Archive for May 2011
Question Time
David F Smallman, Managing Partner of Pathfinder Team Consulting, invited participants in The Inspired Group to ask him any question about business. These are his answers:
Q. What advice would you give someone in their first year of business?
A. Don’t lose the passion. Ever. Not even in your 42nd year.
Q. Is it wise to use an untested business model?
A. No. Get it tested.
Q. How do you make sure a new idea doesn’t get stolen before you develop it?
A. Keep it out of the public domain until you’ve had it patented, trade marked etc. Non disclosure agreements are hard to enforce.
Q. What is the best way to price your services?
A. Price the project according to the value to the customer. This may mean that you charge two very different prices for the same work. Charge 25% up front, then two further instalments of 25% and 50%. In over 40 years in business we’ve never had a significant bad debt or had to waste time chasing money. Cash flow is vitally important and this way, your expenses are covered before you start.
Q. What is the single most important ingredient in creating a successful business?
A. Passion (as above)
Q. What one channel would you choose to market a business?
A. It depends on the type of business:
Manufacturing – distribution / sub contractors
Service Provision – figure out how your customers/clients like to buy and meet them there
Accounting / Financial services – traditional routes are still working
Q. What will the future economic power of the UK be like?
A. Look out for a debate between David and Phil Jones of Excitant Ltd on this topic. David recommends reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis.
Q. If the three essentials of business are producing the product or service, managing and marketing, what time should a business owner spend on each.
A. In a 60 hour week (which most business owners admit to working)
Marketing 55% – 33 hours
Making 35% – 21 hours
Managing 10% - 6 hours
Anyone spending more than 6 hours managing a business needs to streamline or outsource and ask themselves if they using this as an excuse not to do the marketing.
Similarly, when marketing, use the same equation:
Existing customers 55%
Short term prospects 33%
Long term prospects 10%
Q. Should we strive to continuously make our services or products better?
A. Excellence can sometimes be the death of a business. Quality is what is good enough to satisfy the customer.
Q. Is social media providing businesses that use it with an advantage?
A. Many big businesses just haven’t got it yet but many smaller businesses are using Social Media to great advantage so it gives them an edge in engaging, listening and providing what customers want.
There are more questions and answers on the LinkedIn discussion http://lnkd.in/Hw4QVb
Questions that David didn’t have time to answer:
Is there a particular hobby or pastime associated with business success?
Is there a difference between leadership and management? (See http://lnkd.in/xMdyjG for this discussion)
What is the best strategy to cope with a business failure?
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | 
Tags: Bad Debt, Business Model, Business Owner, Business Owners, Cash Flow, Economic Power, Excitant, Financial Services, Instalments, Michael Lewis, Money Cash, Non Disclosure Agreements, Participants, Passion, Public Domain, Question Time, Service Provision, Smallman, Successful Business, Time David | 
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Referrals
Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours
This week I got several spammy emails asking me if I was taking on new clients and if so would I accept this invitation to join something called Referral Key.
Referral Key is a web site that “allows you to tap into your contacts’ networks and track referrals to increase reciprocity”
The sub text is that the owners of Referral Key have a never ending supply of punters to sell their membership services to after the first 3 free referrals are used up.
In other words you load all your contacts from Outlook onto the website and send them all the same spammy email and then everyone who accepts the invitation does the same. If you join, you track the referrals you get and score people on how many referrals they’ve sent you compared to how many you’ve sent them (!)
I’ve always had a problem with the idea of referrals and reciprocity or rewards.
Call me simple but if someone I know could do with the services of someone else I know I’ll introduce them. I don’t want or expect any rewards for doing that.
Most of my work comes from referrals but I don’t bribe, browbeat or guilt trip expect or offer to pay directly or indirectly for those referrals. I sometimes send a thank you gift but no-one knows about it except the people involved.
What I don’t do necessarily is reciprocate with a referral unless there is a very, very good match.
Am I being too simplistic? Do you have to think you’re gonna get something back before you send someone a referral? Isn’t it more powerful if there is no coercion involved? Shouldn’t you be able to rely on being bloody good at what you do in order to get referrals or is it all down to “I’ll scratch your back only if you scratch mine”?
Posted in Networking | Tags: Coercion, Email, Free Referrals, Guilt Trip, Invitation, Match, Membership Services, Punters, Reciprocity, Referral, Rewards, Track Referrals | No Comments »
40 Tried and Tested Twitter Tips
There are many, many Twitter Guides out there, some are just one person’s preferences based on nothing much but this is one of the best I’ve seen, based on three years extensive use.
Its written by Shea Bennett @sheamus who writes for All Twitter which is part of mediabistro.com. The original article is here: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/40-twitter-tips_b8973 and contains lots of links to other articles which explain some of these tips in more detail so if you want more, go there. If you want a quick synopsis of the tips, with my edits, see below:
BEFORE YOU BEGIN
Answer these questions: Why are you using Twitter? What are you hoping to accomplish? What could you accomplish?
YOUR PROFILE
Use a photo of YOU as your avatar. You. That’s who we came to see.
A tailored background is nice, but not vital.
Fill out your bio. It’s OK to be witty, but not at the expense of clarity.
Link to your website. Don’t link back to your Twitter profile – that’s several shades of pointless.
The rest of your profile settings are personal preference, but I strongly recommend you don’t protect your tweets unless you really, really have somebody out there you don’t want seeing your stuff. And if you do, maybe a public network isn’t the best place to hang out.
Use a photo of YOU as your avatar
YOU
Be polite.
Be useful.
Be interesting.
Be unique.
Be yourself.
YOUR TWEETS
You only have 140 characters, so make them count.
Manual good, automatic bad. It’s OK to schedule tweets, but don’t automate anything.
Spelling, grammar and punctuation count. Take a moment to write the perfect tweet. It’s always worth the effort.
There’s an important difference between crediting others for their work (courtesy) and thanking for retweets (noise/egotism).
Likewise, don’t be a metweeter.
Never automate ANYTHING
FINDING FOLLOWERS
Engage, engage, engage. Repeat.
Want to know how not to get somebody to follow you? Ask them to.
If you tweet it, they will come. Behave in the manner with which you wish to be noticed, and write about the subjects you wish to discuss.
All the ‘get more followers’ systems are complete garbage. Don’t waste your time or (in some cases) money. Mass following and autofollowing gives you a large but empty network of eternal strangers, none of whom are paying the slightest bit of attention to you.
Strive for 100 true fans, and be remarkable. The rest will take care of itself.
TWITTER ETIQUETTE
Avoid text speak – if you can’t squeeze a proper sentence into 140 characters (or, ideally, less), try, try again.
Find the balance between being overly negative and happy clappy trappy. Neither camp is enormously popular except with others like them. Don’t be somebody you’re not, but if the real you is a jerk, a sap or a fraud, you should probably work on it.
Act as if. (As if you already have the things you want)
Don’t send people automated ‘welcome!’ direct messages when they start following you (especially not with a link to your website!). We hate that stuff. Again, never automate anything.
Don’t be a MEtweeter
YOUR TWEETS (PART 2)
Become an authority in your niche. Everybody is an expert on something. (And if you’re not, read more.)
People look for and value consistency. It’s OK to go crazy once in a while, but find out where your middle is. Middle doesn’t mean boring. It means balance.
The same applies to how often you tweet. After a period of time (usually a few months) you’ll find a natural place where both you and your audience are comfortable with your daily number of tweets.
You always have a choice in how you behave and react to others.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
Again, never automate
LINKS
Always, always, always use bit.ly to shorten your links. It comes with built-in stats which are great, but that’s not as important as the fact that bit.ly is trusted by the Twitter community.
It’s OK to share your own stuff. In fact, I recommend you do it twice per day so you cover the major timezones. For example, I share my content mid-morning in the UK and also mid-morning (late afternoon UK) in the USA (ET).
If you want to get retweeted, leave enough space.
If you’re retweeting somebody else, always credit them. And by them I mean the original tweeter – don’t go mad trying to squeeze everybody and their uncle in.
Even for the Twitter elite, the level of engagement measured by click-throughs and retweets is incredibly low. So relax, and remember it’s all about your long game.
Act as if
FIVE (FREE) BONUSES
There is no perfect Twitter client – whatever works for you works. (That said, I recommend HootSuite for your desktop and iPad and the official Twitter clients for everything else. I’m not an affiliate – these are, in my opinion, the best products.)
Regularly monitor and clear out any dubious applications authorised in your Twitter profile. Don’t be that guy.
Become a Twitter search kung fu master.
Don’t be afraid to block people, doing so for the right reasons. But be aware that Twitter’s block is junk. Don’t rely on it to protect you.
Make Twitter a part of your life, but don’t make your life a part of Twitter. You often do your best thinking offline.
Twitter is a work in progress, and that includes the platform itself and the way that we all use it. Everything is constantly changing.
If you want to get better at using Twitter I recommend you subscribe to All Twitter at www.mediabistro.com and follow @sheamus.
Related posts: How to get more twitter followers
Posted in Social Media | Tags: Avatar, Clarity, Egotism, Followers, Grammar And Punctuation, Nbsp, Original Article, Personal Preference, Photo, Profile Settings, Shades, Shea, Spelling, Stuff, Tweet, Tweets, Twitter | No Comments »
Social Media Clowns
Gary Vaynerchuck explains why he said “99.5% of social media experts are clowns” and why I agree with him.
Like Gary I see lots of small business owners hiring people to ‘do’ their social media for them or advise them on how to use Twitter, Facebook etc without having any idea or track record on how to grow a business.
Social media is only a part (an increasingly important part) of how to grow a business and can’t be ‘done’ in isolation. Unfortunately it is the latest bandwaggon for people who can talk the talk but have never walked the walk and it is muddying the waters for the genuine folk who really can help businesses to take advantage of this amazing opportunity.
If you are thinking of hiring someone to help you with social media, please check out their track record in growing businesses, including their own, which should be more than just being a social media advisor.
There is no quick fix and definitely not any ‘one size fits all’ solutions so if you are going to spend money, make sure you hire one of the 0.5% who understand what YOUR business needs. Its not about the technology!
Things to check:
What’s their track record in business (other than being a SoMe Guru)?
What do their own social media accounts show? Are they walking the walk or just talking the talk?
Do they have marketing experience? Social Media is primarily a marketing activity not a sales activity.
Anyone can get huge numbers of followers, connections and ‘likes’ but are they your target audience?
Do they understand PR? Will they make you proud of your on-line presence?
Do they write well? Good grammar and spelling are essential – even in a tweet.
Are they excellent communicators? Social media shows up poor communication fast and to many more people.
Do they understand engagement? Social media is not a broadcast platform.
Do they understand the importance of listening and responding?
Do they understand why automation has more drawbacks than advantages?
There are some excellent people who will give good advice on the best way to use Social Media and lots and lots of really good free advice on line. If you need help, give us a call and we’ll be glad to recommend some.
Posted in Social Media | Tags: Automation, Broadcast Platform, Clowns, Communicators, Followers, Free Advice, Gary Vaynerchuck, Good Advice, Grammar, Guru, Isolation, Line Presence, Marketing Social, Media Accounts, Media Advisor, Media Experts, Media Marketing, Money, Numbers Game, Poor Communication, Small Business Owners, Social Marketing, Social Media, Spelling, Target Audience, Tweet, Walking The Walk | 2 Comments »
