Mine Your Own Business

The Closer

One of my favorite television shows is The Closer, thanks to the magic of digital video recorders I never miss an episode (if you are curious about the history of DVRs follow this link to the history of this great invention). When I ran across an article from Inc. about creative ways for making goals for 2011 and following through on them, it made me think of The Closer for two reasons. The first is that we are closing the door on 2010. That may make you happy or sad depending on how the year was for you and your business.

The second reason I thought of The Closer is one of the suggestions mentioned in the article, which was to purchase some poster boards and visually illustrate the steps in your goals for the coming year. This is the very technique that is used on every episode of The Closer (that I have seen anyway). They set up an evidence board to help them figure out who was the perp or perps for the crime they are investigating. I thought since it always works on the tv show, maybe it would be helpful for some of you in generating goals and following through on them. By the way, there are four other suggestions in the article as well, so one of them should be helpful for you.

Another Deadline

We did a posting on Mine Your Own Business last week on some tax credits and favorable loan provisions that were set to expire at the end of the year. We hope you will be able to take advantage of some of the points mentioned in the article and be able to save some money. Now comes another article that has six suggestions for small business owners to start the new year right:

• Write a "Lessons Learned in 2010" list.
• Get organized.
• Don't quit the game.
• Capitize on prospects' planning.
• Acknowledge battles won and lost.
• Review your Web presence

I especially liked two of the suggestions, Get Organized and Review your Web presence. Think how nice it would be to start the new year with your store rid of all clutter and all your files organized. The Web suggestion is very important (and more so every year), so important in fact that we will have a posting on Mine Your Own Business later this week that will serve as a nice follow up to this article. The posting will have some tips on effective Search Engine Optimization that won't destroy your budget.

One last point is that these six tips come from other small business owners, so they have been tried and found successful in the real world. Do you have any suggestions that have worked for you in the past?

Small Business Study

So why did you start your own business? Was it the idea of being your own boss, to make more money, or did you get downsized in the current economy and decided to try start your own business out of necessity? There was a recent article that stated that most business owners were interested in making more money and achieving financial independence. Whatever your motives were for starting your business what steps can you take maximize the value of your business?

There was a recent Business Value Drivers Study that was designed to help small businesses do this very task and there is a link to the study in the article. It takes 15 to 20 minutes to complete and is primarily designed for small businesses with 5 or more employees that have been in business for 5 years or more. Some interesting results for the study as of July 2010 were:

• 34 percent indicated they have more than $1 million in annual revenue.
• 79 percent are over the age of 40.
• 48 percent know when they want to retire.

You can read the article for some more interesting results. Based on an analysis of the results of the study, the article provides some recommendations that any owner can implement maximize the value of  their small business. There are also several links to other resources that can help with growing your business.

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.

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.

Another Sports Metaphor

We posted a piece yesterday on an article that used the baseball metaphor in describing how businesses can cope with unexpected bad news. The posting today is about article in USA Today that uses another sport (ping-pong) to describe the problem faced by many small business owners of switching from one task to another all day long to the detriment of accomplishing any long term goals. The article calls this the "Ping-Pong Syndrome" (or PPS) coined by supply company Staples and a survey they conducted resulted in 61% of small business owners suffer from PPS.

The article then goes on about a program Staples has come up to assist small business owner that suffer from PPS, the Staples stickK to it! Business Challenge and provides a link to the program. We also blogged about this on Mine Your Business on February 19th in Not Too Late so there is great deal of information on the program and some of the results so far. One last thing to consider are the four tips recommended at the end of the article to help small business owners cope with Ping-Pong Syndrome.

Small Businesses and Credit Cards

More and more small businesses are accepting credit and debit cards for purchases as they become ever more popular with their customers. The problem facing small businesses is that credit card fees are increasing as described in an article from The Wall Street Journal. The article describes how merchants don't receive the full purchase amount when they accept plastic because a part of the sale gets re-routed to the card holder's bank, the merchant's bank, and the network that processes the transaction. These swipe fees are up over 3% from the previous year according to a payment industry newsletter, the Nilson Report. The article goes into much more detail on all the increases and why they are increasing.

The problem facing small businesses is that their rates are increasing faster than large businesses because larger businesses (think Walmart) are able to negotiate better rates. The article does provide some tips on reducing the amount of the increase, such as negotiating with their bank. Other options are raising prices or establishing credit card minimums and surcharges. There are problems with credit card surcharges since Visa and MasterCard don't allow them and penalties can include fines or the loss of the ability to accept those cards. One last point is that there are a lot of excellent comments in the article on merchants facing this problem and you might pick up some tips from them.

6 tips for being a better manager when you just don't have enough time

We did a posting on Monday this week on how important it is to step back from the daily grind and do some planning. If you missed the post you can scroll down and review it. Probably a question that came to mind for many of you who read the posting or read it now, is how do you free up the time in your hectic day to do this all important planning?

Now comes an article from Art Petty that gives 6 tips that a small business owner can use to ease some of the frustration. Several of the tips involve taking care of certain types of problems as they come up instead of taking care of them later. The last line of the article sums up what these six tips can do for you. "There’s little chance we’ll find more hours in a day, but you absolutely have the ability to make each and every minute count just a bit more."

Small Business Stress

Running a small business can be very stressful if not all of the time then at least some of the time. We ran across an article from the Wall Street Journal that gives five of the most common sources of stress for business owners. Three of them are excessive workloads, concerns about making enough money, and fears (when employees are concerned) about making payroll. You can read the whole list here, and can probably think of a few that could be added to the list.

One of the most sobering points made by the article is that about one-third of small businesses fail withing two years and almost 60 percent are out of business within four years. So what can a small business do to beat the odds of failure? One thing the piece recommends is to not get too caught up in the daily grind and to step back to do some planning. This of course is a difficult thing to do. Remember the saying: Sometimes its hard to remember that the plan is to drain the swamp when you’re up to your knees in alligators (with knees sometimes replaced by a more colorful term). That is the challenge though and the article provides some other advice on how to accomplish this balance.

Beyond Resolutions

We've done a lot of postings in the last few weeks on planning for 2010. In fact we did a posting on December 24th specifically about New Year's Resolutions with six tips for resolutions in 2010 Resolutions. Now comes an article from Business Week that describes how resolutions are fine, but in 2010 it might be time to think outside the box.

The article provides 12 questions that any business, large or small should ask itself in 2010. For example the first two are What matters most and What can I let go. The 12 questions cover almost all areas that businesses should think about this year and so if you are a procrastinator and haven't gotten around to making resolutions you might want to try this list instead.