How can you Send Consistent Message to your Customers

December 14, 2011


In earlier post we showed how sending inconsistent messages to customers through your actions can harm small business owners greatly. Many small business owners don’t pay attention to how customers perceive their business as a result of actions they take and end up confusing the customer who keeps wondering what your business stands really stands for. Is it low price vendor like Wal-Mart or high quality, easy-to-user products like Apple?
To provide consistent message to your customers all departments within your business have to work in harmony like well-oiled machine. The departments you have to pay particular attention to are customer service and marketing. The list below gives specific actions you can take to achieve this:
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Filed Under: Customers, Employees, Marketing Tagged With: ,

4-Step Approach to Deal with Difficult Employees

November 6, 2011


Every business owner encounters difficult employees – commonly referred to as jerks – in the course of running his business. These difficult employees are easy to spot in an organization. They complain about any task you give them, spread around rumors, slack on their jobs and bully their peers and subordinates. In general, they drain lot of energy from everyone, particularly the managers and business owners.
How you deal with them can help you minimize the impact on you and your business. As a business owner, avoiding them is not an option for you, as much as you would like. This will only delay the problem for later and make it even more challenging to address. Rather than avoiding them it is better to nip the problem in the bud and address the situation head on. From our own experience and after talking to fellow business owners we have come up with a 4-step approach that can help you deal with this problem in an appropriate manner.
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When is a Good Time to Increase Your Payroll?

November 3, 2011


This blog post was created by Bert Deorhoff, CPA, who specializes in small business bookkeeping in Jefferson City.
If you are running a small business, then you are making a lot of big decisions daily. As your business grows, you will need to start thinking about increasing your payroll and hiring new employees.
The first thing you need to do is start planning. You will have to do quite a bit of number crunching in terms of how another employee will affect monthly, quarterly and yearly expenses.
Ask yourself, “Do I have enough work to justify hiring another person? Am I meeting the needs of my customers?”
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How to Measure the Success of Onboarding Process

October 23, 2011

Organizations invest a lot in their workforce, and it’s no surprise that they expect to see a return on their investments (ROI). But as business leaders look for the best ways to maximize the ROI of their workforce, the onboarding process is often overlooked. For many, the onboarding experience is reduced to a mere checklist of tasks to be completed and forms to be submitted. The fact that such organizations fail to understand, though, is that an employees that experience a smoother onboarding process will be more connected to the organization, better trained and, thus, quicker to produce.

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Framework for Deciding What NOT to do

September 28, 2011


In the previous post we highlighted that the most difficult decisions you will ever make are the ones where you decide NOT to move forward. By focusing your resources and energy on narrowly you can achieve number of benefits and get higher return on your investment of time, money or effort. We mentioned how Apple has succeeded to become the most valuable company in the U.S. by applying this principle, while GM had floundered by spreading resources over multiple brands with lot of overlaps.
You should use this approach in decision making every step of the way. If you take a step back and think about the decision in terms of cost vs. benefit of the current choice and evaluate it against alternatives you can improve the odds of making the right choice. You can use this principle in number of different areas as shown below.
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Practical Ideas for Customer Suggestions to Improve Sales

September 18, 2011


In the earlier post we mentioned that if you are not applying customer suggestion tactics in the small business you are losing about 25% of current sales. We also showed best practices to work with when implementing customer suggestion plan. The key to making customers to like your suggestions is to do it in a way such that they do not feel as if they are being forced into buying something they do not want to.
In this post we will show practical ideas that are based on the best practices to implement in your small business. We have seen many of these ideas implemented at number of businesses with great results. I am sure you will be able to enjoy similar sales growth after you implement some of these ideas.
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Best Practices in Customer Suggestions to Improve Sales

September 14, 2011


In the previous post we mentioned that if you are not applying customer suggestion tactics in the small business you are missing out on 25% of current sales. These days customers receive suggestions from businesses and other customers from all kinds of businesses. However, you have to be careful about not turning off customers with your overly aggressive tactics. Customers do like receiving suggestions from their friends and businesses, but they do not want to be bombarded with them every step of the way.
The key to making customers to like your suggestions is to do it in a way such that the customers do not feel as if they are being forced into buying something they do not want to. There are certain things you should keep in mind when working on your customer suggestion plan as described below.
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Find Trouble Spots in your Business from Warning Signs

August 28, 2011

In the previous post we looked at 5 warning signs that tell you if your business is headed for trouble. These signs serve as early warning system that can help you identify and remediate problems before they become too serious.
Looking for a warning sign is just the first step in fixing things and making them better. Once you have received the red sign you need to interpret it, find the underlying causes and correct them – all before your business reaches the point of no return and forces you to close it or sell at a loss. It helps to have a business degree online to get a better understanding of these warning signs.
In general, you will find two types of problems that would cause the businesses to sputter. The first has to do with general market and economic conditions, which you may not have much control over. The second type of problems has to do with your specific business. These issues are the result of how you run your business and are totally under your control. As a business owner your goal should be to uncover issues specific to your business as quickly as possible and take appropriate actions to correct them now rather than waiting till the last minute.
In this post we will show you what could be the underlying causes for the 5 warning signs mentioned in the previous post. The next post will focus on actions you can take to correct them.
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15 Simple Cost Reduction Techniques for Small Business Owners

August 21, 2011


In the previous post we showed a systematic approach you can use to reduce cost in small business while still keeping your foundation intact allowing you to take advantage of the upturn in economy when it happens. We suggested that you should take surgical knife approach to cost reduction as opposed to using machete.
By applying this approach your business may come up with tactics that will be different from some other type of business. You have to tailor the systematic approach to your business and situation. However, there are common tactics that can be employed by almost all types of businesses. Below we describe those techniques categorized by stages in the cost reduction approach.
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How to Grow your Business without Spending a Fortune

July 27, 2011


The great recession of the last 2-3 years has made many small business owners skittish about spending money even if it can help them improve sales in the future. Many of the small business owners are hunkering down to survive till the sky is cleared. They are happy with maintaining current sales and making reasonable profit. While we agree that these are difficult times for all small business owners, you should not have to sacrifice long-term benefits at the expense of short-term survival.
We believe, there are ways to satisfy both the needs of conserving cash and growing your business at the same time. The key is to utilize low-cost marketing techniques to improve sales combined with flexible operations to control cost. We have covered several of these techniques in previous posts. Below we summarize them for your convenience.
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