Posts Tagged ‘business owner’

I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have the next best thing, an iPod Touch. It is a great tool that I keep by my side constantly. Well, every once in awhile the kids manage to borrow it to play some games. It is such a versatile tool that I suggest every business owner should get one (yes, even you Scott Blistein). If you are happy with your cell phone, just buy a Touch like I did.

The reason I suggest the iPhone is because it is so easy to use, and has so much versatility. One moment I can be playing Need For Speed and the next I can be writing a blog post, tracking my hours, or even viewing a spreadsheet.

If you are not familiar with how an iPhone works (and the Touch works the same exact way), everything is based around the Apps. Apple has designed a great piece of hardware with a large touch screen, but it is the Apps that really help make this a must-have tool for small businesses. That and a really easy to use touchscreen keyboard.

Apps are designed by third party software companies, and there are a ton of them. I recently reviewed BottomLine, a tracking app for cash businesses. Here are some more apps that are good for small businesses, suggested by TechStartUps.com, a website dedicated to news and information about to East Coast start-ups.

Here are some of their suggestions:

• Invoice2go. With this app you can create and email PDF invoices from customizable templates.
• Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. The first full-featured Microsoft® Office productivity suite for iPhone or iPod touch with integrated access to multiple cloud services; MobileMe, Dropbox, Google® Docs, and Box.net directly from your iPhone or iPod touch.
• Business Card Reader. Import contact information right from a business card to your iPhone contacts.  Take a photo of the business card, check and correct the new contact info, and the new contact is added. This only works on iPhone, as the iPod Touch does not have a camera.
• SugarSync – Never be without a file when you need it. SugarSync gives you 24/7 access to all your PCs and Macs. View and share Word, Excel & PDF files, photos & more. Share entire photo albums quickly. No need to leave your computers turned on.
• HoursTracker – Track time spent on projects and view earnings, including different rates for different tasks. Clock in or out multiple times, add notes, and email reports.
• iSwipe Global Credit Card – Process major credit cards securely on your iPhone. iSwipe supports 18 currencies, with instant verification and fraud detection.
• Bento – Allows you to manage all your personal or business data in one intuitive application on iPhone. Organize your information using templates for easy tracking of contacts, projects, to-do items, customer information, and more.
• Pointer Remote for PowerPoint and Keynote – Turn your iPhone into a pointer for presentations and control PowerPoint 2008 or 2004 or Keynote ‘06/’08 presentations.

To this list, you could add a ton of great apps. Here are some of my personal favorites:

• ClockIn – A simple time tracking app with an export to Excel file option.
• Wordpress – I sometimes write posts right on my iPod. You can also check on and reply to comments.
• Gist – Gist.com is a powerful tool to manage all of your online relationships. The app brings the power of personal connection to the palm of your hand.
• Google. The Google app gives you access to all of your favorite Google tools, including Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Tasks, and News.
• Amazon Kindle – You can buy and read Kindle titles right on your iPhone. It is surprisingly easy to read on the iPhone, and you can zoom in if you need bigger words. And yes, you can take notes. Great way to read a business book when you are travelling, or in between things.

The iPhone or iPod Touch is a great tool for keeping connected, keeping track of things, and becoming more effective with your time. I know there is a big argument for some people against buying an iPhone because AT&T doesn’t offer good coverage. But this is so much more than a phone. It is a mini-computer that helps you stay on top of things, and maybe have a little fun from time to time as well. So go get yourself an iPhone or iPod Touch.

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Hello, I’m Bradford Shimp. I love my gadgets. You can learn more about me at BradfordShimp.com.

It always amazes me that, come election time, an incumbent politician can pretty much drop everything and run for re-election. It doesn’t matter if they are a senator, a govenor, or even the President of The United States of America.

What is even more interesting is that when they do drop everything to run, government doesn’t miss a beat. Everything goes on as normal.

Of course, this is possible because each politician is surrounded by teams of people who help get the job done. In fact, a politician’s job consists of shaking hands, casting vision, and making decisions.

As a small business owner, there is a lot that you can learn from a politician.

Get a Team Around You

First, form a great team. This team should be able to keep things humming without your involvement in every detail. Politicians are famous for avoiding the details. They don’t write their own speeches, they don’t do their own research. They rely on the quality of their team.

Cast the Vision

The next lesson is that it is your job to guide, not to do. Cast a vision for your business. Politicians have platforms. They bring in key people to help them develop and push their agenda. You need to set up the goals for your business and then find people who are passionate about achieving them.

Make Decisions

The third lesson is to make decisions. Politicians make a lot of decisions, some very publicly by casting a vote. As a business owner, most of your decisions are public as well. They effect employees and customers. If you are wishy-washy with your decision making, it is going to have a negative effect in your business. Look at politicians who make two contrary votes. They are ridiculed as wafflers.

In order to make good decisions that all work together to push your business in a certain direction, you simply need solid goals and a destination in mind for your business. For politicians, this is called ideology. Your business should have it’s own ideology.

Build Support

Finally, you need to know how to build support. Politicians are superstars of networking and building public support. For all the fancy new communication tools, politicians still shake a lot of hands.

For the business owner, it is important to communicate to employees, customers, and the public. Too many business owners are holed up in their offices. Get out there and interact. It will motivate employees. It will help you figure out how to better serve the customer. It will impress the public and pave the path for new customers.

We all can find some negative things to say about politicians, especially the ones we don’t agree with. But as small business owners, it turns out there is a lot you can learn from them.

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Hello, I’m Bradford Shimp. I’ve run for office (and failed miserably at it). What I love is small business. That is why I write this blog, and it is why I am building my business to help other small businesses. Follow me on Twitter.

There is a lot of talk these days about hiring freelancers instead of employees. With the web at our fingertips, it is easy to find highly specialized individuals to do certain tasks, and to pay them just for those tasks. Many experts recommend doing this, and I have as well.

James Little, of the Fusion PR Group, is a fan. He says that “small business owners can be more successful and save money by working with freelancers and consultants.”

Diana Ennen, of Virtual Word Publishing, has similar advice, but more specifically about virtual assistants. She says, “The #1 thing you can do in 2010 is to hire a virtual assistant and not do all the work yourself. This allows you to not only focus on what you do best, but also allows you to get out there more in front of your clients. Virtual assistants can handle all your social media and social marketing, publicity, administrative tasks, etc. Focus on the areas that make you the most money, and let someone else handle everything else. Plus, they can help your business be consistent with blogging, tweeting, being on Facebook, etc.”

It seems the best argument for a small business to hire freelancers is that it will free up the owner to focus on what he or she is best at. There are other benefits, of course. For one, getting a highly qualified person to do a job is a plus. To hire that person full time is out of reach for most small businesses. The alternative has always been to hire people who do good enough. In today’s business world, good enough isn’t cutting it. Employees need to specialize, and small businesses need to hire specialists.

Hiring someone on contract, as a freelancer, is usually more cost effective than bringing on an employee. For one thing, there is no workers compensation or additional taxes to worry about. Sure, the freelancer comes at a higher “price-per-hour”, but you only need to use them for the hours it takes to get the job done. A freelancer can usually do the job faster and better then a general employee.

But there are things freelancers can’t do. You can’t have them help out on the production line for the day. They can’t be a fill-in. Getting freelancers to understand and embrace company culture is harder (but not impossible, especially if you hire the right freelancer). Since most freelancers work long distance, they don’t become part of your office environment. The biggest downfall here is that you don’t have direct control over the freelancer. They usually work from their perspective. This isn’t always a bad thing, but your goals as a small business owner may include building a great culture, helping employees to improve themselves, and being able to see everyone face to face. If so, freelancers are probably not the route that you want to take.

Overall, I would say that freelance employees are great when you have focused tasks that you need to complete. This could be marketing, web design (ah hem, I can help with those two), accounting, law, personal assistants, data entry, typists, public relations, or any number of things. If, however, you want to groom someone into a management role, you need to hire and train.

So look at the things you need to do for your business that aren’t core to your culture and outsource those things. Keep important tasks under closer control by hiring employees.

Here is a final example. If you use sales reps, you can go in house or outsource. If you don’t care how your product gets sold, just that it does, you can hire a freelance salesperson. If you want to provide scripts, track progress daily, and train your reps a certain way, you need to hire in house sales reps.

Freelancers can do a great job. In many cases, better than you or any of your employees. Use them in these instances. But make sure you are developing a company at the same time. You need employees for some things, people who are going to be accountable to you and who are going to be flexible to grow with your business.

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Hi, I’m Bradford Shimp. I head things up here at All Business Answers. If you want to write for this blog, please send me an email. If you have a question that you want answered, click here. If you just want to be my friend, send me an @reply on Twitter or join me on Facebook.

I build Wordpress websites and themes for small businesses. Check out my business at BroadRiverCreative.com.

All Business Answers Podcast

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This is a conversation with Holly Green, president of The Human Factor and author of More than a Minute. In the interview, we talk about how business owners can be strategic, burst the myths they believe, keep what’s important in sight, and much more.

Holly does serious research on business trends and digs deep into the facts about any company she works with. This helps her give the best possible advice, the kind that is real and actionable.

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Call for Interviews: I am looking to interview business owners, authors, experts, and interesting people on a regular basis. If you would like to tell your story on this podcast, please contact me.

Credits: This podcast was recorded using Skype and Pamela. Thanks to Joe Magennis and Desiree Scales for technical advice. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Editing done with Audacity.

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of AllBizAnswers.com.

Most people agree that creating some kind of business plan is important. But sitting down and doing it seems to be a weak spot for many business owners. I myself struggle with this. So I was wondering, what is so darn difficult about writing a business plan?

I think there are a bunch of causes. For one thing, small business owners aren’t as good as they should be taking time off working in their business to work on their business. The client job will always come before the meta work of the business. Beyond that, many people don’t know where to start. You may get caught up on how to structure the business plan, what to include in it, and all of those details.

I’ve picked up a few tricks and discovered a couple of resources that may be helpful in setting up your business plan. I will recommend them throughout the article. One thing that you may need more than anything else is a little motivation to write your plan. Perhaps the best way to do this is to team up with another business owner you know and to hold each other accountable and help each other through the process.

Here are my thoughts on the process, why its difficult, and how you can get through that and succeed in building a great plan for your business.

Writing It

When you sit down to write your business plan, you are confronted with a blank piece of paper. This is no good. You don’t know where to start. What you need to do before you even think of writing out a plan is to find or develop some kind of structure. Determine first what you want to include in your plan. Do you want a detailed plan that you can show to investors and bankers? Or would you rather get your plan down on 1 or 2 sheets of paper?

The simplest of plans simply includes your company goal. From there, you can put in place some ideas and systems that will help you reach that goal. More complex plans include detailed goals for each aspect of your business, current financials and future estimates, market research, and the whole nine yards. A good case can be made for both types of plans.

Mike Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur(affiliate link), argues for the simple plan. His book includes step by step instructions for writing a 1-2 page business plan, which he calls a prosperity plan. This plan does a great job in focusing business owners on the most important things of the business, including why you are in business in the first place. I recommend The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur to all business owners and think everyone should go through the process of writing a prosperity plan.

Tim Berry is on the other side of the argument. He is the founder of Bplans.com and has developed a great software program for writing a business plan. He advocates thinking about all aspects of the business while writing your business plan. While his plan is more complex, he also stresses the importance of crafting a living document that you keep looking at and adjusting as you grow. I really recommend using the Business Plan Pro software if you own a more established business and have not ever successfully created a usable business plan. Throughout the process of writing it, you will be challenged to do some research and look hard at your business and industry. You need to do this as you position to build for growth.

I have used both of these programs and recommend both. The nice thing about Tim Berry’s approach is that is provides a step by step process for writing a more detailed business plan. On the other hand, it is fun and easy to write your prosperity plan as prescribed by Mike Michalowicz. Either of these tools will put you on the path to actually getting some sort of plan written.

There is another option. This is an idea that I picked up from Mark Joyner, the creator of Simpleology. The process is called backward planning. If you know what your business goal is, you can easily create a plan for getting there. You just go through the process backwards. Start at your goal and then write down the thing that will happen right before you reach that goal. Then repeat the process, all the way until you reach the point that you are at right now. This will provide you a step by step plan for reaching your goal, which is what a business plan is really all about, isn’t it?

Writing a business plan is a valuable process because it forces you to think about your business goals and to work on ideas for actually achieving them. Having a good plan in place makes it easier to make decisions, to decide when and where to grow, and to keep your business on track and not get stuck behind roadblocks and waylaid by distracting opportunities that just don’t fit the plan.

Using It

A business plan is only good if you use it. Writing a good business plan and not using it is like having a map to someplace new but not looking at it. You end up lost and frustrated. Think of your business plan as a map or GPS designed specifically to help you reach your business goals.

So, how exactly do you go about using your business plan? Well, for one thing, you need to look at your plan regularly. Stop to take breathers along your trek to business success. Review your plan at least monthly, perhaps even weekly if things are moving fast for your company.

In reviewing your plan, you should be looking to make sure that you are on track. If your plan includes projected numbers, are you hitting them? If your plan says what your next step should be, are you taking that step? As you move forward, the plan should not just tell you what your future should look like, but it should give a pretty good picture of your past. Make notes, highlight important dates where goals were reached. If you fall short, think about why and write it down in your plan. Then gear up for next month.

The other thing that needs to come out of your business plan are measurements. Mike Michalowicz calls them metrics. These are the key numbers or events or activities that you need to keep track of weekly or daily. They will be your dashboard to tell you whether or not you are succeeding with your plan.

Every business will have different measurements. For one, it might be number of meetings held. For another, it could be size of average customer. Your specific measurement should come directly out of your plan. Look at your goal and then figure out what your best measurements will be to determine whether you are meeting that goal. So, if your goal is to ultimately serve larger customers, the measurement of size of average customer would be a good one for you. If your goal is to be in more markets, you want to have a quick way to measure where your business is coming from. You may need to play around with different measurements until you find the ones that will give you the best picture of your business health and the progress being made toward your goal.

Revising It

The business plan is a living document. It is your map to your goals. But it is also a map that you crafted. Maybe you thought you could go one direction, but discover a deep ravine that you cannot cross. As you move forward with your plan, you need to be ready to adapt it. Sometimes you need to make major changes, but if you put a lot of thought into it when you crafted it, the changes will likely be minor adjustments.

Don’t be afraid to make changes to your plan as you progress. The goal is to keep your business plan as a usable map. If you don’t adjust, it will probably become obsolete and be of no use to you. Imagine if we were still using the same maps of the world as we did centuries ago. At one point, people assumed the world was flat. Brave explorers changed that idea. Africa’s interior used to be largely a blank spot on the map. It is only through exploration and moving forward that we can fill in the blanks and improve our plans.

One word of caution. Don’t be quick to change your ultimate goal. Try hard in the beginning to connect with why you are in business and what you want to accomplish. Then stick with it. There are times when you may have to change you big goals. Markets change, you change, it happens. But for the most part, try to see your plan through until you reach your goals.

To that end, perhaps you should think of creating short term business plans. Take a year at a time and look at the goals you want to accomplish for the year. Let your overarching goals feed this yearly plan. At the end of the year, look at what you accomplished, and then start a new plan.

It is Still Hard

The fact is, writing and sticking to a business plan is still hard. It will sometimes just take a dogged commitment. Chet Holmes calls this pig-headed discipline. It is something that is necessary if you want to achieve real success in business. If you don’t have a plan, you may even have a hard time knowing if you are successful or not. So, do the work. Write a plan, follow it, measure it, and keep adapting it as you grow.

photo credit: kigbot

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Bradford Shimp helps small business owners build successful companies at BroadRiverCreative.com.