Mine Your Own Business

Friday Fun

We'll get to the fun part a little later, but first we'll cover some great ideas that were in a recent article by Lisa Barone in Small Business Trends titled 6 Ways To Use Video As A Small Business Owner. She begins with the surprising statistic (at least it surprised me) that YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the Web and has more than 2 billion views a day. She also makes the point that it is just not for entertainment, but that your customers often use YouTube or Universal Search in Google for product reviews, recommendations, and other information about products they are interested in.

She then gives six ways that small business owners can use video to their advantage. A few of them are pretty obvious such as offering reviews and tutorials and showing your product in action. A few that were not immediately obvious (at least to me) were using video to highlight what makes your business unique, or introduce your office, or post customer testimonials. You can read the whole article here. And now for the fun part, don't miss the two links in the article to the Will It Blend video series and Benson's for Bed's mattress dominoes. Talk about a unique and hilarious way to show your product in action! Be sure to notice the crazy smile on the man in the Will It Blend video.

Customers and Carnivals

I recently spotted a thread in a forum where some small business owners were discussing tent sales. The general consensus among the owners was that many of them had conducted tent sales in the past with a great deal of success. They also passed around some great ideas from their experience on how to make a tent sale a big success. There was a lot of great information and it really illustrated what a great tool a forum for small business can be.

I then ran across an article along similar lines titled Small Businesses Find More Customers at Carnivals. Instead of doing all the work of setting up your own tent sale the article suggested setting up tents and exhibits and selling your products at an event or festival. The event or festival will provide the attendees by providing music, entertainment, and refreshments and you can concentrate on doing some selling. The article provided 6 tips to consider when setting up for the event:

1. Estimate profitability.
2. Exhibit Support.
3. Impulse Buys.
4. Become a Carnival Barker.
5. Bring Materials.
6. Create a Follow-up Strategy.

There is a lot of good advice in the article and it might be a good idea to try selling at some local event before trying your own tent sale.

Store Appearance Follow Up

We did a posting on Tuesday about the importance of store appearance for small businesses but didn't really provide any concrete suggestions for improving the look of your business. Now comes an article by Steve Strauss in USA Today that takes the idea one step further. He not only provides some suggestions to enhance your store appearance, but also give some ideas to get your business ready for summer.

1. Spring Cleaning
2. Spruce up your website
3. Planning ahead
4. Try something new

The article makes the point that summer is a slower season for some businesses so there is more time to tackle this list of suggestions. Even if summer is your busy season, your business would probably still benefit by the two areas of spring cleaning Steve suggests in his article. He suggests a physical cleaning and sprucing up of your business and also a spring e-cleaning of your computer by deleting old files, doing a thorough backup, and updating software. If summer is your busy season maybe you can implement the rest of the list in your slow season.

Security Warning

We've done a couple of postings on the importance of small businesses backing up their company computers in the past and you can review both of them at Small Business Backup Option (there is a link to the other posting in this later posting). Just as important as regular back ups is something many small business owners may not normally consider and that is information security. No Business Is Too Small For IT Security in Forbes describes how Richard K. Kissel (an information technology specialist) makes the point that many small businesses may think they are too small to be targets for hackers so they are safe from attacks.

The article then goes on and points out that since large businesses are bigger targets they have been forced to implement more stringent security so attackers may spend more time probing the easier targets of small businesses. Kissel then goes on to recommends three absolutely necessary steps for any small business to take.

• Up to date security software for viruses and malicious software
• Properly configured firewalls
• Wireless network security if you have a wireless network 

The final point the article makes is that any security measures you take will make you that less vulnerable and less of an easy target.

Store Appearance

We do a lot of postings on customer service, if you're curious about how many just click on the link to all of our Customer Service postings on the right hand side of this page under Categories. We do more postings in Sales and Salesmanship and General Business, but customer service still has a huge impact on any business. We ran across this article in USA Today that made the point that "aesthetics is a part of customer service" and is very important to the success of your business along with quality service and reasonable pricing.

The article provides a couple of examples of businesses that are losing customers because they aren't paying enough attention to this aspect of customer service, so how can an owner address this issue. Next time you walk into your place of business try to step back and take an objective look at your business. Is it clean, well lit, and generally attractive. Better yet, ask your employees and some of your regular customers if they have any suggestions (or if you are married, your husband or wife). You might get some great free advice. A last point, if you like this article there is a link to other postings by Gladys Edmunds' columns at the bottom of the page.

Small Business and Brands

We ran across an interesting article on Bloomberg Business Week titled Manage Brand Fanatics and Brand Detractors that began with the question "What causes customers to fall in love with a small business or to hate it?". It started out by discussing problem customers and the rising trend about negative comments about a business that appear on the Internet (it seems with increasing frequency). The article makes the point that some customers are not going to like your business no matter what, but you can listen to their comments and allow your employees to try tom improve the situation. There are a lot of great links to other postings that give even more detail on handling this difficult situation.

The other side of the coin is how you can get customers to love your small business. The article mentions a couple of options and you can check them out. One of the suggestions we really liked is to create an event that happens once a year and make it a really fun event. We have found first hand here at Tacony Corporation that this is can be extremely effective and we have a great example.

One of our strategic business units, Nancy's Notions, had their first Sewing Weekend 25 years ago to celebrate the grand opening of their first official warehouse. 500 people attended, light refreshments were provided, and there was one seminar before the warehouse was opened for shopping. This year Sewing Weekend was from May 6th through the 8th and there were nearly 3,000 attendees. They could choose from 8 educational seminars, 6 hands-on workshops, free stage demonstrations, and more. The warehouse sale is also a very popular part of the event. This is always a successful, exciting, and fun-filled event that our customers appreciate and this is a great example of an event that gets people enthused about Nancy's Notions.

For the Birds

Feeding wild birds is very popular in the United States, according to Wikipedia over 55 million Americans are active bird feeders out of a U.S. population of 309,257,847 (I got that figure from the U.S. Census Bureau Web site). I did the math and that is almost 18 per cent of the American population. So how does this relate to small business? We'll get to that a little later in the posting, but an article in the New York Times, How Do you Keep Them Coming Back, presented some great ideas on getting customers to return that will relate to the bird statistics above. The whole article is worth reading but the examples of how two coffee shops get repeat business made me think of a local business that I frequent. One coffee shop has a frequent sippers reward card that they keep on file at the store and the second provides very personal customer service.

Now for the link to feeding wild birds and repeat customers, but first a little background. I have two bird feeders that I keep filled year round and a bird bath. Winters can be nasty here in the Midwest, so I even have a heater so the birds (and squirrels) have water even in the dead of winter. I buy most of my birdseed from a local, privately owned garden shop for the same reasons mentioned above about the coffee shops. They have a card for me at the store and when I buy 10 bags of seed I get the next one free (an $18 value). I also get excellent customer service, they even carry the bag out and load it in my car.

There is actually a third reason as well, it is simply better quality than I can get at my local grocery store. It has a more expensive blend of seed that appeals to more birds. It could be my imagination, but when I get busy and sometimes fill my feeders with grocery store feed, I don't seem to have near as many birds and I think they get excited when I put the "good stuff" in.

Now for something to see if we can get you coming back to our blog. We'll give a free prize to the first 10 people who post a comment to this article, any takers? By the way, a comment of simply what is the prize does not count.

Small Business Popularity

There has been a great deal of information in all types of media about how many people are upset and even angry with certain segments of our society and with government, one recent example being the Tea Party movement. Now comes the results of a survey from the Pew Research Center that supports this information. Can you guess who is at the bottom of the list with the greatest negative perception? Take your best guess first and then check out Why America admires small business to see if any of your guesses were correct and then see who came out on top, small businesses. In fact, a whopping seventy-one percent of Americans feel that small businesses positively impact our country.

The article then gives some interesting and surprising facts from the National Federation of Independent Business' Research Foundation on some of the reasons small business owners are so popular in their communities. One being that ninety-one percent of small business owners volunteer, or in some way contribute monetarily to their communities. If you read the rest of the article you'll really understand why they come out on top. Seems like the people who came out on the bottoms of the list could definitely learn some lessons from the example set by small businesses.

Is Print Advertising Dead?

We've done a lot of posting on social media and online advertising but only one recently on print advertising, so when we ran across an article in USA Today with a slightly different slant we thought it might be worth revisiting this topic. The article begins by questioning whether print advertising is dead as some critics say. The article maintains that similar to Mark Twain's famous quote "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." By the way I had to look this up on the Internet to make sure I got the quote right and you may be more familiar with this misquote "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

The article maintains that print advertising is still very definitely a worthwhile option and emphasizes the following benefits:

1. It is highly targeted
2. It does not evaporate
3. It is great for branding

Be sure and read the whole article for the reasons behind these three points and as an added bonus there are some statistics on improved small business confidence near the end of the article that we all might find encouraging.

A Word to the Wise - Part 2

We did a posting back in February about how the IRS and several states were starting to scrutinize  companies that were changing the status of employees to independent contractors mainly for tax purposes. If you missed the posting or would like to refresh your memory you can read A Word to the Wise here. Now comes a new article titled The IRS Picks on the Little Guy from CFO.com how the IRS has reduced the amount of time they plan to spend on auditing large companies and plans to increase audits on small businesses. 

The article describes how the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) conducted a study with the results that 20 years ago two out of every three large company returns were audited by the IRS. By 2005 it had dropped to 43 out of every 100 returns and by 2009 it had plummeted to 25 out of every 100. You can read the whole article for all the rationale behind the changes.

The real irony in these changes is near the end of the article where it makes the point that politicians in Washington are always making speeches on how small businesses are the foundation of job growth, yet in these  difficult times the IRS is targeting them for increased tax scrutiny. After all it is a little difficult to fully concentrate on growing your business when your in the middle of a tax audit (or just worrying about one on the horizon).