When are you going to give up your Small Business?

I must say, it is a painful question to ask. But a certain point on the first few months of your small business operations, discouragement, sometimes even despair, starts lurking its ugly head and taunt you to give up. Especially, when the sales and income you projected are not being realized; when payments from clients or customers are not coming in on time; when your suppliers starts knocking at your delayed payments; when customers start pouring their complaints; when the inflation rates soared high; when you can’t hardly pay the salaries of your employees from your gross sales; and the lists of your setbacks seem endless –reason dictates that you give-up your business before bankruptcy hit you.

You tried to go back to the drawing board and start reviewing your business plan, reinvent your business processes and strategies, and still nothing seems to work. Will you throw the towel and close shop?

You are losing money more than how you could even count them. Bankruptcy inched little by little its way to your door –is it time to bail out?

I know what is going on in your head. You are probably reasoning, and gut feeling that if you can just hang-on for another month, the tide may turn in your favor, your business will pick up its stride and starts delivering what you have carefully written in your business plan. So, you convinced yourself to continue, and will try a little harder.

I remember Craig Newmark, of the very popular and successful Craig List, replying when asked about the key to his business success:

“We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.”

Underscore that word again: persistence. More often, the real key and impetus for business success is persistence. As Thomas Edison puts it wisely:

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

However, a good and prudent small business owner or entrepreneur also knows:

• when to quit and start all over again. Quitting here does not mean giving up entirely on business venturing. When solid facts present themselves to you, and say that it is time to close shop –you do. Then you start all over again. This is a practical approach when you do not want to face bankruptcy and you cut your losses at source.

• how to learn from failures, again, like Thomas Edison who painstakingly invented the light bulb amidst thousands of failed experiments: “If I find 10,000 ways something will not work, I have not failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

So, when are you going to give up your business and close shop?

Here a few practical business notes you might want to consider:

1. Make an objective analysis or audit of your business in its entirety. Ask the assistance of an expert if you must. Because, there is always the tendency that we are so immersed in our business operations that we become blinded to a lot things. A third party professional can help you with an objective assessment of your business’ health.


2. Read and study economic indicators, like inflation rates and forex, in relation to your small business.


3. Look at your competitors’ performance. Are they on the same boat as you are? Or, are they doing something that you do not know? Learn from them.


4. Consider new technology and new way of doing business, yours might be obsolete.

From these, make a sound decision.

Now, when are you going to give up your business and close shop?

> Read the rest of this entry

Small Business Planning and Business Common Sense

When I started out in business, I spent a great deal of time researching every detail that might be pertinent to the deal I was interested in making. I still do the same today. People often comment on how quickly I operate, but the reason I can move quickly is that I’ve done the background work first, which no one usually sees. I prepare myself thoroughly, and then when it is time to move ahead, I am ready to sprint. ~Donald Trump

If you have only 5 minutes to solve a business problem, you need at least the equivalent time to plan on how to solve it. Better yet, twice the amount solving it.

There are only very few business owners who never plan -they are the exceptions rather than the rules, and they are indeed exceptional in their crafts. Gifted with business intuitions and guts, they succeed. However, if you do not belong to these exceptional entities, common sense dictates that in any business endeavors, it is imperative to plan. To put it bluntly, in fact, business planning is plain common sense.

Business Planning is essential. It encompasses all the goals, strategies, and actions that you project, to ensure your business’s success. Sounds high-sounding, isn’t it? In simpler terms, think of business planning as being broken into two concepts: the profit-making side and the contingent side.

Profit making is your main business agenda, otherwise, you might want to consider building a charity organization instead, or go broke like me at the outset. XD . In this stage, you carefully and meticulosuly allocate your resources to create a viable business that will ensure you profit in the long run. Therefore, you look at your material, operational, selling and HR or people costs. You lay down these items in your business blue print. This ‘blue print’ is a dynamic document that needs to be updated throughout the life cycle of your business. You might want it in a soft format for easier updating. Microsoft Project is an excellent software tool for this ( That is not a product endorsement silly. XD)

Some business owners make business planning once, that is at the start. Some never, while others do it annually. IMO, and again, common sense dictates, business planning is most effective when it is done frequently and consistently in predetermined intervals. Schedule your frequency palnning, commit to it, and make sure that you do it religiously. Business planning is a dynamic process of reviewing progress on business goals and targets and setting new ones, that is why you have to do this frequently.

The other major aspect of business planning is contingent planning or contingency business planning. This aspect focuses on dealing with business crises, assessing beforehand the possible critical devastating scenarios (business threats) even before they occur. Insuring your business is only one part of contingency planning. A business contingency plan is a comprehensive and documented implementation plan to deal with perceived emergencies, events, or even new information affecting or may affect the viability of your business. Some calls this Risk Management. At this stage of your planning, you will assess your business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). Based on these assessments, you will lay down the implementing mechanisms that will shelter your business from any of these perceived possible crises and scenarios.

If your committed to succeed in your business, then, it is but common sense to plan. Otherwise,

“if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Am I making sense here? Your comments please.

> Read the rest of this entry

BPO: A Small Business Alternative

Running a small business can be too complex sometimes, which I believe need not be. Simplifying and improving processes can save you manhours, resources, and money; and it can also increase your productivity and most important of all, your profitability by focusing more on customers’ demand fulfillment.

Have a quick audit of your business processes and see where you can apply BPO or Business Process Outsourcing. Zero-in on those processes and see how you can increase your competitiveness and improve your efficiency by outsourcing. You will be surprised that you can in fact save more if you outsource these processes.

When you outsource, you can easily manage your order fulfillment because of your streamlined operations and business processes. You will be employing less people this way. Your other resources can now be channeled to the most important aspects of your business like R & D or Research and Development, Market Analysis, Strategic Business Planning, among others. Product fulfillment like packaging and or certain critical production operations, can be outsourced too. What you need to do is make a thorough process inventory and analysis to pinpoint these areas.

Do business smartly, outsource your important business processes.

> Read the rest of this entry

Mailing Leads for Your Sales and Marketing Campaign

One of the crucial lessons I learned from corporate selling is getting quality mailing leads that are likely to be converted into sales. An inexperienced sales representative would out rightly tear a couple of pages from the telephone directory or yellow pages for his leads and go on ‘cold calls’ or starts faxing proposals. Inevitably, the result is frustrations and wasted efforts.

Generating leads is simpler, convenient, and effective today with American Heritage Data Corporation. They provide marketing list and direct marketing solutions to businesses of all sizes. In fact, if you are targeting a specific niche like potential borrowers, they can provide you a mortgage mailing list that you can start with for a small fee.

So why not simplify your sales and marketing campaign and start selling with quality leads.

> Read the rest of this entry

Protect your Business Data with an Anti Spam filtering Mechanism

I remembered receiving an email sometime in June 2000 from one of my staff with a subject heading, “I love you” and an attachment text entitled, “love letter for you.” I was, of course, surprised and at the same time elated. Wow! I have a secret admirer (lover lol) from one my pretty staff. Little did I know that the email was not actually sent by her. I clicked on the attachment to read the ‘letter’ but there was none. Instead, funny things happened afterwards. My MIS staff reported that our mail server was infected by the ‘love bug.’

The ‘love bug’ or ‘I love you virus’ is actually a worm encrypted as VBS script attached to emails.

“Its massive spread moved westward as workers arrived at their offices and encountered messages generated by people from the East. Because the virus used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from an acquaintance and so might be considered "safe", providing further incentive to open them. All it took was a few users at each site to access the VBS attachment to generate the thousands and thousands of e-mails that would cripple e-mail systems under their weight, not to mention overwrite thousands of files on workstations and accessible servers.” (Source: Wikipedia)

It wrought a damage amounting to $5.5 billion approximately, before an anti-virus was developed to counter it.

If your network or system does not have an Anti Spam Filtering mechanism, you are making your business data vulnerable to possible malicious access and attacks like what the ‘love bug’ did in 2000. Stop threats before they reach your network with a Barracuda Spam Firewall. Enterprise class protection is now affordable to the small medium sized businesses like yours.

• Nothing to purchase, install, manage or maintain
• Your email passes through our filters before reaching your network
• Powered by Hosted Barracuda , a worldwide leader in email and web security

Email has now become the standard tool for business communication and therefore you have the responsibility to protect yourself and your business associated from any possible threats. Threats over the net will always be there. A simple spam mail is no longer simply an added memory grabber in your inbox, it could be a malicious script that is ready do harm on your sensitive files, which could mean unnecessary losses and/ or cost on your part. By all means, make that small investment and protect your business.

> Read the rest of this entry

Sales Management is about Relationship Management

During the early years of my career, I actually moonlighted into sales for more than 4 years then I went back to my first love, i.e., Human Resource Management. I remember being asked on an interview for my first sales Job for Xerox: What’s common between Human Resource Management and Sales Management? I answered confidently: People Management. Further, I said, in HRM you manage people within the organization, while in sales you manage those outside the organization. I got the job, and so my immersion in sales management begun.

My answer during that interview was immediately tested during my sales calls. I realized that selling is building relationships. You do not simply shoved products to your potential customers. They expect that you provide value and credibility more than what your product offers. And this can only be accomplished through relationship building.

How many SME’s (Small and Medium Enterprises) know that basic sales principle? Or narrowly, how many sales people know selling is about relationship building?

John Huggart, founder of Sales Positive, believes that sales is a profession and should be recognized as such. Further, he believes that the cost of winning and keeping customers is an investment and management process that must be measured and managed. His approach lies on the basic principle of customer relationships building. To this end, he emphasizes the core value and discipline of aligning all efforts and investments towards assessing and refining the sales processes and activities to produced maximum results and profits.

His consultancy outfit provides strategic sales consulting and services that enable companies to grow and lift profits. It also offers Sales Audit that provides a comprehensive review of sales capability, functions, and marketing alignments; and a Sales Survey that scan your market for sales challenges that need to be addressed. The results derived from these exercises then become the basis for practical and profitable recommendations for change.

Getting sales, higher than the previous month, will always be any business’ primary goal. Who wouldn’t? Because in a market-driven society we quickly learn that we either grow or outsell our competitions, or we die and close shops. We lose our edge if we allow our competitors to win and keep our customers while we sit on the fences figuring-out how they did it. It’s time for a paradigm-shifting: get your customers by building relationships with them.

> Read the rest of this entry

Branding Basics for Small Businesses

Other than providing value for your services or products offering, how do you set your small business apart from your competitors? How do you want to project yourself in public, especially to both to your loyal and potential customers?

Every business wants to be a customer's preferred choice. However, how do you make that happen? Branding. Sounds too simplistic huh. Yeah. But more often, this is one of the crucial elements in our sales and marketing efforts that we tend to neglect or remove from the process entirely.

Building and managing a brand, though sounds simple, is not easy. When done properly, it can significantly boost your sales and your product becomes a preferred choice. Here are two important takes you can immediately do:

Define and create your brand. You start by identifying your strengths as an organization and the values that your products or services offer. You must ensure that you can always deliver your promises using your strengths and core values. This brand should differentiate you from your competitors. It should impel your customer’s choice to sway on your side when making a buying decision. Package this brand in your offers and in the way you do business. Match your brand with your customers’ needs and requirements. Most often, customers buy not because of the price consideration but because they perceive that, you are able to meet their needs and requirements as your brand represents.

Build and promote your brand by telling your customers. Take every opportunity to reinforce your brand image and core values. Here are some of the areas that you need to consider:

• Organization’s or business name,
• Products or services labels or identities,
• Business logo and byline or slogan printed on promotional products and corporate gifts,
• Packaging that bespeaks of your brand and core values,
• Advertising means and methods, e.g., investing on promotional items that projects the image of your business,
• Develop employee’s values and attitudes consistent with your brand and core values. This is where some organizations fail to deliver. The attitudes of their employees speak contrary to what they claim. Communicate your brand to your employees and train them through your HRM department to behave and talk according to your brand and core values.

Align all of these to your brand and core values on a consistent basis. Surely, your customers will value you in return. On the contrary, when these things do not speak of your brand, your customer will remember you in a bad light, and worse, tell others.

> Read the rest of this entry

Small Business Marketing Basics and its Implications in ProBlogging

If you're attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn't, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income. -Jay Abraham

When marketing your small business, you have to remember that you are embedding a message in each unit you sell; a message that you hope will aid your market in distinguishing you from your competitors, because consumers don't just buy a product, but perceived benefits as well. Jeans, for example, are clothing articles made of denim, but Calvin Klein attaches sex appeal to every pair, and Lee sells individuality. Coke sells happiness in a bottle , while Pepsi sells youth.

Ironically, I have observed that in most cases due to our ardent desire to pursue our customers, we tend to neglect the basics of small business marketing where all of our small business efforts hinge. When engaging on a marketing campaign, online or off-line, consider the following small business marketing basics:

• Product. Pay attention to your product features and benefits; capitalize on them. Today's consumers are value driven. Consider finding what your niche market values most and present your product towards that end. Remember, customers buy on the perceived benefits of your product first and foremost, the rest is secondary. So package your product benefits well. Make them stand-out from the rest of the pack!
  

• Price. Is your price competitive? Is it a pay-per value offer to your targeted consumers? I know, you want a quick ROI (Return on Investment) on your capital, but please don't do it overnight. Business experts say that the first six months of your operation may be considered operating at a loss. Pay-off usually starts on the seventh. One way of keeping your targeted customers is paying close attention to your pricing.
  

• Place. Is your product accessible to your targeted customers? Is it visible on the shelf, if you are selling off-line. Do you have a shopping cart in your web site where they can conveniently add the product when they purchase online? Is your web user-friendly? Meaning, they do not have to use the search function in order to find what they came for? IMO, a good, simple, and easily-navigated web design is a customer-keeper. Also, check your websites's loading time more often. Product pictures or other graphics can slow down its loading. Slower loading can easily drive-off your potential customers.
  

• Promotion. Try other marketing activities. Don't stick on one medium or methodology. Experiment. But experiment with caution, i'd say, for experimenting is costly. Lastly, three important things: (1) promote, (2) promote, (3) and promote your products to your targeted consumers.

Implications in ProBlogging:

If you are treat ProBlogging like a small business, here are ProBlogging Marketing basics you need to seriously consider:

• Product: Is your blog a visit-for-value blog? How is it different from the millions of blogs out there? Do your readers get a perceived benefits when they visit?
  

• Price: I suppose, you are selling ad spaces or reviews, then check with other blogs on the same niche if your pricing is competitive. Compare by PR's, Alexa Ranking, Traffic, and other elements which advertiser might consider.
  

• Place: Is your blog lay-out 'eyes-friendly'? Meaning, are readers encouraged to read when they visit your blog? Consider your blog's design. Avoid clutters. Remember the KISS principle? Keep it simple sweetheart (err...stupid?). Ask the opinion of others regarding your blog's readability. Also, if you have submitted your blog to social networks and blog directories, make sure that it is listed on the appropriate category. IMO, that is plain common sense, right? Sadly, to date I am seeing a lot of blogs that are somehow misplaced in Entrecard. ^^
  

• Promotion: There are so many mediums out there, don't stick to one. If you are thinking (imagining) of monetizing your blog with 10 to 30 page views a day -forget it. Your source of income is from traffic -I see none else. So, again, promote, promote, and promote!

Here's to your ProBlogging success! Now, you may react. ^^

> Read the rest of this entry

Basic Small Business Management Principles: A Practical Perspective

We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are…MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is it's a mixture of luck and persistence. ~Craig Newmark, founder of the popular free classifieds website Craigslist

Can success to small business management be relegated to luck? Or is it a mixture of luck and persistence as Craig puts it? Is there a short-cut to small business success?

Here, I’d like to address the issue of small business management in a very practical way. Do note that I am qualifying it to ‘small business’ because larger enterprises are more complicated to be given a micro treatment. However, it does not negate the practicality of these two basic small business management principles I’d like to share:


Principle 1: Small Business Management is not Easy

Managing your own small business is never easy. This is an entirely different ball game. You are the boss, and that made it more difficult. Because your day to day business decisions can make or break your small business and none is responsible but you!

What do you do when you don’t see profits over the last six months? When you are incurring cost after cost which you have not anticipated during your business planning? When the people you hired are not delivering the performance or results you expected? When the marketing and advertising campaigns you launched seem to have not met the targeted exposure you want? When clients fail to pay on time or sometimes, not pay at all? When you received daily complaints on your products and services? The list can go on and on.

These things can cause small businesses to tilt, lose moorings, and eventually close shop in no time if not properly address. It is never easy to manage your own small business. Corporate work is a lot easier because you are only responsible for certain aspects of the business, not all, unlike when you own and manage the small business yourself. It takes sound business acumen, entrepreneurial skills, and accurate planning to succeed in this enterprise.


Principle 2: Small Business Management takes Persistence

It is not easy, yes, but anyone can succeed if they hang-on and face the challenges. What I mentioned above are but parts and parcels of realities you have to face when running your own small business. Again, it is not an easy path to take. I am just dispelling the idea that small business management is easy. In fact, in the strictest sense, it is not even a principle but plain business common sense.

Money is not all the necessary investment you have to make in order to succeed in small business management. You need to invest a lot on persistence too. Persistence, which is a mark of a devoted businessman or entrepreneur, is your key to sustaining your business in the worse of times. Especially now that global economic recession has encroached us, or is in fact pushing businesses out of the game. Persistence will not come overnight. It is something that you have to cultivate within you. It is something that you have practice in every area of your life. It is never luck. Frank Lloyd said it more accurately:

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Here's to your small business success!

Now, have your say please.

----------

Related post: Small Business Planning

> Read the rest of this entry

Customer-Focused and Employee-Centered Core Values

Xerox: A case in point

In 2000, Xerox was $17 billion in debt, and by 2001 the company’s stock price had dropped from a high of $63 to about $4. Xerox suffered seven straight losing quarters. The company also faced an accounting investigation by Securities and Exchange Commission into the way it accounted for customer leases on copiers.

Today the company has shifted its main business from small copiers to desktop copiers from offices and high-quality printers for publishers. Xerox has experienced a remarkable comeback. Fourth quarter net income for 2003 rose to $222 million or 22 cents a share in 2002. Recent stock prices have been in the $15 range and are expected to go higher. The company’s operations are guided by customer-focused and Employee-Centered Core Values…and the strategic involvement of Human Resource Management (HRM). (Xerox2004)

Implications in Business Operations

The value placed on people, customers and employees, is the defining brand of a business however the size is. Today, where globalization is no longer a strange business term and where customers are presented with a thousand options for a particular product, the human factor of the business creates the ultimate product differentiation.

Productivity and sales are high when Employees (Human Resource) are given their much-needed attention. Vis a vis, when customers’ needs, wants, and expectations are met, you will have a business that is likely to profit and grow. Xerox and other companies who shifted from a profit-focused business models to HR and customer focused models have experienced a positive turn-around. Your small business can do too.


Implications in ProBlogging

Subscribers, readers, and visitors are the probloggers’ primary assets. No amount of advertising, publicity, contests, social networking schemes, and other gimmicks can replace their loyalty. They will make or break your problogging efforts. Make them a center of your ‘problogging core values’ by:

• Writing posts that create or add values to their reading experience. Post to feed your audience, not the other way around;
  

• Developing and easily navigated blog lay-outs where they can easily find their needs and/or wants;
  

• Responding promptly and sensibly to comments;
  

• Lastly, lesser commercialization more blogging. Meaning, while making money out of your blog is your ultimate goal, do not make it so evident that it drives your readers and visitors away. Make blogging your first priority, the money will follow. This is what is meant by making people, not robots (name the implications –pun intended) your ‘core values.’

Now, have your say please.

> Read the rest of this entry

Small Business Planning

If you have only 5 minutes to solve a business problem, or an HRM related issue problem, you need at least the equivalent time to plan on how to solve the issue. Better yet, twice the amount of time solving it. There are only very few business owners who never plan -they are the exceptions rather than the rules, and they are indeed exceptional in their crafts. Gifted with business intuitions and guts, they succeed. However, if you don't belong to those exceptional business tycoons, common sense dictates that in any business endeavors, it is imperative to plan.

Business Planning is essential. It encompasses all the goals, strategies and actions that you project, to ensure your business’s success. Sounds high-sounding, isn’t it? In simpler terms, think of business planning as being broken into two concepts: profit-making side and contingency side.

Profit-making is your main agenda for the business, otherwise, you might want to consider building a charity organization instead. In this stage of the business planning, you pour out all your resources and means in creating a viable business that will ensure you profit. So, you look at your material, operational, selling and HR costs. You lay don these items in your blue print -the business plan. This plan isn’t a do-it-and-forget-it business planning exercise but a dynamic document that needs to be updated throughout the lifecycle of your business. Once the business has officially taken-off, all your other planning efforts are geared towards setting and achieving business targets and goals.

While some businesses make business planning an annual event, business planning is most effective when it’s done frequently and consistently. The business planning process of reviewing progress on business goals and targets and setting new ones should take place at least monthly. Daily business planning is an incredibly effective way for individuals to focus on achieving both their own goals and the goals of the organization.

The other major aspect of business planning is contingent planning or contingency business planning. This aspect focuses on dealing with business crises., assessing before hand the possible critical devastating scenarios even before they occur. Insuring your business is only one part of contingency planning. A business contingency plan is a comprehensive proposed implementation plan to deal with perceived emergencies, events or even new information affecting the viability of your business. Some calls this Risk Management (I will discuss this on another post later). At this stage of your planning, you will assess your business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (a full discussion on SWOT analysis will be posted later). Based on those assessments, you will lay down the implementing mechanisms that will shelter your business from any these perceived possible economic crises.

Lets discuss this in detail on my next post will ya. Post your comments or questions below.

> Read the rest of this entry