5 tools that give you the confidence to take a vacation
The most important tool you can use to enjoy a real vacation without too many worries is a little thing called “delegation.” However, for those of us – and we are many – who can’t completely let go of the reins when we’re away from our businesses, here are five tools that will give you the confidence to take (and enjoy) a vacation. Social media customer service. You can use Twitter or Facebook – I recommend Twitter – to handle your customer service. This way, you can get a real-time picture of any problems that are brewing back at your business while you’re on the beach. I’ve written on the topic before and Bryan Haines has a great article over on Buffer that goes over 14 examples of businesses using social media for customer service. Slack. Think of Slack as instant messaging on steroids developed expressly for businesses. You can integrate it with all kinds of third-party apps and services, such as Google drive, so sharing progress and ideas in a complicated business environment is easy and immediate. You can also divide your crew into teams so you don’t bother people with messages that don’t concern them. Google Video Hangout. Hate missing those regular morning meetings with your employees? Why not move it to a Google Video Hangout so you can still attend and put in your two cents. Many companies today exist only in the virtual world and they use Google Video Hangouts for their “company” meetings. Basecamp. Do you typically leave a long list of to-do’s when you head out the door for your vacation? With Basecamp, you’ll know exactly when they’ve been completed. And, if you get more bright ideas when you’re poolside in Vegas, you can create another to-do, assign it to someone, and give it a due date. Pipedrive. Most small business owners will want to know how sales are going and be assured that their sales team is keeping the funnel filled and flowing. Pipedrive is an excellent – and simple – customer relationship management system that will get the job done. Also, it’s flexible enough to be used for non-sales processes. If you have anything where employees or customers go through a series of steps, Pipedrive can be set up to handle it. Before I leave this topic and start planning my next vacation, let me mention one more bonus of integrating one or more of these apps or systems into your small business: Your team will be more productive even when you aren’t on...
read morePlay your small business lifeline: Leverage your nearest SBDC
What prevents small business owners from reaching out for help? There are a few good answers to this question: They’re too busy, They don’t know who to ask, and They think they can’t afford it. Do any of these sound familiar? It wouldn’t surprise me if they do, but before I go any further, I want to modify my first reason above to: They think they’re too busy. I’ve helped many small business owners over the years, who wish they would have reached out for help much earlier. Correcting a few problems early on would have prevented years of unnecessary pain and substantially improved their rate of growth. I’m glad you’re here looking for some tips and today the tip I want to share is going to lead you back into your own community…or at worst a nearby community. Have you explored all the resources available at your closest Small Business Development Center (SBDC)? They’re usually free, so there goes the “can’t afford it” argument. SBDCs are nearby Just for the sake of an example, I did a search to see how many SBDCs there are in Kansas. After all, Kansas sits squarely in the middle of the Lower 48 and it’s typical of many other areas in our country. There are no fewer than 13 SBDCs spread out across the state, often associated with a college or university. I didn’t plot them all out on a map but considering that I-70 runs 424 miles across the state, it’s about 35 miles between exits that will take you to an SBDC. In other words, for most Kansans, getting to an SBDC shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes to an hour. Yes, I know they can be located to the north and south as well, but all I’m trying to do here is chip away at the excuse that you don’t have the time to talk to someone or attend a seminar at your nearest SBDC…even if you don’t live in Kansas. You’ll find your local SBDC to be a fantastic source of information and advice on all the “nuts and bolts” issues of running a small business, such as keeping your financials in order (and understood). These foundational issues of running a small business can be the difference between merely creating work for yourself and creating a commercial asset. SBDC advice No matter where you are in the life of your small business, you’ll discover resources that are greatly beneficial. If you’re getting ready to launch a startup, you’ll find advisors to help you. If you’ve been established for a number of years, you’ll be able to get the help you need to take your business to the next level. Are you ready to get started? If you are, then right now there’s really only one thing you need to know: your zip code. Head over to this page where you can search for SBDCs in your area. Enter your zip code in the box and start down the path of additional growth and success. Related: 7 Great Web Resources to Build Your Knowledge and Grow Your...
read moreNew small business health insurance website: An incredibly easy site that works for you
By Susan Solovic, THE Small Business Expert Here are some actual headlines I saw today when I was researching small business health insurance: Forbes: The Cost Of Health Insurance Is A Big Problem For Small Business Huffington Post: The Small Business Health Insurance Roller Coaster – What is Next? New York Post: ObamaCare just killed my health insurance – again I doubt that any of these shock you. For small business owners, navigating the industry to find affordable health insurance has been a major headache for as long as most people can remember. And to be frank, despite good intentions, the Affordable Care Act has, in many ways, made the situation more complicated. Even Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton – a loyal Democrat – just said that The Affordable Care Act is “no longer affordable.” Small biz health and wellness The other part of this issue is that it’s wise for small business owners to encourage employee health and wellness. Healthy employees take fewer sick days and are more productive. This means that you aren’t having people constantly covering for one another trying to get two jobs done during the work day. There’s one more piece of this picture that I need to mention: health insurance is a highly desirable benefit that creates loyalty and helps you recruit and keep high-performing talented professionals. Not all the news about small business health insurance is bad. UnitedHealthcare recently launched a website expressly for the purpose of helping small business owners and their employees get affordable health insurance easily and quickly. It’s great to see someone bringing the power and convenience of an online shopping experience to the small business health insurance market and doing it right. Convenient health insurance site Let me explain what I mean by “doing it right.” I went to the new website, entered my zip code, and the number of employees in my business and immediately had a screen in front of me spelling out the estimated costs for me and my employees for 12 different plans. That’s great, but there’s one little detail that really won me over: They didn’t require me to create an account to get the small business health insurance information I wanted! I do not like commerce websites that promise free information and then make you give them your name, email address, phone number, and in many cases even a credit card number before they will give you the “free” information. In other words, when you head over to the UnitedHealthcare small business health insurance store, you will get the most important information you need in under a minute without having to cough up any personal or business information. Other “doing it right” details: Easy navigation. You can get back to previous screens to change entries with a single click. Flexible options. If you want to add additional plans to give employees more choices, you can do this later; you don’t have to make every decision up front. Information upload. You can upload employee information from Xero, QuickBooks, or Excel files. By the way, every small business owner will have at least two plans to choose from, and many will have 27 plans. As I said above, I was presented with 12 plans. Control health insurance costs The bottom line with health insurance is, literally, the...
read more5 benefits of leveraging the small business checklist
While it doesn’t get loads of attention like some other special days, Checklist Day (October 30) should be on the calendar of every small business owner. Let’s look at five incredible benefits you can get by simply creating good checklists in your small business. Reduce errors. Establishing a checklist for routines, procedures, and processes will assure you that steps don’t get skipped. Further, if team members submit their completed checklists and you review them, it gives you a way to “close the loop” on operations, which is fundamental to quality control. Increase efficiency. Reducing errors by itself will increase efficiency. You’ll also find that over time, people working through the checklists will discover steps that are outdated or otherwise no longer necessary. You can use checklists as a starting point, keeping your eyes always open to finding unnecessary or redundant steps. Train better. There are few better tools in training than the simple checklist. New employees can do their jobs with less supervision when they have good checklists to work from. Take a step toward automation. If you can create an accurate, step-by-step checklist for repetitive tasks, it is the first step toward automation. By the way, you should have checklists for computer-based tasks because they could give you the foundation on which to create software to do operations that you’re currently doing by hand. Provide a basis for “productization.” If you are a service provider or consultant, create a checklist that captures all the things you do to provide your service. You can take that information and then create a product out of your service. When you productize your service, you create a business that is more easily scalable. Vic Dorfman gets into the process in detail in this article he wrote for WPcurve. And, the whole process can start with creating a good checklist for what you do! Checklist design If you have Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Google Docs achieving a good checklist design is not a problem. Word, Excel, and Google Docs have checklist templates ready to use. You’ll find checklist templates for a range of specific uses – such as buying a new house. Even if you can’t find one that meets your needs right “off the shelf,” you can easily edit them. In fact, a good idea is to create your own, custom checklist template with your small business logo etc. In the Microsoft software go to File > New From Template, and then search for “checklist.” If you’re using Google docs head over to this template collection page and search for “checklist.” Armed with either a Word checklist template, Excel checklist template, or Google Docs checklist template, you’ll be able to make professional looking – and extremely useful – checklists for your small business. The Checklist Manifesto In honor of Checklist Day, I’ve written this short “ode to the checklist,” but if you want to delve into the topic in much more depth, grab a copy of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande. It’s a highly rated work where Gawande uses his medical background to demonstrate the importance and the power of checklists. I think that’s about it for this topic today. Excuse me while I check another thing off my...
read moreYour small business online: What do you really need?
When it comes to your small business online presence, how big does it really need to be? While I think it’s true that most small businesses would benefit from a decent-sized website that includes a blog and other elements to aid in marketing, frankly many small businesses can get by with a fairly minimal presence. (And it’s definitely better than no online presence at all!) In fact, a one-page website may be enough to promote your small business online. (And, I would say that a single well-designed and informative page is better than a haphazardly designed multi-page small business website.) Here’s a one-page website for a property used for events that looks great and serves a specific purpose. It’s pretty much intended just to supply guests with directions and give them a good feel about their upcoming experience. Technically and artistically, the design of this site is fairly advanced; nonetheless, you can get some excellent “design clues” from it even if you’re planning something much more basic: Its subject is completely clear: Malibu House and its address. Its design is “airy.” It’s not jammed with type. The graphics are large and bold. Visitors get the information they need in the “Directions” section. There’s no confusion. Currently, this website isn’t being used for marketing. If it was – and there’s a good chance your website will be designed with some marketing intent – it should have a call to action. The CTA can be as simple as urging the visitor to call and having your phone number in clear type. Or you could provide a simple contact form to boost your small business online marketing. I’ve seen other single-page websites that function well for their owners. Freelancers can sometimes get by with a single page. Small local businesses often can as well. But, just because you think you can accomplish your goals in a single web page, don’t think that you can get by with throwing anything up on the old Interweb. In fact, the information and “feel” conveyed by your single webpage may be all a prospect ever knows about you. It has to be good. I’ve given you some design tips above. In addition to those, you need to give serious thought to the colors you use, your logo, and your type faces. These will all be elements within your branding, so you need to get them right the first time. You might find a WordPress theme that works for you or a template at one of the DIY website building services. But if you decide you need something more custom, you’ll want to find a good designer and you really can’t hire the first person who knocks at your door…or responds to your email. Andy Crestodina has written a good article that tells you what kinds of questions you need to ask any prospective website designer. Pay heed. We know that as many as half of all small businesses don’t have a website. It could be that the task seems too big, so some small business owners decide not to deal with it. If that’s you, I hope that my “ode to a one-page website” will make the project seem less daunting and inspire you to finally establish your small business online...
read moreThis week in small business: When is the right time to pivot?
Some small businesses go under because owners think that if they just stick to their original business plan, they’ll eventually be rewarded for their persistence. However, sometimes a pivot is in order, as we see in a couple of excellent articles this week. Leadership, management, and productivity Sometimes survival is all about “the pivot.” Dileep Rao delivers five strategies for adjusting your business plan. And speaking of mid-course corrections, Laura K. Inamedinova tells the story of one entrepreneur who demonstrates the power of pivoting. This cyber security report and related articles provided by AT&T (one of my sponsors) proved very popular with my Twitter followers last week. Check it out. Meet the introverted Australian business coach with a disability who is helping U.S. small businesses “rock the world.” Marketing and sales In this Business-2-Community article, Yash Mehta runs through three ways to boost online business sales. I wonder how many aren’t doing the second strategy listed. In sales, actions speak louder than words. Discover four reasons why starting a sales call with “I want” is a terrible idea. Looking for someone to manage your sales team. Bruce Sevy tells why you shouldn’t look to your top sales people to plug into the position. Jeff Rajeck gives us 10 ways to freshen-up our email marketing. Good, solid, advice. If you’re B2B, you need a LinkedIn marketing strategy. Krystal Overmyer’s ContentStandard article will get you going in the right direction. Do you outsource your online marketing? If so, is it time to move on to a different agency? Jacob Baadsgaard tells us the signs to look for. Growing old is a growth industry. Here are five ways companies are capturing the senior market from Dan Blacharski. This infographic from Vistaprint gives us the main ways people discover small businesses. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation This ranking of the best states in which to start s small business takes into account the best startup activity, business survival rate, cost of living, and other factors. Emily Gruber, CFO/Co-Founder of Apliiq, and Luz Rivas, Founder/Director of DIY Girls, talk about what it’s really like to be a female entrepreneur. Staring failure straight in the eye in your startup? Chris Myers delivers a road map on how to navigate the “entrepreneurial valley of death. Politics, government, and the economy Wonder why the U.S. economy seems sluggish? Kevin Drum takes on that question in this Mother Jones article. Writing for Forbes, John Mauldin outlines an infrastructure plan that he says will save the U.S....
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