I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions: Read more fiction. Read fewer celebrity magazines. Eat more vegetables. Drink less wine. Stop leaving my clothes hanging over the chair in my closet rather than hanging them up/yelling at my kids/watching reality TV/starting to write columns the night before they’re due.

Who needs to fail so early into the fresh start of an unsoiled Filofax?

And yet, the greatest lesson I’ve learned in writing this column—and in reading the thousands of emails you all have written to me in response (I do read them all)—is that the key to gaining control over the chaos is to be mindful about not just how I spend money, but how I think about it as well.

So here it goes: The Checks Balances 2012 Resolutions.

The key to gaining control over the chaos is to be mindful about not just how I spend money, but how I think about it as well.

1. I resolve to make and bring lunch to work once a week.

I spend a huge amount of money—in excess of $12 a day—on lunch during the workweek. This is not because I overeat (I may have plenty of vices, but this is not one). Nor do I eat fancy—in fact, I most often eat lunch at my desk (even though I hate crumbs in my keyboard, it is a gross inevitability of modern-day cubicle life). The problems are twofold: First, I work in midtown Manhattan, a neighborhood not known for its affordability; I’ve paid $3.50 for a peanut-butter-and-jelly-on-white-bread sandwich. Second, by the time I pry myself from my desk to get lunch, I often am starved. I am motivated by proximity, not cost.

So, at least one day per week, as I am packing a lunch for my son to take to school the following day, I will do so for myself as well. Maybe I’ll convince him occasionally to write me a note that he’ll tuck in my lunch bag as I do for him. Saving 12 bucks will never taste sweeter.

2. I will make a list every morning.

In addition to my full-time job, I write this column every other week, I have two kids, I have one husband, I have a home and I have an hour-plus (each way!) daily commute between the aforementioned full-time job and home. I am always running late—for my deadlines, for the bus, for the kids’ karate/ballet/reading/ski classes. I am in a constant frenzy of being frazzled. As far as my time-management skills are concerned, well, I’d never get promoted to management. And the truth is, the nonstop frenzy is costly, in ways big and small. For instance, when I forget that I need to buy a new bulk packet of discounted bus passes, I end up paying double the fare. When I leave work three minutes late and miss the bus, I might not get home before my daughter’s bedtime. That is a high price to pay for disorganization.

Thus, I resolve to make a list EVERY. SINGLE. MORNING.

In college, I was an epic list maker and considered my lists something akin to diary entries I would reflect back upon at times. These days I make lists, but haphazardly. When I do, I am so much more efficient and less manic.

Also, I love crossing items off lists, the feeling of self-satisfaction is so unmatched that I am not ashamed to admit I add items to lists I have already done just so I can cross them off. Maybe I’ll make the first item on my daily list, “MAKE A LIST”! I can hear the squeaky sound of the Sharpie blackening the center of those letters now.

3. I will pay my bills on time.

I pay interest and overdue fines less than I once did and more than I should. Paying these fees is a colossal waste of money. You know this. I know this, too. You don’t need to send me an email calling me an irresponsible financial disaster unworthy of love and employment. I get paralyzed by the anxiety of knowing I am running out of time and that leads to procrastination. I know, I know. I’m a work in progress.

I will achieve the bill-paying goal by writing on my morning list: “PAY YOUR BILLS, CROSS THIS ITEM OFF YOUR LIST AND BASK IN GLOW OF YOUR OWN SPLENDOR!”

4. I will earn more money.

I have no idea how I might fulfill this resolution and will be shocked if I do. But when setting financial goals, it feels like an essential one.

5. I will buy a lottery ticket now and again.

See Resolution No. 4.

6. I will be smart.

I will not go to the grocery store when I am famished, because when I do, I buy high-priced junk food that I actually don’t enjoy eating and won’t let my kids eat. I will not buy clothes that are on sale just because I feel like I’m getting a great deal on an item that I otherwise would not consider buying. I will put a little time into finding online coupons for yoga studios. I will not surf craft-supply websites after I’ve had a glass of wine.

7. I will enjoy my life and will treat myself and my kids to responsible indulgences.

I have had the same Kate Spade wallet since 1995. It is falling apart: The separation between the coin and dollar compartments no longer exists. I had made a mental note to find a new wallet online but since I wasn’t at that time keeping a daily list, it never happened.

The other day when I was looking for stamps deep in a desk drawer, I came upon my late mother’s green leather wallet. I unsnapped it and raised it to my nose to see if I could still smell her. Inside, I found a dollar bill.

You can’t take it with you.

I’ll carry Mom’s wallet as a reminder of that.

—Katherine Rosman writes about pop culture and technology for The Wall Street Journal; she and her family live outside New York City. Email: checksandbalances@wsj.com. Twitter: @katierosman.

Article source: Wall Street Journal

 

Want to know what your employees are up to? Just check their status.

A slew of new services offer to help small companies keep track of their workers, essentially by tapping some of the same tools that social-networking sites use.

With most of these systems, workers go online and enter their status into a website, like they might do on Facebook or Twitter. But these updates center on work, things like “I’ve just started a project,” “I’ve just finished” or “I’m in transit to the next job.” Managers and other employees can see the updates in a news feed or on a dashboard screen, and bosses can get an analysis of the posts that shows how long workers are spending on certain jobs, among other things.

A New Approach

The idea of employee-tracking software has been around for some time. But some entrepreneurs say the old systems were clunky. They had to be installed on every user’s machine and the data couldn’t easily be shared. What’s more, workers had to enter lots of data every time they logged on. The new systems promise to remove those complications by operating online instead of locally, and by offering a setup workers already know from social networking.

Vinca LaFleur, partner at West Wing Writers Inc., a 14-person speech-writing firm in Washington, D.C., uses a system from Harvest Inc. of New York. The writers can post updates when they start and finish projects, keeping her in the loop without taking them away from work for a chat.

Ms. LaFleur says the service helps the company better understand its hiring needs by showing how long writers spend on each project. “It allowed us to have a firm-wide understanding of where everyone’s time is going,” explains Ms. LaFleur.

VivoPools LLC, a 100-person pool-management company in Los Angeles, uses smartphone apps from DoubleDutch Inc. to keep track of field workers as they travel from job to job. The workers can use their company-issued phones to send updates while supervisors monitor them.

The program has helped cut managers’ supervisory work by half, giving them more time to meet with clients, says Chief Executive Willan Johnson. “The challenge with businesses like ours is that we don’t know what [pool technicians] are doing” in the field, he explains. “Now we can specifically see where they are, and how long they were at a particular pool.”

Use With Care

Still, integrating these services into a company’s routine can be difficult. Simple carelessness can throw off the systems—for instance, if an employee forgets to input the status of a project. Employees may also see the systems as an intrusion.

Some entrepreneurs say they need to mix and match systems to get the right combination of features. Ashley Ranger, founder of Excelamktg Inc., a Culver City, Calif., social-media company, asks her 30 employees to use two services. Toggl, from Apprise LLC, allows time tracking—but it doesn’t let her assign workers specific tasks. So, she also uses a service from Wedoist.

There was some initial confusion when they started using both programs, she says, but management now holds training sessions for employees. And, all things considered, the services have made things simpler. “Instead of verbally saying things to my employees, everything needs to go on to the [programs],” she says.

Ms. Dizik is a writer in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Article source: Wall Street Journal

 

The downturn has created two classes of business owners. Those with the drive to keep their business growing despite the difficult economic scene, and those who are struggling. Research firm Anchor Advisors dubbed them “movers” and “head-shakers.”

In a newly released study, Anchor talked to more than 130 mostly founder-led small businesses, the majority with under $10 million in revenue. The goal was to identify the common traits of thriving small business owners, and the behaviors that might be preventing the head-shakers from doing better.

So what does it take to be a recession-era mover? Anchor found five important differences that set movers apart:

1. Work hard, play hard. The movers worked more hours than shakers — but also took more vacation time.
2. Keep talking to customers. Movers spent more time in direct contact with their customers.
3. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. The movers spent more time reviewing company performance and planning for the future.
4. Avoid time-wasters. At the thriving businesses, the owners also spent less time in meetings and resolving employee issues.
5. Think and grow rich. The movers were more likely to read business and personal-growth books in an effort to improve their business-management skills and their level of satisfaction with their life.

No surprise, the movers made a lot more money than the head-shakers. We all know meetings can be a big time waster.

I think the one factor the study may not have quantified that I’ve noticed in entrepreneurs who’re still doing well. It’s an attitude of “I’m not going to let this beat me” instead of one of “well, the economy is hurting, so business is down.”

Are you a mover or a head-shaker? Leave a comment and tell us your attitude toward the downturn.

Article source: Entrepreneur.com

 

We all spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources focused on optimizing our online programs for traffic, engagement, conversion, and other hard metrics related to defined business goals. But if you asked your management team if they wanted to know what customers think about your brand, how they speak about it, to whom, how often and in what channels, what would motivate a second or third purchase during your season, if your advertising or communications are resonating, or why a certain group left you for a competitor, could the answer be anything other than a loud “Hell yes”?

It’s time we raised the importance of learning objectives to equal that of awareness, preference, conversion, and other goals, because the feedback we can get through customer interactions and the tracking of response and behaviors has the power to inform and improve everything else we do. That is if we set ourselves up to succeed.

Frame the questions you want to answer in advance of your campaign or programs. That way you can make sure you have in place the right tracking, the right listening tools, the right personnel or partners, have the scale of response to answer your particular question reliably, and most importantly – you have internal agreement on the important question(s). If you don’t agree in advance on the critical learning that you need and what you will do with the information after the fact, then you will find yourself sifting through a mountain of data and inputs trying to make sense out of chaos.

Differentiate between testing and learning. Testing is about performance. If you are not testing your digital programs, you are missing one of the primary advantages of marketing online. Tests might include time of day, day of week, landing pages, messaging, targeting criteria, creative approach, or device preferences – really any variable in your program. Learning is about the key insights that help you make better business decisions. Insights might be something like “new customers connect to my brand for the first time primarily through recommendations online” or “customers in this segment of our business value this product attribute most by a large margin.”

Get a budget commitment. Information is not free. Market research is not free and the insights and information that you glean have value. Your organization is going to have to invest time, money, and resources to succeed in this effort. Besides the obvious work to craft the test and expend the man hours to analyze the inputs, you may have to purchase or license new tools and train people to use them.

Differentiate clearly between directional insights and hard statistical facts. A vocal minority can have a very real impact on your markets in this age of social media. In fact, we court evangelists and advocates for that very reason. So while it is no less important to note, understand, and respond to the small voices, they are important for very different reasons than a large body of new or current customers that exhibit some common behavioral characteristics or voice common opinions about your product or service. You need to be able to separate noise from true insights, whether it comes from a small or a large group.

Consult non-obvious team members or departments. Especially those that don’t typically have direct contact with customers or access to their insights. The customer service department or operations group might have a burning question that if answered could have real operations value to the organization. Maybe those responsible for packaging design have a suspicion that the current packaging is a deterrent or want to test a hypothesis regarding the introduction of a new size, formulation, or package.

Don’t overlook the simple ask or insights available from partners or external inputs. There are valuable insights just waiting for the question to be crafted and posed. Conversely, are you ignoring what your customers are already asking you? There could be no more direct or potentially valuable input, yet those gems are often relegated to customer service realms never to be unearthed or explored for their possible potential. Partners are also a rich source of data and insights and they may have the added benefit of other industry or category experience to give those nuggets context.

Create the feedback loops and review cycles that lead to action. Organizations are driven by planning and release cycles, so make sure the information you are gathering is available within a time frame that allows you to use and benefit from its capture. It does no good to gather the information if you don’t know in advance when you need it and how you are going to ultimately apply the learning. If this is a new effort for your company, it may require some additional time and work to break with habit and integrate this into your planning process. Start small – maybe just a few critical questions for the first couple of attempts, but make sure to enlist strong support from someone influential in the organization.

Set expectations. You may not be able to get solid, reliable direction against all of your questions. There is learning involved in the design and implementation of these queries and you should expect some inconclusive or unexpected outcomes that may need further exploration. Sometimes those results ultimately yield the most value.

Digital paths to customers and interactions with digital customers provide a potential gold mine of valuable information and insights, but like any other effort, you need a plan and a framework that allows you to succeed.

What broader business, product, or customer insights have you gleaned from your digital channels?

Article source: ClickZ

 

Every time I turn around there is something new and better on the horizon in digital marketing – new hardware, new software, new tools, new channels, new targeting opportunities, new tracking capabilities, new providers, new pricing models, new ad units, new everything. If consumers are overwhelmed by choice in this fast moving marketplace then marketers are doubly so.

Consumers adopt along a well-documented bell curve, while smart marketers watch and follow that consumer curve. In our current environment, there are many overlapping curves to watch, and placing your bets on which ones have staying power or will achieve the uniqueness or scale that makes them attractive to marketers is extraordinarily difficult – and risky.

The risk to marketers in all this change takes many forms. Jump too fast to trial a new offering, channel, or approach and you may get ahead of the consumer adoption and have inconsequential or too highly segmented, early adopter-only participation. Wait too long, however, and you might lose the opportunity to stand out or capture incremental value. Of course, all things in marketing being relative, your risk and potential reward depend on your business goals, competitive environment, and target audience demographics. Groundbreaking ideas, whether in a category, in the industry, or even just within your own organization may bring some advantages but it also introduces uncertainties.

How to manage marketing risks:

• Work with proven providers. As trusted partners roll out new offerings you can quiz them on the readiness of those offerings and even perhaps participate in beta trials.
• Don’t bet the farm. When trying a new approach or effort make it part of your test budget first with rigorous metrics for success.
• Set expectations. If you don’t know what the impact will be – say so. Inventive marketing requires some stomach for the unknown.
• Watch progress closely. Build in out-clauses and other stop measures that may limit the bleeding on something that isn’t working, but make sure you have the appropriate metrics tracked and have allowed enough time to truly assess results. Look outside of expected results to see if there are unintended impacts either positive or negative from your new efforts.
• Make sure you are doing it for the right reason. If this risk doesn’t have an associated and large enough potential reward, then reconsider.

The internal, operations side of the business is a whole different set of risks. New tools and other first-time efforts exact a hefty toll in training and trialing, whether for an agency or for a corporate marketing department. Processes all down the line may be impacted by a seemingly minor change. Multiply that across all the tools and relationships that have the potential for regular change and you may induce staff fatigue around a constant state of transition.

If you swap out key partners, processes, or tools too often within your organization you risk never really maximizing your expertise in an area. It simply takes time to learn to excel at our complex tasks. On the other hand, if you don’t keep current with the latest tools, knowledge, tactics, and opportunities on behalf of your clients or brands you will be obsolete quickly. So how do you make the right changes, offering enough stasis and stability to your practice to support excellence while staying on top of your game?

• Evaluate whether the incremental benefits offered by the change make the investment worthwhile. Include a time frame, if you can, in which you are likely to be able to benefit from the transfer.
• Don’t be swayed by emotion or competitive pressure. Do an objective evaluation of the features, functionality, costs, and benefits as they relate to your specific situation. Use an outside consultant to help you make the go/no go decision if you can’t detach from the emotion.
• Reach out to your networks for feedback.
• Bring the teams impacted by the proposed change into the conversation. Assess how attached they are to their current state of affairs and if they are likely to resist or embrace adoption efforts.
• Designate a leader for the change process and have them develop a transition plan with associated costs and timetables and report back on them regularly. Track training and adoption time in a separate category from other work so you can really see the cost.
• In early change state, consider creating at least one super user who is responsible for training internally and assumes an overseer role to limit errors.
• Learn to look at the ripples created by change efforts across an organization and prioritize how many you will attempt in any one time period even if they are not directly related. Err on the side of caution. Better to successfully navigate fewer evolutions then to suffer from taking on too much at once.
• Don’t necessarily consider it an either/or situation. You may be able to add incremental capabilities or tool sets and still keep the old for a time period if that does not multiply costs unacceptably. That way you can trial something first with a subset of staff or projects/clients and spread out some of the learning time and the risk.
• Don’t be afraid to change course in the middle. If it truly doesn’t feel right for your team, is not as promised, is overly taxing on the organization, or more costly then you anticipated don’t wed yourself to a disaster. Allow yourself the option to reconsider or postpone.

In the end, “better” is often a very subjective term that needs to be weighed against your organization’s mission and business goals, and carefully balanced with your ability to execute. In this age of newer and better we can easily get caught in a hamster wheel of perpetual change. It is a rare and valuable skill to be able to separate the new and better from the just new.

Article source: ClickZ

 

One of the topics that is most frequently written about is time.  Every person wishes that they had more time available to do the things that are important to them.  Since time is so elusive, it is reasonable to conduct a closer examination of the time that we have in a given day, and how we choose to allocate that scarce resource known as time.

Every day contains within it, 86,400 seconds.  One way to gains some insight into how we use the time of each day is to think of the activities we engage in as ‘spending’ our time.  This ultimately begs the natural question of whether we are spending the majority of our time each day on the things that are the most important in our life.  The impact of this question is profound, because time is the single greatest equalizing force in the universe.  All people have the same amount of time in the day.  Regardless of your personal or financial situation, each day contains within it a finite amount of seconds, minutes, and hours.  How you choose to use those precious seconds will shape the future of your life.

Speaking for myself, I prefer to view our daily time in terms of seconds.  By articulating time in terms of seconds, it highlights the extend to which each second is important.  In many cases, it is quite possible to overlook things that we use time on and waste time on by sliding it in-between other activities that take larger amounts of time, and thus delude ourselves into thinking that we are being productive when we are actually wasting large amounts of time on activities that do not support our long-term goals.

Let’s start with the time that we spend sleeping . . . Since rest is an important part of being productive, why don’t we assume 7 hours (25,200 seconds) are spent sleeping?  Most people also have jobs that they work at during the day.  We should also assume 8 hours per day of work (26,800 seconds) and a total of 60 minutes (3,600 seconds) spent driving to and from work.  If we add 30 minutes for each meal and another 30 minutes each morning and evening to get ready, that leaves us with only 19,800 seconds each day to spend on things that aren’t eating, sleeping, or working.

The critical question to ask yourself is what are you doing with those 19,800 seconds each day to improve your life?  Some studies have shown that the average person spends approximately 5 hours (18,000 seconds) each day watching television.  Simple arithmetic shows that if television (or other forms of passive entertainment) occupies 18,000 of the 19,800 seconds that you have available each day to spend on yourself, that you won’t have much time left for self improvement.

What if we shifted things around a little bit and focused on self improvement first and entertainment second?  What if you spent an hour (3.600 seconds) each day reading?  What if you spent 30 minutes (1,800 seconds) each day planning and organizing?  Maybe another 30 minutes exercising to stay healthy?  How about 30 more minutes to analyze your finances and investments?  If you did all of this, there would still be 10,800 seconds left in the day to do whatever you want (including watching television), and would most certainly create a noticeable improvement in your lifestyle and financial situation.

Changes at the Margin

The way that we shift the course of our life is to make small changes at the margin.  It is not reasonable for most people to completely change everything about their life.  However, it is quite reasonable to do one thing differently each day.  In this way, a single small change that is compounded over time can produce tremendous results.  In the case of most people, allocating 30 to 60 minutes (or 3,600 to 7,200 seconds) per day toward an activity that will help their future can pay tremendous rewards over time.

In the end, our achievements of tomorrow will be built on the activities and decisions of today.  In this way, each day becomes a building block for tomorrow.  Each time that we decide to do something productive, it represents a victory.  Each time that we decide to waste time, it represents a failure.  Success results from tilting the balance of victory vs. failure in your favor.  By doing this every day, it can create a tremendous impact over time that creates real value for our personal, professional, and financial lives.

 

Editor’s Note: Entrepreneur Richard Branson regularly shares his business experience and advice with readers. What follows is the latest edited round of insightful responses. Ask him a question and your query might be the inspiration for a future column.

Q: Virgin is a large company with many diversified businesses and a culture of delegating. How do you avoid breakdowns in communication and ensure that good decisions are made? – Shezad Virji, Kenya

Q: How do you deal with the hundreds of emails you receive from readers? I know you are very busy. Do you have any secret? – Harvey Chen, China

A: Reading through recent emails, I was struck by the number of questions from readers about how entrepreneurs can better manage their own time as they manage their complex businesses.

As a successful business matures and expands, bureaucracy usually starts to take hold and members of the senior management team find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings and volume of correspondence. At this stage, an entrepreneur faces the challenge of how to effectively manage this new structure — a transition that has been the undoing of many enterprises.

First, let’s look at how to manage your own time. I receive 300 to 400 messages a day, so time management is an issue for me. I’m aware some senior executives simply delete all emails from people they don’t know personally, arguing that most of the messages just create distraction. To them, it is not worth the effort of weeding through the emails to find those that contain useful information. But I find this approach impolite and bad for business.

Recalling a time when I was just starting out and needed advice, I try to respond to as many reader emails as I can. I read through the list every morning and dictate quick answers to my assistants, pass some to colleagues, and usually write a couple of longer, more detailed responses myself. This is the most effective way of dealing with my inbox, and while doing so, I learn about trends that may affect Virgin businesses or about problems that need my attention.

You must manage your Blackberry; do not let it manage you. Many executives check their smartphones throughout meetings and during off-hours. This is not good for concentration, and has a negative impact on decision making. Use it only in bursts: check emails for an hour or so and then put it away so you can focus on the task at hand.

When you’re thinking about how to manage not just your own time, but all your employees’, the key is to enable everyone to stay focused. I have become more aware of this in recent years, as I have invited groups of entrepreneurs to meetings at my home and resort on Necker Island, where expert speakers discuss issues such as climate change, poverty and peace. I often spend some time talking about my experiences, hoping to share lessons that will help my guests.

The advice that entrepreneurs seem to find most helpful: give the rest of your team space to work — in many cases, by moving your office out of the building. Remove yourself from the business’s day-to-day functions and find someone to replace you as head of operations so you have enough uninterrupted time to look at the big picture and make decisions about the company’s future direction. If you don’t break up the workload, you and your team are more likely to find yourselves struggling to manage the complex and competing responsibilities of running the business, determining strategy and evaluating ways to expand.

Be sure to hire great people who you can trust to run your business. Your replacements may not do everything exactly as you would and might make mistakes, but resist the urge to take back control. This is the only way to instill a true sense of responsibility; it will prompt your senior management team to run the business as though they own it themselves.

You can build good communications into your company’s DNA by ensuring that discussions are built on openness, clear language, and a willingness to listen to everyone who has something to say, from the person at reception to your top manager. Make sure that people’s curiosity is encouraged. If they have made a good suggestion and have seen results in the past, your employees will ask questions and be persistent, which will help them to solve problems they encounter.

This will free you up to focus on the larger picture: to dive in when you see an issue that needs your attention, to help senior management sort out a crisis, to lend your expertise when executives are swinging a deal and, importantly, to deal with the emails you will receive every week, from people needing advice on how to launch a successful business.

Article source: Entrepreneur.com

 

It’s the beginning of the tough-love era. Some small-business owners are ending relationships with aggressive customers who ask for more discounts and concessions or want more leeway on payment time.

Hampered by a slackening economy, these businesses, mainly service providers, are cutting loose nonpaying or late-paying clients who divert resources away from more loyal or profitable clients. Last fall, many businesses retained customers by discounting, providing special payment terms or creating loyalty programs. But today, they can no longer afford to do so.

Cindy Mole

Chris Cole, of Volvo Construction Equipment Rents in Riverside, Calif., is stricter with delinquent customers.

For the first time since she started her business five years ago, Kishau Rogers, owner of Websmith Group LLC in Richmond, Va., had to “drop or avoid clients that are high-maintenance or late payers.” Some of her clients, mainly retail-store owners or solo entrepreneurs, often asked for discounts because of their own tight budgets or an expanded level of service beyond the agreed-upon contract.

As a result, by eliminating 5% of her clientele this year, the 36-year-old is saving 20% more of her time while the Web-site development firm’s 2009 revenue is on track to rise 10%. “It was the best decision I’ve made, because it really reduced the level of frustration that I was experiencing,” Ms. Rogers says. “It freed me up to the clients that are loyal and pay on time.”

Still, the drastic action is bringing separation anxiety for some small-business owners. For years, many have prided themselves on customer service and even staked their reputations on customer loyalty. And some small businesses, suffering from a drop in sales, fear they can’t afford to be picky.

But problematic customers need to be fired, says Valarie Zeithaml, a marketing professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “That is a scary thing to do in an economy like this,” she says. “But to have to continue to have a customer that’s losing the company money with every transaction is not a good strategy either.”

It is taking four days longer to collect receivables this year at an average of 27.4 days, compared with 23.7 days last year, according to Sageworks Inc., a private-company financial-data provider in Raleigh, N.C.

Alice Bredin, small-business adviser for American Express Open, says small-business owners should drop difficult clients carefully. As always, she says, “when you choose to no longer do business with someone, be courteous and professional.”

This year alone, Ren Moulton, chief executive of Dogmatic Products Inc., a New York maker of interactive pet toys and treats, has dismissed 30 out of 300 small-business clients, mainly because of slow payments by the independent pet specialty stores.

Over the past year, Mr. Moulton has meticulously taken delinquent clients to task by calling them for payments. Some of them made up excuses or told him they just forgot to pay, he says. “We understand it’s a tough time for everyone,” he says. “So sometimes, we’d let it go. After a while, it wasn’t an efficient way to kind of run things.” He adds that it isn’t worth it for his 10 employees to spend five hours for an account that may only generate $2,000 in sales over the year. Dogmatic expects to post $4 million in revenue this year.

Now, he’s doing more to protect his company from problematic customers, such as running credit checks for the first time on smaller accounts, sending contracts ahead of time and reiterating terms and obligations. For international clients, he now has a pay-upfront policy. Before, they only had to pay half upfront. “I do believe in firing bad accounts,” he says.

Recently, Chris Cole, owner of a Riverside, Calif., franchise of Volvo Construction Equipment Rents Inc., received an urgent call from a dispatcher of a construction company who needed to rent some equipment the next day. He refused to fill the order immediately. The client had been 100 days behind in payments. He didn’t tell the customer “no,” but said he couldn’t shuffle his other commitments and would only be able to get the request done at a later time. It was a good decision. The next day, Mr. Cole received five local orders, which he wouldn’t have had time to fulfill if he had rented out his equipment to the delinquent customer. “Those customers are better off being served by your competitors than by you,” he says. Still, some maintain a relationship with troubled clients.

Ed Engoron, co-founder and president of Choclatique Inc., a high-end chocolate and confection maker in Los Angeles, decided to help out a client that entered bankruptcy court instead of leaving the customer in the lurch. He read about his client’s predicament online in May and was worried that he would never receive the several thousands of dollars that Choclatique was owed. So, he talked to the Phoenix-based upscale grocer and worked out a deal where the debt is being set aside until the customer’s finances improve.

“I want my company to be remembered as a company that worked with them and did not cut them off,” he says. He adds that the client was nice to work with and had always paid on time. The grocer is even now placing holiday orders and making regular payments.

“It’s a sacrifice,” Mr. Engoron says, “but it’s a worse sacrifice if I don’t have additional income coming in.”

By RAYMUND FLANDEZ

Article source: Wall Street Journal

 

Take a look at your schedule this week, business owners. How much of your time is taken up with activities that don’t create new products or services, drive more sales or find new customers?

If the answer is a lot, it’s probably time to think about offloading some of your chores so you can concentrate on what really matters. For instance, are you cleaning counters or writing Web copy, when what you’re really good at is inventing, selling or servicing customers?

Here is a list of the top 10 tasks creative solopreneurs should outsource, says Kevin Reeth, CEO and co-founder of the accounting-software firm Outright.

1. Taxes
2. Production
3. Technology Setup
4. Scheduling
5. Cleaning
6. Bookkeeping
7. Data entry
8. Shopping
9. Creative work outside your specialty
10. Anything you don’t enjoy

Personally, I think that No. 10 there should come first on this list. Things you don’t enjoy take forever to do, naturally. So what that amounts to for you is a major time-waster.

Shopping and errands, to me, rank a close second. Rather than drive to town, hand a bank deposit to a teller and pick up the dry cleaning, your precious time is likely better spent elsewhere. Recruit a teen – unemployment is high among our nation’s youth and you won’t have any trouble finding someone great.

Cleaning I have made a longstanding vow not to do — it’s really a bad idea for me, as I am allergic to both dust and cleaners. Plus I hate it, so back to that No. 10 there.

Having once been a secretary, I’m not so sure scheduling is a good one to outsource. Seems like half the time there’s a miscommunication once you hand that off, and we all have those handy online calendars now that track our appointments. Think I’m keeping that one.

Bookkeeping or accounting always seem like the one where you outsource it and the next thing you know, you realize somebody’s been writing themselves company checks and they’ve flown off to the Bahamas. Or maybe it’s that I’m sort of a numbers dork, having covered business finance for a long time, so I like it. Just did my half-year close and projections for annual income for 2011 this morning…my idea of a good time. If you outsource this one, I say make sure you keep a close eye on it.

Article source: Entrepreneur.com

 

The acronym KISS was first coined by Kelly Johnson, one of the most prolific aircraft design engineers in the history of aviation. Most people correctly translate this phrase as “Keep it simple, stupid” and assume it pertains to communications. For Johnson, however, it was a pointed reminder that people want products and services that are easy to learn and use. Focusing on this groundbreaking principle led to the development of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, among many other world-renowned aircraft.

For Johnson and his team, simplicity was the key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity was to be avoided at all costs. Consumers certainly agree. Who among us doesn’t seek products, services, and experiences that make our lives simpler and less complex?

My company’s recently published Global Brand Simplicity Index uncovered in dollar terms just how much value consumers actually place on simplicity. This study showed that industries as diverse as grocery, technology, auto, fitness, banking, and train travel are leaving more than $25 billion on the table by not making their products and services simpler for consumers.

The business implications of this are actually encouraging. In an era when meaningful differentiation is hard to come by, and supply chain and ingredient costs are rising around the globe, the survey identifies real opportunities to create product demand while gaining pricing power and enhancing profit margins.

Of course, the challenge today is to enhance competitive position without increasing production costs. Innovative answers to that toughie can often be found in digital channels. Here are some ideas my design teams have suggested that could entice customers to pay more for products or services by adding utility and simplicity.

Grocery Stores

Cutting grocery bills and spending less time pushing around an overflowing cart are the goals of every weekly shopper, who would surely appreciate the opportunity to utilize these digital applications.

• A cellphone or smartphone app that scans bar codes of products in the aisles of the store. By the time a customer pays, the stockroom has already bagged the order.
• An online calculator that allows consumers to compare the unit prices of similar items.
• Apps that display scannable coupons on smartphones.

Gyms/Fitness Centers

Staying motivated is often the hardest part of the gym experience. The digital solutions below can help even the most hardcore athletes maintain consistent workouts and improve their fitness.

• An online personal trainer that provides new workouts every week based on selected preferences or goals.
• Gym-specific apps that demonstrate different workouts using only machines found in that gym or that count calories based on classes taken, machines used, and length of workouts.
• Interactive online profiles that demonstrate how a person’s gym attendance increased or decreased over time, and how it compares to other members.

Train Travel (Amtrak, Commuter Trains)

According to a recent survey from Orbitz¸ travelers are demanding flexibility and efficiency as well as cost savings. The applications below could help tourists and road warriors alike avoid the aggravation of long lines and late trains.

• Mobile apps to buy and display a ticket using an iPhone or handheld device.
• Mobile apps and e-boarding passes integrated with an expanded customer rewards program.
• Live train tracking and arrival times.
• Interactive city guides for travelers visiting new cities.

Cars

We love our cars, but who can remember the last time the brakes were checked? And there is nothing worse than the lack of transparency surrounding the in-showroom purchase process. Here are a few tools that could help avoid these frustrating car-related moments.

• Mobile apps containing car manuals and repair information (recommended tire pressure, oil levels, and perhaps a link to the onboard computer).
• Interactive displays for browsing optional features and various models.
• An app or digital channel that lists car specs and offers prices for dealers to review and accept.

It’s my belief that there is significant opportunity for brands the world over to bake more simplicity into their customer experience. Keeping it simple is smart.

Article source: ClickZ