Millennials and the future value of your business: You snooze, you lose!
There’s a great big elephant in the room and it’s not being discussed in the detail and depth that it deserves. I’m talking about the impact the Millennial generation is having and will continue to have over the next several decades. Here’s the starting point for discussion: Millennials are the biggest demographic to ever hit the U.S. economy. Yes, even bigger than the much ballyhooed Baby Boomers. You’ve probably seen a cartoon of a snake who has just swallowed a rabbit or something. It has that huge lump working its way down its skinny snake body. That’s a pretty fair representation of Millennials working their way through our society and economy over the next several decades. It will take a while for them to be completely digested…and understood! Millennials and future value I’ve discussed selling to Millennials and working with Millennials previously, but today I want to approach those topics from a slightly different angle: If you are considering an exit strategy for your business, you need to be one of the best at hiring Millennials and marketing to them. Whether you want to build your business then flip it to raise money for your next project or you want to sell your business to fund your retirement, you need to be a leader with Millennials. Think of it this way: How will your business be valued if sales to Baby Boomers make up the biggest share of your revenue? How will your business be valued if your key employees are older and nearing retirement themselves? On the other hand, if Millennials are a vibrant and profitable market for you and your team has talented Millennials in key positions, that should boost the value of your small business when you decide it’s time to sell. Further, you need to appreciate the fact that Millennials in management positions make decisions that vary significantly from the decisions made by older individuals, such as Baby Boomers. A recent survey by Magisto makes this very clear and I want to share some of the details so you’ll keep an open mind to the kinds of strategies Millennials will bring to your small business when you give them decision-making authority. Millennials and video marketing Magisto studied the most powerful shifts in small and medium-sized business marketing, and contrasted the strategies employed by Millennials versus those used by Baby Boomers. They found a huge move to video marketing. The survey found that Millennials are 136 percent more likely to create videos for posting on social media than Baby Boomers. On the other hand, Baby Boomers were 112 percent more likely to put their marketing money into radio ads, when compared to the Millennials. By the way, Millennials completely refuse to invest in traditional television ads – none surveyed said they put their money into TV advertising! We all need to accept the fact that Millennials do not respond to verbal reasoning in the same way older generations have. We hear the term “visual learners” a lot today and – for better or for worse – it looks like Millennials are, in large part, visual learners. And, this lesson applies to your marketing strategies. Empower bright Millennials Millennials in business leadership positions know how to communicate with their fellow Millennials better than anyone, so you need...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Is community-powered marketing right for you?
Community-based marketing, email marketing, and how to handle a hostile work environment are just a few of the extremely diverse topics we’re directing you to this week. There’s something for everyone. Really. Leadership, management, and productivity How do you maintain “the personal touch” in an increasingly digital world? Allan Hall has some ideas. Today, business flows to those with the best customer experience. Here are three ways to put your customers first. In a recent survey, only 12 percent of small business owners said they were interested in an ecommerce presence; Are small business owners throwing away their future? SCORE Counselor Dick Milon gives practical advice on how to find the right talent for your small business. Customer engagement is where the heart is. This Kissmetrics blog covers how the right analytics can strengthen customer engagement. Not a fun topic, but an important one: How to handle a hostile work environment. Believe it or not: Texting and online chat get a “like” from small business owners! Marketing and sales If traditional B2B marketing efforts are failing for you, it may be time for a community-powered approach to marketing. YouTube is beginning to help small business owners with video ad production…for free! This MovableInk article delivers a lot of useful email marketing info, which will always be a cornerstone of digital marketing. Although you may not have individuals for each and every role, you still need to understand all the players on a comprehensive content marketing team. As part of a series on how to build a business and lifestyle, this article covers “conversations that sell” and how to convert a lead into a client. Survey after survey prove the increasing importance of video. Here are five essential factors of great video marketing. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Startup marketing requires a special skill set and special strategies. Matthew Toren relates seven creative strategies to consider if your startup budget is tight. On the same topic, this article suggests that Apple’s “marketing first” strategy could work for your startup. Politics, government and the economy Heather Long offers 10 key facts about the U.S. economy…and with this economy facts are a precious commodity. Do you know at which point your hobby becomes a business? The IRS may be interested in this. Check out this article by Barbara Weltman. Hard data: The Cass Freight Index reflects a slowing economy via freight shipments and spending. Congress is taking some steps to fight the Department of Labor’s new rules on who can be considered a salaried employee and who must be paid overtime...
read moreStuck selling a commodity? Learn how this independent rose seller multiplied his margins
You could order online and send a dozen roses to someone you love for about $20. I just checked. So why would you – or anyone else – pay five to 10 times that much? Before we answer that question, let’s examine the florist industry and e-commerce. If you have been a student of e-commerce, you’ll know that ordering flower arrangements via the Internet has been around since the beginning of e-commerce. Much of this business now works like this: You order online, then A local florist, who is part of a network of florists, fulfills the order. It’s a great system and in many ways it’s a precursor of what Uber, Airbnb, Lyft and others are doing today. A central ordering system is used to parcel out business to local providers. The efficiency of this system explains why you can get a dozen roses for 20 bucks. But let’s be honest: There can’t be a lot of margin in a 20-dollar bouquet of roses. How to transform a ‘commodity’ But if you head over to the Roseshire website, you’ll discover roses being sold for five to 10 times the price of the commoditized e-commerce roses. How can they do it? And, according to sales figures Roseshire co-founder Nasim Pakmanesh recently discussed during his appearance on the Mixergy podcast, they are selling a lot of roses at that significantly higher price point. I think the answer is captured in one of the links Roseshire has on its home page. At the top of their home page a link titled “Experience.” They want you to know that buying and even more importantly, receiving, a bouquet of Roseshire roses is an experience; it is not a commodity! I want you to really appreciate this point because it’s critical to small business success. Pakmanesh has created an aura of “experience” around selling roses that enables him to differentiate his business from all of the garden variety (apologies for the pun) florists selling in this highly competitive market. If you explore the Roseshire website, you’ll see that the company’s packaging is upscale and that they include custom-designed cards in their orders. Further, the care they give their product is incredible. Frankly, aren’t these the kind of messages and feelings you want to send to someone when you’re presenting them with a dozen roses? On the other hand, what’s the message you’re sending to the recipient when there’s nothing special about how the rose order has been handled, packaged and delivered? Position for your business for pride Hallmark used to use the slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best.” I think this sentiment is the foundation of the success at Roseshire and note how people . (Does anyone not care enough to give the best?) As you examine your small business, ask yourself this question, “What about my business tells prospects to do business with me ‘when they care enough’ to want the best?” If you’re trying to improve your margins and differentiate your business, you should have a good answer for this question. Let’s look at how your differentiation strategy must harmonize with your marketing and advertising strategies. Pakmanesh made an excellent point on this issue. If you do a Google search for a dozen roses, you won’t find his...
read moreFree tools to optimize your all-important local listings
A funny thing is happening as Internet speeds get faster and faster – users are getting less and less patient. I think this is even more dramatic in the mobile world, because when people are using their smartphones for information while they’re out in the community, they are often trying to get somewhere or accomplish something in real time. In other words, they aren’t sitting in front of their desktop computers the evening before, putting together plans for the following day. Understanding and appreciating this fact is crucial for local small businesses. The modern adage, “You snooze, you lose,” definitely applies in mobile computing/marketing. Having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory, but it takes more than that to be sure that your business is fully “present” and quickly accessible in the mobile computing world. Another important element of your mobile marketing and mobile SEO (search engine optimization) is your accurate presence in the many sites that specialize in local listings. Several companies are competing for your business in this area. They help you list your business, keep it updated and accurate, and provide other related services. Some offer a few basic tools for free, then prices go up as you buy more bells and whistles. I’ll touch on these points and give you some links in a moment, but first I wanted to introduce you to a very important free tool provided by SEO Bandwagon and Yext. Enter your business name, address, and telephone number in this tool at SEO Bandwagon and you’ll quickly get a report that summarizes information about your business that is found on more than 60 sites that feature local listings. There’s a good chance you’ll discover than many include basic location and contact information errors. These can be disastrous for your small business. The report, however, does not cover other critical elements, such as the hours you are open for business. I just did a quick search using the address and phone number for a small investment firm I know and there were several address and phone number errors. Further, a handful of the listing sites had no information for the business. If you have the time, you can deal with getting your local listings done correctly yourself. You can take the campaign further with many levels of paid services. At the bottom of this, I have a short list of companies that specialize in this area. Some have basic services available at no cost. However, if you haven’t already claimed your local listing on Google, this is a mandatory first step. Head over to this page on Google to input your up-to-date and correct information. You’ll have the opportunity to upload pictures and add more details, so be prepared with graphics and information that will help market your business. With that out of the way, explore the following list of service providers that will help you get all the other non-Google local listings lined up properly for you: MyBusinessListingManager Universal Business Listing Whitespark Localeze Yext When one of today’s increasingly impatient mobile searchers is out looking for a business in your niche in your neighborhood, if you’ve taken care of all the details I’ve outlined here, you’ll have a great chance at landing a new...
read moreCracking the Secrets of Restaurant Tipping Policies
How are restauranteurs Danny Meyer and Bob Merritt like canaries in a coal mine? Coal miners, as you probably know, used to take canaries down into the mines with them to test the air. If the birds died, it meant that the air was unsafe for the miners. Meyer and Merritt have recently provided a similar service to small business restaurant owners. Toward the end of 2015, each decided to experiment with no-tipping policies in their restaurants. Expensive vs moderately priced restaurants It’s important to put this in perspective. Danny Meyer operates some very high-end restaurants in New York City as part of the Union Square Hospitality Group. These are five-star restaurants – not only in the quality of the food but in the price as well. Bob Merritt, chief executive officer of Ignite Restaurant Group, runs the Joe’s Crab Shack chain of seafood restaurants. Any restaurant that has “Joe’s” in the name serves solid food at reasonable prices. This background is necessary to understand because we’ve been treated to public experiments in which two very different types of restaurants tried the same radical change in policy by eliminating tipping. And, as perhaps we should have suspected, these experiments seem to have produced very different results. Potential benefits of no tipping There are some very good ideas and principles behind the no-tipping policy. First, as Shep Hyken wrote here at the time, good service is every employee’s responsibility, not just those who get the tips. Second, eliminating tipping allowed for a slight rise in prices, which would be used to increase wages across the board. The hope was to improve pay for everyone, acknowledge their roles in customer service, and encourage their commitment to great customer service. The early results are in: In Meyer’s restaurants the change seems to be working, but Merritt has already dropped the policy. Meyer first implemented the policy in The Modern back in November and he reported that the restaurant had its biggest December ever. However, as Meyer himself noted in an interview with New York Eater, The Modern enjoyed a lot of press coverage prior to the policy change and that would have contributed to some of the restaurant’s traffic. As he implements the policy in other restaurants, they won’t have that advantage. It’s a no-go at Joe’s The experiment with no tipping at Joe’s Crab Shack didn’t last very long; it quickly dropped the policy at 14 of its 18 trial locations. “Our customers and staff spoke very loudly, and a lot of them voted with their feet,” Merritt said. While experimenting with changes like these can be worthwhile, I’m glad that these two well-heeled restaurant companies went first and were willing to be very public about their results. They have saved many small business people who own independent restaurants a lot of trouble. If you’re operating at the top end of the pricing spectrum, you might want to try no tipping. However, if you’re battling it out among moderately priced restaurants, don’t bother. (I think it’s interesting to note that no-tipping seems to work at both ends of the pricing spectrum: fast food restaurants are generally no-tip eateries, and high-end restaurants can go that route if they so desire.) There’s one more lesson to be learned here: Keep an eye on...
read moreThe Two Big Keys to Online Small Business Success
In years gone by – and this holds true for many small business owners still today – the keys to success were often relatively few and could be mastered by a single person. Let me give you a very simple example. Individuals starting a small business that revolved around outside sales could pack up their samples in their cars and then go around and make sales calls. They already had the knowledge to drive the car, so if they were good at engaging prospects, and they had the right solutions, success would usually follow. Two elements of success Today, however, a lot of small business success – even for non-ecommerce companies – depends on strategies carried out in the online environment. And, there are two major components to achieving online business success: Properly working with the realities of the Internet, and Properly understanding and addressing the psychology of your prospects. Although the Internet is a beast made up of bits and bytes and powered by flowing electrons, I like to think about this technical side of small business success today as almost “mechanical.” You have to set up various pipelines, feed search engines the right fuel, boost the speed of your website, hook up an auto-answering service for customer inquiries, etc. It’s really like one huge, digital Rube Goldberg machine that needs to be running smoothly – with everything happening in the right order at the right time – for you to be successful. The other part of this, the psychology, presents entirely different challenges, and these can be quite subtle. You need to understand what motivates your prospects. You need to be able to think like they think so you can engage them in ways that will make them respond in the manner you need them to respond. This understanding is critical no matter what your end goals are. It’s important whether you want to ultimately make a sale, or whether you just need to collect email addresses. Personal contact required By the way, this gets to one of the reasons why I always encourage founders to continue making direct contact with customers. The small business owners I referred to at the top – those who drove from client to client, engaging each one – had a built-in advantage: Their personal contact helped them understand their customers better and build relationships. Let’s pull this together now. Considering the two big keys to online small business success that I’ve outlined here, how many of those keys do you personally hold? If we can be honest with ourselves, I think most of us would say that we had much better command of one compared to the other. Where is your strength? Are you an Internet guru who knows how to magically weave all the elements of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, website user experience (UX) design, landing pages, pop-up boxes and all of the other online elements? Or do you have a complete grasp of your prospects and what it is about your solution that makes them fall in love with your product or service? Who completes you? Unless you’re that one-in-a-thousand individual who is incredibly competent on both the technical side and the people side of your business, you need to bolster your weaker area with either a partner, employees or...
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