How to get a great ‘startup’ education fast and cheap
It doesn’t matter what kind of education you’ve had when you start a new job, some 90 percent of the information and skills you’ll need to be successful will come from hands-on experience. This is one of the biggest reasons I encourage people to start their own business. They will acquire skills more quickly through the process of launching and growing a business than through virtually any other means. And the beautiful thing today is that you can get all of this practical knowledge and insights with very little risk. Just open an online store. Not long ago I gave you a quick rundown on the best and least expensive DIY ecommerce website building services. If you use one of these you can get an online store up and running in a lazy afternoon. Literally. However, today’s advice isn’t specifically on that topic. I want to discuss some of the ways you’ll grow in knowledge and skills when you take the plunge and bring your brand new small business online. And, I’m going to start with the process of “building” your store. Interface skills. All kinds of web-based interfaces today are built around some form of “drag-and-drop.” That phrase makes them sound easy, and they are…but only after you’ve had some experience with them. You’ll climb a long way up the drag-and-drop learning curve by putting your website together. Design skills. Related to the previous point is the use of templates. Every app from the venerable Microsoft Word to email providers like Constant Contact offer templates. When you commit to a DIY website building service, you’ll want to opt for a pre-built template. You’ll then have some options to customize it. Ask others how it looks and encourage them to be brutally honest. You want to use this experience to improve your graphic design “eye” and skills. Merchandising. Build your store around something for which you have passion and knowledge. Start with just a few products – maybe only one. See what sells and what. You might be surprised to discover that some things you absolutely love, aren’t such a big hit with the general population. Pricing. Here’s the flip side of merchandising. People will buy virtually anything if the price is right. What merchandise can you feature that delivers the margins you need? Marketing and advertising. When success or failure depends on your ability to sell your products, marketing rises to a whole new level of urgency. Here’s something very cool: When you establish accounts with new web hosts, they often will give you $100 or $200 in ad credits with Google, for example. You can experiment and learn on another guy’s nickel! Customer service. Make a few sales and the importance of customer service will soon become very real for you. Because you’ve started a small, online e-commerce business, customer service will not be overwhelming initially, but it will teach you the importance of having systems and people in place should you decide to launch a bigger project someday. Networking. This is a tricky one. As an e-commerce startup you are sort of an isolated island in the middle of a huge online ocean. However, to be successful you’ll find that partnerships and cooperation with others is required. Developing those symbiotic relationships with other web properties will...
read moreThinking startup? Consider these three special U.S. states
People migrate to where the jobs are. Similarly, it’s generally a wise strategy for entrepreneurs to migrate to where it’s easiest to found a business. If that’s true, what should you be looking for? I suggest that you want a state with a good overall climate for business where you can easily find banks willing to lend to small business founders with a good plan. With those criteria in mind, North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia currently emerge as the overall winners. I’m basing this on Forbes’ yearly ranking of states good for business and Biz2Credit’s recent survey of state loan approval rates. Here are top 10 states with the highest small business loan approval rates: New Jersey (23.4% approval rate) New York (19% approval rate) Illinois (15% approval rate) California (14.2% approval rate) Pennsylvania (12.9% approval rate) Florida (11.1% approval rate) Georgia (10.2% approval rate) Texas (10% approval rate) Ohio (8.8% approval rate) North Carolina (7.9% approval rate) Here’s the Forbes ranking of the states that are best for business: Utah North Carolina Nebraska Texas Colorado Virginia Georgia North Dakota Washington South Dakota Those three states – North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia – represent a general demographic trend we have been experiencing in recent decades: The shift of people from the North to the South. Further, we know that even in the depths of the Great Recession, Texas was the lone star (pun intended), leading the way in job creation. To create its ranking, Forbes looks for low business costs, an educated workforce, and pro-business regulatory climate. Combine those qualities with more cooperative bank loan officers, and you have a winning...
read moreExplore the ‘unknown’ to propel your small business forward
Trial lawyers have an old rule: Don’t ask any question you don’t know the answer to. It’s good advice when you have a witness on the stand, but the opposite advice is better for small business owners: Ask the questions that you don’t know the answer to. One of the biggest ways to improve your product, service, or systems is to discover the things people won’t or don’t tell you. Sometimes these are negatives, like the customer service calls people end up not making. But other times the “unknowns” can provide positive, proactive information. This comes to mind because today I noticed that the hashtag #NetflixNeeds is trending on Twitter. I don’t know if Netflix started this, or some Netflix customers got it going. In any case, it gives consumers the opportunity to say what they would like to see on Netflix and also air some criticism they have with the way the streaming service operates. If you follow the business news, you know that the original content Netflix and other streaming services create is central to its growth. If the company notices patterns in the #NetflixNeeds posts, it might help them make programming decisions in the future. Further, by following up on the suggestions made in the social media, Netflix will probably get additional positive social media mentions. Can something like this work for you? Would you consider creating a hashtag like #AcmeWidgetsNeeds to see what your social media followers would say? If you don’t have the courage to put something like that out in cyberspace, it probably means that you know you have some work to do in some areas of your small business. If that’s the case, get busy fixing the problems. As a variation on this, you could create a hashtag that addresses the needs of your industry in general, such as #Whatlocalcoffeeshopsneed. An approach like this could reveal bigger surprises that might help you shape an aggressive and creative long-term strategy for growth. Whether you use a hashtag campaign or directly survey your customers, make it part of your company’s DNA to be always seeking the things you don’t know about your customers. 5 crippling customer service...
read moreProvide a home service? Discover how local search and marketing is rapidly changing
Any home services small business needs to be aware of critical changes in online marketing and local search. These changes could cause you to lose business overnight, or – if you take advantage of them – make you a premium provider of home services in your area. Before I get into some important specifics, let me paint the big picture: The home services online ecosystem is going through a mid-life crisis. The earth moves under your feet Sites like Angie’s List have been stalwarts on the scene for many, many years, and I’ll even include Yelp in this group. But recent years have seen aggressive startups like Thumbtack, Porch, Takl, and Handy enter the fray. At the same time, the tech behemoths – Google, Amazon, and Facebook – have become players. Let me add one more wrinkle to this: IAC, which owns HomeAdvisor and other online properties, is buying Angie’s List for some $500 million. They’ll rebrand it as ANGI Homeservice and move it from a recommendation platform to a marketplace. Is your head spinning fast enough now? From reviews to bookings A key to understanding this is to focus on the upcoming changes at Angie’s List – moving from merely finding recommendations to a platform where you can book a home service provider. This is the direction these services, big and small, are going – with the exception, so far, of Yelp. There are two monetization models: 1) Providers pay for leads or 2) Clients pay through the service and the service takes a cut. Google Home Services and Amazon Home Services use these models. The Google program is basically part of its AdWords platform and providers are charged for clicks and leads. Providers in the Amazon program pay between 10 and 20 percent commissions to Amazon. Google hasn’t rolled out its Home Services program everywhere yet. It’s important to find out if it’s in your area for your service. Do a Google search like this: Plumbers Your City. That’s what I did for Los Angeles. (Of course, substitute the generic term for your industry for “Plumbers.”) If you get results like those in the graphic below, you know that Google has rolled out its program in your area. We’re used to having AdWords ads at the top of Google search results pages, but you see from the above how they are a bit different if Google Home Services is in an area. These spots are now taken over by companies that are part of Google’s Home Services program. Providers have to meet certain criteria to be included in the program; note the Google guarantee. Further, Google controls the communication between Home Service providers and potential clients. When prospects call via the phone number Google provides, the Home Service provider does not get the caller’s actual phone number. This is maintained for 15 days after a prospect contacts a provider. The provider can return calls via the system, but can’t contact the prospect outside of the system for at least 15 days. Because Google is slowly rolling this out, I assume they are testing features so they can develop the best ways to maximize their revenue while providing a worthwhile service to businesses and consumers. Keep up with the times If your company provides a home service, you need...
read moreUse your NPS to guide your business
Are you a “big picture” person? I think it’s good to always have a feeling for the big picture. It takes a vision of the big picture to make the big decisions in your business. You need to have your eyes on the horizon – people who are constantly staring at their feet end up walking around in circles. The net promoter score (NPS) is perhaps the best single metric we have that gives you the big picture with regards to how well your business is doing. It is simply a number between -100 and +100 that captures the number of “promoters” your company has as they relate to the number of “detractors” your company has. In other words, do more people have a positive or negative feeling about your company. One simple question You have all seen the question that drives the NPS: On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend (the brand) to a friend or colleague? Individuals that give you a 9 or 10 are deemed “promoters,” those who score your business 6 and lower are deemed “detractors,” and anyone who gives you a 7 or 8 is considered “passive” and they aren’t counted in the final score at all. I like the NPS question because it’s essentially asking, “How likely is it that you’ll give my business word-of-mouth advertising?” We all know that this is the most valuable kind of advertising any business can hope for, so the NPS gives you a good idea how likely you are to benefit from word-of-mouth advertising. If all your customers were willing to talk you up to others and gave you 10s, your NPS would be 100. On the other hand, if you have 100 percent totally Unsatisfied customers, your NPS would be -100. You could expect to be bad mouthed in the marketplace. Using your NPS When you make contact with your customers for the purpose of getting their feedback, be sure to ask this question. The NPS is a concept everyone in your organization can relate to. It puts the nebulous feeling of “customer satisfaction” into a hard number that can be used to inform and motivate your team. When it goes up, you can celebrate the result and catalog what you’re doing right. When it goes down, you can rally the team and identify the areas that need improvement or the situation that caused customer experience problems. It’s a tool that can be used to keep everyone rowing in the same direction. Don’t ignore the details At the top, I asked if you were a big picture person and gave my reasons why it’s good to always have the big picture in mind. However, the problem with big pictures is that they are usually made up of several smaller pictures and if any or all of those are bad, they detract from the big picture. This means that you can’t rely on the NPS alone. To some lesser degree you need to survey your customers on their satisfaction with the smaller “scenes” that all come together to make the big picture. Fortunately, surveys are easy and inexpensive to conduct today so even small business owners can gather the information they...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Economic omens, cheat sheets, and startup advice
Cheat sheets, tips from a Facebook insider, and some gloomy economic thoughts (sorry, I don’t write them, I just report them) are among the interesting and important items you’ll discover as you work your way through this week’s created content. Leadership, management, and productivity In this installment of Laura Emily Dunn’s Women in Business Q&A, she talks to Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky, the co-founders of BaubleBar. On a related note, Oliver Staley says that women in business profit when they talk to each other. Have you tapped into the five incredibly valuable resources (that actually work) described in this piece by Helen Callier? What you don’t know about a small business can hurt you, says Shawn Porat, so get up to speed. Do not put off reading Jeffrey Hayzlett’s article, Six Steps To Go from Procrastinating to Productive. Facebooks SMB director for North America, Katherine Shappley, delivers four success tips from small businesses that are “doing it right.” Marketing and sales Looking for growth? Maybe it’s time to go international. John Winter outlines the top five challenges of creating a global marketing campaign. It’s a common question: Are marketing and advertising the same? Laurel Mintz answers (no) and explains why you need both. Jonathan Long uses a fashion brand as an example showing us how to leverage marketing trends for viral growth. Your high school teachers may not have liked them, but cheat sheets are a great tool Ted Dhanik provides one on marketing technology for small biz owners. Matei Gavril gives us four things that we can’t forget when we’re creating a digital marketing plan for a startup. Save your money with the nine low-budget marketing strategies described in this Entrepreneur article by Tony Tie. Jonathan Chan covers the basics of buyer personas for e-commerce. Are you using them? Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Jules Schroeder interviews mompreneur Kelly Roach to reveal the secrets of turning a side hustle into a seven-figure business. Smart city governments will take the advice of Geri Stengel and start unlocking the potential of women entrepreneurs. It took just one question to convince Michael McTeigue to quit his corporate job and start his own company. Check out Trent Innes’ article to find out what that question is. You can handle a list with just one item on it, right? You’ll appreciate Murray Newlands, This Is the Single Most Important Thing You Can Do as an Entrepreneur. Politics, government, and the economy In this article by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, economist Stephen King explains how the U.S. economy is on the verge of breaking two records – one good and one bad. (BTW, it’s another Stephen King.) In Sabrina Willmer’s Bloomberg article, she outlines how Larry Fink thinks dark clouds are a warning on the U.S....
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