Will this wrestling professional fight for small business?
One of the most intriguing picks President-elect Donald Trump made for his team is Linda McMahon to head up the Small Business Administration. The press hasn’t spent very much space reporting on this nomination (as it doesn’t spend very much time on small business issues at all) so you may have heard nothing more than Trump picked the “former chief executive officer of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)” to run the SBA. First I want to note that I find it fascinating that she comes from an industry known for being flamboyant and expert at promoting…as can be Trump himself. Who knows how these early picks will work out over the long and arduous journey of taming and training this beast we call Washington D.C., but there are a few things I’d like to note about this WWE veteran. McMahon is consumer savvy. There have been plenty of picks from business among Trump’s appointees, but none really understand the heartland consumer like McMahon. She, her husband Vince, and their WWE team have created millions of rabid WWE fans. And, I have to say that some of the enthusiastic Trump rallies weren’t very unlike WWE events. McMahon has won in a male-dominated arena. Is there a sport or entertainment more macho than WWE? Certainly, there aren’t many, but McMahon has been able to get in there, rub elbows, be heard, and make crucial decisions despite swimming against a heavy flow of testosterone. McMahon has been a “have-not.” It’s easy to look are her success today and just assume she was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. That’s not the case. She has worked as a receptionist, been on food stamps, declared bankruptcy, and started WWE with less than 15 employees. McMahon didn’t stay a “have-not.” This is the message I hope she sends and I hope she couples it with legislation that better enables Americans to start their own businesses and move from poverty to prosperity. Frankly, in many ways our leaders in Washington do not make tremendous societal and economic shifts. When you boil everything down, the decision to start a business rests on our shoulders. However, one of the most powerful tools our leaders have is the ability to inspire, and I think McMahon can tell an inspirational story. Let’s give the new head of the SBA our support and encouragement. I’ve been pleased to hear many comments from Trump and his team about the importance of making life easier for small business owners and would-be owners. If they follow through, we should be in for a good four years. Image: Linda McMahon at #FITN in Nashua, NH, by Michael Vadon, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
read moreSmall Business Inspiration for 2017 National Technology Day
Since 2016, each year at this time in January, we note National Technology Day. But I must add that at the current rate of development, almost every day seems like a National Technology Day! However, because things change so fast, it’s very easy to veer off the wise application of technology to our businesses in two different directions: Some give up on staying current and continue to rely on old – and maybe “proven” technology. Others jump from new technology to newer technology as soon as they come along. Each of these paths creates problems. If you fail to modernize, you eventually get to a place where you’re unable to leverage newer, practical, and cost-effective technologies. But if you chase every shiny new technology, it becomes costly and you may never fully realize the potential of any single tech development. A middle path is preferred, but you also need to be technology literate. In honor of National Technology Day, I want to briefly discuss an area of the Internet of Things (IoT) that is beginning to mature and could be very useful to many small business owners: home automation. Many of the major tech players – Apple, Google, and Amazon – are introducing hardware and software to automate various functions of our homes. Third-party manufacturers are creating devices that work with the systems these tech giants have introduced. I believe that savvy small business owners will find ways to use these in their businesses, making operations and management easier and less costly. Lights, alarms, and locks There are many Wi-Fi- and Bluetooth-enabled lighting systems, alarm systems, and door locks. Just a couple of years ago a friend of mine tried to install a simple Web-based video surveillance system at his vacation cabin. He never got it to work properly. Today, however, that are many user-friendly Wi-Fi video cameras that use the cloud so if you want to be able to check your small business facility when you’re away, it can be done easily and inexpensively. You can also control lights and locks from a distance. For example, with the Schlage Sense system, a vacationing restaurant owner could set up a temporary entry code to let a plumber in during off hours using his or her smartphone. For lights, and anything electrical, there are outlet controllers that are inexpensive and easy to use. If you want to minimize your small business utility bill, check out the various smart thermostats. Although they are marketed for home use, many small business owners will find them useful. Ground control You don’t have to worship the ground you walk on, but you can use technology to optimize it. How about trying one of the vacuum cleaner robots to keep your office floor always looking its best? This might save you some cleaning time and costs. If you have outdoor landscaping at your small business, consider a smart sprinkler controller. Put one of those into service and you won’t be the person watering in the middle of a rain storm. Appliances I know many small businesses, such as motels, that do their own laundry. There are several brands of washing machines and dryers that can be controlled via Wi-Fi. Further, there are IFTTT recipes that you might find handy. One, for example, would send...
read moreTry this New Year’s resolution to boost email marketing ?
Let’s make a New Year’s resolution together: Let’s agree to experiment with using an emoji or emoticon in the subject line of an email marketing piece or email newsletter. Okay? According to some numbers published by Experian, 56 percent of the brands who are working with these kinds of graphic symbols in subject lines have experienced higher open rates. Now let’s be honest: That’s slightly over 50 percent, so the results are not overwhelming…they are however, somewhat promising. Power and danger of symbols There are some dangers when using emojis in your marketing and branding materials, whether in email subject lines or elsewhere. You need to understand how they are going to “play” with your audience. Will your customers and prospects find them cute and engaging or shallow and cheap? Here are some specifics from the Experian survey: The heart symbol boosted open rates for 56 percent of the brands analyzed, The black heart, while often used, only improved open rates by 2.2 percent, and The black sun with rates made the biggest impact, improving open rates by nearly 15 percent. The study also suggested that you might find that these symbols help for a while and then their magic power wears off. That is essentially the pattern that all “new” Internet things follow. They catch our eye and attention for a little while and then we soon get to the point where we have seen them so often, we begin to ignore them. They fade into the virtual background. How to use emojis Fortunately, getting these symbols embedded in your subject lines is not hard. Just find a set you like, select the one you want to use, copy it, and paste it into your subject line. This collection of Facebook symbols is a good place to start. They are nicely designed and people are familiar with them; they are “friendly faces” – except for the ones that display anger or other emotions! Graphemica has a cool search feature. Put your term in the site’s search box and it will return symbols with that tag. I just searched for love – or at least an emoji symbolizing love! – and got a whole page or good symbols. If you’re marketing to a younger crowd, there’s certainly a place for these symbols in your emails and probably in other marketing materials. Make a promise to yourself to explore this more...
read moreSmall business and entrepreneurship: Where do you stand?
There are areas where small business and entrepreneurship cross over, but there are other areas where they diverge. If you are going into business for yourself, or if you already own a small business, it’s important to know where you stand on this topic. Put simply, virtually every entrepreneur starts as a small business owner. However, true entrepreneurs don’t stay there. But don’t misread me: There is nothing wrong with having the goal of simply owning and operating a successful small business in your community. For example, over the years I’ve met several people who dreamed of owning a local bookstore, probably combined with a coffee shop, where the locals could go to find literary gems and enjoy one another’s company. A place like that would be a great institution in a local community. However, the entrepreneur would be exploring ways to take that model further. In this case, small business and entrepreneurship are linked by an initial concept, but they diverge in purpose. The non-entrepreneur owner is pursuing a lifestyle and the ability to provide a service he or she thinks is important. The entrepreneur looks at the bookstore-coffee shop as something that people need almost everywhere and therefore works hard to find ways to scale up. The small business owner works hard to perfect the single location. Operating a single location is the main job for the local small business owner; finding, nurturing and exploiting funding sources for growth is probably the main job for the entrepreneur. Risks and rewards We can also look at small business and entrepreneurship in light of risks and rewards. It’s easy to conclude that the financial risks and potential rewards are far greater for the entrepreneur. The small business owner takes a smaller risk but certainly doesn’t eliminate risk. In fact, you could say that depending on one local business is “putting all your eggs in one basket.” If your local business flounders, that’s it. While a total failure for the entrepreneur would be far more costly, after a certain period of growth, the entrepreneur could absorb some isolated downturns and still be in a position to continue operations. For the small business owner, there may be lifestyle rewards that are especially appealing. Being an important and involved member of a close community can be a wonderfully rewarding experience. It could be the family lifestyle that a couple would prefer. Small business and entrepreneurship ideas There’s another interesting cross over between small business and entrepreneurship. Typically, an individual will start a small business around an area of personal interest, experience, or expertise. Let’s use a pet shop for an example. An expert topical fish hobbyist might open a local store. This is also true for many entrepreneurs. They take their expertise/passion and set out to build an empire rather than a local business. I think that many of the entrepreneurial tech leaders today are passionate about the place of technology in society. Mark Zuckerberg would be included in this group. However, there are also entrepreneurs who are passionate about building businesses and the specific area of any one business doesn’t matter so much. They recognize opportunities within business sectors and that excites them. I think Warren Buffet clearly fits into this category. So, what’s your vision? What’s your passion? Is it the...
read moreThis week in small business: A short list of articles long on good tips and inspiration
Our recommended reading list this week is a little light in its quantity of articles, but there are some gems here. If you need inspiration, skills, or marketing tips, we got ’em. Leadership, management, and productivity If you’re a visual learner and need convincing that small business is vulnerable to cyber attacks, you need to check out the infographics Dan Patterson posted on TechRepublic. Marketing and sales Don’t sell yourself short. That’s part of the message Vivian Nunez relays in this Women @Forbes article about creative Emma Ramos. Admittedly not a lot of my readers run farms, but for those of you who do, this Sara Schafer article about how to cash in with a well-written commodity marketing plan could pay off handsomely in 2017. You know how strongly I support online skills improvement, and the 37 free marketing and social classes listed here by Brian Peters is a good place to start. Are you a technical person who feels somewhat challenged when it comes to marketing? Mateusz Warcholinski’s article on Brainhub is a good place to start getting yourself up to speed on the basics. Don’t worry so much about your home page, but be certain to design killer landing pages. The top 10 tips in Andy Reese’s article will give you a good foundation. R.L. Adams delivers eight crucial rules for dominating Google’s search results. However, keep in mind Adams’ caution that “it won’t happen overnight.” Jason Unger takes a slightly different path with his “3 Things Every Website Needs for a Better SEO Ranking.” Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation How do entrepreneurs succeed? That’s how Stephanie Denning starts her review of Tracy Kidder’s “A Truck Full of Money,” which relates the story Kayak founder Paul English. Good inspiration...
read moreCan we bother you for a moment to help you get ready for #NoInteruptionsDay?
We interrupt this blog to bring you the annual No Interruptions Day! The last work day of each year has been designated No Interruptions Day and for some small business owners, it’s a very fitting special day. It seems like there are two types of businesses and/or business people: Those for whom the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is dead, and Those for whom the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is crazy busy. If you fall into that second category, Dec. 30 this year would be an excellent time to take No Interruptions Day to heart and turn off your phone, ignore your emails, lock the door shut and enjoy some undisturbed peace while you take care of the tasks that have to be completed before you can close out the year. What we’re really talking about here is productivity and maybe we should let this special day remind us of a discipline we should be practicing all year long: Focusing on the tasks before us until they are completed. Here are some more tips to help you maintain the concentration required to stay on task without interruptions: Toss the notion of multi-tasking into the dust bin. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that we don’t multi-task efficiently. Each time you switch between tasks you open the door to distractions and it always takes several moments to rev your brain up to speed on the new task. Crank up some instrumental music. Classical music in the style of Mozart gets our brains working at higher levels of efficiency. If you haven’t developed a taste for the classics, be sure to stick with instrumentals; the lyrics in vocal music engage the word processing parts of our brains, and unless you’re mopping the floor, you probably need to have 100 percent of those verbal skills available for the tasks you’re working on. Snack and hydrate between meals. Eat snacks balanced between protein and carbohydrates between your regular meals. You don’t want your mind to get lost wandering around the food groups when you’re trying to get some work done. With small, balanced snacks, and plenty of liquids (they’re important at work for several reasons, as Kaya Ismail points out here), you’ll keep your tummy under control and your energy level up. Work off campus. If you’re in a position where you can grab your laptop and work someplace away from the daily grind, go for it. You’ll separate yourself from some of your regular tormentors and a fresh scene can give you some extra energy as long as it doesn’t come with even more distractions! Clear your calendar. Since we’re giving you a few days notice, review your calendar and see if you really need to keep all of those appointments. If not, clear them off and get to work. These tips should give you a fighting chance to finish the year strong. And, if you have some strategies you use to maintain your focus, share them in the comments below and send them out into social media cyberspace with the hashtag...
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