Mine Your Own Business

Sales and Stories

So you might wonder what is the relationship between small business sales and stories? The first thing to do is define what a story is. Since it relates to sales the following definition from the Internet is probably the best fit; a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale. For sales purposes the narrative would be true, in prose (for most of us unless you are an aspiring poet), and designed to interest and instruct a prospect in your product.

At this point you may be a little skeptical about how stories can help small business sales, so here is an article that makes a very complete and compelling case for using stories in your sales efforts. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, the last paragraph is a pretty good summary of why incorporating stories in your sales effort could really improve your bottom line.

Balancing Act

Small business owners face the challenging task of balancing the very heavy demands of running their business efficiently and still taking care of their personal life, after all there are only so many hours in a day and sometimes something has to take a back seat. The Wall Street Journal posted an interesting article that brings this balancing act into sharp focus.

The main point of the article is that skimping on your personal life with regard to health care and exercise can actually be detrimental to efficiently running your business. In this case your health should not take a back seat to running your business and a balance between the two is essential.

Hiring and Firing

We've done a lot of posts on the importance of good employees for any small business and just a few days ago we did a posting on the kinds of workers a business could hire as the economy improves in the future. But what about the other side of the coin, what to do if all else fails with a problem employee. It is something almost every business owner faces at some point and it is one of the least pleasant situations in business ownership.

A recent Wall Street article describes this scenario and first describes some of the actions an employer should try to help a problem employee improve. If all attempts fail the article then goes on to describe the next actions in the process and some pitfalls to avoid. This is never a pleasant situation, but the advice presented in the article should help make the best of a difficult situation for all parties involved.

More Timely Advice

Small business owners face the daunting tasks of working at their business and in addition must take care of the overall management of their business. Good employees can help tremendously and in fact we did a posting on May 9th this year in A Timeless Article that referenced a piece that focused mainly on getting the most from your employees. It had a few more tips on time management for the owner, but overall it emphasized the daily work of a business and not overall management.

Now comes a new article that focuses more on effective time management tools for overall management of your business. It provides four techniques that should help any small business owner with the difficult task of finding enough hours in a day. The four tips are:

1. Prioritize
2. Delegate
3. Limitations
4. Perspective

There are further details and examples for these four tips and you can read the whole posting here. Either article is good in itself, but combined ideas from the two could really help any small business owner beat the clock.

What Kind of Employee?

One of the few positive aspects of our current economic downturn and dismal unemployment figures is that it means the pool of high quality workers is much greater than usual. An article from the Associated Press discusses the many employment options available for small businesses when they are ready to add employees again.

The article presents three kinds of workers, employees, independent contractors, and temporary workers. Each of the options has some pros and cons as discussed in the article. There are also some other options in the three main categories,  for example employees can be full or part time and temporary workers can be someone that is a temporary hire or hired through a temp agency. The main point is that there are a great number of employee options to be considered before taking the first step.

Pricing Dilemna

Small businesses are all well aware that price has always been a major concern with any prospective customer and in the past few years it seems that it has become more important than ever to many people. We ran across an interesting article that presents some ideas on how to honestly answer the question on price (usually the first question from a possible customer) and still have the opportunity to make the case to the customer why that price is justified for your product.

The article then gives some thoughts on why the price question is so important to customers and presents the following selling strategy. Answer the question on price and then follow up with a question that will bring them back to the features of your product or service that make it worth that price to the customer. There are a couple of very good examples in the piece that illustrate the concept. How do you handle the price question? Do you have a particularly effective strategy that seems to usually work for your business?

Increased Business Spending

An article in USA Today reports that after reduced business spending for six quarters in a row that businesses increased spending on new computers and software at an annual rate of 1.1%. That may not sound too impressive, but after an annualized drop of 36.4 percent in the first quarter, it takes on a whole new light.

The government initiatives earlier in the year (such as cash for clunkers) were put in place to stabilize the economy until small businesses could bounce back and this latest news indicates that it looks like it has been at least partially successful. We still have a long way to go, but since it may take a while for consumer spending to pick up, maybe it makes sense now to consider selling to businesses whose spending is increasing

Gain Community Support

We've done several postings in the past about the importance of supporting local businesses such as the 3/50 Project posted on May 20th of this year. What we haven't mentioned is how small businesses can gain local support from their local community. An article from the Wall Street Journal suggests that small retailers or service providers should highlight their local roots to bring in customer from their community.

The article provides three recommendations to emphasize the origins of your business and win local supports. The piece then goes on to give some excellent and very entertaining examples of how some other businesses have had great success in this area, such as Nathan's famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest held every Fourth of July. There are many other great ideas and examples in this great article.

Vaccum Blowups Revisited

We did a posting on January 9th this year on how many municipalities were relaxing restrictions on sign ordinances due to the weak economy at Vacuum Blowups. The thought was that allowing more signs, banners, and other creative marketing could increase business and help the local economy.

There was an article in a local St. Louis newspaper that some municipalities have taken this idea to heart with businesses around Grant's Trail in St. Louis. For those who are not familiar with Grant's Trail, it is a paved biking, walking, running, rollerblading, etc. path that is hugely popular and does a great deal of pedestrian traffic. There have already been some businesses that have tried to tap into this traffic due to the fact that you have a lot more time to read a sign at 5 to 15 miles an hour as opposed to 60 or 70 miles an hour on the highway. Now that this bill has been passed there should be even more creative ideas put in place by local businesses. Talk about an almost captive audience.....

The Big Picture

Many of the postings on Mine Your Own Business concern the daily running of a small business such as keeping good employees, effective advertising, sales and salesmanship, or customer service. Here's an interesting piece that instead focuses more on the big picture in keeping employees motivated in these challenging times. Pay special attention to Bill Bridge's four P's mentioned about midway in the article.

Now for a follow up, as promised, on a previous posting. On October 29th we mentioned the incredibly rainy October we were having in St. Louis and now the final results are in. St. Louis received 12.38 inches of rain in October making it the wettest October ever in St. Louis while records have been kept (average rainfall is 2.7 inches). In fact it is also the fourth wettest month period. No wonder we are experiencing some flooding of some of the rivers here.