can also share your screen, which is very helpful in the business environment. 4. Track expenses. One of the biggest headaches of the business traveler is collecting receipts and dealing with them after the trip is complete. There are a variety of mobile apps that connect with accounting software that make this virtually painless. One of the great features you’ll find as you compare these apps, is the ability to snap a picture of the receipt with your smartphone camera. These app do some optical character recognition magic and file it away in the right place. 5. Hold that thought. Evernote continues to be the app of choice...
read more7 Critical Keys to Small Business Employee Loyalty and Retention
There’s a great scene in “Casablanca” where Sam, the piano player gets the opportunity to move to a rival nightclub and perform for a lot more money: Rick (Humphrey Bogart): Sam, Ferrari wants you to work for him at the Blue Parrot. Sam (Dooley Wilson): I like it fine here. Rick: He’ll double what I pay you. Sam: Yeah, but I ain’t got time to spend the money I make here. Do you have employees who would stay with you when offered double their current salary by your competitor? That’s a tall order, but the fact is that good, even great, employees quit every day, and not always for jobs that offer higher pay or better benefits. In fact, the primary reason people quit is because of poor management. The success of your small business depends on having a team filled with people who have the kind of loyalty Sam showed Rick in “Casablanca,” here are seven keys to getting the job done: Eliminate bad managers. If employees bristle under the supervision of one or two individuals in your small business, you must some changes. You need to work with the supervisors, but if things don’t work out – make a major personnel change. Either move them to nonsupervisory positions, or let them go. Survey your team. Find out what your employees really think about working in your small business. Solicit suggestions about improvements and find out what things they would like to be doing that aren’t currently happening. Engage your employees. We toss around the word “engagement” too casually today, so let me unpack it a little so we can get a sense of what it really means as it applies to managing your workforce for more loyalty and better retention. Make employees know that they are part of the process, not merely cogs in a gear wheel. Let employees see the big picture so they understand where you are headed. People don’t do well with surprises. Train and provide opportunities for gaining additional knowledge and skills. Promote from within when you can. These four elements will make your employees feel like they are players in the game, not just taking up space on the bench. They will help make your employees sense that their future is inextricably tied to the future of your small business. Make work interesting. Most, but not all, employees like to take on new challenges and get an occasional change of pace. Don’t let someone toil away at the same tasks for years, especially if you’re just making life easy on yourself because you don’t want to have to train or find someone else to do the work. Build community. If you think about strong communities, you’ll discover that the people in them work together, have fun together and enjoy meals together. You’re meeting the first of these three needs in your small business, be sure you do the others as well. Find time to have some fun and enjoy some meals together. Keep the conversation going. After you’ve surveyed your team, keep discussing ways to improve the workplace and act on them. Make it a topic at occasional meetings. Keep up your end of the bargain. For example, if you commit do conducting yearly reviews on anniversary dates, do it. Don’t let...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Tune up your customer experience and get your website humming!
I don’t doubt that 2016 will be yet another year when customer service standards are ratcheted up even higher. This week’s compilation of the best small business articles from around the Internet includes some top tips to help you improve the customer experience at your small business. Leadership, management and productivity If you don’t know the “unwritten rules of customer service,” you can find them written down in this article. And with those under your belt, learn the essential attitudes required to be a customer experience leader. When you get really serious about providing a great customer experience, take these pages from the playbook of some top brands. Here are two essential ingredients in the recipe for small business success. Leave them out and you’re “smallbiz success soufflé” will fall flat! Company culture comes from the top down; here are four ways leaders can shape a positive company culture. Is it time to redo your website? Is it unproductive or woefully outdated? Get the tools you need to make that decision. Success is all about teamwork. Here’s how to build an ACE team for your small business. Do you have all 10 of these mobile tools (hardware and software) – or ones like them – to help you manage and promote your small business? Attracting top talent can be troublesome. Properly managing your brand can help. Marketing and sales Backlinks are still a major component of SEO. You need all the good ones you can get. These 50 ways to get backlinks should help. Social media marketing success requires that you deliver what your audience wants. Discover what that really is. If you can create a habit for your product or service, you’re well on the road to success. In this article you’ll learn why email marketing is so important, how to set up an opt-in email list, and how to get your emails delivered, opened, and read. Here are five statistics that prove you should be marketing on Twitter. If you want your marketing to get noticed, it has to be unique…like a unicorn. Here are five attributes of truly unique marketing. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation A new law changing ?crowd funding rules passed three years ago, but it’s just now taking effect. Will it revolutionize investing or how you fund your startup? Politics, government and the economy Participation in the “Collaborative Economy” has grown by 25 percent in the past year alone – and it’s not going to stop growing. Check out this infographic and article to understand these fundamental changes....
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