Small Business Growing

Archive for the 'Growing' Category

Building Repeat and Referral Business: Events!

One of the most under-utilized strategies for building repeat and referral business is “events.”

By “events” I am referring to special gatherings that show appreciation and attention to your past, present, and prospective customers/clients.

In the current resource-constrained environment, many small business owners are either unable or reluctant to invest in events, but when it is possible for you to make the investment in putting on an event, the rewards can be significant.

Every year during the early part of December we do a holiday event to show appreciation for clients of one of our enterprises, our real estate business.  We do this because we sincerely want to show appreciation and respect for the people who have and will support our business.  The event gives us opportunity to renew relationships, build or sustain emotional connections, and demonstrate how much we value our clients as people.

Here is my point in sharing this aspect of one of our businesses:  if you do not have one customer “reconnection and appreciation” type event in your business now, consider incorporating this into your strategy.

You don’t have to spend a fortune.  You can find creative ways to stage some kind of event whose primary purpose is to express appreciation and reconnect.  As best you can, of course, you want to offer something that provides an incentive for folks to attend the event.  Some have found that doing something fun for kids is a nice way to bring in customers with children in their life.  Obviously it depends on the demographics of your customer base and area.

Here are a few critical points to keep in mind as you think about orchestrating an event.

• Your first event is a learning process. But once  you get a process established, you can repeat it with much greater ease.

•  Customers and clients must feel appreciated if they are to return and tell others about us.  The event will help achieve this goal.

• When done well, events create buzz among your customer base, and they will be anticipated and attended by many of the same people each time.

• Events are effective way to sustain any emotional connection you made previously with past customers. They will help keep people in your orbit.

There are lots of other good reasons to do events.  Of course, the big concern businesses have is financial costs and time in preparing and executing the event.  If you can start small and test the effectiveness of an event, you can better judge the usefulness for your business.

One thing is for sure.  To build sustainable, repeat and referral business we must have methods to keep our relationships with customers alive and well.  Events are one way to do this.  Let me know if you would like to know more about what we do and how it works for us.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Small Business Growth: Getting Control of “Overwhelm”

A question was recently  asked by one of our Entrepreneur’s Journey participants. (The journey is a faith-based educational program for small business owners in the Northern Virginia and DC area).

“How do you deal with that feeling of being overwhelmed…having too much to do and not getting it done?”

Good question.  Most of us in the world of small business have to deal with this challenge.

You might not solve this problem in a day,  but you can invest 30 minutes to get a start that can be life changing.

The first thing is to not accept “overwhelm” as inevitable, and schedule a 30 minutes block to get started on a strategy that will move you toward an increasing sense of control.

Work through three primary dimensions of your business:
• your physical space
• your mental space
• your daily habits

Our Physical Environment becomes automatic and taken for granted.  But the level of order, clarity, simplicity, and ease of use of your physical space has everything to do with how efficiently work is done.  The order and refinement of all the things you need to use to accomplish work has everything to do with personal performance and personal emotion.

POINT:  get your personal space in a state of extreme order and neatness, maintain it, and watch what good things start to happen.

Our Mental Space includes all kinds of “stuff” that sits in our minds and hearts.  The point here is to reduce and simplify that mass of perceptions and feelings down to a few key areas of our work that are the focal points.  You will have more that three things in your work life, but identify the three really important areas of your work life that will be at the top of your list.

POINT:  Radically reduce the mental clutter, by getting clear about the three most important things in your business at this time.

Our Daily Habits determine how the day plays out.  Sure, stuff happens that you can’t control, and things arise that you must respond to.  That is small business life.  But our habitual ways of doing work determine a good deal of our productivity, as well as how “overwhelmed” or “in control” we feel.

POINT:  Take a good look at how your daily habits are helping or hurting.  Some habits are like fuel on the fire of “overwhelm” – such as jumping from one task to another before finishing anything – and other habits will start to reduce “overwhelm” and increase a sense of positive control.  For example, starting the day with a clear image of what we will focus on, and staying with it, in spite of potential distractions.

Overwhelm is not a condition of nature.  It can be reversed.  It just takes starting somewhere.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Small Business Success: You Must Have Systems

The past two weeks in The Entrepreneur’s Journey we have been working through Systems and Processes for small business.

Identifying and improving the primary systems and supporting processes for your small business is critical for sustainable success.

Many small business owners get the idea that they need clear, repeatable steps that produce a predictable result, but they are not sure how to get the whole business to the place where it is lean, process oriented, and fully “systematized.”

System and process thinking and execution can transform your business, and take you to a whole new level of business performance.  But it won’t happen with one single step, or in one 30 minute time period.  You’ll have to work at it over time.  But for the business that clearly lays out their major systems and the supporting processes, there is a whole new level of possibilities that will open up.

We work on this challenge in The Journey and it is a joy to watch participants make progress.  By the way, the next cohort of The Journey will probably start around April of 2012, so if you are in the Northern Virginia or DC area, we certainly invite you to learn more about this program.

Where do you begin if you are serious about crafting or re-crafting the major systems of your business?

Start with identifying the overarching categories under which you will list your systems. This is simple.  You could start with something as intuitive as Before, During, and After.  “Before” might include your marketing and lead conversion activities.  “During” might include the delivery of your primary product or service,  And “After” might include your follow-on activities such as how you stay in contact with past customers.  You could also nest your Administrative and Financial support functions here.

Another way of categorizing the high level activities of your business might be Marketing, Sales, Operations, Product Development, Financial, and Human Resources.  Obviously your high level Category identification depends on the size and complexity of your enterprise.

The next step would be to identify the Systems and Processes that fit under your prime categories.  More about that in the next post in this series.

Getting your Categories, Systems, and Processes identified and organized so that you can perform the functions of the business in a lean, coherent, and repeatable manner will separate you from many of your small business competitors.  And as someone who has consulted with many large organizations, I can tell you that even, or should I say especially, big businesses are nowhere near as lean, and systematized as they could be.

Once you get hooked on well formed systems, you won’t want anything less.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Achieving Extreme Organization: Start a Productivity Transformation with Simplicity (2)

We underestimate the impact our physical work space has on our motivation and personal productivity.

We develop habits and accept them as “normal,” but some habits can severely constrain our level of productivity, and personal satisfaction.

Here is the simple – yet overlooked – point I’d like to make in this brief post:  There is a very good chance you have way too much “stuff” in your work space, and if you do it can really slow you down, on many levels.

The structure, logic, and basic order of our physical space has everything to do with how productive we can be on any given day.

Where do you start if you want to get a more functional, deliberate, and productive design for you work space?

Start by asking and answering this question:  What can I throw out to make the space lean, more visually coherent, and eventually far more productive?

Then start somewhere…anywhere.

Pick just one focused area of your work space..maybe one file in one filing cabinet (physical or digital, and eventually both), and get that one area totally cleaned out and organized.

Then work through the whole space, one small area at a time.

Toss everything you can, being aware of legal needs to hold some docs.

Removing the things you do not actually use in the performance of work, is one first step in applying design principles to your personal performance.  The intent is a design of space and a discipline of maintenance that contributes to flow, speed, ease, organization, rapid retrieval of documents and other “things” you use to do work,  and that great feeling of being in control.

Tossing is so obvious and simple that it is often overlooked, but know that there is good theory and more than enough sophisticated thinking behind the design of uncluttered work space.

Clutter in your work space is like carrying extra weight on your shoulders.  Remove it and feel the liberation.

[Fran O'Neal is a small business owner, consultant and researcher who helps business owners use a remarkable business growth system.  He is also the founder of The Entrepreneur's Journey, an educational ministry for small business owners.]

Why Referral Business Does (or Does Not) Come In

For many small businesses, referral business is golden.

Nothing rivals the potential customer who comes to you with a nice recommendation from someone you previously served.

But the reality is that many small businesses are not anywhere near the volume of referral business they would like.

There are many reasons why we don’t perform at the optimal level of referral business.

We’ll discuss these reasons in future posts, but let’s start with the most important consideration.

Why would a customer be inclined to tell others about us?  The obvious answer is that they had a great experience, especially as they assess the prime deliverable they were expecting to receive from our business. In other words, the prime service or product we provide has to be delivered in such a way that the customer’s prime expectations were satisfied, at least at a level that would incline them to share us with others.

If we come up short in this, the additional; things we do to enhance customer value may have an impact at the margins, but most people will be judging us on the major service or product they expected to receive.

Bottom line:  to earn referral business get the main things delivered with excellence.  And we do this in lots of ways, one of which is to lay out clear, simple, repeatable processes and systems that get it done with consistency and reliability.

There are many ways to build referral business, but if our main deliverable is uneven or poorly executed they all become window dressing around a less that attractive centerpiece.

If you would like a more detailed essay on this topic, do request our free E-Boklet, “The Road to Repeat and Referral Business.”

One Reason Why Small Businesses Fail

Some on the most critical insights about success and failure in small business are so simple.

But we often bypass the truly insightful because it seems obvious.

Here is one of those simple insights:  really successful small business leaders spend time working ON the business as well as working IN the business.

As small business owners we always have more job than time.  So we are constantly working IN the business.  We often neglect working ON the business.

The difference is simple.  When we are doing the work of serving customers, or any other activity that involves producing or delivering our products and/or services, we are working IN the business.  Working ON the business means getting outside our normal routines to assess, review, refine, reinvent, innovate, create, or just think and reevaluate what we do, and how we do it.

Working ON means getting off the playing field just long enough to watch how the game is being played, and to think critically and creatively about where we are and where we need be headed.

If you are not spending some time working ON the business, you are putting the business future in jeopardy.  Take a moment to schedule some ON time right now.  Once you have build the habit of regular ON time, you will never go back to the old way.

If you would like to receive our free E-Letter we’d love to include you.  Just get signed up and we will email you each issue.

Small Business Leaders Can’t Afford The Luxury of Pessimism

In the current business environment there is no shortage of pessimism.

As a small business owners, if we are not careful, it can become a nearly unconscious and automatic part of our mindset.

And its consequences can be highly damaging. I offer this post as an encouragement and a reminder that pessimism can be as harmful as any competitor. It saps energy, and gives us a distorted view of both the possibilities and potentialities of our business. It pulls us down and carries us out to sea, like a strong undertow.

There are many ways to spot and then stop the grip of pessimism, but I’d suggest the first thing to do is simply to start paying attention to what we are thinking and feeling. When we become conscious of the feelings and thoughts that run through our mind we can start to control and change things.  Pessimism creeps in and before you realize it, takes up residence in your emotional life.  It can be entirely removed but we must start by getting a higher level of mindfulness.

Just begin by paying attention to your current level of optimism vs pessimism. Great small business strategy and execution thrives on optimism. I am not talking about a Polyanna or unrealistic view of current reality. No, we must see things as they actually are, not as we might wish them to be.  But we have lots of choices in how we interpret what we will do, given the realities of our current situation.

Think of pessimism as simply a luxury that small business owners can’t afford. We just can’t afford the cost of pessimism..there are too many things to accomplish, too many strategies to employee, too many creative possibilities, too many constructive ways to solve problems, too many goals to achieve, too many insights to learn, too many interesting and positive people to meet, too many ways to improve how we serve customers…just too many good things that need the time and attention that pessimism drains away.

Just start buy doing a reality check on your current level of optimism vs pessimism. I would suggest that if you are feeling on the pessimistic side, start by recognizing it.  Awareness and recognition are often the first steps to making an intentional choice toward something different.

By the way, if you happen to reside in the Northern Virginia area and are a small business owner, do be aware of a free educational program I lead called The Entrepreneur’s Journey.  It is a free program – a ministry really – that is offered through my home church, McLean Bible Church.  We work through state-of-the-art business strategies  on a foundation of Christian principles.

If you want to know more visit our Journey website, or send me an email.  Our next cohort will begin around October 2011.

Social Media Insights From Brad Hill Of Site Organic

This week, the Entrepreneur’s Journey participants heard from Brad Hill, Founder of SiteOrganic.

The Journey is a faith-based program for small business owners and entrepreneurs here in the Northern Virginia and surrounding Metro area.  During the 12-week program we hear the varied voices of our “power team” and they provide insights from their areas of expertise.  All are topics vital to the success of small business.

Brad spoke to us about the applications of Social Media strategies for small business.  It was a lively and deeply insightful evening, with an steady stream of questions from Journey participants.  Brad provided one insight after the other, and left everyone with a lot to consider.

Often, the most fundamental insights are the most useful.  We were reminded of how critically important it is to have a website design that is immediately understandable and usable to site visitors. As primary as this principle is, how often do you see it not put into play?

If you are in the design stage of your primary website, or if you are about ready to refresh your current design, don’t let this basic principle become so obvious that it gets side-stepped.  You will be rewarded many times over if you create a design that immediately communicates what you are offering and what the user can do to get to your offer.

If you want more information on what SiteOrganic is up to, by all means visit Brad’s very informative site.  And if you are a small business owner or entrepreneur in the Northern Virginia area and want to know more about The Journey, visit our City Impact web page, or drop me an email and I will be glad to answer any questions.

Small Business Brand: Crafting the Authentic Story

Your small business has a story.

But you may not be taking advantage of just how powerful your story can be in building your business.

This is a very short reflection on something that deserves a good deal more time.  But in future posts here at SmallBusinessGrowing.com we will return to this question of how Story fits into your overall brand.

Right now I’d like to offer just three points.

The first is basic:  “What is ‘Story”?

The answer can fill a book, but in essence, Story is the core narrative on how your business came into existence, what it is about, and where it is headed.  As you work on “extracting” the key truths in answer to these questions, you go on a little journey of discovery that helps to bring forth the human and motivational aspects of how your story has and is unfolding.

Second, we do have to work on mining the uniqueness and the truths contained in our own story. One simple place to start is with this question:

• What were the key events that lead up to my starting the business?

Inside of this question there is a gold mine of insight on what your business is about, and why you were motivated to go down this road.

Third, mining the rich insights from our own story is one critical way to inject humanity and drama into the business. Doing so gives our customers and prospects a human view of what we are about.  People are hungry for and responsive to businesses that are REAL….businesses that are deeply committed to their customers and are able to succinctly communicate their commitments and vision.

Story helps to do this.  But it starts with unearthing the events, motivations, and values that are from your heart and soul.

More to come on Story.

In the meantime  we invite you to check out a marketing tool we discovered a year ago and use constantly as an easy, extremely inexpensive, and highly effective way to build repeat and referral business.  You also have a standing invitation to receive out free E-Letter along with a copy of our E-Booklet “The Road to Repeat and Referral Business.”

Why Small Businesses Need Systems

We are off and running with this cohort of our new program, The Entrepreneur’s Journey.

I am working with about 25 small business owners and entrepreneur’s as we work our way through the 12-week program, meeting one evening per week.  One of the things we do early on is to address having a systems approach as a business.

This means identifying and then clarifying the major systems that together comprise your business.

Many, I’d say most, small business owners have not done so.

A system map of your business is a fairly high level model of the major functions and processes that together make up the business.  You can start this by simply naming the “Categories” which are your major functional areas.

Something as simple as Marketing – Sales – Operations and Follow-Up is a basic start.  Most of us have some marketing activities that lead into a selling or “lead-conversion” process.   We also have the actual delivery of our product of service (Operations) and we hopefully have a Follow-up process to build our community of customers and stay in touch with those we have served.

Whatever way you choose to go about this, developing a systems perspective and a clear model of what the business does and how it does it, is vital to taking your enterprise up to its next level of growth.

More on this topic ahead.

And…if you are based in the Northern Virgina or DC area and would like to know more about The Entrepreneur’s Journey experience, let me know and I will provide further information.