Mine Your Own Business

We've Moved

Mine Your Own Business has moved to a new site Mine Your Biz that will give us more flexibility in the future. One of the great new tools is a search function where you can search all of our previous postings. We will also be adding new features in the future, so even if you don't wish to subscribe to receive an e-mail when we post, check back often for updates.

Optimism Reigns Again?

The main office of Tacony Corporation is located in St. Louis, MO (well actually Fenton, MO) and as in many areas of the country it has been a long, cold, and ugly winter. As a side note, St. Louis is also know for changeable weather, we have a saying something to the effect that " if you don't like the weather in St. Louis, just wait ten minutes." I thought that saying was unique to St. Louis until I did a search using the phrase "St. Louis weather if you don't like it just wait a few minutes" and came up with a whole Web page of similar sayings. I think it may be true of other areas of the country, but I know it is true in St. Louis because we had an accumulating snow on Monday and it is currently 82 degrees on Thursday afternoon.

What does weather in St. Louis have to do with small business? When I came across an article in The Wall Street Journal reporting on increasing optimism by small business owners, I thought of a comparison between our long nasty winter, the Great Recession, and the coming spring (by the way the official first day of spring is this Sunday).

There is a great deal of encouraging information in the article. The National Federation of Independent Business's small business optimism index increased in February. The article also describes how hiring has made gains as well. There may even be a chance that businesses may be able to raise prices and that the prices will hold, in fact after a negative 4 per cent in January,  February posted a 5 percent increase. The thing that is really encouraging about that information is that it is the first positive reading in more than two years. Maybe the long, cold, ugly winter is finally over and spring has arrived at last.

 

Weathering a Sales Slump

Hopefully the Great Recession is over for your small business or ,even better, maybe it didn't impact your business much in the first place. Even as the economy begins to recover, many small businesses sometimes experience an occasional slump.  It might be due to the seasons (think garden shops in the winter or ski resorts in the summer) or some other reason. Eight Tips for Surviving A Sales Slump in Entrepreneur provides the following ideas that might help your small business in a slump:

1. Shed staff.
2. Cut other spending.
3. Manage cash flow.
4. Think of new uses for your resources.
5. Ramp up marketing.
6. Think of ways to extend your season.
7. Team up.
8. Refresh.

The article gives lots of good examples for these eight tips, but as I read the article two local examples came to mind of point 6 above about extending your season came to mind. Ted Drewes is a South St. Louis landmark that has been in business in the same location since 1941. During the spring and summer the parking lot is jamb packed on weekend afternoons and at night. So what does a frozen custard store do during the cold winter months? Ted Drewes uses the empty parking lot to sell Christmas trees and does a great business.

A similar example is a local garden shop about a mile from my house that has been in business since 1967. They do a great business during the spring, summer, and fall. What they do is very similar to Ted Drewes since they sell all kinds of Christmas decorations, lights, artificial trees, etc. I've been in there many times during the holiday season to buy bird feed, and they seem to do pretty well during what would otherwise be a very slow time of your for them.

I thought of a local example of point 4 above about new uses for your resources. I saw something on a local news show that I thought was very clever. Doggie Day Camps have become quite popular in the St. Louis area. The piece was about one company that lets people pay to use their facilities with their pets outside of their normal business hours. Both owners and their pets were having a great time on a Sunday afternoon in the winter. Not only did they make a little money during a time they would normally be closed, they also get some good will from the pet owners and maybe some future customers as well.

 

 

 

Web Survey Tools

We did a posting last month titled A Simple Way to Survey that described a new survey tool designed for mobile devices that made it easy to create simple and short surveys. Not everyone has an iPhone, iPad, or other smart mobile device (yet), and since both positive and negative feedback from your customers is so crucial I thought it might be a good idea to mention an article I ran across.  five cheap or even free Web survey tools. Online Tools to Solicit Feedback from Customers presents five cheap or even free Web survey tools they recommend. The article didn't include links so I've added them below to save you a little time.

• Get Satisfaction
• SurveyMonkey
• PollDaddy
• Search.Twitter.com
• 4Q Online Survey

I've done the bulk of the Web surveys for Tacony since 2004, so our experience might be beneficial for anyone who is new to surveys. We started off by purchasing survey software and installing it on one of our servers. We got pretty good response rates from our surveys by offering coupons and other incentives. Probably the most effective technique has been offering points that can be redeemed for merchandise.

We are still using the survey software since it is extremely cost effective, but it was incapable of doing some of the more advanced functions and reporting we sometimes needed, so we tried one of the premium versions of  SurveyMonkey with excellent results. I did check out all the other tools mentioned above and they all looked like they would work very well for starting out with Web surveys. One of the most important things to remember is to use both the positive and negative results to actively improve your business since that is the whole reason for doing surveys in the first place.

5 Myths to Live a Longer Life Debunked

Many small business owners are so passionate about their business that they rarely, if ever think about retirement and put in long hours contributing to the success of their business.  In the past this would seem to be a recipe for an earlier death than someone who retired early and spent their retirement on the golf course or other pleasurable pastimes. USA Today reports on a 90 year study that followed 1,528 Americans with surprising results on how to live a longer and healhtier life. These are the five myths they found about thriving:

1. Thinking happy thoughts reduces stress and leads to a longer life.
2. Gardening and walking aren't enough to keep you healthy.
3. Lighten up; being serious is bad for you.
4. Take it easy and don't work so hard. You'll live longer.
5. Get married and you will live longer.

Many of these fly in the face of past conventional wisdom. I think myths number 1, 4, and 5 were the most surprising to me, although you might be more surprised at some of the other results of the study. I recently read someplace about one tip mentioned in the article that can contribute to a long healthy life. The study found that being active in middle age was the most important attribute of all, so beware all you middle aged couch potatoes.

More Friday Fun

I had to name this post More Friday Fun since we had already done a post called Friday Fun back in May of last year. It focused on an article about six ways a small business could use video to attract customers, increase their rankings, and differentiate their products from competitors. I checked out the fun links I mentioned in the post (fortunately) since I found that the link to Will It Blend had changed so here is the correct link. There are eighteen pages of videos that show that a Bentec blender can blend about anything.

Now for another fun (and rather strange) article about some research that found that people with a full bladder exercised more self restraint when it came to making expensive or important decisions leading to a wiser choice. You have to wonder how they came up with the idea to do this study in the first place and also how they were able to get funding for it. I then got curious about the title of such an article and when I used the search phrase "bladder control and decision making" I came up with pages and pages of results. Who knew this would be such a popular topic?

One thing a small business owner can take away from this research is to keep the bathroom your customers would use very clean and if you are in the middle of a sales demonstration and the prospective customer asks to use the bathroom, be sure and let them. According to this research it just might close the sale for you.

Breaking the Ice with Prospective Customers

How to approach your regular customers when they come through the front door of your business is usually pretty simple. If they are frequent visitors to your store you have already established some sort of relationship with them and sometimes even a close one. But how to approach a new prospective customer can be very daunting for some store owners and their employees. 6 Things to Tell Every Customer Who Walks in the Door gives six tips from small business owners on how to address this issue with both new and regular customers.

1. "How's the weather treating you?"
2. "Let me introduce you to our team."
3. "Have you visited our store before?"
4. "Try us out for free."
5. "Would you like some coffee?"
6. "I want you to be happy."

I know from personal experience that the free coffee works. My father-in-law has been gone for over fifteen years, so times have changed a little bit, but knew every bank, gas station, car dealer, hardware store, etc. in his neighborhood that had free coffee. Those were the ones he always visited on a regular basis. He might not always buy something, but it did get him in the door.

The article also makes a strong point for asking the customer if they've visited your store before. The article cites a study that showed it could increase sales by 16 percent. It also works as a way to determine how they found your store in the first place, which is very valuable information. So, do you have any icebreakers that seem to work better than others in your store?