For small business owners staff productivity is a major issue. We simply cannot afford to have staff hanging around doing nothing. This is particularly difficult in the personal care services industry, e.g. hair salons, dentists, plumbers, nail technicians etc, where generally staff are present in the office waiting for bookings and appointments to occur.There is an underlying problem which is in the way these businesses have taken on staff in the past and I’ll explain. The root of the problem is about aligning costs with revenue streams: only incur costs when there is an associated revenue stream. Sounds simple. In the personal care industry, the main source of costs are typically rent and staff, these are fixed costs which do not change regardless of what is happening to the top line!
So what can we do to transfer to these fixed costs to variable, i.e. make them only occur where there is an associated revenue stream? One idea is to adopt some IT: there are many low-cost online solutions available http://www.reserviz.com whereby a small business can put all of its appointments online and available to registered users. Employees can then logon from home and only turn up in the work place when they have confirmed an appointment which means the employer stops paying them for dead time.
Consultants can benefit as they can use dead time to do something more useful. Customers are happier as they can use the same system to automatically book appointments with their prepared stylist or technician using an on-line interface and email confirmation system.
Overall costs are reduced, the benefit of which could be passed onto employees, shareholders and even customers making for a positive impact all round.
Small Business Staff Productivity ? Essential in a Slowing Economy
Free Corporate Fitness Programs For Your Small Business
We all know the positive benefits of exercise: reduce the chance of developing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, reduce body weight and fat, build healthy muscles, bones, and joints, reduce depression and anxiety, enhance and improve physical performance, and on and on and on. So why hasn’t your small business taken an active role in improving the lives of your employees by promoting exercise?The answer is simple: you don’t have the time, energy, or money to put a corporate fitness program together, or pay to have someone do it for you. That’s no excuse! Encouraging your employees to get into shape can have exponential returns in increased employee productivity, reduced health insurance costs, and decreases in employee sick days.Better yet, you might not have to pay anything at all. There are many fitness companies and personal trainers that will come provide information, employee-paid fitness classes, and other services at no charge to the small business itself. Here are a few ways you can encourage fitness (without spending any money):Fitness Education for Your EmployeesMany fitness companies, personal trainers, and nutritionists would jump at the opportunity to speak to your employees about fitness and nutrition, FOR FREE! Look for fitness professionals around your area and ask them if they’d like to come speak about a specific topic, like weight loss, eating right, or overall fitness.Organize Group Fitness ActivitiesRather than waiting until team cohesion breaks down to schedule some kind of corporate retreat in the mountains, make physical exercise like hiking, biking, running, and casual sports like soccer, basketball, and softball part of your weekly or monthly schedule. This will enhance teamwork while getting everyone into shape.Local Fitness ProgramsIf you look around your area, you might find a local gym or fitness company that conducts lunch-time exercise programs. You might want to encourage your employees to get a membership and attend the classes at lunch as a group activity. If you’d like to help with the expense, maybe offer to pay for some of the class, or negotiate a group rate with the gym. If you don’t have the money for that, offer your employees a “fitness hour” to go to the gym and keep them on the clock.On-site Fitness ClassesSome fitness companies and trainers will conduct on-site fitness services in or outside your location. Depending on the type of training, some companies will even bring the necessary equipment with them to conduct the class. If you can’t afford to pay for the class, your employees might. See if you could get a per-session rate from the trainer that is reasonable for all your employees to pay.
Another Simple Tactic For Increasing Your Customer Base and Growing Your Small Business
Entrepreneurs often find it difficult to grow their small businesses. They struggle with the effort and expense involved in traditional marketing methods, and the limited budgets they have to work with. However, there are four extremely powerful and practically free marketing tools that we all have at our disposal, but we often over look.
Let’s take a look at one of the easiest techniques for growing a small business on a shoestring budget:
Take Advantage Of Customer Testimonials
The next best thing to customer referrals is customer testimonials. Testimonials help put your customers at ease. They break down doubt and buying resistance. Plus, the customer who gave the testimonial becomes more loyal (just like the customer who gave a referral).
We all know that testimonials are extremely powerful, but it still amazes me how few small businesses actually use them. Every single bit of marketing you do should include customer testimonials. Every sales letter, every display ad, every radio spot. Even your brochures and business cards will be more effective if they contain testimonials. So, from here on out, get in the habit of including testimonials on everything!
What’s that you said? You don’t have any testimonials? Well, start collecting them NOW by using the following tips:
1. Create a mechanism for collecting testimonials. A fill-in-the-blanks form works great in most circumstances. Be sure to ask for your client’s full name and permission to publish the testimonial.
2. Ask for a testimonial right away. This strategy has two benefits. First, the details of your service will still be fresh in your customer’s mind. Second, buyer’s remorse and refund requests will be reduced once the client has “taken a stand” for your service.
3. Ask for a specific testimonial. For instance, you can say, “Kathy can you jot down a brief description of how we took care of your squeaky brakes?”
4. Ask your customer to describe the problem she was having before using your product or service. This helps your prospect identify with the customer giving a testimonial, and also helps aggravate the pain the prospect is experiencing (aggravation is part of the selling process).
5. Try to get a picture of your customer to use along with the testimonial. Keep a Polaroid or digital camera handy for this purpose.
So, what should you do with all these testimonials once you’ve collected them? First and foremost, use them in every single bit of marketing that you generate. Here are a few more ideas:
1. Compile your testimonials into an “Important Tips” free report and use it as a lead generator.
2. Create a CD of audio testimonials that you can send to prospects.
3. Play a DVD of video testimonials on a loop in your waiting room. This is especially effective if you have testimonials about products or services that many of your customers aren’t aware that you offer. This makes great covert “advertising”.
4. Plaster your written, audio and video testimonials all over your website.
5. Post your testimonials on a huge bulletin board in your lobby and include photos of your customers if you have them.
6. Use corresponding testimonials in your advertising. Are you creating a coupon for a coolant flush? Include testimonials about how great your coolant flush service is.
7. Use complimentary testimonials in your advertising. Running an oil change special? Include testimonials about your tire rotation service.
And just like referrals, it is absolutely imperative that you come up with a special way to thank the customers who gave you testimonials. More than likely, the clients who give referrals and testimonials are your best and most loyal customers – and you want to keep it that way!
The Truth About Living Your Purpose For Small Business Owners
In the popular press these days, a dominant theme is about living your purpose. The articles usually ask “Are you passionate about what you’re doing earning an income?” One thing about living your purpose or your passion for that matter is that living your purpose can really get ugly at times.
When you live a life on purpose you might appear selfish to the people around you. That’s because purpose is about unleashing the quiet giant inside of you. That giant wants to give to the world something that tends to be larger than life. The famous comic book writer Stan Lee said “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”
You have to have an immense amount of love inside yourself to let your purpose come to life. When you peek at your purpose, you know that it must happen. It’s a glimmer that sparks all great businesses, big and small. You are passing through you, the gift that was lovingly implanted in you at conception from the glorious universe. But you live in the everyday mundane world of hard cold realities.
All around you, you’ll find well meaning people who say they absolutely support you living your purpose. (As long as they aren’t inconvenienced by it.) Nobody tells you a purpose has a lifecycle to it. Only other people living their purpose know this cycle. But they even have a hard time articulating it. They will share the glory side of it and that there is no better way to live. But they won’t share the phases.
Here is the hard reality I have uncovered. There is a germination phase, the assimilation phase, the achievement phase and maturity. Here’s the real kicker, until you reach the third phase, you can face a lot of emotional and economic hardship. You may find that no one who knows you, will really understand you. So let me ask again “do you want to live a life of purpose?”
I don’t want to scare you out of living a life of purpose. Quite the opposite, once you enter the world of living on purpose it is a Pandora’s Box that can’t be closed. You are a child learning to walk with everyone around you saying with a big smile (yeah right) “you can do it” while they sit on your shoulders or kick your feet out from under you any chance they can.
If you decide to create a small business from your passion you might hear a cacophony of remarks; “It can’t be done”, “just get a real job already” or “you can do it in your spare time”. These torments only make you more determined to stand up, waddle and run. Because walking your purpose becomes the only thing controlling your existence!
So ask yourself, if you had no income coming in, would you still be doing the kind of work you are doing right now? Would you be able to endure everyone around you saying you are crazy doing what you’re doing because at this moment they may see no income? Would you spend all you emotional energy and risk all your financial resources to live your purpose not knowing for certain a positive outcome? When you’re on purpose there is no other choice and that’s why others may not understand you. Talk to any successful business owner they’ll tell you “Welcome to the world of small business.”
Most people are working in a job that provides a suitable income and false safety. Yes, that’s right suitable income. I specifically did not say sustainable. As soon as a JOB disappears the income stops. Suitable income is such that you have enough to pay the bills that you can’t really afford. A sustainable income occurs even when you’re sleeping.
What anyone who is living a life of purpose will tell you is that they can’t imagine doing anything else. The amount of energy they put into their purpose creates a passion that creates even more energy. There is no working on purpose; it is only living on purpose. You get so much more than you give. “Purpose livers” will also tell you that the money takes care of itself. It does, once you abandon yourself to a “knowing” that everything will be OK and you dedicate yourself to accepting all your purpose has to offer. During the assimilation phase is when you begin to realize how to communicate your passion to others so they finally understand how your passion is about helping the world at large not a selfish lust for something.
When you reach the achievement phase of purpose, you may discover a sense of silliness and peaceful knowing that life has so much that’s wonderful. A clarity falls into place and the tragedies of life are shaping tools that make life more humane. For those on the path, there is a cycle. All too often, the mature phase can introduce disharmony. But that too is part of the cycle to enter an even higher purpose with greater impact. The highest purpose is after all found when our life’s activities outlive our life. And that all the lives we touched through our purpose are greatly enriched because we took a brief moment in history to love the sleeping giant within enough to teach it to walk, run and fly.
Blogging For SEO: How To Get Maximum Search Benefit From Your Small Business Blog
If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think.
The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog:
1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword
2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning
3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword
4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts
5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword
6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases
7. Be sure to ping the directories
8. Include tags for all of your blog entries
9. Use categories effectively
10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website
Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.
You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group.
Your blog category should indicate an important element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use “main” or “uncategorized.” Those are too generic. Use a specific keyword-related category as that will make your blog posts more crawlable by the search engines.
There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.
Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page of your Website, this will make your Website more crawlable and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, “Find Out More About Keyword.” Then add another link that points to your home page.
The important thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your Website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.
Small Business Web Hosting-Companies You May Want to Consider
This article will give you a quick rundown on a few small business web hosting companies you may want to consider when choosing a company to work with. The amount of information and effort going into building a website can be very great so this article is meant to serve as a shortcut in finding a company to work with.
The first and usually most popular company that many people recommend is GoDaddy. This company is very widely known for its Super Bowl commercials that allowed it to burst onto the scene. It is one of the largest domain registrars and offers almost anything that your website would demand. One of the strongest features is the Support Staff. This area is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can talk with them, email them, or find the answers yourself through their extensive help section. Basic hosting can cost as little as 2.99 a month when talking about Linux.
Another highly rated small business web hosting company is Infinology. This has ranked very highly with many active web site users and often can be found near the top of the list, if not at the top of the list, for overall satisfaction. There are many different scripting languages available for free with cost usually being around $6.95 a month.
The final one which will be discussed is LunarPages. Some languages will cost an extra dollar or two a month but the best part about this website is the generous space and bandwidth included in the price. The cost starts at exactly the same rate as Infinology: $6.95 a month.
There are third party web sites where you can find more information if you want to do more extensive research on any of these three companies. Any good small business web hosting company should not charge a great deal for basic web hosting activities.
Looking at the above examples shows you how little it can cost to find a good company with good service. As you can see from these three examples, costs can run under ten dollars a month without batting an eyelash. You may want to see which particular company will work best with your situation, especially if you start using more bandwidth if you get into social networking. One of the major keys is the customer service because you will not normally worry about your website’s hosting until it goes down. At that point, you will want someone ready and available to help bring your website back up.
The Marketing Mix for Small Business Marketing
All marketing resources will eventually talk about your marketing mix, but what do they mean exactly? Marketing mix is a term that the marketing world tries to hold as a private term that only the industry knows about, but as a small business owner, you need to understand how to plan and implement your marketing mix.The marketing mix is defined as the four P’s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. These four areas make up the complete outline for product or service marketing. Once you have defined the variables for each P, you have a basis for proper marketing.Market research will play a major role in each area of your marketing mix. You must understand what you are competing with in regards to products and pricing. Although you may have a new and unique item with an innovative type of distribution, you still must compare your product or service to existing ones.Here are the four P’s of your marketing mix for small business marketing.P #1: ProductThe product or service or selling must be defined first. What are you selling? How will it be packaged? Determine your product’s features, and then build the benefits from them. At this point, you will make all of the decisions relating to your product or service: style, quality, packaging, warranty, etc.P#2: PricePricing actually plays a vital role in the branding and image of your product. Determining your price can be difficult, especially if you product is in a widely-variable industry. You must determine pricing strategy, retail and wholesale pricing, possible bundling, and any type of discounts.P#3: PlacePlace refers to how you will distribute the product. Will you sell to retail stores, or will you sell directly to customers? Is your product a wholesale item? The decisions made about distribution will affect your marketing mix in terms of how you will warehouse your products, how you will process orders, what types of channels will you use, and how will you cover the market.P#4: PromotionPromotion is the area where you will make decisions on how people will learn about your product. What types of sales strategies and promotions will you use? What kind of sales force will you need to sell your product? How will you use public relations and publicity to support your product? There are many aspects of the promotion element of your marketing mix. In fact, the other three P’s will affect your promotion strategy.Decide on the first three P’s before you tackle Promotion, but ultimately, each P will coordinate with the others. Once you complete your marketing mix decisions, review the entire plan to make sure you have a consistent and precise marketing mix plan in order to properly sell, distribute, and promote your product.
Small Business Profit Begins With Intelligent Pricing Strategy
What is the right price for your product or service? Most small business owners struggle with this question, because they confuse the cost of producing the product with the value it brings to the customer.
When it comes to establishing a price for your goods or services, the value of your product has absolutely nothing to do with production cost. The value is based on how much you help clients save, increase, reduce or improve. If you can quantify these benefits, then you have a foundation for establishing an appropriate price for your goods or services provided by your small business.
It is All About Value
Think about your last software purchase. You opened an attractive box which contained a CD and a small manual. There was less than $10 worth of material in the box, and yet you may have paid $300, $500 or even $1,000 for the software.
You paid a premium, well above production cost, because of the need the software fulfilled and the benefits it would provide.
Calculate Your Value
The same is true for your product or service. How much value do you deliver?
Use these questions to build your value:
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How much can my product save my customer? Savings may be in time, money or effort.
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How much can my product earn for my customer? Can you help them increase their income; directly or indirectly? Does it create a foundation for future opportunities or establish valuable personal relationships?
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What intangible benefits might customers realize, and is it possible to quantify these benefits?