Say ¡Bienvenidos! to the Global Economy
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.” – Charlemagne. I certainly love the sentiment in that Charlemagne quote, but for the practical small business owner, being able to speak a second language in today’s global marketplace and increasingly polyglot United States does even more: it can be a distinct competitive advantage. A friend of mine – an Anglo – speaks Spanish quite well. He once supervised a fairly large assembly line in California where Spanish was the first language of almost half the workers. He remembers his first few days on the job. He hadn’t used his Spanish yet or told anyone he could speak Spanish but he overheard several employees speaking among themselves saying, “I think he knows Spanish.” They could sense it. Advantages of a second language It was a great group of employees and his ability to speak Spanish created more loyalty and better shop floor communication. People are more relaxed and open when they are speaking their first language. If you’ve ever been in a country where few speak English, you know how relieved you are when you finally connect with someone who does. The workplace certainly requires command of a common language among employees, but when the owner or manager speaks a second language, it can be a very useful tool. This is even more important when overseas expansion is a possibility. Fortunately we have a wealth of resources today that can get us well along the road of learning a second language. Gone are the days when all you got was a box of cassette tapes and some workbooks when you purchased a language course. Rosetta Stone, for example, is mostly Internet-based today and it uses sophisticated software to guide your learning. There are plenty of free language learning resources on the Internet and they’ll serve you well if all you need right now is an introduction to a language. However, to push yourself further than the most common conversational phrases, you’ll need a bigger commitment, in time and probably in money as well. Local courses Beyond web resources, one of the best ways to get some serious second language skills is by signing up for a course at a local community college. The instruction there will be more formal and held on a regular schedule. The discipline of attending a class a couple of nights a week on a continuing basis will probably help you learn more quickly. Sometimes when we plan to pursue a self-paced course in our free time, we find that we don’t have any free time. If you have children studying a second language in school you might ask to see their materials and unofficially “audit” their coursework from home to give you at least an overview of what to expect. Of course, before you jump into learning a second language, give some thought to which language will best serve the interests of growing and managing your business. Spanish is certainly a strong candidate in many cases, but if expansion into Asia is on your radar screen, you might want to go in that direction. Image: Public Domain...
read moreSo Crazy, These Small Biz Ideas Might Just Work!
Even smart venture capitalists swing and miss far more often than they hit home runs. It’s difficult to predict which business ideas will make money and which will tank. A friend bought extra tickets to this year’s PGA Championship tournament figuring he’d be able to resell some to help defray his cost of going. When he listed them he found that there was a glut of tickets selling for under their face value. However, it turned out that parking passes were fetching two to three times their original price. Alas, he hadn’t invested in parking passes. The lesson here is that you need to be willing to experiment and subject even the oddest ideas to marketplace testing. To offer you a little inspiration, here are some quirky business ideas that should help you think outside of the proverbial box. Pet Rock When listing the craziest ideas that made money, you have to start the list with the Pet Rock. Advertising executive Gary Dahl had this idea one night in a Bay Area bar while listening to friends complain about their pets. TIP: Do a better job remembering all those wacky ideas that get tossed around in bars late at night. Place-in-line-holder Guy New York city resident Robert Samuel lost his job selling cellphones and needed to make a few bucks. There was a new iPhone release coming up, so he offered his services via Craig’s List to hold a place in line. Samuel has branched out since then and it looks like much of his work has been waiting in line for cronuts – you know, doughnuts made from croissant dough. By the way, I also think cronuts rate as a crazy, yet very successful, idea. Rent-a-Pet(lover) Perhaps this is a new twist on the Pet Rock idea: petless people who love pets sign up to take care of pets for people who need to get away. Websites like BorrowMyDoggie and DogVacay connect the pet-plentiful with the petless for as little as a few hours to several days. The advantage is that the pets get to stay with folks who are enthusiastic about animals. If you don’t want to turn your home over to strange pets, consider dog walking. It’s becoming a growth industry in bigger cities. Rent-a-Chicken There seems to be an animal/pet theme here, doesn’t there? This one plays to the current desire to get closer to the source of our food – way closer. If you think you might want to raise your own chickens for eggs, in the spring Rent The Chicken will set residents of Western Pennsylvania up with a portable coop, two layers and all the supplies needed for the rental period. If you fall in love with the chicks, you have the option to adopt. I think a lesson to be learned from these businesses is to be on the lookout for how you can help people cope with their modern busy lives. This is reflected in the boom in personal assistants, shoppers, trainers and chefs. A more traditional business that taps these needs and is growing significantly is housecleaning. But don’t be afraid to experiment with the wild and wacky before you turn to a tried-and-true business idea. Image: Big and little dog 1, © 2006 Ellen Levy Finch, used under a Creative Commons...
read moreYou Are Your Company’s Culture: Three Essential Qualities
Have you worked for any large corporations? Some are great to work for; others make employees feel more like the number on their security badge than the smiling face on the badge. Often the difference between those ecosystems is this: In the first, the original founders are still active, while in the second, the founders left the scene three to four mergers ago. The lesson is that as the founder of a small business you virtually are the company culture. Unfortunately, as small business owners wrestle with staying afloat they can easily forget this fact and inadvertently create a bad company culture. So if you’re in a hurry and can’t read any more, just remember that your business will be a reflection of who you are, or at least who your employees perceive you to be. And now that we have the “big idea” out of the way, let’s break it down a little bit and examine three essential qualities. Openness and transparency The term “transparency” gets bantered about a lot today, especially as it applies to our political leadership. Being open and transparent with your team is critically important. You want to instill in them the same passion you have for your business. If you build a wall around yourself, that passion will never be transferred. I’ve often heard the saying, “More gets caught than taught.” You can have employee meetings every week stressing what you think is important, but if you actively model what is important, the information is transferred much more efficiently and internalized much more deeply. Communication The prefix “com” in communication means “with” or “together.” While it takes one person to be transparent – you – it takes two or more people to communicate, one of which must be you. You need to consistently communicate your values and priorities while at the same time listening to your employees. Make sure they understand your message and also be certain that you hear – and take to heart – their observations, suggestions, feelings and concerns. Remember: It’s just possible that you may occasionally be wrong! Focus I mentioned priorities above. Your small business needs to have a focus and everyone needs to know it, understand it and share it. A friend once worked in a struggling division of a large corporation. One day he and his coworkers found themselves under the thumb of the company’s “fix it” guy. To some, this manager was an ogre; to others, he was focused and intense. If an employee strayed from his priorities, it was bad news. However, even when employees screwed up big time there was no problem as long as their focus was the same as his. That was liberating for the employees who got on-board. They had the freedom to be innovative and creative without the fear of failure as long as they were aligned with leadership. That is a productive environment. I can’t tell you exactly what “flavor” your company culture should be. It’s different with every small business and its owner. However, I want you to understand how wise it is to invest your time in creating a strong company culture. If you can achieve that, it will serve like the keel of a sail boat and keep your business headed in the right direction...
read more5 Cheap or Free Tools That Will Magnify Your Small Business
Big business managers can do something small business owners can’t afford to do: They can throw money at a problem or project until they’re satisfied with the results. Small business owners have to be smarter and today you are blessed with a wide variety of technology-based solutions that allow you compete with bigger businesses without draining your bank account. In fact, many of the most clever solutions are geared to the small business market; the big guys can’t really take advantage of them. Social Media Hootsuite. A great way to boost productivity is to accomplish two things at one time. If you spend time on the Internet doing research of any kind, why not also use that time to line up your social media posts? Hootsuite (free) allows you to post to all of your social media accounts from any webpage. When you find great content, share it with your followers. With its “autoschedule” function it will even optimize the best time for your posts to go live. It’s like having a fully staffed social media department. Organization and Ideas Evernote. We’re doing business today in the information and idea age. Your ability to succeed correlates directly to your ability to have and find ideas, and keep them organized and ready to use. Evernote is designed to capture and organize your ideas from virtually any medium and have them ready for you when you – or others on your team – need them. Text, web clippings, photos, audio, URLs, and almost anything else can be pulled into Evernote and organized and tagged to meet your needs. Share lists and notebooks with whoever you want, or keep some private. Free and paid plans. Phone Service Cloudphone. Your small business can seem like a big business to callers with a service like Cloudphone. It automates answering and gives callers a menu to properly route their calls – even if they all end up going to you in your spare bedroom home office. eVoice is a similar service. There are other options in this realm from the bigger players, such as AT&T’s “RingCentral Office@Hand” cloud-based service. Various pricing options. Customer Relationship Management Zoho CRM. There are a lot of good CRM tools today. I singled out Zoho because there of fewer users and there is a free option. If your business has a web presence, you can easily create forms to capture user information and pull them into your marketing campaigns. It also integrates well with Google products, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google tasks. Email marketing Constant Contact. You know I work with and use Constant Contact and I believe they do a great job making it easy for the busy small business owner to mount professional and highly effective email marketing and branding campaigns. Pricing starts at $15 a month. With excellent and easy-to-use list management and analytic tools, small businesses can always be on top of what works best with their customer base. I confess that this is a closely curated list; there are many other excellent choices and I hope you share some of your favorites as comments below. The beauty of these is they that they turbocharge the productivity of any small business. Even the solopreneur operating off the kitchen table can use these services and...
read moreLearn from the Best: Psychoanalyzing the Top CEOs
If you steal ideas from one person, it’s called plagiarism. If you steal ideas from a lot of people, it’s called research. So let’s do some “research” and crawl into the brains of a few Inc 500 CEOs to dig up some nuggets of business and marketing wisdom that we can apply to our own small businesses. The Inc 500, by the way, is a compendium of the fastest growing companies of the year. Fuhu What better place is there to start than with Jim Mitchell, the CEO of the number one Inc 500 company, Fuhu? Mitchell’s company makes “Nabi” tablets specially designed for children. “We were tired of giving our kids the iPad when it first came out, and there really wasn’t anything else,” Mitchell told the LA Times. “They wanted to play with all the games on the iPad, and it would come back all smudged, or if they dropped it, for heaven’s sakes, it would shatter.” Lesson: If a product is designed for a certain market segment, how can it be modified to make it better suited for a different market segment? Can you tweak your product or service and start selling to a different group of people? Simplified cellphones with larger keyboards marketed to older people is a similar idea. Quest Nutrition Tom Bilyeu is co-founder, president and CEO of Quest Nutrition, number two on the Inc 500 list for 2014. Quest Nutrition makes snack foods and sweets that appeal to the health, fitness and weight loss markets. You can find quite a few blogs that Bilyeu has written in the last few years, but the central theme of one is advice we should all take: Excuses are your one true enemy. Bilyeu makes a compelling case that we are our own worst enemies. We are the only ones who can prevent us from achieving our goals and if we allow ourselves to make excuses, we are hiding this fact from ourselves. This is powerful business and personal advice. Take it. (By the way both Fuhu and Quest Nutrition are located in El Segundo, California. So maybe another big lesson we learn here is if you’re planning a startup, El Segundo is a primo location.) Reliant Asset Management Barry Roman and Michael Roman are cofounders of Reliant Asset Management (RAM), a company that designs, leases and sells modular buildings. The pair have a long history in this market. Back in 1986 they started Resun Leasing, which also operated in this area. Two big lessons are worth noting with RAM. First, when they left Resun, Barry and Michael Roman had to wait out a long “no compete” period. Second, RAM’s success can be attributed in large part to the fact that it leases and sells modular buildings in the areas experiencing the oil shale boom. Let’s quickly look at these two lessons. Despite being “out of the game” for a while, Barry and Michael Roman kept their focus on what they knew best and as soon as their “time out” was over, they jumped back in. Know your strengths and don’t let any temporary setback keep you from applying your strengths to your business. Next, it’s often said that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and that’s why it’s smart to get involved when you see a...
read moreSave Money, Engage Customers with Bitcoins
It seems like there is more news about currencies today than ever before. The US dollar is being challenged as the global currency of record and at the same time Bitcoin is mounting an increasingly serious challenge to all national currencies. Recently Dell announced that it would accept Bitcoins as payment. The computer-making behemoth joins a group that includes Overstock, Newegg, Expedia, Dish Networks and CheapAir. For web retailers, offering a Bitcoin payment option is another way to enhance the customer experience. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency which purports to be secure and low-risk. For merchants it has the added advantage of offering very low or even no transaction charges. Try finding that with a standard credit card processor. Although it is certainly gaining popularity among merchants, Bitcoin is even more popular as an investment. Many individuals are buying Bitcoins and holding on to them just as they would gold. Bitcoins hit a high of nearly $1,150 in 2011 and today are hovering above $600. Merchant payment options If you’re a merchant and would like to give your customers the option of paying in Bitcoin, there are really two ways to do it and these essentially correspond to whether you’re an online or brick-and-mortar merchant. We’ll start with a physical store location. Last year on an ESPN College Game Day broadcast, a fan held up a sign that read, “Hi Mom Send” followed by a Bitcoin graphic and the QR code for his Bitcoin account. He netted $24,000 from people who saw him on TV and transferred Bitcoins to his account. That illustrates all a store needs to get started with Bitcoins: an account and a QR code for the account. With those two things, your customers who want to use Bitcoins would scan the QR code with their smartphones, transfer their Bitcoins to your account and they show up immediately. Processing fees: zero. That’s a very rudimentary system. For more integrated solutions, companies such as Coin of Sale offer systems and charge fees well under one percent. Bitcoins in e-commerce For Internet transactions, you absolutely need a third party processor to facilitate the transaction. You’ll find fees of one percent and less when you shop around as well as the ability to immediately transfer the Bitcoin value to your traditional bank account in a standard currency. You can also find flat-fee plans. Players include BitPay, Coinbase, BitcoinPay, BIPS and Polycoin. You’ll need to know a lot more to establish your comfort level and decide when, if and how you want to enable Bitcoin transaction, but even traditional payment processors are taking note. In a recent blog, San Francisco-based Stripe – which is in a Bitcoin beta – concluded: “We’re still in the very early days, but we can already start to see the shape of the potential impact of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If we get things right, life is going to be much better for billions of people.” Image: “Bitcoin banknote” by CASASCIUS – CASASCIUS. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 via Wikimedia...
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