Free (and honest) Small Business Owner Job Description
I have stressed the importance of creating job descriptions before you start hiring to expand your small business. But I recently realized that I’ve never discussed a job description for the actual small business owner. Instead of discussing it, I decided to write it. See how much of it describes your job. Small business owner job description We have a great need for small business owners. There are openings in every state of the union and unless desired on the candidate’s part, relocation is not required. This is a long-term, full-time position that requires total dedication to the company. The successful candidate will have the perform following duties, have the listed abilities, and meet the educational requirements below. Be certain to review the compensation expectations before applying. Duties The small business owner is responsible for all aspects of the day-to-day operations and strategic planning for the future. Due to these broad duties, the successful candidate will be able to perform the following functions: Exert financial control and planning. The small business owner must be able to understand the financial principles necessary for small business success. These include, payroll, taxation, inventory, cash flow, margins (gross and net), as well as other industry-specific financial areas. Manage purchasing department. Running a small business, even if it’s service oriented, requires a lot of purchasing. These can be raw materials, finished products, and general supplies required for overhead. Assuring your company gets the best possible prices is important in order to be competitive and successful. Handle general administrative responsibilities. Scheduling employees and jobs along with all the various functions performed by a human resources department will be part of your standard duties. Provide customer service. As the small business owner, you are ultimately responsible for the satisfaction of your customers or clients. You may delegate some of the areas (see Delegating below) but you need to provide sufficient oversight to be assured that you are meeting customer expectations. Head up sales and marketing. Nothing happens in your small business until a sale is made, therefore your most important duty is to be certain that sales are being made. This requires skills in marketing, advertising, and sales. Abilities The small business owner must be competent and effective in several general areas. Sometimes these abilities are natural, sometimes they must be learned…and sometimes they are learned the hard way. Goal setting. Although small business owners are responsible for all of the duties listed above, they must still maintain a strategic outlook and set goals for the organization. These goals must be short term, medium term and long term. Delegating. The successful small business owner recognizes when help is needed and understand his or her shortcomings. Therefore, you must wisely delegate tasks and specific areas of responsibility to others. Team building. To scale a small business, it requires an ever-growing team of loyal employees. The successful small business owner knows how to work with others to get the best from them. Communicating. Virtually every item on this Small Business Owner Job Description requires excellent communication skills. You need to know how to communicate verbally in both one-on-one and groups settings and you also must be able to communicate via digital technology – social media, chat apps, email, etc. Problem solving. The path to success for the small...
read moreQuick guide to online invoicing for small businesses
By Mark Thomasson The traditional way of invoicing has many limitations. It takes a lot of time which you could use for business development and strategic thinking. For most people, operational details are boring and time-consuming, especially for small business owners. You must manually generate the invoice, send it by mail to the client, and wait for their check. There is a way to simplify the entire invoicing process and improve your business. Online invoicing made a major breakthrough in achieving cash flow. Also, it´s automated, so the online invoicing software does everything for you. With it, you don’t have to think about billing due dates. It keeps track of payment status and an amount of every client´s debt. These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many of them. When you try an online invoice system such as ours, you’ll be sorry why you didn’t know about it earlier. If you are a small business and you want to show your full professionalism to your clients, you must master invoicing process. You can create and manage your invoices using this simple guide to online invoicing for small businesses. First, it’s important to format your invoices correctly Although this process is online and you have many beautiful and functional templates to choose, there is some formatting that you must standardize. If you choose a corporate invoice template, legal invoice template, catering invoice template or any other, all your invoices must have the same format. Fortunately, that is the rule that most templates follow. So it doesn’t matter which industry you’re in, there are always invoice themes to reflect that and integrate with your branding strategy. What should the invoice header look like? On the left top of every invoice, there needs to be the name of your company and logo, or your full name if you are a freelancer. Under that, you should list your contact information: address, city, state, ZIP code, country, your phone and email. The client’s contact information Beneath header, on the right side of the invoice, add your client’s information such as: company, client´s name, address, phone, and email. If you do freelancing and you don’t know the address, then it is all right to add your client’s name and email address only. Invoice number and date On the opposite side of the client’s information, you should add: invoice number, preparation date, payment due date and preferred payment option or currency. Set a due date of 30, 45 or 60 days from the preparation date by client’s pay cycle. Listed items In the central part of the invoice (in a tabular display) list all the products or services that you delivered to your client. Include these six columns: Item: This is the short description of your delivered products or services. Quantity (or Hours): This includes quantity of sold products or how many hours you worked on projects. Price (Rate): In this column, write the price you are charging for products or your hourly rate. Discount: If you give a discount to the client it should be emphasized here. Tax: Include taxes here. Line total (Amount): This is the total charged amount that is for every product or service. Finally, calculate the Total, which is the Subtotal (sum of Line total) plus tax, delivery...
read moreYelp killed the ‘soft opening’ – What you can do about it
I have a friend who spent most of his life in California. He lives in Tennessee now and loves it, but he’s always on the lookout for a good Mexican restaurant. He’s only found a few that live up to his expectations. He was excited when he saw that a new Mexican Restaurant was about to open near him. One afternoon he decided to go online and check out the menu. Unfortunately, the restaurant didn’t have a website (mistake number one), but he saw that there were a couple of reviews on Yelp. Power of negative reviews The reviews were written by locals who, like him, were anxiously waiting for a good Mexican restaurant to open in their neighborhood. Unfortunately, both reviews panned the food. The service was okay, but the quality of the food didn’t pass muster (mistake number two). Maybe the restaurant will see those reviews, take them to heart, and improve the quality of the food. Maybe locals will give the restaurant a second chance. Those are both big “maybes.” However, one thing is certain: In our day of instant online reviews, the importance of your first impression is critical. It’s a cliché to say that you only get one opportunity to make a first impression, but that is hyper-true now when people can post Yelp or Google reviews the moment they set down their forks. And, if you make a bad first impression on one customer, it can become the vicarious first impression of one hundred or a thousand other potential new customers. For years, new restaurants and stores have been using a tactic called the “soft opening.” Before declaring an official “grand opening,” these businesses open their doors with little or no advertising so customers begin to come in in smaller numbers. It helps the business owners iron out problems that would be magnified if they were inundated with customers during a heavily promoted official grand opening. There are a lot of advantages to using the soft opening, as Dave Carter outlines in this article. Modify the soft opening However, there is nothing to stop soft opening customers from posting online reviews, so that strategy alone may not always be the best way to work out the bugs. Today, it may be necessary to organize a “pre-soft opening” with invited guests who understand that they are “test customers.” People in this special group would need to agree to two things: Not to post any online review, and Provide you with an honest, anonymous review. In other words, say to them, “If you were going to review my business on Yelp, what would you say? How many stars would you give it?” Provide a means for them to give you this information without revealing their identities. It’s imperative that you know all the bad along with all the good. Although I’ve been using a restaurant as my example here, any local business that provides a product or service and is subject to online reviews should use some variation of this strategy. Get ready for Broadway Broadway musical and play producers have been using this technique for generations. They try out their shows on the road in smaller communities and even have preview nights in New York when reviewers aren’t allowed to write about their shows....
read more4 partners or hires to propel your business growth
If you’ve set your success goals high– and are honest with yourself – you know that you alone can’t do everything. You read about the “fog of war” and sometimes I think there’s a “fog of running or starting a small business” when you can get so focused on making it through the day or week that you fail to see the bigger picture. Let’s look at an important piece of that bigger picture: What addition(s) to your management or ownership would best position you for the growth you want to achieve. Where you are in the life of your small business will, in large part, determine the position of this person or persons. If you’re just getting off the ground, you might consider bringing on a partner. If reducing your ownership share isn’t an option, that channels you toward making an addition to your management team or hiring consultants. You need to really analyze your weaknesses and uncover where a strategic addition would benefit you the most. The areas to explore are: Operations, Technology, Sales and Marketing Financial If you’re in the startup mode, I would add “fundraising” to this list. However, the background of a person good at fundraising often overlaps with sales and marketing or financial professionals. Let’s look at each of these categories to help you get started with your analysis. Operations. Constant incremental improvements in the operations side of your business can pay off with dramatically increased profits. If you’ve been doing the same things the same way for a long time, or your business is new and you’re “flying by the seat of your pants,” a skilled professional who knows how to get things done efficiently, may be ideal for your company. Another element of this is that it might be time to outsource some of your operations. You may even want to consider going overseas to get some things done. Do you have the time or experience to do this? If not, consider adding a Mr. or Ms. Fixit to your team or ownership. Technology. Companies that best leverage technology are the most likely to succeed today. If you’re limping by on old systems kludged together to “run” your business, bolstering your technology talent could be what you need to get to the next level. Do a technology audit. See how your systems compare to the current best practices in your industry. You might bring in a professional to look at what you do and make suggestions. That person might end up working with you to upgrade your systems. Sales and marketing. I doubt I need to emphasize the importance of this category. The question you need to ask yourself is if your sales and marketing efforts currently have the kind of direction they need to achieve the level of success you’ve always hoped to achieve. Look at sales and marketing from a strategic point of view. Is there, in fact, a strategy in place? How is your territory or client base growing? If you think you can always milk the same cow, you’ll find that the cow soon starts producing less and less milk until it eventually goes dry. Financial. You may know your product or service better than anyone in the world or be able to sell ice to Eskimos,...
read moreYou vote has been counted: A collection of your most useful small business articles
With so many ways to measure web traffic, page views, and clicks, it’s easy to crowd-source information on a lot of different topics. I went back through our click statistics to find the most popular articles that I’ve linked to over the last year or so. Most of these were included in our regular “This week in small business” feature of curated content. Think of it as voting by clicking! If you missed any of these “crowd pleasers” the first time around, here they are again, and they are just as relevant now as they were when we originally featured them. Social media marketing 3 social marketing tools that come with super powers, by Jim Belosic. Jim discusses three of his favorite tools and each one covered in this article performs an entirely different function. Great curation. 110+ Top Bloggers And Entrepreneurs Share Their Most Successful Social Media Action, by Minuca Elena. As you know from my introduction, I’m a fan of crowd sourcing and this article crowd sources social media marketing strategies, with the “crowd” composed of experts. Taylor Swift’s Seven Marketing Lessons, by Morgan Chessman. If you can get past the GIF that greets you in this article, you’ll get some solid advice on how you should present yourself in the social media. Five Small Business Marketing Ideas That Won’t Break the Bank, by Susan Solovic…hey that’s me! This article I wrote for Guidant Financial continues to be popular. The advice is solid and serves both brick-and-mortar and online businesses. (Some non-digital marketing advice here.) Content Marketing Questions: How To Do Marketing With No Budget? By Michael Brenner. The title of this article is a little misleading. What Michael actually does here is answer some very good and basic questions about content marketing. I’m willing to bet that you’ll find a question you’ve been wanting to ask someone. Community-powered marketing succeeds where traditional marketing fails, by Jackie Yeaney. Jackie does a great job explaining the differences between push and pull marketing and gives a ton of advice on how to start “pulling” customers in via your marketing. 4 Tips for Small-business Retail Marketing for 2016, by Armando Roggio. Prioritizing is big with Armando and here he shows you four areas where retailers need to prioritize their marketing. Instagram – When images matter most: 19 Marketing Tips for Success, by Adam Houlahan. Instagram’s importance to marketing is booming and I just read that Buffer is now able to share images to Instagram. These tips will give you a good foundation for getting started. 5 Overlooked Features of Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy, by, Krystal Overmyer. For B2B marketing, LinkedIn may be your most powerful weapon, yet few really take advantage of it. Krystal’s observations will help. 5 Marketing Technology Trends on the Horizon, by Rohit Roy. No compilation would be complete without a quick glance to the future and a lot of what Rohit says here is already happening. Alternatives to social media marketing Take your marketing out of home to cut through the clutter, by Catherine Monson. Catherine makes a strong case for outdoor advertising. It can be cost effective and an excellent way to rise above the online din. I’m a big believer in sometimes walking the “road less traveled by” when it comes to marketing. Email...
read moreThis week in small business: Gangster, supermodel, and startups
We are chock-full of entrepreneurial wisdom and inspiration this week. Supermodel Kathy Ireland checks in with her story, we go on a journey with a former gang member, and there’s even advice for Millennials who have entrepreneurial dreams but are burdened by student loan debt. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Small business owners can learn a lot from startup entrepreneurs. “What exactly?” you might ask. Well, read this Forbes article to answer that question. Being an entrepreneur is not all high fives and hugs, says John Quick, as he breaks it down into three main points in this piece. Talk about the college of hard knocks! Gang-member-turned-millionaire, entrepreneur Ryan Blair has some brilliant business advice. Not every SEO technique is equally useful to everyone: Four things every entrepreneur needs to know about SEO. Supermodel Kathy Ireland is more likely to be on the cover of Forbes today than on Cosmo. The story of her journey is inspiring. For startups, capital is ammunition, not oxygen, cautions Jenny Lefcourt in Forbes. After losing family in the World Trade Center and to cancer, Lori Barzvi channeled her grief into a business plan and now has the number-one rated product on Amazon. Listen up Millennials: Don’t let student loan debt stop you from pursuing your entrepreneurial dream. Marketing and sales Addressing the 18th annual Women in Business Conference, Ann Marie van den Hurk lays out the necessities: business card, website, and the right social media presence. And, to help you pick the right social media platform, check out this Business-2-Community piece by Aleh Barysevich. Wanna be a rock star? Would you settle for becoming a digital marketing star? If so, here’s the article for you. Marcela De Vivo goes through all the steps required to create content for your social media sales funnel. If you’re still trying traditional marketing strategies to grow your brand, you need to give this Hubspot article a quick read. Leadership, management, and productivity Want real, in-the-trenches instruction on how to start a successful business from scratch? My sponsored free course at openSAP is now open, but time is limited. He (or she) who conquers the email in-box wins. Check out these tips and tactics from Dr. Mercola. More scary than Halloween: Rhonda Abrams’ eight things small business should fear! Stephanie Newby goes over what you need to remember when you’re suffering through a career setback....
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