-
Testimonials Key for Small Businesses Looking to Capture Word of Mouth
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (5)You already know that the most effective advertising for your business is one person telling another. That kind of natural word-of-mouth referral carries more weight than all the advertising you can buy. Testimonials are how you capture and share that enthusiasm.
When a customer, employee, vendor or anyone else starts telling you how great your business, service, or product is, ask them immediately to share it. Get creative about the format.
-
10 Overused Business Phrases More Depressing Than a Depression
Tweet Share on Facebook November 26, 2008 Comment (2)Talk about overload: Suddenly everybody's spewing small-business survival tips for the greater depression. It makes me long for those good old days of, say, last year, when every other E-mail promised me the Zen of something or other, like the Zen of online backup. Or, better yet, the way back time when all software was user friendly.
So, here's my list of 10 overused and worn-out come-on lines for small business in times of economic crisis.
Let's start this top 10 with four glaringly obvious lies that are starting to smell like two-week-old socks caught in the gymnasium bleachers:
-
Want Job Creation? Look to Microbusinesses, not just Detroit
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2008 Comment (6)According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, microbusiness employers created a slight share of total new jobs and cut about the same share of total jobs lost as firms with more than 1,000 employees during the first quarter of this year. In other words, these two firm size classes had approximately the same impact on the labor market for the quarter.
Stop and think about that for a minute.
Job creation is one of the holy grails of the economy. That's a big piece of the reason why your government is spending tens of billions of dollars in bailouts of private-sector companies these days. They believe that creating and retaining jobs is one of the most important side effects of economic growth.
-
Top 3 Basics a Small Business Can't Ignore in Today's Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2008 Comment (5)If you've been worried about the economy, you could choose to focus instead on improving your business basics. Here are my top three small-business basics you can't afford to ignore, especially today.
1. Bookkeeping and Accounting
Finance may be the least-loved business subject, but that doesn't mean you can ignore it. You want to watch for possible warning signs that your business might be in trouble, so you have to understand which factors are most important in your business.
What can you do?
- Take care of your bookkeeping basics; keep on top of data entry.
- Choose a handful of important measures you will monitor regularly: gross sales, cash on hand, whatever makes sense for your business. Watch those results carefully.
-
No Bailout for Small Businesses … But How About Help With Planning?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2008 Comment (3)So everybody in power talks about helping small business but, seriously, how do they do that? The presidential election is over. The plumber is back under the sink. Small business is back out of the spotlight. Things go back to normal. In my business—20 years old, 40+ employees—we're back to watching our numbers. We tend our own garden.
Everything's back to normal, that is, except that we've got an economic perfect storm going: Banks are short, people are scared, layoffs everywhere, house values dropping, and so on.
-
Don't Forget About Nonemployer Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2008 Comment (6)If you run a small business in the United States, the odds are 3 to 1 that it's a nonemployer business.
Sadly, the odds also favor something of an identity crisis for you.
The term "nonemployer" business was coined (as far as I know) by the Census Bureau, and almost nobody uses the term except me (also as far as I know). I use it for its precision.
-
Back to Fundamentals: How Small Businesses Are Weathering the Recession
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2008 CommentWith the recession and all, most of us in small business and start-ups are clearly short on liquidity, short on financial resources, short on sales, and short of temper, too. The one thing we're oversupplied with is obvious advice on how to weather the recession.
My E-mail is full of vendors offering webinars on how their stuff will help me get through the recession. My blog reader headlines offer lots more of it. We're all supposed to cut costs, pare down expenses, of course, but not our marketing costs or sales expenses. We're supposed to lay people off in groups, but we're also supposed to not panic, and remember how much it will cost us to find and train new people. We're supposed to concentrate and focus on our best customers, unless of course we're supposed to beat the bushes to find new customers. And stockpile cash, too.
