Mine Your Own Business

Selling Your Business Part Two

We posted on the rather dismal prospects of selling your business during the current economic situation  with an article titled Selling Your Business. The economic situation seems to be improving slowly and so when we ran across an article from The New York Times that provided a detailed strategy for considering if it is time to sell business and how to do it we thought it was worth a second post on this topic. One sentence from the article caught my attention. "You only sell your business once."

The article suggests that any small business owner considering selling their business should ask themselves three questions:

• Can Your Business Be Sold?
• Are You Ready to Sell?
• What's Your Business Worth

The most difficult of the three question is the last one due to how different each small business is. Markets are different, locations are different, etc. The article provides some tips on coming up with a reasonable valuation of the worth of your business.

The last part of the article gives some tips on promoting the sale of your business and making sure potential buyers are qualified. This may be one of the most imporant parts of the transaction.

 

Postive Behavior Change

All of us have certain things we'd like to change about our coworkers or ourselves. I have worked with some people in the past who would never admit a mistake or that they were wrong, it was always someone elses fault. I don't have that particular flaw since it is easy for me to admit my too frequent mistakes, but I have other problems that keep me from being as effective in my work as I could be.

In my particular case one problem I hate about myself is procrastination. I've improved in this area over the years by breaking large, daunting projects into smaller more manageable pieces. I've also learned (but have to keep reminding myself) that usually once I start on something it is not as bad as I thought it would be.

I recently ran across an article from the Harvard Business Review that described other problems that can reduce our effectiveness in the workplace  It pointed out that a lot of people keep making the same mistakes over and over. They also sometimes do something right and then fail to do it the same way the next  time a similar situation comes up. So how can you stop repeating mistakes and instead repeat sucesses? The posting came up with a very simple and quick solution. Spend five minutes at the end of the day and ask yourself three simple sets of questions.

• How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
• What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do differently or the same tomorrow?
• Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?

I'm planning on adding a fourth set of questions custom designed for me personally. Did I procrastinate on anything today? If so, why?

I'm sure you can come up with some for some area you would like to improve, unless of course you're one of those people who is never wrong. One last point, if you have time look at some of the other past postings on the right side of the Web page. I skimmed a few of them and they had a lot of great information.

 

Sales Advice from a Professional Sales Trainer

We've done a lot of posts on small business and sales over the years since effective selling is so important.  I recently ran across an excellent article, Nine Essentials for Sales Success, that summarizes an address presented by Tom Black who is a professional sales trainer. I thought who better to learn about effective selling than from someone who makes a living teaching people how to sell.

I was reviewing our previous posts in the category of Sales and Salesmanship after reading the article and noticed that with all the posts we've done on sales, very few give specific tips on exactly how to sell. The whole article is worth a read for the great tips and the points Black makes on why these are so important. I especially liked his tip number three, where he presents the four factors that determine results in selling. I also like tip number four where he presents the idea that it is important for sales people to have faith in the law of averages. If you are in the middle of a sales slump, keep plugging away since Black stresses that no slump lasts forever.

More Tips on Email

We just did a posting yesterday with some tips to make your emails more effective and originally thought we might combine two articles on the topic, but there was so much good and different information in both of them that we thought it was worth two postings. The article The 7 Top Email Marketing Trends for 2011 begins by describing how one of the most important small business marketing trends for 2011 may be the integration of social media and email marketing. Two leading email marketers also provided seven other trends they are predicting for 2011.

1. Integrate Your Email Marketing with Your Social Media Campaigns
2. Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Mobile
3. Engage Readers
4. Keep Content Brief and Focused
5. Don't Go Overboard On Images or Design
6. Plan Ahead for More Effective Email Campaigns
7. Track Campaigns To Determine What's Working and What's Not

While there is some overlap on the two articles (point number four above with point number 1 in the previous article on brevity), this article presented some totally different points that I had never considered. With the current explosion of smart phones and new tablets point 2 is especially relevant since more and more people may read your email on one of these devices. Your emails of the past that were designed with a computer or laptop in will not work as well on one of these devices, so the article provides some great ideas for making your email more mobile device friendly.

The other point I especially liked is the last point about tracking or analytics software. I spoke to a fellow employee that is involved with Tacony email marketing and he said that this is very important and we use a number of different techniques to monitor the success of our emails. After all, if you don't have some way to track results how do you know what does work and what doesn't?

 

 

 

More Effective Email

I know a lot of people think that with all the new social media email is quickly becoming an an obsolete technology (some would even say it is already effectively dead). Let's have a little fun before we get to our main article and look at a very interesting post that illustrates the above point. It seems that Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List every August since 1998. The list gives some cultural touchstones that have shaped the thinking of the incoming freshmen. This is where I found some interesting points on the class of 2014, one being that they think email is too slow. You can have a lot of fun with the list and there are lists all the way back to 2002, so it is worh a visit.

Now on to our main article titled 10 Old New Rules for Business Emails that makes the point that email is the backbone of all the other social media and it is still very important for a small business to use it correctly. Here are the 10 tips recommended in the posting.

1. Keep it short.
2. Make the subject line a summary.
3. Start and end with "you."
4. Only one topic per message.
5. Use appropriate tone.
6. Don't send extra copies.
7. Respect spelling and grammar.
8. Remember it's not private.
9. Email isn't for arguments.
10. Mind those threads.

Most are common sense and are rules we have probably all followed for years, but a few of them were something I had not considered before. I'd also like to provide one addition to point number 8 on Remember it's not private. I take that one a step further and assume every email I send can be read by anyone. With all the hackers out there it makes me cringe when I see what some people put in their emails.

 

Small Business Scams

I think almost everyone reading this post has received an e-mail from Nigeria about a way to get fabulously wealthy, commonly called the Nigerian Scam. Well I did a little research and found out that this has existed in one form or another since the 1920s. Even more astounding is that it is still bilking people out of money, 100 million in 15 months according to a 1997 newspaper article. Click the link above to read all about it. What got me thinking about that particular scam is an article titled 7 Small Business Scam To Watch Out For and one of them was Phishing E-mails. Here's the complete list:

• Directory Scams
• Office Supply Scams
• Overpayment Scams
• Data Breach
• Vanity Awards
• Stolen Identity
• Phishing E-mails.

I had never even thought of a few that were mentioned in the article, so hopefully you'll find the list helpful. We've also done some posts in the past on some scams that you might be interested in Tis the Season and Another Scam Alert. Do you have any other scams that you've heard about or experienced first hand?

Online Reputation is Very Important

We've frequently posted on Mine Your Own Business on how more and more potential customers are researching products on the Internet before visiting any brick-and-mortar retailer (both large and small). We ran across an interesting article from CIO titled How to Clean Up Your Online Reputation that takes Internet researching a step further. Potential customers are not only researching products, they are searching for reviews of your company as well.

Havng a positive online reputation is crucial for any small business. So how do you check on your online presence and how do you improve your reputation? The article recommends two ways to monitor and improve your company image. One possibility is to pay a company for your online reputation management and  provides numerous links to companies that will provide that service, but with a cost.

The other way is to manage your online reputation yourself and the article recommends and gives tips on three steps.

• Track Your Online Presence
• Address the Issues
• Connect and Create Content

The conclusion of the article gives some pros and cons on both approaches, but the final recommendation to manage your online reputation yourself probably makes the most sense. Just make sure to monitor it on a regular basis since bad information spreads so fast on the Internet.

Something Else to Avoid in Your Small Business

We posted something earlier this week on Mine Your Own Business with some tips on what to avoid to make sure your business is successful and ensures that it is around for a long time. This is a follow up in one way since it focuses on one thing not mentioned in the last post that can really be detrimental to your business and that is demotivating your employees.

We've frequently posted on how important employees are to any successful business and concentrated in the past on the positive aspects of finding, training, and motivating good employees. Now comes an article from NFIB on 8 Surefire Ways to Demotivate Your Employees.

1. Public criticism
2. Failing to provide praise.
3. Not following up.
4. Give unachievable goals or deadlines.
5. Not explaining your actions or sharing company data.
6. Implied threats.
7. Not honoring creative thinking and problem solving.
8. Micromanagement.

Unfortunately in my business career I've either been on the receiving end of some of these actions or seen them used on other employees. I'm sure you have as well. The main thing is to keep these points in mind as you work with your employees. It might be a good idea to do something that we have mentioned with some other posts in the past. Print the list out and refer to it occasionally to make sure you're not demotivating one very important asset of your business, your valuable employees.

What to Avoid in Your Small Business

It's the biggest nightmare of any small business owner, after all the blood, sweat, and tears you put into starting and running your small business there comes the day when you are forced to close your business. Hopefully this never happens to your small business and here's an article from the New York Times that provides ten tips from small businesses that have failed that may help your business avoid a similar fate.

1. The math just doesn't work.
2. Owners who cannot get out of their own way.
3. Out-of-control growth.
4. Poor accounting.
5. Lack of a cash cushion.
6. Operational mediocrity.
7. Operational inefficiencies.
8. Dysfunctional management.
9. The lack of a succession plan.
10. A declining market.

The beginning of the article points out that many failed small businesses have no clue why they went out of business, so it might be a good idea to take a good hard look at your small business with these tips in mind. If you spot something that is similar to some of the ten tips above, maybe you can make some corrections. A bonus of this article is a link near the beginning with 6 real life examples of actual failed businesses They might still be in business if they had looked at the list above in time.

 

Tough Customers

No matter how your employees and your business in general focuses on customer service, every small business owner has faced a less then contented customer (sometimes that is putting it mildly). Maybe the problem is they think they found a better deal at a big box store, or they had a problem with your product after only six years of extensive use, or they can't purchase bags for the vacuum cleaner you sold them at Wally World, etc. The question is how do you deal with such a customer? The natural urge is to fight back, but a recent article at Bloomberg Business Week presents some different approaches.

• Listen up.
• Pace yourself.
• Take the lead.

Try the techniques mentioned in the article the next time you face a difficult or combative customer (sadly to say you'll probably get a chance far too soon), or do you have some suggestions you've had success with in the past?