This week in Small Business: Marketing tips from big biz, how to cope with startup stress and more
Tips this week are inspired by binge viewing Netflix, writing a novel, competing with LinkedIn, becoming totally obsessed and more. Scan the topics here and dive into a few of the articles to increase your small business edge. Leadership, management and productivity Here is advice that is sooo 2015: 12 things you can do for your small business while you’re binge watching Netflix! Since this is more of a “why to” article than “how to” article on social media, I’m putting it under management. In any case, if you aren’t all-in on social media, here’s what your missing out on. Some millennials don’t have the right attitude toward work, says J.T. O’Donnell, and this is causing them to get fired. Employers and millennials both need to read this article. When creating the ideal customer experience becomes an obsession – not merely an item on a to-do list – it can have a powerful organizing effect on your company, says Shep Hyken. Marketing and sales Joe Calloway is a performance coach and advisor who helps great companies get even better. In my One Percent Club podcast he tells how to attract new business like a magnet. Your prospects get turned off when they find themselves staring at big blocks of text. (Notice how I keep these paragraphs short?) These eight ways to use visuals in your small business content marketing will prove beneficial. Are you using direct mail? If you need inspiration, here’s how one tech unicorn became a billion-dollar startup via direct mail. The five low-to-no-cost marketing tips in this article will serve virtually any small business well. (Don’t miss the Yelp review badge idea at the bottom.) Big businesses started out as small businesses, so they must be doing some things right. Jeffrey Hayzlett shares some big business marketing tips for small business owners. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Male entrepreneurs are 86 percent more likely to be VC funded than their female counterparts and men are 59 percent more likely to secure angel investment. Shivvy Jervis looks at the reasons. You think all the good social media ideas have been taken? If so, you need to read about these two guys who have launched a startup intended to be the LinkedIn of small business. Entrepreneurship requires a whole lot of mental energy. Understanding these five emotional challenges you’ll face will improve your chances at success. Need more guidance on the best way to get your small business or startup up on its feet and growing? Think of it like writing a novel. Politics, government and the economy The US House of Representatives recently voted to increase the SBA’s lending authorization ceiling to $23.5 billion for the 7(a) loan guaranty program. Brock Blake explains why that’s such a good thing for small...
read moreWhy Even Hot Startups Need To Do Business Development
A friend was telling me about a great Brian Wilson concert he went to. Wilson is the creative mastermind of the Beach Boys and he had fellow Beach Boy founder Al Jardine with him for the show and a slew of other great musicians. The audience was on its feet throughout the show and singing with all the great Beach Boy tunes and when it was over they refused to sit down or leave. They demanded more. The band didn’t disappoint. They retook the stage and lit into “Barbara Ann” and “Surfin’ USA.” Wilson knew he needed to have more to offer his fans and he produced. Where was the business development? It’s a lesson business owners need to learn and that was recently highlighted by the financial crash and burn of Internet retailer, Zulily. Wilson had a great audience entertainment strategy while Zulily didn’t have a solid business development strategy. Zulily is one of those enterprises that streaks across the IPO sky like a Death Star falling out of its orbit. At its high point, it was valued at some $9 billion. When its growth tanked, so did its value and QVC picked it up for the bargain basement price of about $2.4 billion. Unfortunately, in the startup world, it’s easy to get blinded by your initial idea and then be caught without any business development ideas when the original idea runs its course. Flash sales were Zulily’s original hot concept. It offers deep discounts on great brands. Zulily doesn’t hold any inventory. It buys merchandise as it is ordered and buyers have to wait a couple of weeks to receive their orders. Because Zulily started during the recession, initially there were plenty of manufacturers looking to dump excess inventory. However, today supplier inventories are in balance, consumers are less pleased by the wait-vs-discount tradeoff, and there are other flash sale sites. Zulily didn’t have an encore prepared. Hiring a director of business development isn’t a high item on most founder’s “to-do” list. After all, they’ve done the initial business development by coming up with the original concept. But for most businesses, that’s not enough. Look at how Amazon has done business development; it has branched out into all kinds of services. In fact, I think that its web services area is doing very well in terms of profits and that part of the business is quite unlike selling Oprah Book Club bestsellers. Where were the brand loyalists? The handwriting was on the wall with Zulily when most of its customers made one purchase and never returned. Any business that doesn’t have a way to develop brand loyalty as part of its strategy is always swimming in perilous waters. The very nature of offering super low prices on items that will be on sale one day and off sale the next, makes developing brand loyalty virtually impossible. The only people who will be loyal are deep-discount shoppers who have no idea what they want and are willing to wait for three weeks to get it. I suppose some hoarders fall in to this category, but it’s a very small universe. So the question becomes, once you saturate that universe, where does your business development strategy lead you for expansion. It’s interesting to note that QVC made a very...
read moreLessons from a Linebacker: There Are No Participation Awards in the Real World
Steelers linebacker James Harrison created a small social media firestorm when he posted that he wouldn’t let his sons accept trophies for merely participating in sports. In fact, when he found out that they had participation awards, he had them sent back. The intimidating linebacker (jhharrison92) posted a photo of two participation trophies on Instagram with the hashtag #harrisonfamilyvalues and had this to say: “I came home to find out that my boys received two trophies for nothing, participation trophies! While I am very proud of my boys for everything they do and will encourage them till the day I die, these trophies will be given back until they EARN a real trophy. I’m sorry I’m not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I’m not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best…cause sometimes your best is not enough, and that should drive you to want to do better…not cry and whine until somebody gives you something to shut u up and keep you happy.” When I checked, the post had 17.3k likes. Bravo! I don’t know if Harrison’s boys will grow up to be athletes or go into business, but I know that if they decide to go into business for themselves, the lesson their father taught them about earning real trophies will serve them well. You see, the business world has something that’s nearly the equivalent of a children’s sports participation trophy – it’s called a bankruptcy judgment. It concerns me that our country’s small business startup rate has been going down and I wonder if it’s because too many younger Americans grew up being awarded for merely participating and they realize that launching a successful business requires a much deeper level of commitment. This might be reflected in the fact that as of 2013, immigrants started 430 businesses per 100,000 people while native-born Americans started only 250. And although immigrants are only one fifth of the labor force, they account for a quarter of the new US entrepreneurs. I suspect that these hard-working immigrant entrepreneurs were raised in cultures where they don’t hand out participation trophies. In any case, learning the lesson that Harrison is teaching his children and adopting the attitude toward business formation that our immigrant population is modeling would serve us all well and do more to secure the future of our country than anything our politicians can do from Washington, D.C. The basics are simple. For startup and small business success you need to be competitive and put in an effort that goes far beyond what you think you are capable of. Harrison, a five-time all-pro linebacker, said that sometimes our best isn’t good enough to win and when that’s the case we aren’t entitled to some kind of award. And in that same spirit, we need to know that we can soar beyond what we consider our best. Sometimes it takes being knocked down – or facing the threat of failure – but there is always room for “extra effort,” for establishing a new “personal best” and then setting out and beating it tomorrow. In every endeavor, refuse to settle for a participation trophy. In fact, see it as an insult to...
read moreHow to Avoid Bursting with a Second Internet Bubble
The peer-to-peer business model, virtual employees and the so-called gig economy have been major topics in the news over the last few years. And the media have been overwhelmingly reporting on how these areas are growing like mad. Not so fast, Bunky. In recent days, dark clouds gathered and poured a little rain on the gig economy sunshine: Zirtual, a virtual assistance service, closed its doors and then reopened – pared down – after an 11th hour sale. Homejoy, a peer-to-peer house cleaning startup, went belly up. Zen99, an accounting service for members of the gig economy, died with no reincarnation plans announced. There are some lessons here, maybe the first of which – no matter what Big Bird says – is to avoid the letter Z at the beginning of your startup’s name. But since that may be purely coincidental, there’s a lot more to learn from these troubled companies. 1. Government policy matters. Homejoy co-founder Adora Cheung suggested that law suits over whether or not the cleaners using its site were, in fact, Homejoy employees, as well as a California Labor Commission ruling on Uber over a similar issue, scared off investors. We recently covered the Department of Labor’s apparent crackdown on these kinds of working situations. I should also mention that Hillary Clinton seems to hold a position that could disrupt much of the “gig economy.” Investors hate uncertainty and political currents are creating a lot of uncertainty around the peer-to-peer business model. 2. Burn rates matter. It’s a sad fact that humans tend to make the same mistakes over and over. Remember the first Internet Bubble? It can happen again and I think some of the companies I referenced at the beginning failed to judiciously control their burn rates. Explaining the situation at Zirtual, founder and CEO Maren Kate, explains how the company’s burn rate got away from them. When they moved from using independent contractors to regular employees, labor costs jumped some 20 to 30 percent. Further, the company had nearly 500 employees and offices in San Francisco and Los Vegas. While those are great cities with talented people, neither one comes cheap for business ventures. 3. Attention to detail matters. All three of the businesses I started this article with were built around good ideas, but without extremely attentive care and feeding, a good idea can turn into Frankenstein’s monster almost overnight. If you’re the founder, there’s a good chance you don’t have the operations background required to pinch every penny. It can be a very smart idea to bring in someone with the necessary practical experience. Big companies have the Fixit Guy I’ve discussed before, but that person is never part of a startup’s founding team. Sometimes a venture capital company will have those kinds of managers available to send in and save the day. But the truly wise founder pays sufficient attention to the details that the Fixit Guy – or bankruptcy attorneys – don’t need to be called in. 4. The handwriting on the wall matters. Founders have so much of their own psyche tied up in their projects that they are either blind to or choose to ignore the handwriting on the wall. You need to always have good information and be willing to act on the data. Further, you...
read moreHow to Leverage Employee Benefits for Recruitment Success
We’ve been chronicling the ups and downs of small business optimism for many months and sometimes it resembles one of those championship prize fights where the spunky challenger refuses to be beaten by the champ: He’s down! He’s up! He’s down! He’s up! All in all, I’ll stick by the prognosis I made at the beginning of the year and reaffirm my confidence that 2015 is going to be good for small business. (And hey, it doesn’t hurt that we’re entering into an important election cycle when every politician wants to be on the good side of small business owners and employees!) The hiring headache But when you start sifting through the problems that small business owners are having, one that is on the top of virtually every list is the ability to hire talented new employees. More than half of all small business owners say that they plan to expand their team this year…if they can recruit the right people. Wisely, many small business owners are adopting social media strategies to recruit talented employees. This is a natural offshoot for businesses that have developed a savvy social media marketing program. Another smart move is to look at what some of the country’s most desirable employers do to bring top quality people on board. If you think it’s hard to find good people where you’re located, the problem is compounded in Silicon Valley, where today there is virtually no unemployment in a wide range of professions. This is why companies like Google and Apple are famous for the benefits they give their employees. No in-house French bistro? While you may not have the space or the funds to offer things like a 24-hour gourmet food court or a cavernous employee game room, you can offer better insurance benefits than your competitors, such as dental, life, disability and vision. And with information easily accessible via the web, including sites like Met Life’s small business pages, developing the right strategy for your business is easier than it used to be. In other words, you can begin to get an idea of what you can offer to boost your benefit plan just by taking a few minutes to surf the web. When you decide to upgrade your benefits package, make sure that you communicate it properly to your current team as well as in any job postings you may have out in cyberspace or in the local newspaper. For example an ad that says “health, vision, dental, life insurance benefits” has a lot more impact than simply saying “benefits.” If you have to pay a few bucks more for a slightly bigger ad, it will be worth the investment. You’re far more likely to recruit the quality individuals you’re looking for. Also, be sure your current employees really understand everything that comes with any addition you make to your benefits package. Let them know that when disability insurance is part of the benefits package, for example, it means that it’s being offered through the workplace – you aren’t just scheduling appointments with an insurance broker to discuss buying it on their own. Empowering your best recruiters I stress this because your best current employees are often your top recruiters. They know the individuals within their circle of acquaintances who are good workers...
read moreThis week in Small Business: Don’t worry, Do Relax and Don’t Miss Any of these Marketing Tips
What we can learn from the marketing of genetically modified dinosaurs is among the hot tips we found on the web over the last week. And since running a small business can be as stressful as running from Velociraptors, we also dug up some great advice on taking care of ourselves and learning to worry less. Leadership, management and productivity Many of us are dogged by worry and it impedes our ability to success. Bob Burg takes a look at “Worry No More!” by Bruce Van Horn and offers some sound advice. Sooner or later, retirement is a nut we all have to crack. These six strategies to extend our savings without working longer should prove helpful. Dear Small Business Owner: Take care of yourself first, or the rest of it just won’t matter. Need help doing that? This guide will come in handy. If you get your company culture right, most other things will just fall into place. Here’s a quick primer. A B C – It’s easy as, 1 2 3 – As simple as, do re mi…and now the 800-pound gorilla formerly known as Google is Alphabet. (Hey two pop music icons referenced in one item!) Marketing and sales Small business owners can’t afford to leave any marketing stone unturned that’s why this article on four ways to integrate direct mail into digital marketing is useful. “Jurassic World” grossed $500 million worldwide in one weekend. Hmmm. Maybe we can learn something from the guys who market blockbusters. Shhh! Don’t let your competition know that public relations is the secret weapon of content marketing. With social media marketing, practical experience always trumps book knowledge. Here’s why. Reclaim your time: Six ways to be more efficient on social media! What to do if you suck at cold calling. Paul Chastain implores you to at least do tip number one! Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Farming may not be seen as fertile ground (sorry) for a cutting edge tech startup. Farmbox Direct CEO Ashley Tyrner might disagree. Check out this video. Politics, government and the economy Writing for Fast Company, Brendon Schrader outlines why the freelance economy is growing so quickly. If you need additional reasons to be angry at Congress, you might want to join the chorus that’s complaining about how they registered themselves as a “small...
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