For Richer and For Poorer: Can Your Marriage Survive a Small Business Partnership?
Can your partner in life also be your partner in business without the second partnership jeopardizing the first? Couples who have “been there, done that” hold opinions that are polar opposites of one another. Many can be productive and amiable from the first 7 a.m. meeting to lights off at night, while others experience days that are often interrupted by mini-world wars. If you’re considering such a partnership, the first thing to do is be honest about how you relate in your marriage. If you tend to be a couple that spars over almost anything that pops up, moving your relationship into the business world might not be a good idea. “Fiery” couples can often make things work on the personal sides of their lives. But when the finances and future of a business are at stake, the sparks that fly between two people can set the house on fire. Here are some questions to ask yourselves: What are your individual strengths? If you are both strong in the same area, it could be a problem. If you have different strengths, you may be able to slot into different roles within your company and both be comfortable. What do you want to get out of the business? If you’re both looking to grow your business, sell it and move on to the next adventure, that’s great. However, if one of you wants to found and flip while the other wants to create a family legacy, you’re in trouble. How much time do you typically spend together now? If you have both had separate careers that have kept you busy – and apart most of the time – breaking that routine could be disastrous. Maybe I shouldn’t say it, but some married couples manage to stay together because a good deal of the time they’re apart! Can you laugh at yourself and yourselves? If you take yourself too seriously, then every little mole hill becomes a mountain. Can you recognize your weaknesses and failings and smile about them? Do you communicate well? Can you discuss issues and problems in your marriage or do either of you allow things to get bottled up? If there are one or two bottlers in a marriage, it makes running a business difficult. Also, can arguments be settled peacefully or does someone have to emerge with a victory? If your business fails, will your marriage follow? Can your egos and finances survive a business failure? You both will invest a lot of yourselves and perhaps your family nest egg in the business. If it comes crashing down, your relationship could get buried under the rubble. Honestly discuss “worst case scenarios.” Many couples love living and working together. Starting a business is a seamless event in their lives. But if you have any question about your compatibility in the family-owned small business environment, be very careful. Starting a part-time venture together could be the best way to “test the...
read moreCRM and Contact Management for Micro and Small Businesses
Have you ever tried to express the difficulty and frustration of getting a tough job done by saying that it was “like herding cats”? The reason cats are difficult to herd – should you ever be in that situation – is because they go all over the place; they won’t organize themselves into one “herdable” entity. This also gives us a good picture of a common problem that thwarts small business growth. When starting out, small businesses often find themselves exploring a variety of channels to drum up business and even tweaking their products and services in different ways to find the “winning” formula. A result of this can be a disjointed collection of customer information. Data spread too far Small businesses end up with customer information in spread sheets, Microsoft Outlook, social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, Google Contacts and other places around the office and at home. It doesn’t take long for that widely spread tapestry of contact information to become a hindrance to serious growth. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to get to know the folks at Swiftpage this year. They are the folks behind the perennial best-selling contact and customer relationship management (CRM) software Act! and they’ve just introduced Act! Cloud. Small businesses have always been the focus with Act! and with Act! Cloud they are extending their target audience to “micro businesses.” With the rise of solopreneurs, this seems like a really smart idea. I asked Bob Ogdon, chairman and founder of Swiftpage, to give me his “elevator” description of what his company’s new cloud-based service would do. “Act! Cloud is a simple application to organize and keep track of your contacts and the history you have with them and the activities you plan to do with them. In addition, it makes it simple to create email marketing campaigns, track the results and receive a ranked list of the most engaged contacts based on their interaction with your email messages,” Ogdon told me. Built-in intelligence The company launched a beta last summer and it’s now up and running for the the public. A free trial is available and at just $10 a month, its price shouldn’t be a barrier for any business – micro or otherwise. With that 10 bucks you can import as many as 10,000 contacts and use its “lead scoring” system, as well as send unlimited emails to 500 contacts. They’ve designed it to import from a wide variety of sources, so getting set up initially shouldn’t be too difficult. “There is a simple set up or onboarding wizard that helps first time users get their contacts into the application and connect their social accounts. Following this simple set up, users will arrive in the product with a full contact list with pictures to match the contacts pulled from their social networks – LinkedIn and Facebook,” Ogdon explained. Once that’s done you can capture virtually any kind of customer interaction. Its analytics engine is constantly looking at your interactions and scoring them so it can help guide your followup. Segment your list Segmentation is critical today and Act! Cloud allows you to segment your contacts using any of the criteria you have set up. At that point, you have a variety of professional templates you can use for your email blasts....
read moreSmart Productivity Tips for Your Small Business
I’d be willing to bet that virtually everyone has said, “There just aren’t enough hours in the day!” It’s especially true for the small business owner. Pile family responsibilities on top of work duties and it makes for a seemingly impossible situation. However, if you start hacking away at this problem from two angles, you can dramatically improve your productivity and take control of your life. First, let’s lighten the load by delegating. You can delegate both professional and personal responsibilities. If you need to hire someone to run errands or clean around the house, do it. Not only does it give you more time, more importantly it frees you of the mental burden. It’s like getting rid of those weights some of us walkers occasionally use to increase the intensity of our workouts. This principle applies to business as well. There are probably tasks that you’re still doing that should be handed off to someone else. Please, jettison the work that you aren’t so good at and concentrate on the things you do well. Now that we’ve got you out from under some burdens, let’s get organized and look at the psychology of poor productivity. Get started. The first step is always the most difficult and we come up with 1,001 ways to avoid taking it. Wean yourself from social media. Don’t check your email every 15 minutes. I don’t know what it is for you, but there’s a list of little things you allow to stand between yourself and the important stuff. Make a to-do list every day. You may want to do this the evening before. Get the important jobs completed first. Success feeds on itself. Starting the day out with a win will propel you into the next item on your list. Make this a habit. Humans only have so much “will power” at any given time. You shouldn’t be expending it on the tasks you need to complete to keep your business moving forward. Create manageable tasks. Break up big projects into smaller tasks. Dawdling 10 minutes on social media looks too inviting when we’re staring at a huge job that needs to get done. This process will also help you understand what needs to be accomplished to meet the goals of your small business. Work intensely, then take a break. Studies and personal testimonies indicate that the most productive people spend a short(er) intense time working on one thing and follow it with a 10-20 minute break. I’ve seen arguments for this short period of focused work lasting about 30, 50 or 90 minutes. Pick a number that works for you, but follow it up with a real period of mental rest. Don’t multitask. Honestly people, multi-taskers are less productive. They’re like a driver stuck in the mud who continues to jam the accelerator pedal to the floor. The tires spin and mud flies, but the vehicle isn’t moving forward. Don’t mistake activity for accomplishment. Make these your habits. Here’s where you put your will power for a few weeks: making these points your work day habits. It shouldn’t require a big effort. When you see positive results, the taste of victory will fuel your desire to stay the course. How about your personal approach to work and life? Have any tips that have helped...
read moreRun Your Small Company With Big-Business Efficiency – These Tools Can Help
In April, the Small Business Optimism Index rose to its highest point since the recession began in late 2007, the National Federation of Independent Businesses reported. While NFIB chief economist Bill Dunkelberg emphasized there’s still plenty of room for growth, this optimism concurs with a TriNet Harris Poll conducted in January, which found that 74 percent of small business owners anticipated revenue growth in 2014 and half expected to hire new employees. This increasingly sunny outlook assumes small business owners will overcome certain obstacles, of course. Along with common financial concerns such as getting more business and managing expenses and cash flow, a third of those polled in the NFIB survey said one of their top concerns was achieving better work-life balance, a concern that underscores the need for greater efficiency. Fortunately, today’s technological tools help small business owners perform key back-office operations with efficiency comparable to larger companies, while still operating within a small-scale budget. Hosting One place where small businesses can access resources on par with their big-business counterparts is Web hosting. PC Magazine offers a comparison of popular hosting options for small businesses, ranking categories such as bandwidth, storage space and pricing. Most leading services offer unlimited bandwidth and storage, putting these features within reach of the average small business owner. Most companies can get online with a shared hosting plan for as little as $5 a month. Backup Backing up your business data is crucial, and many hosting providers don’t provide backup services (or charge extra for a minimal amount of backup). You’re not limited to your hosting provider’s options, fortunately, so arrange to have your data backed up by a provider that specializes in this area. For instance, Mozy’s enterprise cloud backup service offers both backup and file syncing that covers all of the mobile devices in your network. Collaboration Collaboration software is key to productivity in today’s virtual workspace, where business needs are rapidly shifting from an on-premise orientation to solutions compatible with mobile devices, the cloud and social media. ZDNet provides a rundown of the big players in today’s business collaboration landscape, which consists of solutions for content creation, document and file sharing, communication and enterprise apps. The market space includes traditional industry leaders such as Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, as well as newer players. Google is increasingly moving into this market with solutions such as Google Apps for Business. Bookkeeping Small businesses can use the same bookkeeping tools as companies with full accounting departments do. Sage 50 is one of the most popular accounting software programs among small business owners—it enables you to automate most basic accounting functions, including income and expense tracking, invoicing, online payment collection and electronic payroll...
read moreHow to Provide Great Training To Keep Your Biz Running Strong
You’re beginning to hit your stride and the growth of your business is putting pressure on you to increase your staff. Up to now you could have been a solopreneur or worked with a few others who grew into their jobs as you figured out how to run your business. But it’s going to be different with new hires from now on. You need to provide some level of training. You have two choices: you can make it up as you go along or you can be proactive and organize your training program. Okay, there’s a third choice: toss your new employees out onto the floor and let them figure it out as they go along. The problem with the first choice is that every time you bring on someone new, you’ll find yourself reinventing the wheel. In the long run, it will require more of your time and you will end up with a staff that has not received consistent training. The third option, while it is the choice of many, leads to frustration all around and can greatly increase turnover. Two important principles Evaluate your approach to training with these two goals in mind: Quality control. Make sure your training covers the knowledge and skills required to do a good job. Repeatability. Make sure new hire number four is trained just as well as new hire number three. In order to properly develop a training program, you must have good job descriptions in place. These will help you be certain that the content of your training program matches the requirements delineated in your jobs descriptions. However, there is one thing to consider even before you get down to the “nuts and bolts” of making sure new hires have the tools they need to get the job done. You need to introduce new employees to your company’s culture. Go over the history of your business. Explain its origins. Initially it may be you providing the introduction; later it may be someone else. It’s even a good idea to provide a written history of your business with personal remarks as part of your “hiring packet.” Hopefully you will have shared some of this during the interview process. Facility tours and introductions are also important for preserving your company’s DNA. List the requirements As you prepare for training, create checklists to be sure no important points are missed. Health and safety issues are critical. As you get further along developing training materials, incorporate dated sign offs so you can document when employees were trained. Should problems arise later, you may need this documentation. Further, government agencies, such as OSHA, require certain kinds of documentation depending on your industry. Be sure your knowledge is up to date as well as your records. Consider standardizing some of your training through video and use of the Internet. Also, there are many third-party training groups that have created excellent content, classes and tutorials. Investing in outside training can easily save you money when you consider the gained productivity. If your employees need specific technical training, there are lots of Internet resources available. However, don’t leave it to employees to browse the web and find something they like. If new employees need to learn Excel basics, for example, find what you think is the best tutorial...
read more2015 Will Bring Changes: Is Your Smallbiz Ready?
It’s a tale of two Teddy bears, one that has had a long career and the other that was merely a flash in the pan. The “one hit wonder” was Beanie Babies and the one with staying power is Build a Bear Workshop. If you or your kids have a closet full of Beanie Babies, (as I do) you probably know that they are virtually worthless today. However, during their 15 minutes of fame, people were lining up at stores to get the latest release and their price on the resale market was through the roof. The Teddy bears that customers make at the various Build a Bear Workshops located around the world, aren’t subject to the extremes in value that we saw with Beanie Babies. Further, I expect they will continue to find their way into hearts and homes for generations to come. Here’s my question for you today: Is your business riding a wave of current popularity, or its its success being carried by something more substantial? Surviving long term Sometimes we mistake luck for genius. Fortunately, Ty Inc., the company that made Beanie Babies, developed other lines of plush toys and was able to survive the downfall of the Beanie Baby fad. Maxine Clarke, Build a Bear Workshop founder, developed a business that is much more than Teddy bears. She created an experience families and friends could enjoy together. Not only are Teddy bears produced, so are memories. Further, Maxine expanded her business around the world. If your small business is too “one note,” you need to figure out what to do next that will sustain it as trends shift. One day Starbucks management woke up and discovered that they needed to do a little more than just serve coffee and a few bakery items. The company expanded its menu. An important key here is to carefully examine consumer and business trends. When buying patterns shift, you don’t want to be the last person to notice. Compare Netflix and Blockbuster. Blockbuster was always behind the curve when DVD rentals moved from neighborhood stores to being web-based and it proved to be a fatal mistake. Netflix’s midcourse correction However, although Netflix was quite successful with its “through-the-mail” model, it sensed that web streaming was the future and separated streaming from its online-ordering. After the split, streaming cost more for consumers and they complained for about an Internet minute, then accepted it. Netflix took a gamble rather than stick with a business plan that it knew would be ultimately obsolete. It has been said many times that change is the only constant and change comes faster today than ever before. While we aren’t all Steve-Jobs-like geniuses who can anticipate change before it happens, we should be able to sense the initial indicators of change and make smart adjustments. How can you work with your business model and make it more sustainable going into 2015? * Image: Beanie Babies, © 2005 Joel Telling, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
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