Get smart small business: It’s not ‘either-or’ anymore!
Honestly answer these important questions: Can you make each operation in your business one percent more effective and efficient? Can you improve the products and services you deliver by one percent? Can you fine-tune your marketing to reach an additional one percent of prospects? Can you make these one percent improvements today and again tomorrow? Owners who constantly drive to achieve a one-percent edge up and down their businesses are the ones who create companies that grow into million-dollar enterprises and become the leaders in their sectors. The owners who fail to work for the advantages powered by these cumulative one-percent edges, are the ones who end up working in their businesses, not on their businesses. This is what I have personally experienced and also seen as I’ve talked to and worked with small businesses from coast to coast; it’s the message I’ve been working hard to deliver to every business owner eager to experience real growth and a secure future. Agility in your small business Agility is a fundamental quality required to make these kinds of improvements and I see that emphasis in AT&T’s program, which is one of the reasons I’ve been so pleased to collaborate with them. Further, achieving these kinds of efficiencies and competitive advantages isn’t a matter of selecting between a menu of tradeoffs – I can choose to do this, or I can choose to do that – more often than not, it’s a decision to do this and that. (By the way, as part of AT&T’s “The Power of &” program, they’ve given me a Microsoft Lumia 950 Windows 10 smartphone to give away. I’m going to randomly select someone who has made a comment on this article…so keep reading and share your insights with all of us! More entry details are below.) At the heart of the power of “and” is being able to pivot when fresh market opportunities are sensed, old business models fade, and new technologies create the potential for disruption. Many of today’s most successful and well-known companies have followed this path. For example, although we know PayPal as the dominate online payment service that it is today, founders were originally planning to create a company that specialized in cryptography. Later they focused on creating a means to transfer money via PDAs. (Remember PDAs? Back in the day, that’s what we called personal digital assistants, like the Palm Pilot.) PayPal continues to keep “and” as a central part of its growth strategy. When small businesses were having a hard time securing loans, PayPal launched its “Working Capital” program for merchants. And as the peer-to-peer business model has caught fire throughout e-commerce in recent years, PayPal created its “PayPal.Me” service We can look at the topic of agility in business from a wide range of angles. The PayPal examples I just gave you demonstrate how the leaders of that company have been agile enough to anticipate and flow with marketplace and technological changes. But if you think you need to be as big as PayPal to pull off these kinds of business moves, consider the online T-shirt business, Threadless. In many ways, Threadless makes PayPal look slow! The company has a community of customers and artists who essentially collaborate online to create popular t-shirt designs. Artists submit designs, potential buyers vote on their favorite designs, and the designs with the most votes...
read moreWill Your Retirement be a Pain or Pleasure? A Strategy for Success
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Capital One Spark. All the comments and opinions are my own. All small business owners plan to exit someday, but the most recent figures I’ve seen say that 72 percent don’t have a real plan in place that can make that happen…at least not without having to substantially downgrade their personal lifestyle. There’s another dimension in this problem: Only 32 percent of the workers in our nation’s smallest companies have any savings plan. Further, according to the recent Capital One’s Spark Business Barometer survey, the percentage of small businesses that offer 401(k) plans to their employees has dropped almost 50 percent since Q4 2014 – from 24 to 13 percent. Let’s look at this from two points of view. First, for the small business owners and employees of small businesses, failing to plan for retirement will result in all kinds of financial and personal problems. Money will be stretched thin to the breaking point when they try to scrape by on social security plus any meager savings. Assets will have to be sold. Dreams of relaxing and traveling during retirement will go out the window. Second, a huge group of unprepared retirees will be hitting the social security rolls at a time when there will be fewer and fewer wage earners paying into the Social Security Trust fund. Who knows how that drama will play out? However, it’s a safe bet that one way or another, social security benefits will be decreased. What is sad about this situation is the fact that small business is the economic engine that has always driven our nation’s prosperity, but the owners and workers in that segment of the economy are among the least fortunate when retirement years arrive. I mentioned 401(k) plans above and they probably embody the best strategy for overcoming all of the hurdles small business owners face in providing an adequate retirement for themselves, as well as for their employees. There are other sanctioned retirement accounts worth considering, but they often don’t work out as well for the small business owner: Simple IRA. These accounts have lower contribution limits than the 401(k) and any money you put into a Simple IRA counts against any 401(k) contributions you make in a given tax year. This impacts small business owners who have a side job that comes with a 401(k). SEP IRA. SEP stands for Simplified Employee Pension. A SEP IRA covers all of your employees as well as yourself. All contributions come from the small business owner; employees do not contribute. Also, everyone in your SEP IRA gets the same contribution each year, so whatever you give yourself, everyone gets. Because 401(k) plans have been around a long time, there are many good options for you and they can be very “user friendly.” You want to find plans that are easy to set up and manage, and have very low operating expenses. Those seem to be the selling points for Capital One’s ShareBuilder 401(k). According to its figures, getting started with a ShareBuilder 401(k) will cost some 35 to 40 percent less for employers starting their first 401(k), compared to a 401(k) from a traditional provider. Also, virtually the entire process can be “paperless” and completed online in about 20 minutes. ShareBuilder 401(k)...
read moreSmall Business Owners Lagging in Technology. Is that You?
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Capital One Spark. All the comments and opinions are my own. Looking forward to the November presidential election, pundits are already saying that the candidate who best leverages digital analytics and marketing is likely to win. The same is true in small business. That’s why the results of a Capital One’s Spark Business Barometer should be a wakeup call for many small business owners. Here are some of the findings: Only 21 percent of small business owners are currently using data analytics to help them make business decisions. Some 40 percent of all small business owners are not using social media in their businesses at all. Of the owners who do use social media, only 26 percent are “very familiar” with the ways to take advantage of commerce opportunities and market their products via social media. Tech savvy small business owners have several ways they can use a wide range of new tools to get an edge on the competition. Smart use of technology and other available modern offerings will help you lower costs, make smarter decisions, and boost sales – just to mention the main categories. Let’s look at some highlights in each of these areas. Lower costs Productivity is often what separates the winners from the losers, and small business owners must be constantly on the lookout for anything that boosts productivity, even marginally. In the long run, it’s almost always a long string of small productivity improvements that delivers high profitability. Cloud services are a major player in lowering costs and improving productivity. It can be as simple as efficient file sharing and document handling via something like DropBox or Office365. Or if your office is still tied down to an ancient fax machine, you need to check out services like Adobe FormsCentral and DocuSign. Whenever something can be done more easily online through the cloud, it delivers a productivity boost. And remember, time saved in one area of your operation can be invested in another area. This makes it especially attractive to streamline legacy operations, and this is certainly true with the various cloud-based accounting and billing options you have today. For service providers who invoice billable hours, a cloud-based app like OfficeTime, for example, will greatly improve productivity and help prevent losing any billable time. Since we’re on the topic of lowering costs, let me step “out of the cloud” for a moment and point out another area where many small businesses are missing the boat, according to the Capital One survey. Although a majority of small business owners have business credit cards, only 29 percent use rewards to pay for business expenses. Further, only 10 percent say they use rewards to boost their bottom lines. You know, the yearly fee you pay for your business credit card isn’t tied to how often you use it, yet only 17 percent of small business owners say they use their business credit card as their primary method of making business purchases. A majority of small business owners continue to rely onusing savings or checking accounts. What’s the cost of those checks? Do you get rewards for writing checks? If you found more ways to use your business credit card, you would enjoy more rewards that could filter down to...
read moreIs a Promising Future Hidden Inside a Small Biz Confidence Survey’s Disheartenting Results?
Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Capital One Spark. All the comments and opinions are my own. One survey result is a data point. When you get a few consecutive survey results that are all pointed in the same direction it’s a trend – and unfortunately that’s what’s revealed in the results of Capital One’s latest Spark Business Barometer. The survey, which has been giving a Small Business Confidence Score since at least 2009, showed a nine-point drop in the percentage of business owners who say conditions are either “good” or “excellent” compared to the same time last year. Further, the survey has shown an uninterrupted decline since the first quarter of 2014. You can probably chalk up most of the uneasiness to factors such as the seemingly tenuous economic conditions, the unsettled political situation, and the heightened regulatory environment. But if you have a little history in small business, you know that most owners tend to be optimists and even in challenging economic conditions many forge ahead and do quite well. We see these underlying truths in the Capital One survey results as well: 41 percent of small business owners say conditions are excellent or good, and 26 percent say they plan to hire within the next six months, and of those, about half say they will be hiring full-time employees. But there are a couple of statistics buried in the survey results that I think are even more promising for U.S. small business and our overall economic health in the coming years: Younger small business owners and women have an extremely positive attitude about the futures of their businesses and seem to be doing some promising planning for the future. Let’s first take a look at two telling examples: hiring plans and retirement planning. Younger groups of respondents reported more plans to hire in the next six months. Younger respondents also said they offered retirement plans at rates higher than older groups. This is fascinating because it says that younger small business owners are planning to provide better for the American workforce both today – through increased hiring – and tomorrow, by providing retirement options for their employees! Further, as women look to the near future, they have a more optimistic outlook than men: While only 36 percent of male business owners think their financial standing will be better in six months, 44 percent of women owners are looking forward to better finances. Millennials have gotten a bad rap in the media of late. You may remember reading news stories over the last few years that Millennials weren’t buying things like previous generations? It was said that instead of buying cars, they were punching up Uber rides on their smart phones. Instead of buying houses they were living in their parents’ basements. It turns out that those observations are not quite so true…at least any more. For example, the National Association of Realtors just published a report on generational trends for home buyers and sellers. It turns out that the largest generational group of buyers (at 35 percent) are 35 years old and younger, with a median age of 30 years old. This is great news for our economy because there are 75.4 million Americans between the age of 18 and 34, compared to only 74.9...
read moreShurg Off The Winter Blues: Refresh and Re-energize Your Small Business
It’s been a long, difficult winter for many small businesses. Crazy weather patterns combined with a challenging economy makes the joy of spring a welcomed sight. As the world bursts into bright, blooming colors, creating a sense of renewal spring is here, lifting our spirits and giving us a sense of excitement. Spring is also a good time to refresh and re-energize your business. Start by taking a good look at your physical surroundings. When was the last time you spruced up your office area? A new coat of paint and a few pieces of artwork or plants can make your old work area look new and exciting. Personally, I like to rearrange my office furniture. It makes me feel as though I have an entirely new perspective. Lighting is important too. Harshly or dimly lit work spaces often cause headaches and eye strain. Adjust the lighting to your comfort level. For example, two of my co-workers purchased touchier lights for their offices. The indirect lighting makes their work area warm and comforting. Scented candles are good too and certain fragrances help reduce stress. Sprucing up also means cleaning up so don’t forget to get rid of the clutter. Throw away those stacks of unread magazines and newspapers. Organize your books and files. And don’t forget to get out the dusting rags and anti-bacterial wipes. According to University of Arizona researchers – there’s more bacteria on your desk than on the average toilet seat. Yuck! Now that you have a clean, refreshed office, use the same energy to refresh your business outlook. Shrug off your pessimism and throw a new coat of cautious optimism on your business plan. Be creative about designing new ways of attracting additional revenue to your business. Are there new products or services you can offer? How about reinventing your current business offerings? One of the leaders in brand marketing is Procter & Gamble. If you’ve ever bought a box of laundry detergent, you know the phrase “new and improved.” Successful brands continually look for ways to enhance their existing products. Because you’re not a Procter & Gamble with a large research and development staff, that doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to offer “new and improved” products and services to your customers too. So spruce up your office to pick up your spirits and productivity. Refresh and reinvent your business strategies. And top it all off with a fresh coat of cautious optimism because spring has...
read more