Mine Your Own Business

New Employee Training

As the economy starts to improve, most small businesses will eventually hire new employees as their business grows. It is crucial for the employee to be trained effectively both so the employee can grow in their job over time and to maximize their contribution to your business. So how do you accomplish this complicated and difficult task? Here is a great article that provides nine tips for training that new employee. While all the tips in the article are very good, five of them are especially applicable to a small business as opposed to a larger business or corporation. 

• Remind new employees why they were hired.
• Always explain "why".
• Blend in customer service.
• Encourage personality.
• Inspect what you expect.

Of the five points above, I thought two of them would be especially helpful in training new employees and were something I had never really considered before. The two points were Always explain "why", and Blend in customer service. The article makes the point that by combining job skills and customer service during the training process, there will never be any question in the employee's mind of which is more important.

Chaos Control for Small Businesses

We've posted so frequently on the challenges facing any small business owner that we even have a specific category for it titled Balancing Business and Personal Life. Now comes a new article in Small Business Trends that describes how more and more people are starting their own business, but a report from the National Small Business Association reveals that 41 percent of new entrepreneurs are worried that their small business will fail. The article makes the point that chaos is what is causing so many problems for small business owner and reports on a new book that proposes six steps for controlling chaos in your small business.

1. Build your emotional capital.
2. Practice disciplined optimism.
3. Assert your entrepreneurial independence.
4. Centralize and organize your stuff.
5. Tap into the magical power of follow-up.
6. Burn the to-do list and move from manual to automated.

The article provides a great argument on how these steps can be used to control the chaos that threatens to overwhelm any small business, or at least make your business and personal life a lot more difficult. Do you have any other ways that you control chaos in your small business?

One Dilemma Facing Small Businesses

As we've frequently covered in Mine Your Own Business, small businesses by their very nature face a number of challenges. Some we've covered are finding and keeping good employees,  customer service issues, increasing sales, effective pricing, getting new customers.....the list goes on and on. A large corporation has different departments and a larger budget to cover all these areas, whereas a small business owner usually has to handle all or most of them himself.

The Wall Street Journal had a recent article on a survey of 734 entrepreneurs that described one especially pressing dilemma. Nearly half of the business owners were having problems effectively marketing their companies in the current economic situation. The business owners were facing a Catch-22 in that when business is slow they need to increase spending for advertising and marketing but they have trouble finding the funds to do so.

The article goes on to describe several tactics that some small business owners have used to address this problem with a great deal of success. You can read the entire article for their very clever solutions and they may give you some ideas as well. One of the least expensive solutions used by many of the owners was something we've posted about as well, online resources and social media. Here's a link to one of our postings from earlier this year.

Help for Procrastinators

Like many people, I've always had a problem with procrastination. I've always used the excuse that it is genetic since my Mother is a bad about procrastinating and is also a pack rat and I am guilty of both vices. Now comes an article from the Harvard Business Review about some research from two business professors that may help with procrastination and improve the final results of a project as well. 

The professors conducted a study where three groups of workers were given a project to complete. One group just received a final deadline. Another group was given a set of interim deadlines at weekly intervals. The final group was allowed to set up their own interim deadlines. So what do you think the results were? The single deadline group was 12 days late and their results were the worst. The weekly interim deadlines groups was just .5 days late and had the best results. The third group was in between. So if your like me or have employees who procrastinate, set of series of deadlines for best results. I also ran across this series of quotations about procrastination that are really amusing and quite accurate.

Organize Ideas Effectively

There was a good article in USA Today that started with the premise that most small business owners come up with all kinds of new ideas to increase sales and improve their businesses. In fact so many that frequently it is difficult to implement them in an effective manner. The author of the article provides a tip that they have found effective in their business and that is to start a Red Book. They use the Red Book to write down any new idea on products, service, marketing, etc. and then they periodically review everything in the Red Book.

There are a lot of good tips in the article for starting your own Red Book and some good variations on the Red Book, such as a:

• Leads book
• Trade show book
• Product development book

I'm sure you can come up with some other variations for your particular business. One great point the article makes near the end is that frequently something that someone puts in the Red Book sounds like a great idea at the time, but on further reflection is not worth implementing. I personally know that works because I use a similar technique for my personal purchases. I may see something I think I really want or need, but I've gotten in the habit on waiting and thinking about it for a week or a month and then making a purchasing decision. It has worked very well in reducing my impulse purchases.

Free Apps From Google

Most of us think that free is a pretty good thing, and now Google is offering Google Apps for small businesses. Google Apps is a free Web based suite of services that includes word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail and website building products to replace traditional software from vendors such as Microsoft and Apple. Some businesses that have used Google Apps feel that customer support and security needs to be improved and Google offers their Premium Edition for $50 per year per person that addresses these issues and also includes more storage space and added customization.

If this sounds interesting you can read the whole article Google's free Apps click with entrepreneurs that provides more details. If you are used to using Microsoft products and would like a summary of their offerings, that is covered in the article as well. There are some free offerings from Microsoft as long as a business has purchase Microsoft Office. The article doesn't cover any business software for Apple, so I did a little research and here is a link to the Apple business software site.

Business and Back to School

The leaves have not begun to turn in the Midwest where Tacony is located, but students are already returning to school. Actually some of the trees have dropped some leaves because it has been a very hot Summer in St. Louis and the trees are getting a little stressed in some cases. So what is the link between students returning so school and business? An article from ABC News describes how many small business owners are interested in expanding their business knowledge and that there are more choices to choose from than ever before. The article gives a lot of background information on four choices:

• Colleges, universities, and for-profit schools
• Chambers of commerce and trade groups
• Small business development centers
• Online resources
  

All four of the choices have certain advantages, but probably the most convenient are the online courses offered by the Small Business Association (the article provides a URL to that resource) and SCORE. We've done several postings on SCORE in the past on Mine Your Own Business and More on Score provides a lot more information if you are interested. If you are new to online courses now might be a good time to give them a try. What have you got to lose, the online resources at SCORE are free.

Software Licensing Warning

We ran across an interesting article in Entrepreneur titled The Hard Truth About Software Licensing that warned all small businesses about the danger of pirated or improperly licensed software. It is so tempting to buy one copy of that very expensive software and install it on more than one computer. The problem is that the Business Software Alliance and other groups are always on the lookout for software and fines can be very expensive. The article provides three tips so make sure you are in compliance:

1. Find the right tools.
2. Save your receipts.
3. Ask your reseller for help.

There are also some very helpful links in the article. Two more points we'd like to add are, make sure you understand the licensing because it does vary by vendor and don’t allow employees to download and install any software without your knowledge. Not only can they be breaking the law, but it can also slow down a computer if it has too many applications on it.

New Small Business Survey

We did a posting on July 27th titled Small Business Help where we mentioned the results of a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). That survey reported that he NFIB Index of Small Business Optimism lost 3.2 point in June after minor gains for several previous months. Now comes an article about a survey done for the National Association of Business Economics that reports optimistic results.

In this survey 31 percent of businesses hired new employees in the second quarter of this year while 14 percent cut jobs. The article also refers to the NFIB survey mentioned above and gives some interesting background on that survey and some thinking on why the results are so different. The whole article is definitely worth reading. So which survey do you think more accurately reflects the current situation for small businesses and how is your business doing?

Power Backup

Tacony  Corporation is located in the Midwest which is famous (or should I say infamous) for some pretty intense summer thunderstorms, especially in the months of July and August. For years it was a common occurrence to lose power for a few minutes or a few hours a few times almost every summer and all the PCs that were on surge suppressors and not on an uninterpretable power supply (UPS) would crash. Our main computer was on a UPS with a  run time of a few hours since all of our other offices relied on it as well for all the company information.

Eventually Tacony grew to a size that it could no longer afford for an extended power outage and a generator was installed that would power the main computer and the second floor where all the sales people were located. So how does this Tacony history and power backup apply to other small businesses? We ran across this article in The Wall Street Journal that provided some examples from other companies similar to what we had experienced and while many or most small businesses can't justify the cost of a backup generator system such as Tacony installed, it does provide some less expensive options.

The article first stresses that power outages can result in several problems for small businesses such as lost sales, lost production, or data destruction. They then suggest battery backups or generators for some mission critical equipment, and protective software on computers to prevent data destruction. This is one area where it is very important to follow the Scout motto and Be Prepared.