5 simple things you should do every day to succeed with your business

From workitmom.com

Running a business is one of the most stressful, exhausting, all-consuming, and challenging things I’ve ever done – and I’m proud to say that I’ve paid my dues with hard work before I started my own company. Every day there are too many things to do and absolutely never is there enough time to do them. During the first few months of my stint as an entrepreneur I would often get completely overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done (not to mention the fear of failure, but that’s for another article.) Feeling overwhelmed made me extremely unproductive, creating this horrible cycle of having too much to do and not enough time or focus to do it.

 

So I sat down and wrote down a list of 10 things I’d try to accomplish every day to move my business forward. Once I had the list, I read it, and realized that it was too long. So I cut it down to 5 things and I’ve stuck to doing each one every single day for about a month now. I hasn’t yet made mine a million-dollar business, but I can honestly say it’s made my day-to-day more focused, organized, and has allowed me to get some insights into the business I am not sure I was getting otherwise. So I thought I’d share my 5 things with you and perhaps they can help you succeed with your business!

1. Do 3 things every day to get the word out about your business.

Getting the word out about your business is a continuous process. If you get a huge PR hit, great; if you run an ad campaign and get good results, also great. But great PR hits are rare (and some great PR hits don’t produce any real results) and few small business owners have tons of marketing dollars to spend on advertising. But there are endless things you can do every single day to spread the word about your business, such as

• Participate in discussions on relevant blogs, related to your business or with readers who would benefit from your business. Make sure that any comments you leave are genuine comments and are not just there to pitch your site or product. This will get you nowhere fast.

• Personally connect with a blogger or journalist who writes about your industry or related products. Don’t pitch your business – just introduce yourself and say something (a) nice and (b) relevant about their blog or writing. This is a great way to get on their radar.

• Compile a list of useful data that is related to your business and make it available on your site or blog. You can then mention this useful list – and it should be useful! – to any bloggers or journalists you contact.

2. Make one tough phone call (or send one tough email) per day.

Being an entrepreneur is about making tough phone calls – to suppliers, to business prospects, to potential clients, lawyers, accountants, and even competitors. It’s not pleasant but it definitely gets easier the more you do it. If you stick to doing this once a day eventually it will not be a big deal at all. (I’ve now learned this through my own experience.)

3. Spend 20 minutes each day thinking about daily, weekly, and monthly priorities.I like to write things down so I have a notebook where every day I make a list of daily, weekly, and monthly to-dos and priorities. This forces me to not just think short-term and allows time to plan ahead and work out initiatives that might need lead time.

4. Connect with at least one customer per day in a personal way.

Whatever your business is, whether you’re selling a product or service, you have customers. And the best way to build a successful business is to connect with your customers who will then spread the word about your business to new prospects. If you write a blog or send out an email newsletter to your customers, that’s great. But every day aim to connect with at least one customer personally. Send a thank you note to a recent customer. Reply to a comment left on your blog. Send a personal email as a reply to a customer service inquiry. Customers are people – make sure they get to know you as a person.

5. At the end of each day, write down one what went great and what needs some more work. (Look at your notes first thing in the morning the following day.)

This need not be a long and exhaustive list, but I find as an entrepreneur that what I have no time for is reflecting on the business – there is just too much business to actually do! So I’ve made this a rule for myself and by sticking to it I think I’ve learned a lot. And reminding myself about the things that go right has turned out really important. Running a business involves constant challenges and disappointments – not growing fast enough, too much competition, not making enough money, etc. Making notes about things that do go right is a great shot of positive energy and optimism that I think we ALL need as entrepreneurs.
Do you have daily habits that you stick to as a small business owner? I’d love to hear them!

5 Things Your Small Business Should Do Today To Increase Profits

From Crowdspring.com

Here are five practical tips from my own experience with crowdSPRING that you can implement today to increase sales and profits for your small business:


1. Evaluate What’s Working And What Isn’t. Wasted time could be a small business owner’s worst enemy. Your time is limited but you have a great deal to accomplish every day. It’s OK to have occasional unproductive days, but most successful small businesses figure out what works and what doesn’t - and focus on the things that work for them.
For example, it’s entirely possible that a huge amount of your effort is spent on daily activities that aren’t contributing to building your brand, your sales/profits or accomplishing the other meaningful goals you’ve set for your business.
Some small business owners are so protective of their accounting, for example, that they’ll resist the need to bring in a part-time accountant to help them to maintain their financial records. While this appears to be prudent - after all, you’re saving the cost of paying a part-time accountant - such decisions turn out to be very short-sighted for many businesses. If you’re running a solo business, you could be focused on sales during the hours you devote to accounting. Or you can be working to improve your product or service.

How You Can Start Today: Start by listing on a sheet of paper - or in an electronic document - all of the tasks you do on a regular basis (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly).  Do your best to break these tasks into logical areas, such as sales, accounting, marketing, inventory, etc. Second, assign times to each task. How long does it take you to pay your bills every week/month? If you have to maintain inventory, how long does it take you to review your inventory and order replacement inventory? Do this for each task to begin to understand the time you are spending on each activity. Third, assess whether each activity is important. You’d be surprised how many things we all do during a normal day that add little value to our business. Once you understand the importance of each activity, rank the activities (or logical areas) to better understand where YOU should be focusing. If you’re like me, you’ll find plenty of activities that are only modestly important - but those activities sometimes take the most amount of time to accomplish. Determine whether those activities are sufficiently important to continue - or whether you need to find someone else (part-time or full-time) to help you with those activities. We all have areas in which we excel. And we all have areas in which we don’t. Focus on the areas where you bring the most value to your business and find the right people to fill the gaps in areas you don’t. If you focus on the things that work, you’ll be more efficient and productive, and you’ll see meaningful impact to your bottom line.
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2. Experiment With Hyper-Local Advertising on Facebook. Most small business owners don’t know that in March of this year, Facebook made some very powerful upgrades to its social network. Those upgrades are especially important to small business owners because it’s now possible to target customers based on the language they speak and where they live/work. This means that a bakery can now advertise specifically to people who live within a certain mile radius of the bakery. A language tutor can advertise to families who speak Russian or Chinese - within a 10 mile radius - to target families that may want to hire a tutor for their kids.


How You Can Start Today: Advertising on Facebook is comparatively inexpensive and more importantly, measurable. When you place a print ad in your local newspaper or in a Yellow Pages directory, you are rarely able to determine whether the cost of the ad is justified. However, when you run ads on Facebook, you’ll get reports that will tell you exactly how much it’s costing you and by combining your Facebook advertising with your analytics reports, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of this type of advertising. I am not suggesting that hyper-local advertising will work for you - but you should give it a try by setting a small budget and experimenting.


3. Study Your Competitors. Most small businesses are so focused on their own activities that they never take the time to understand and evaluate their competitors. This is a mistake. While you no doubt are operating your business better than many of your competitors, you’ll always learn from studying your competitors. Sometimes, you’ll learn what you can do better. Other times, you’ll learn about what you should NOT do.

How You Can Start Today: A few weeks ago, I wrote a detailed post sharing how I evaluate competitors. In that post, I offered 10 tips to help other small businesses evaluate their competitors. I encourage you to read that post or the more detailed post in my personal blog, where I presented the 10 tips with a detailed analysis evaluating two competitive businesses - Mashable and TechCrunch.
image credit: TheBusyBrain


4. Set Meaningful Goals. Most small businesses - even successful small businesses - fail to grow because the owners don’t take the time to set meaningful goals. I’ve talked to thousands of small business owners. Most want to work for themselves and operate a business that will provide them and their families a good standard of living. But those aren’t the goals I’m talking about. Most small business owners fail to set quarterly or yearly goals for their businesses. They simply operate the business, focusing on day to day activities, without establishing what they hope to accomplish within a certain amount of time. While your overall goal can be to make a ton of money and find enough free time to enjoy other activities, you should establish operating goals for your business.

How You Can Start Today: You can start by asking yourself where you want your business to be six months from today? One year from today? If you are the sole owner/employee, do you want to have five employees in one year? If you have five clients, is your goal to have 15 in six months? If your revenues are $30,000 this year, do you want to have revenues of $75,000 next year?

Yet again why government shouldn't run healthcare

From KELOLAND.COM:


Dealers are still waiting for cash for clunkers cash.

Auto makers will release their monthly sales reports Tuesday and they're expected to show the first year-to-year increase since 2007.  While the Cash for Clunkers program is getting all the credit, local car dealers are still waiting for their cash.

During the month long program, Billion Automotive sold close to a thousand vehicles but has only been reimbursed for 272 of them.  Vern Eide sold over 200 cars and has only been paid for 27 of them, and that's fueling lots of concerns in the auto industry.

Billion Automotive cashed in during Cash for Clunkers, but owner Dave Billion is still waiting for the rest of his money from the government run program, $3.2 million.

"I wonder how long they'd wait if I owed them $3.2 million.  I think they'd be at my door or at least my banker's door," Billion said.

Even though Billion is beginning to get some of his reimbursement money, he's still concerned because he says there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the program.

When Cash for Clunkers was first announced, dealers were supposed to be reimbursed within 10 days of a sale. Billion says that hasn't happened.

"The program started in July and we haven't gotten paid for cars we sold back then, but then on the other hand we got paid for a car we sold last week.  They don't have an accurate format.  It's not like they're taking the first deals that were submitted and working those.  I don't know how they're doing it, no idea.  I know it's very random" Billion said.

Plus, he's had problems getting some vehicles qualified.

"We had a situation where we had a submission, they rejected it for multiple reasons.  We didn't see anything wrong with it, so we resubmitted it.  They rejected, we resubmitted it.  They rejected it, seven times and finally they paid it, and we never changed a single thing on it," Billion said.

But Billion thinks he'll get his money eventually, it just may take longer than what the government first said.