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Business Enhancement

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Entrepreneurs don’t care about Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn

Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, landing pages, SEO, blogging, direct mail, networking, telemarketing, advertising, seminars– Arg!! The many ways an entrepreneur can spend money generating leads are infinite. Sadly, the return on those “investments” is not. In a nutshell, you want:

Cost-Effective Leads!!

As a business owner, you don’t really care about the different tools, you just want to know your cost per lead/bid/closed sale. Since I utilize all of the above tools, I wanted to share my thoughts:

  • Before you spend it, decide how it will be measured – Always build the dashboard first. For instance, my cost-effective overseas telemarketers self-manage every day at the end of their shift. Variables tracked include quality of the list, % talked to, % long lead, % hot lead, etc. They quickly chuck bad lists out while they call good lists repeatedly.
  • Spend Judiciously – You can hire someone to make a WordPress-based site that is user-friendly with all the SEO, blogging, social media, and sharing capabilities for only $500-1500. Also, a Virtual Assistance doing all that SEO and Social Media work for 2 hours per day can be had for $400(!) a month. Compare that against the cost of a full-time entry-level marketing person- $35,000+/year?
  • Easy to Use – Older websites were impossible to keep updated and fresh. One reason I recommend WordPress-based sites is non-programmers can add fresh, new content. Even video blogs are relatively easy to do. Also since Google’s algorithm assigns a premium to fresh, new local content, finding a way that is low-cost- and hassle-free is critical.
  • Understand where your leads come from Now!– Forget all these fancy, internet tools. How do clients and referral sources find your business now? How are you found, researched, investigated, and finally given a check? Don’t limit generating leads to the Internet. Utilize every channel at your disposal to get your desired results.

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The Magic of Doing Things One At A Time

Tony Schwartz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of “Be Excellent at Anything” shared in Harvard Business Review the magic of doing one thing at a time. – Chris Curtin
 
Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?
It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
 
What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.
 
Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?
 
The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.
 
But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.
 
I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.
 
If you’re a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:
  1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what’s been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.
  2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it’s urgent, you can call them — but that won’t happen very often.
  3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.
It’s also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:
  1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.
  2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.
  3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.
A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you’re engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you’re renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.

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Business Acquisition Checklist

“When you buy a company, you are not buying a building or the employees but you are really buying the customers.”
Planning of acquiring a business? There are a couple of things you definitely need to know before you sign that check.

Inc Magazine lists the things you will need to consider before acquiring a business. Some of these helpful tips include:

  • Doing your own due diligence and having your own team when doing it to ensure that every nook and cranny of the business acquisition is explored
  • Assessing what the new business will do to your bottom line. ideally, buying a business should compliment your current organization’s bottom line.
  • Determining the other advantages of buying the business. Are you buying out a competitor from the marketplace? Or is this business acquisition going to build a barrier to entry for other competitors?

Additionally, you will also need to determine the customers of the new business. After all, buying a company means that you are buying their customers.

Here are the tips that you need to keep in mind.
Read more…

Ready to enter business ownership? Bankers Advocate is here to help. We have served our clients for over 20 years in Exiting and Entering Business Ownership.

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5 Reasons Every Small Business Are Extending Credit

There is much debate over whether or not extending net terms to customers is a smart practice for small businesses. There is risk involved, with providing a service or product and trusting the customer to pay you back at a later, specified date. Some say it is harder for small businesses to monitor their credit department, as they don’t have the tools like Fortune 500 companies, but thanks to emerging technologies, handling their customers’ payments is easier than ever. The truth remains that, if your business model supports the practice, extending credit opens an immense opportunity for your small business.

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Tools to manage your business in the cloud

Since Bankers Advocate has Virtual Offices with teams members in Orlando, South Florida and the Philippines (Jessie and Rachael are our wonderful Virtual Assistants), we thought you would be interested in the tools we use to be in the “Cloud” and communicate with each other effectively:

  • Google Hosted Email – At $50 per user/year, we switched to Google hosted cloud email via Google Apps. It is very smartphone friendly, spam has been reduced and it syncs continuously with our CRM (see the next product).
  • Capsule CRM – Our Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is Capsule CRM. We picked Capsule for its low cost ($12/month per user), ability to link to individual Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, Email centric, and it’s seamless integration with Google Hosted email. For instance, every email we receive will show at the bottom whether that individual is already in our CRM and if not a new record can be created with a simple button click.
  • Virtual Assistance from 123Employee – We have used Virtual Assistance from 123Employee for almost a year now and it has allowed our business to become much more efficient by adding or enhancing telemarketing, database management, basic research, seminar follow-up,etc.
  • Websites based on WordPress – We have switched all of our web sites to WordPress. The pluses of a site based on WordPress include the ease of which non programmers (most Business Owners) can upload or change blogs, events, videos and link their site to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook.
  • Dropbox – Dropbox is a wonderful tool to share files and folders to individuals and team members. You are notified immediately on your desktop when a new file or folder is added. Also, 3gb is free and you get more space as your clients or friends share the tool.

This has been a brief introduction to some of the tools we use to keep in touch and freely communicate with our far-flung team members. Please contact Chris Curtin at 561-882-1331 or chris@bankersadvocate.com for more information.

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