More small business interest articles…
Over the last few days, I’ve published some more guest articles that are helpful to small business/solo entrepreneurs/micro business. Take a look at these:
“The Marketing World is Changing” is a bit dated, because one of the first points Jessica Swanson makes is that “traditional marketing will be 1/3 as effective by 2010.” However, it is still relevant, even if the article is a couple of years old. It is true that traditional marketing has slipped considerably and that prediction may have come true (if we knew what to measure it against). What’s important about the article is that “do-it-yourself-on-a-shoestring” marketing has become available in a big way to entrepreneurs and is very, very effective. That’s good news for the new or soon-to-be entrepreneurs who are making the jump from employment to self-employment. And for those who are trying to start up while maintaining some sort of job.
In “Why You Must Attend Events To Grow Your Biz,” Michele PW outlines a rationale for attending events that not only help you learn more about developing and promoting your business, but also can give you opportunities to network with a variety of others who may help you with that or even become your customers or clients. So, go to seminars, workshops, continuing education classes for your profession and conventions. You’ll probably get lots more out of them than the cost of the actual educational offering.
In “Social Networking Mindset Tip: Be Approachable!,” Nancy Marmolejo helps you hone your social networking skills by showing you how to present yourself so that your warmth, charm and interest in others comes shining through. After all, social networking is personal. Your potential clients/customers want to see your inviting personality.
In “Leadership: 5 Barriers to Your Success,” Duncan Brodie reminds you that success requires you to have a clear idea of what that success looks like and be able to adequately describe it to others. Moreover, you must believe that it can be achieved and have specific goals that will lead to its achievement. And you must overcome both fears and inertia that keep you from continually moving forward.
Small business and entrepreneurial abilities
As a follow-up to my July 24 blog post on Career transitions to self-employment, I wrote an article, Basic Business Start-Up Abilities and published it yesterday. It goes on a bit more about the minimum it takes to start a business for a solo entrepreneur operation or micro-business.
I want to be clear about something: When I say you don’t need as many “abilities” or “personal characteristics” as are often outlined as ideal for small business success, I don’t mean that those skills aren’t important. It’s simply that unless you are considering buying a business or a franchise, getting a loan, or putting a large sum of money into getting started, you can forgo some of the extensive planning and analysis often advised and take a shot at something you already know how to do very well. You can pick up the rest of the business skills you need along the way. That’s the way it’s done more often than not. I just want to encourage you to be creative and not allow yourself to be overwhelmed or intimidated. For example, if you’ve long wanted to try out being an EBay seller, you could experiment by listing a few things you want to get rid of in your own household and it will probably cost you nothing if you strike out or a few dollars if you fail to price correctly. (Although people rarely take a loss there.) So I’m talking about starting on a shoestring, without employees and risking little other than your time. Anytime any amount of money you can’t afford to lose is involved, get help from sources experienced in your field and professional advice. And under those circumstances, yes you do need a well-written business plan, more solid current business skills and a careful analysis of your ideas and the marketplace.Read the article.
Blogging for better government
Have you checked out the many blogs our various government entities and representatives are using? Have you read the White House blog? The blogs of your Senators and Congressmen? How about the blogs of the various agencies of the state you live in? Next time you go searching for information on a subject of interest, try using .gov as one of the keywords in your search. You might be surprised at the wealth of information to be found.
Just a few minutes ago, I was reading the blog of a Georgia representative (not my rep, I live in Nevada), Congressman David Scott of Georgia’s 13th district. I learned about the H.R. 2142, the Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Performance Improvement Act. It’s designed, as its name implies. to provide standards and processes for continuous performance improvement in agencies under the supervision of Congress. He provides a summary here:
http://www.davidscott.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=190873.
As you may well imagine, there are “government watchdogs” who report on such bills. But isn’t it nice to find folks who are paid by our taxes doing their jobs and keeping us informed. Especially when they inform us objectively, rather than with political rant.
If you want a good example of an informative blog by a politician, Scott’s is worth a visit for that alone. http://davidscott.house.gov/News/DocumentQuery.aspx?DocumentTypeID=1836
Career transitions to self-employment
Lately, I’ve been publishing more articles relevant to small business. Especially one-person operations and micro-businesses. I’ve been focusing more on small business because it’s one of the most available career transitions for the unemployed and underemployed. As fewer and fewer acceptable jobs are available, large numbers of the formerly employed are turning to entrepreneurship, contract work and other forms of self-employment to make a living. Many never wanted or expected to work for themselves; but now they seem to have no other choices. And it’s a hard choice, because so few people are actually prepared for all the variables of working without a job.
I’ve read quite a lot of books and articles about the necessary “characteristics” of people who are suitable for running their own businesses. Much of it has merit as guidelines for identifying your strengths and weaknesses in business. However, I’ve found in my many years of experience researching and counseling, that necessity is truly the mother of invention (or motivation), and the idea that you “must” have certain entrepreneurial abilities to succeed is greatly exaggerated. Most people who have gone into their own businesses have few of the “standard” entrepreneurial attributes, at least in the beginning. The biggest determinant is your willingness to do whatever is necessary to earn a living. If that means making up your own job and making it work, that’s what you’ll do.
You also get to define “success” as being able to make a living or make extra cash or whatever else you decide to call it. You’re not stuck with “success” being defined as becoming wealthy. After all, few people do become wealthy running their own businesses. They may make a comfortable living and move into middle-class neighborhoods. But that’s pretty successful.
There are numberless ideas and opportunities awaiting the unemployed who want to take charge of their own work lives through self-employment. If you are among those people, take the chance, experiment, try it out. Educate yourself so you avoid the many scams. Get creative and think of what you might do that requires little or no money to start.
(If you’re thinking in more traditional terms, however, such as investing your own money that you can’t afford to lose, getting loans, starting a franchise or going into a partnership with some other person’s money, you actually do need to be better prepared. And you need to do all the traditional “stuff” like extensive research, analyses and planning.)
Stay tuned to this website. I’m going to be publishing articles and links to resources for more information for starting up your own solo or micro business. Remember, though, I publish more articles in the main section of this site (http://superperformance.com) than I do on this blog. So look for the daily content uploads there.
Selling by teaching and demonstrating
Earlier today I published a guest article Stop Selling and Start Teaching!. In the article, Jessica Swanson tells of her experience with the hard sell in a brick-and-mortar store. She shows clearly how off-putting “the sell” can be and advocates using an educational/informational approach in your online business, to build trust and confidence.
Jessica’s article reminded me of my Dad. He was a “born salesman.” He was one of those guys who could sell anything. He could extract your eye teeth and sell them back to you. And get you to agree he had done you a favor. He did it all by informing, explaining and demonstrating. In his retirement years, he became a crafter. He made tole-painted decor objects and sold them at craft fairs. I occasionally got to see him work his sales craft on customers. He would pick up an object the customer was inspecting and just start talking about it. With great enthusiasm, he would tell 
the tale of how it was made, what materials went into it, and even the history of the particular pattern or the history of tole-painting. He never asked someone to buy something. He just talked to them casually, while showing great love for his creation. Not only did the immediate customer buy the product, but also bystanders who overheard would often buy the same item or other items. He usually drew small crowds just curious to hear his stories. And when he ran out of product, he took orders to make and deliver the sold-out items. He actually build a fan-base of customers who would look for his booth at the craft fairs, buy from him again and again and phone him to make custom gifts to give.
Think about it. What can you do to connect so powerfully with your prospective customers or clients on line? How can you show them the value of your product or service? How can you create for them a demonstration of your commitment to, enthusiasm for and expertise in your field of endeavor? And for those who operate only on line: how can you show your interest in and concern for your customer or client even though you never connect with them face to face?
Turning down business and beating overwhelm
Yesterday, I published one of my own articles about the reasons for turning down new business: Turn Them Down, Don’t Let Them Down. I encourage you to avoid one of the biggest mistakes any organization can make, but one that is most common to solo entrepreneurs. Don’t take on work that you can’t reasonably handle.
Sure, there are a lot of jobs that will strain you or even force you into hiring temporary help to manage. Everyone gets that occasionally. But some work just isn’t worth it. Some work isn’t humanly possible to complete in the contracted time line. Some isn’t possible to do to the exact specifications of the contract. Some is from folks who are impossible to please. You must be able to differentiate the jobs you can do from the jobs that are just too much. If you don’t, you’ll let your client or customer down, you might not get paid, you’ll develop a bad reputation and you’ll ultimately lose business — not only from the disappointed client/customer, but from others. Read the article.
As a related follow-up, I also published a guest article today, How to Get Rid of the Entrepreneurial Overwhelm…for GOOD!, which has a few suggestions for avoiding the ways entrepreneurs find to feel overwhelmed by the distractions of possible work opportunities and marketing ploys. With all the advice on line about how to market, especially the rage for “social marketing,” it’s easy to lose the focus you need to make your product or service better and keep up with the business you already have. And then there is all the advice on how to turn your one current product into a line of fifty products, with little or no effort and create a fortune in multiple streams of income. Not. Don’t get distracted.
Time shift happens
Yesterday’s guest article for Superperformance.com was Can You Really Make Up For Lost Time? by Bryan Beckstead. His theme is that the use of time is valuable and the opportunity for getting the planned work done is not fully replaceable. He argues that shifting one day’s lost work to another day displaces at least some, if not most of the second day’s work, which then must be shifted to yet another day.
He’s right, if you assume that all the work being shifted is something that has to be done, that it has to be done all on the same day and that you have to do it all yourself, as originally planned and without help. In the context of today’s “lean” organizations (large and small) that assumption often holds. So, in that context, it is very, very difficult to make up for lost time.
Yet, interruptions, distractions and emergencies happen. You can cope with them by giving yourself as flexible a schedule as possible, acknowledging that they occur. And while Beckstead is writing primarily about wasting time and spelling out the consequences of doing it, the consequences are the same whether you waste your own time or others waste it for you. They are the same if you have a sick day. They are the same if your boss can’t make a conference and sends you in his place. They are the same if you actually have too much work to do in one day.
All of that means that you need to find ways to deal with it effectively when your plan or schedule for your time/task has failed in any way. Regardless of what happened or who caused it.
1. First ask yourself if there are to-do’s that don’t actually have to be done, either from the lost work schedule or from the current one to which you are shifting. If so, cut them. This is essential because most people over-schedule, and most add items that would be nice, but are unneeded.
2. Re-examine the work schedule for inefficiencies. Are you doing things in the right order? At the right time? If you re-ordered your schedule, would you be able to get some items done faster and therefore fit more work into the time? Do all the things on your schedule have to be done on that particular day. Look at the whole week. When else can you do what needs to be done?
3. Get help. Even if you have wasted time and you are responsible for the debacle, the work still needs doing. If you can’t fit it in the time available, get someone else to help you with it. Remember, the help doesn’t have to be with any particular work, you can get someone to help you with work that doesn’t require your expertise so that you can do the work only you can do. This is particularly important to note for people like solo entrepreneurs who tend to try to do everything for themselves. For example, if you are a painter, you can get someone to, say, answer phones and return calls while you go paint a house. Or you could trade work with a friend at the office. I know a woman whose friend, Betty, helped her finish a report that had to be in by Friday, and on Saturday, she went to Betty’s house and pre-cooked and froze the week’s meals for the family to return the favor.
It’s best if you don’t waste your own time and have to pay for it, but when you lose time, it is difficult, not a tragedy. Shift happens. Be ready for it and know what to do. You may not be able to get the time back, but you can always find a way to get the work done.
Superperformance — The Intellectual Property Theft
Here’s a quote from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: “It is just as wrong to steal intellectual property as it is to break into a home, steal a car, or rob a bank. ”
The problem with intellectual property theft is that it is not afforded the same kind of protection as burglary or the theft of cars or money. If someone steals other kinds of property from you, a government agency such as the police or FBI will arrest and prosecute them. If someone steals your intellectual property, you may have to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars suing them to make them stop. Large corporations can afford to do that. Individuals and small businesses are out of luck.
Superperformance, the idea behind and the name of my website, is a trademark. It’s been a trademark since 1997 in common law and is currently registered as a Federal trademark. By law, in the field of organizational and individual performance improvement, no one else may write and publish about superperformance in print or digital media. (Yes, that means books as well.) No one else may offer seminars, workshops or consultations on the theme of superperformance. And no one may encourage others to do so or aid others in doing so.
Don’t be fooled by others claiming my rights. Superperformance is my intellectual property. I have not granted anyone else permission to use the term in any media or any services. If you find others using it, other than for the purposes of referring to me or my website, those folks are violating my intellectual property rights.
Don’t help them steal what I have worked long years for: my property and reputation.
The Hype
I just published a guest article Making Money on the Internet — Forget all the Hype — You Have to Work at This by Kathleen Gage. I’m always glad to see article authors who call the hype sellers on their bull hockey. While I don’t want to go off on a rant, I do resent the number of article authors and marketers who promise instant gratification–not to mention pots of money — by using their system to start a website.
Wow, you can put up a website in 10 minutes and start selling today! Sure. Uh-huh. You can fill that website with original and unique content via PLR and content spinners. Yeah. That really works — not.
(Now, I haven’t tried all of the PLR available nor all of the content spinner systems, so I can only talk about my experience in testing them. Pardon my skepticism, but to me it seemed on the face of it that they couldn’t work. Nevertheless, before I came down on the idea, I actually did the research. And, no, I won’t name the products or sites I tested. I will say, however, that I did not shell out any cash to check out the “premium” membership PLR sites. Who knows? Maybe there’s something in them. I’m just not taking the chance just in order to write a couple of articles or posts. I did test both free and non-membership pay for PLR products and found neither worthwhile. Take a free trial, and see for yourself if you think anyone would be interested in a site filled with the “content” some of these methods produce.)
Oh, you can actually do those promised things. It’s just that your site probably will have poor quality, have little recognition by search engines, and sell nothing, or almost nothing. And, no, having a bunch of low-quality, non-productive sites is not the road to multiple-streams of income.
You have to put as much work into a commercial website as a brick-and-mortar business. Sometimes more. At least in your own community you have friends and family to start the word of mouth marketing for your business. On the internet, nobody knows you. Unless, of course, you are a celebrity. Are you? Otherwise you’ve got to work for it.
Great video on critical thinking
The YouTube video below is an excellent presentation of the purpose, value and process of critical thinking. No amount of training or education can take the place of the ability to evaluate circumstances, analyze problems and think through solutions. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to get ahead in your company, building a team to complete a project or training your sole employee for your small business: you need to know how to think critically and teach your employees to do the same. Here’s a 5 minute introduction.