Avoiding Common Mistakes in Small Business Ownership

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Owning a business can be very intimidating, even when owning a small business. The pressure to be successful is always a hindrance, especially when competing with larger businesses. There are common mistakes small business owners make along the way that could have been easily avoided. In order to ensure the success of your small business, it is imperative to avoid these mistakes:

 

Failing to Plan

No matter the size of the business or how it got started, there must always be a business plan. This is vital to the success of the business and what will help it stay on its feet. Although it can be a bit tedious and seem pointless, it’s the most important step to running a business. Make sure to do the proper research and identify the market potential. Before your business takes off, be sure to have a business plan, marketing plan, and financial plan in place.

 

Undervaluing the Business

Whether it be lack of confidence or lack of proper market research, a common mistake first-time business owners will make is undervaluing their products and services. This could ultimately lead to a business’s failure because they’re not realizing their uniqueness and the value of what sets them apart. In order to avoid this, it’s important to do extensive market research to understand your value. Instead of realizing you’ve been undervalued when it’s too late, identify your best selling start price ahead of time. 

 

Hiring Too Late

When a small business first gets off its feet, often times there aren’t many employees. This is normal, but shouldn’t last for very long. When the business finally gains momentum and starts to take off, often times they haven’t hire the right amount of employees to assist with the growing demand. Waiting too long to hire can lead to hiring incompetent employees which can reflect poorly on your business. It’s important to delegate small tasks at the beginning instead of waiting until you are desperate. 

 

Not Having a Website

In today’s new technology age, not having a website for your business is a death wish. Every business, no matter what kind it is or the products they sell, must have an online platform. Not only does this give your business instant marketing, but it also establishes itself as professional in the eyes of consumers. There are many web-hosting companies that will host your site, design, maintain, and market it for you for very low monthly prices.

Handle Entrepreneurial Stress like a Professional

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geoffrey-byruch-stressIn being an entrepreneur, you have to learn to juggle many different ideas, projects, and tasks all at the same time. This must all be done while you are also trying to build up your own company and create success within your business. One of the significant issues that come into play when entrepreneurs are dealing with multiple things at one time is stress.

Stress is something that hits us all in different ways when we have too much on our plate. The way we handle stress is essential to whether we are successful or not. Not managing your stress can lend itself to a great deal of failure in the entrepreneurial world, and your business will suffer because of it.

Understanding the effects of stress and what causes stress are the first steps to success and also healthily dealing with stress. When you are stressed, your mind automatically begins to think negatively and therefore, shuts down the possibilities of innovation and utilizing your brain to its full capacity. The best thing you can do is realize you are indeed stressed and make a choice to think positively with a small amount of stress. This way, you will continue making plans and ideas that will push yourself and your company forward.

Another way to handle your stress is by removing unnecessary worry. A lot of times, entrepreneurs and business leaders take on a lot at once, and many times, they worry about things that are out of their control. Take the time to make a list of everything that is currently on your mind and stressing you out. Then go through and either delegate things to others or shift your focus from the things that aren’t yours to handle to the issues you can personally deal with.

Instead of continuing to take on project after project or even more clients than your company can handle, just to grow your business, only take on what you can complete right now. If your business is not ready for the influx of clients, then do not take the extra work onto your plate. The same goes for projects. Learn to delegate and take work off of your plate and give it to others who have the extra time to do it. This removes the continued downward spiral of work piling up on top of the work that is already there. It will also help to remove that stress for you.

Managing Customer Relationships in Your Small Business

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geoffrey-byruch-handsThere are a few key items that your small business should value, but the most important are the customers. They form the backbone that helps the business achieve its goals, fulfill its mission, and realize financial growth. Experts advocate for small businesses to invest heavily in the realization of their goals by taking a series of measures that focus on managing customer relationships. Here is an idea of how your small business can approach the entire concept of customer relationship management.

Understand your customers first
The first thing to do is to build an overall and individual understanding of your customers by coming up with an appropriate profile of every customer in the business. The profile should be comprised of valuable information such as the customers’ details among other personal but insensitive details. The profile created helps your business to gain an overview of what to do in the bid to nurture a good relationship.

Express passion and sympathy in customer service
The next step is to develop a well-integrated system within your customer service department where customers are handled passionately and with emphasis on empathy. When serving your customers, expressing genuineness gives them the impression that your business is caring and thus outstanding.

Invest in CRM solutions
The entire concept of managing thousands of your businesses’ customers can be so complicated and challenging. To make your work easier, you may need to invest in the various CRM solutions designed for small businesses. Such solutions come in handy in helping your small business to manage its customers efficiently without having to worry about the multitude of data that you will have to deal with.

Build a long-term relationship
Customer relationship management should be approached as a long-term project and idea. The relationships you target and build upon can exhibit benefits if they are nurtured to maturity in the long term. It, therefore, requires patience and emphasis on resilience to ensure that such relationships endure the test of time.

Incorporate CRM in your marketing
When marketing yourself to your existing and potential customers, it is important to consider nurturing good customer relations. You may, for instance, focus on giving your existing customers incentives and offers to help build a strong and continuous relationship. Incentives such as offers, discounts, and other forms of customer engagements by your business help create a good impression.

Incorporate Pinterest into Your Marketing Strategy

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When your business is trying to find the right digital marketing strategy to utilize, there are so many options to choose from. This is especially true when it comes to social media platforms. Because there are lists of different profiles to use, it’s essential to know which is best for your business and which one will give you the most bang for your buck.

One of the great things about digital marketing is the fact that it can be relatively less expensive than regular marketing tactics such as magazines, billboards, and television ads. This is one of the main reasons small businesses look to digital marketing to achieve their goals without having to put all of their money into a few methods that may not bring in their target audience.

To many business owners, Pinterest may not always seem like the “go to” social profile to use for engagement and gaining followers. But, it is in fact, beneficial when you are in the business of selling products rather than services. Pinterest has such a broad reach which can help your business gain a new audience with the proper utilization.

Be sure to become familiar with what the site is used for before developing a digital marketing strategy around it. This is true for any social media profile you decide to use in your business, so you understand the language and differences of the particular media.

One of the first things you should do when either creating your Pinterest business profile or updating a current one is making sure you are indeed registered as a business profile instead of the standard personal site. This will give access to analytics so you can track engagement, audience, followers, and people who view particular boards and pins.

When you begin to create pins, be sure to make them eye-catching to draw attention and gain followers. You will also need to fully optimize them by adding a photo, title, description with relevant hashtags, as well as your keyword.

Pinterest also offers the option to schedule your pins so they will post at certain times as well as paying for advertisements. The profile gives a wide range of options when it comes to paid advertisement depending on your company’s needs. This would include carousel ads, promoted pins, as well as video ads.

Lastly, keep your boards neat and organized. Give your site a theme that represents your company’s brand what you are all about. When you can keep your pins in specific boards organized, it allows your audience to navigate your site and find what they are looking for much easier.

Motivation For Your Small Business Team

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Small businesses definitely have some advantages over large businesses. Smaller teams make it easier to keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction. In many cases, small businesses actually outperform larger businesses based on scale. There are some challenges that all businesses face regardless of size, but the answers are not always the same. Small businesses will struggle with keeping their teams motivated the same way larger businesses will, but they may not have the same level of resources to throw into programs to help increase motivation. Here are 3 tips to help keep your small business team motivated.

Regularly recognize their accomplishments
You might be surprised just how far a little recognition can go towards improving employee satisfaction. Satisfied employees tend to be productive employees. While large companies may recognize employee achievements on an annual or semi-annual basis, small businesses have the opportunity to recognize employees on a daily basis. Recognition doesn’t have to be in the form of a plaque or award. Just a few words of acknowledgment of their hard work on a regular basis may actually be even more effective.

Set team goals and create a visual to measure progress
Anyone who has any experience with fundraising knows that simple visuals go a long way towards motivating donors. This is why almost all fundraising sites will have some kind of chart or measuring device to show potential donors how close to the goal the campaign is. The closer a campaign gets to achieving the goal, the more motivated donors become. Some donors may even pledge a second or even third time. The same thing that is true of fundraising is true of your small business.

Provide incentives they actually want
If everyone on your team loves Indian food, then promising a catered lunch from an Indian restaurant might be a great motivator to achieve a specific goal, but not if your entire team does not like Indian food. Providing incentives is a great way to motivate your employees, but not if the incentives are not attractive to your entire team. While they say you can’t please everyone, if you genuinely want to provide an incentive to motivate your entire team, then you will, in fact, have to find an incentive that is equally attractive to them all.

Building A Network For Your Business

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Building a proper social network is essential for the success of any business. Very little can be done by only one person. Every entrepreneur needs a few connections to help the various moving parts of a business to run as smoothly as possible. One person can’t possibly handle outreach, public or human relations, advertising, product or service development, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with getting a little help from an adequate and knowledgeable network of peers and associates. The following are ways to build the right network around your business.

Establish Relationships
Put yourself out there and make some powerful business acquaintances. Every friend you make regarding your business will, undoubtedly, help your cause, whether you befriend someone who works in digital marketing or mingle with fellow entrepreneurs. Different people come from various backgrounds, bringing a wide variety of skills to the table. Even if you don’t enlist these people for your own entrepreneurial purposes, it is beneficial to surround yourself with others that have similar goals. Perhaps you will find yourself in a symbiotic relationship, helping others as they help you achieve your business goals.

Segment the Network
Once you have added a fair amount of people to your social network, you should keep everything in working order by segmenting the pieces of your network into various categories. These are a few of the labels you can place on people within your network, based on how they affect your business:

  • Advocates
  • Helpers
  • Lurkers

How you organize your network is completely up to you, depending on your own unique and individual goals, however, as long as a system is in place you will be able to easily recall and locate contacts anytime you need to call upon someone within your network.

Share The Wealth
People within your network are more likely to help your business succeed if they also benefit from your success. Make sure to share the credit and revenue you gain with those who deserve it. Anyone who’s help you’ve employed to make your business-related dreams a reality should probably receive a pat on the back, especially your own employees. This will only strengthen your network by building a sense of trust between you, your business, and its associates.

What We Learn From Mark Cuban

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Mark Cuban is iconic in the world of business. He has successfully built and sold multiple businesses since his early 20s and is estimated to be worth $3 billion dollars to this day. Now as much as we can relish about his accomplishments with various projects such as “broadcast.com,” the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters, and even Shark Tank, what we love about him is his philosophy of being a well-minded entrepreneur. Many Americans try to live the dream of creating, operating, and managing their own business. But what they run into is the lack of drive and willingness-to-sacrifice everything to achieve their goal. For Mark Cuban, he believes in sacrifice, education, and long-term planning. It is these three simple concepts that have allowed him to become the self-made billionaire that he is today.

“Work like there is someone working twenty four hours a day to take it all away from you.”

The one thing you can see from Mark Cuban is his control and focus with his work ethics. Mark Cuban has said countless times that, “you don’t start a company unless it is an obsession and something you love. If you have an exit strategy, it is not an obsession.” This sacrifice of obsessing over your business is what he embodies every single day. He believes in this idea whole-heartedly and knows what it takes to eat, sleep, and work for success. In his early 90s, Mark moved back to Pittsburg and took a job with Mellon Bank. Having seen the growth that technology had over the past few years, Mark immersed himself in computers and networking. After leaving Pittsburg and moving to Dallas, Texas, Mark decided to form his own consulting business, MicrosScolutions, which eventually lead to the start of success within the tech industry.

Now the moral of the story is not simply to the idea of leaving a job, packing up to Dallas, and hoping for the best. Rather, it is about investing every ounce of your energy into something that you believe in. Just like Mark Cuban, successful entrepreneurs do not simply go into their business half-minded with an exit strategy already lined up. Instead, they invest as much as possible. Whether it is their time, money, or life to the business, Mark Cuban would simply see this as the real commitment to your work.

In addition to commitment, education played a large role for Mark’s success. For Mark, it wasn’t simply the concept of being paid for doing a good job, but learning and gaining the necessary knowledge from every job that he worked at. Many people find themselves in positions that they see as stepping-stones for the future. For Mark, every moment was an opportunity to learn and grow professionally. His interest of computers developed way before the $6 billion buy out with Yahoo. It began in Dallas when he was selling software. Deciding that it was time to move, Mark took those necessary sales tactics and knowledge of computers to invest him in the field. It eventually led to not just a success in the early 90s, but also a path to the tech world. Learning from every job is key to ones success. As much as risk and luck plays a role in finding the winning jackpot, the drive to learn, create, and grow will allow you to shape your business in the most positive way.

Now the last thing we learn from Mark in the entrepreneur world is to simply have a long-term plan. Yes, the idea of creating an online sports platform in the early days of the Internet would of course be a hit, but it wouldn’t have happened if Mark and his partners didn’t foresee the potential their idea had for their future. Having an initial end-goal to your business will be key to any success. It will spark the drive when times are tough. It will inspire the masses to hold everyone grounded. Last but not least, it will wake you up and push you to the best version of yourself.