This week in small business: Power naps, superpowers, browser extensions, and more!
If you need a nap, you’ll find good justification for taking one every day in this week’s collection of curated content. Also, women entrepreneurs get a lot of coverage on both the challenges they face and the contributions they are making. Leadership, management, and productivity Because women-owned businesses tend to be small, JR Thorpe makes the case that they will be losers if net neutrality rules change. Do you know what “design thinking” is? Jessica Sweet explains the concept and how it can contribute to career success. I’m heartened by the fact that “get enough sleep” and “take a nap” are among Deep Patel’s 10 daily habits of the most productive leaders. In other good news: Jamie Mercer suggests you can increase your productivity by working fewer hours each day. (Testing these notions, starting now! Zzzzz…) If you’re productive enough, but could use an extra dose of happiness, then you need to check out Cathy Caprino’s five pieces of advice. Much is being written today about retail. Jennifer Schulties’ article suggests that department store woes may be tied to a sort of identity crisis. Marketing and sales With so many of us using the Google Chrome browser today, the five social media marketing extensions in Arachika Kapoor’s list are sure to get a lot of use. Don’t overlook the power of direct mail. In this interview with Advantage Travel Partnership’s Carolyn Hardy, Abra Dunsby describes its advantages. Ellie Roddy gives you 10 questions to ask yourself designed to find out if you’re doing social media right. With the increased adoption of ad blockers, the time is right for this article by Lewis Gersh: The 7 rules of respectful marketing. Bob McKay gives us six of the most effective social media metrics to understand your campaign’s success in his Forbes article. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Writing for the Financial Times, Andy Bounds chronicles how a surge in female entrepreneurs is narrowing the UK’s gender gap. No doubt the 20 “Wonder Woman Traits” described in this piece by Patti Fletcher are helping this women in the UK. (Hey, if you have superpowers, use ’em!) There’s no shortage of excellent articles on the topic of women entrepreneurs this week. I think you’ll also appreciate Gabrielle Healy’s Women In Tech On Funding, Harassment And Building A Business. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Francis J. Greene and Christian Hopp share research that shows how writing a business plan increases the likelihood of success for your startup. While Muhammad Siddiqui admits that there is no fixed formula for entrepreneurial success, he offers five tips that will serve founders in every industry...
read moreHow to prepare your business for sale
One of Don Draper’s most memorable lines in “Mad Men” is, “The day you sign a client is the day you start losing him.” Smart business owners apply a similar thought to planning, founding, and managing their companies: The day you start your business is the day you start preparing to sell it. If you don’t have an exit strategy in mind when you start and build your business, you can paint yourself into a corner and be left with no good ways to get value out of what you have worked so hard to build. And if you’re depending on selling the business to fund your retirement, the problem is magnified because you won’t get any “do-overs.” There are two critical elements of preparing to sell your business: Identifying your buyer, Organizing or preparing your business for maximum value. Although the second point above should be acted on first (you should always be building your business for maximum value) let’s look at point number one no because it does have some impact on your preparation. Who will buy your business? There are three general categories of buyers you need to consider: Family member, Key employee, and Outside buyer. As I alluded to above, you want to present each of these buyers with a business whose value has been maximized. However, with the first two on the list, you need to do additional prep work. If you’re going to work out a deal with a family member or one of your current employees, you need to be sure that they have been sufficiently trained to take over the reins. You would probably want to go into a transition period to make the sale and change in leadership go smoothly for everyone involved. If you sell to an outside buyer, there’s a good chance that some kind of training or transition period will be part of the sales agreement. Grooming your business for sale You need to keep an eye on the finish line from day one. However, that doesn’t mean there are strict rules that apply to every phase of your business development. It means that you need to be ready to make the correct course adjustments depending on the stage of your development. Let’s look at one of the first ways to groom your business for sale to illustrate this. Maximize cash flow and profitability. With the exception of some tech startups whose value is based on potential payoff in the future, most businesses are appealing to buyers when both the top and bottom lines look healthy. This means that as you get nearer to the time when you want to sell, you don’t want to be taking a risk on a costly new venture. It’s fine to gamble a little when you’re not close to your exit date, but it will bite you if you’re not able to turn it into a profitable venture by the time buyers start looking over your operation. Diversify income streams. If you’re a service business with one or two major sources of revenue or a manufacturer with few products, this can lower the value of your business because it scares potential buyers. They will naturally wonder what happens if they lose one of these key accounts or sales drops on your...
read moreHow Airbnb turned a bad deal into a winning hand
Humans are risk adverse by nature. It probably comes from the days when we risked being chased down by a sabertooth tiger whenever we ventured outside of our caves. Entire industries and product lines are built around this fact: insurance, hedge funds, home alarms, and many more. If you’re in one of these businesses, you want to play up the dark side of risk, however, most of us aren’t in a business that benefits from heightened risk. We’re in businesses where we want our customers to feel no or minimal risk. And, this is doubly true when we’re trying to establish new customers. There is always a risk associated with anything new. How do you lure new customers out of the comfort zone associated with the product or service they have been using for years and try yours? There’s an old adage, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Risky business Nowhere is this problem bigger than when you’re trying to establish the legitimacy of a new business model. When a new business model finds a successful way to minimize the risk experience for consumers, we can all learn a lesson. The recent experience of some friends brings this to mind. They were headed out on vacation to visit family and friends. When they went to make hotel reservations, they were shocked by the prices. They couldn’t find anything under $300 a night and didn’t want to spend that much money. They decided to see what they could find using Airbnb. A little background is in order here. This couple is older, Baby Boomers, in fact. While I’m sure than many Boomers have been happily using Airbnb since it launched, I think it takes more convincing to make them believers. In any case, the couple found a great property. The price and location were ideal. They made the reservation and then started to look forward to their stay. The dreaded call The bad news didn’t come until much later. While they were only hours away from checking into their Airbnb, they got a call from the property owners: There was a plumbing problem that wouldn’t be repaired until the next day. There was no water, shower, or toilet in the property. The property owners were very apologetic and my friends were sympathetic; they had once owned a motel so they knew that things like this can happen. They cancelled the reservation and found a hotel room. They knew that their payment in advance would, of course, be returned. Here’s what surprised them: Two days later they got a call directly from Airbnb asking about what alternative arrangements my friends had made. If they had to pay more for lodging, Airbnb said to take a photo of the receipt, send it to them, and they would refund the extra cost as well as the original cost of the Airbnb stay. With one fell swoop, Airbnb eliminated much of the risk of using its service. My friends told me that they would certainly give Airbnb another try. Money talks… Generous money-back guarantees, paying for return shipping, and other risk-minimizing tools are virtually always worth it in the long run. But there are some caveats you need to recognize. First, the systems assuring the quality of your products and...
read morePersonal branding basics: The content question
“When you come to a fork in the road – take it.” – Yogi Berra While it may seem nonsensical from a logical point of view, Yogi’s advice applies exactly to the content you must create for a successful personal brand. Your content must focus on two areas (although not in equal proportions): Your profession, and Your personality. Consider the successful outcomes you want from your personal branding efforts: You want people to consider you an authority, and You want to be the kind of authority that people like and are willing to listen to. For these reasons, the laws of personal branding basics say that you need to convince people that you know what you’re talking about, and at the same time reveal enough about yourself that they will want to spend time with you. These qualities will serve you well when you want to grow your business or when you start knocking on doors (or sending out emails) to launch a new idea or simply get a new job. I’m not going to spend much time here talking about the avenues you use to establish your personal brand; you probably know most of them. They are all communication pipelines and vary from short Twitter posts (and other social media posts) to longer blogs to video (Internet and broadcast) to presentations made before small, medium, and large audiences. Personal branding basics: Professional content There are two dimensions to the professional content you present: original and curated. You want to create solid original content, and by “original” I mean that it needs to be your ideas and sufficiently unique. (I know that “sufficiently” shouldn’t really be used to qualify the word “unique.” However, there’s really nothing – or very little – new under the sun, so you need to work hard to find the inventive variations that set your content apart from all the other content competing for eyes and ears.) Perhaps you have insights into your niche unlike most others. If so, develop and express those to their maximum benefit. However, what makes you unique, might be more subtle. The Next Food Network Star has been on the Cooking Channel this summer and the judges are always urging the contestants to find and express their own point of view, or POV as it’s often expressed. The unique element to your professional content could be your POV. It might unfold from your worldview, your background, or the way you see the consumers of your product or service. Further, don’t be afraid to swim against the tide. If everyone in your industry is going toward automation to lower prices, why not make the case for higher-priced hand-crafted products? The point is that the “public” needs to have some handle to grab on to when they think of you. Don’t be afraid to be professionally controversial. There’s an old saying: If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. I also like what Ambrose Bierce said: We know what happens to people who stand in the middle of the road. They get run over. I have one final thought here and it connects your professional content to your personal content: Establish your “voice.” It might be that your voice is what separates your professional content from everything else being expressed in...
read moreThis week in small business: All about funding!
We have some solid advice on small business funding this week and it tends to focus on the dangers of debt – both personal and from a small business loan. Be sure you read them before you sign on the dotted line or pull out your personal credit card. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Going into personal debt to fund your entrepreneurial vision is dangerous. But if you follow the five rules Jayson Demers describes here, you reduce the danger. Also check out the two important principles I offer in When is it okay to fund your startup with credit cards? And while we’re on the subject, Nathan Hamilton outlines one reason to avoid a small business loan in his Motley Fool article. Somehow I think a lot of women with good ideas are going to like this one: Five Tips For The Female Entrepreneur With No Cash To Spare, by Rachel Feldman. Elain Pofeldt tells the story of Michael Ward, a father whose life changed when his daughter was diagnosed with cancer. She’s doing well today and as he rebuilt his business after her health scare subsided, Ward discovered the potential of selling on Amazon. Leadership, management, and productivity In this edition of Laura Emily Dunn’s Women in business Q&A she talks to Patti Clark, Vice President of Product Development at Lakeshore Learning. Barbara Thau gives us five signs that stores – not e-commerce – are the future of retail. (Yes, you read that right.) Small business owners face a lot of challenges. Andrew DePietro profiles the top four in his Forbes article. Vigilance and readily available security tools can keep credit card fraud losses to a minimum, according to John Rampton. Marketing and sales Go for depth rather than breadth. That’s the first of the three ways your company can better engage Millennials via your marketing, says Daniel Rounds. UX isn’t something from Area 51. It stands for “user experience” and Sheila Kloefkorn explains its importance for SEO. There are right and wrong ways to win new customers and in this article, John Nemo discusses the “worst type of marketing.” Politics, government, and the economy When it was reported that the economy created 222,000 new jobs in June, Brookings Institution analyst Aaron Klein said the economy “has room to run.” Get Klein’s outlook in this article by Michael Sheetz. And maybe to get it running, leaders should read Anthony B. Kim and Patrick Tyrrell’s column on how to restore optimism and verve to the U.S....
read moreThe essentials: 15 social media apps and services to improve your marketing
Few business owners question the importance of social media marketing today, but doing a consistently good job with social media marketing is not easy. In fact, it can become very time consuming. Whether you take care of it yourself, or you have someone on your team who’s in charge of your social media marketing, it’s always a good idea to get outside help. This help can come in the form of an agency, a specialist, or any number of apps or software as a service (SaaS) websites. Below is a curated list of popular apps and services. There are certainly many good free apps available that will serve a lot of small businesses quite well. Further, for $20 or less a month you can start to get into some apps that are quite powerful. The apps and services provide these kinds of services: Find content for you to share Provide easy manual scheduling, Provide automated scheduling, Analyze followers, keywords, growth, etc Manage your accounts for followers Browse the list. Find the social media platforms you target and the prices where you feel comfortable, then start comparing all their features. Take some of the paid services out for a free trial run. (Legend: F=Facebook, T=Twitter, IN=LinkedIn, P=Pinterest, TM= Tumblr, G+=Google+, Insta=Instagram.) Service Platforms Free Plan Price Range Service DrumUp F, T, IN Trial $15-$159/mo find, schedule Upflow F, T, IN, P, TM, Y $29-$99/mo find, schedule Social Jukebox F, T, IN Y $13-$100/mo schedule Socialoomph F, T, IN, P, Plurk Y $6.50-$39/mo schedule, automate, analysis management Crowdfire F, T, Insta, P, TM Y $10-$200/mo content, schedule, management Buffer F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ Y $10-$400/mo schedule, analysis Good Audience F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ N $300-$2000/mo agency service Boostagram Insta Trial $80-$160/mo Instagram growth service InstaSchedule Insta Trial $20-$90/mo schedule Round Team T Y $12-$144/mo automate Hootsuite F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+, YT Y $20-$500/mo schedule, analysis, engage SocialQuant T Trial $50-$300/mo automate Hypergrowth T Trial not revealed automate Followed F, T, IN Trial $99-$250/mo content, schedule, automate Sprout Social F, T, Insta, IN, G+ Trial $100-$250/mo schedule, manage, CRM, analysis...
read more