Posts Tagged ‘ Better Business ’

Creating a Business Plan for Your Shop

By Devlin Smith , December 9, 2011 in Business Resources

A well-researched, crafted and implemented business plan can be an important element in your shop’s growth. Regularly reviewing and updating the plan can ensure your company stays on the right track, no matter what outside pressures it faces.

You probably wouldn’t take a long road trip without consulting a map, so it makes sense to apply that same principle to running your shop. Like a map, a business plan helps you chart the course for your shop, identifying the different changes you want to make and any challenges you foresee along the way.

Here, a panel of manufacturers and business experts answer 11 questions about crafting and updating a business plan.

What is a business plan?

“A business plan is a worthwhile process, it’s not a product, it’s not an endpoint, it’s a process, so it’s never complete because issues are always changing around them,” said Phillip S. Bessler, associate professor, business clinic director and SIFE Sam Walton Fellow at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. “Markets are changing, competition is changing, and potential customers are changing.

“It’s a statement at a point in time and it must be maintained,” he said. “A new venture needs a business plan to think through all the issues before they actually execute in order to minimize errors or catastrophic failure. An existing business needs to at least annually revisit their business plan to look at, particularly, the external issues that affect their business, the industry, the competition, and edit critical sections of that market analysis and marketing and sales plans.”

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Maintaining Good Relationships With Departing Employees

By Devlin Smith , December 6, 2011 in Business Resources

It’s easy to have hard feelings with an employee quits, but letting your hurt feelings permanently damage your relationship with that employee can harm your business, according to Dave Balter, founder and chief executive officer of the social marketing company BzzAgent, who tackled the topic in a recent Inc. article.

“A ‘bad break up’ with an employee is a huge mistake,” Balter wrote. ”The one who leaves and the one who is left both must understand that the emotions at the time of departure—the frustration about mistakes that were made, the disagreements over strategy, and the heated debates—won’t mean much in a short time. Bad memories will fade. What remains is a bond from shared experiences.”

Balter shared three other reasons why it’s important for business owners to maintain good relationships with departing employees:  

We are infinitely connected in a social world. “Former employees are easy for client and employee prospects to find to check your reputation,” he wrote. “They can drive business and talent to (and away from) your company.”  

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How to Write Effective Facebook Posts

By Devlin Smith , December 6, 2011 in Business Resources

Succeeding on Facebook isn’t about amassing the most “likes” but about writing wall posts that inspire action.

“When done correctly, Facebook wall posts can generate buzz about your brand, offer insight about your customers and drive traffic to your website,” Monika Jansen wrote in a recent Grow Smart Biz article. “But if you’ve been crafting Facebook wall posts for any length of time, you know it’s not that simple.”

To help small business owners craft more-effective Facebook posts, Jansen shared the following five tips from Buddy Media, a social enterprise software company:

Shorter is better. “[P]osts containing 80 characters or less have 27 percent higher engagement rates,” Jansen wrote. “So, as with other copywriting, users are more likely to consume your content when it’s concise.”

URL shorteners aren’t all that. “When people can’t discern where that link will lead them, they may be less likely to click,” Jansen wrote. “Think about it—don’t you look for indicators in a URL to see what type of website it leads to?”

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Tips for Handling an OSHA Inspection

By Devlin Smith , November 29, 2011 in Business Resources, Rod Shops

If your shop is facing a visit from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), the best thing you can do is take the proper precautions to prepare for an inspection, according to Tressi Cordaro, an attorney with Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart in Washington DC. She offered tips on what shop owners can do before, during and after the inspection with Fox Business.

Before the inspection, business owners should assess the workplace and prepare a plan that addresses what hazards currently exist in the workplace and what personal protective requirements are in place, Cordaro advised.

During the inspection, assign someone from your shop to shadow the OSHA compliance officer at all times, Cordaro recommended. He or she should take the same photos and measurements as the officer, and can step in to answer any questions the OSHA officer may have.

After the inspection, limit what information you give to the inspector to only materials that are requested, Cordaro advised. She also suggested not agreeing with or admitting to anything about hazardous conditions, and not arguing with the officer.

To read more about complying with OSHA requirements at your shop, click here.

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How to Promote Your Shop on Foursquare

By Devlin Smith , November 29, 2011 in Business Resources

Does your shop have a mayor? If you’re listed on foursquare and customers are regularly checking in at your shop, chances are one of your most-loyal customers has claimed the title. If your shop doesn’t have a mayor, if you’re not even familiar with what foursquare is, you could be missing out on an inexpensive way to attract new customers and engage current ones, according to a recent Entrepreneur.com article by Carmine Gallo.

“You might have heard of foursquare, but if you’re not using it for business, you’re missing out on a powerful marketing and engagement tool that can help any business—large or small—tell its brand story to an entirely new category of consumer,” Gallo wrote.

With foursquare, a location-based social networking platform, people use their smartphones to check in to places like restaurants, gyms, stadiums and even your restoration shop, and then share that information with family and friends via Facebook and Twitter. Users compete for badges, points and “mayorships,” a title awarded to the person who checks into a place most-frequently.

“The app is fun and can make the world a more interesting place,” Gallo wrote. “But the full power of foursquare is unleashed by giving local businesses a tool to attract, retain and engage their customers in ways that were never possible.”

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Editor’s Corner: ‘Social: The Now Media’ Social Media Summit for Small Business

By Devlin Smith , November 23, 2011 in Business Resources, Editor's Corner

By Devlin Smith

Social media feels like this big, imposing, time-consuming thing. Are you on the right social media site? Do you have enough followers? Are you interacting with them enough? Not wanting to fight these issues out, some shops have chosen to ignore social media all together, either sticking to their websites or staying off the Internet completely.

I hate to break it to you, but in today’s ultra-connected world, staying off the web and social media isn’t a viable option for small businesses, hard truths that were cemented for me last week at “Social: The Now Media” a social media summit for small business presented by CBSRadio at the Hollywood Palladium.

“It’s like an address, a phone number,” Ava DuVernay, an independent film director, marketer and publicist who was a panelist at the event, said of social media. “You’re going to have to do it.”

The summit offered small business owners advice on just how to do it, featuring speakers and panelists discussing lead generation, content development and reputation management.

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How to Craft a Succession Plan for Your Business

By Devlin Smith , November 22, 2011 in Business Resources

It’s essential for the sake of your family and employees to determine who’ll take over your shop when you no longer want to or can run it yourself.

Paul Freese is planning to pass his shop down to his middle son.

“I’ve always hoped that my middle son would be interested in this … so when I opened the business, at that time he was only nine years old and he was out here working with me and learning from the very start, so I’ve always known that we would probably pass it on to him someday,” the owner of Batesville, Indiana-based FAST Automotive said. “When he was a junior in high school, we actually started putting a plan in place and seriously looking at what’s coming down that road.”

That plan includes getting Freese’s son, now 18, more involved with every aspect of the business, from building motors to handling billing. As he takes on more responsibility in the business, Freese would eventually like to make his son a part-owner, dividing ownership of the business that’s now split between Freese and his wife into three pieces, with the son eventually buying out his parents.

This succession plan isn’t in writing yet, and Freese hasn’t set a date for when he’d like his son to take over the business, but health issues have made this an important issue at the shop.

“We don’t have a set date, however I am diabetic and have had heart issues, so I would really like to him to be able to step in and take this over,” he said. “If I have a heart attack next week, I would like him to be able to continue on, obviously that would be very tough to do at this point, but I am trying to groom him immediately to be able to run this place should something happen to me.”

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Making Sales Projections For Your Business in Uncertain Times

By Devlin Smith , November 15, 2011 in Business Resources

As the current year winds down, it’s time for small businesses to make their plans, budgets and forecasts for the coming year. How can you plot what next year’s sales are going to be when the old patterns just don’t hold true anymore?

Tom Searcy, an author and speaker, offered some advice for realistically making 2012 sales projections in a recent CBS Money Watch article.

“I have architected, led, and suffered through these processes for 25 years of my career,” he wrote. “During that period, I don’t know if I ever had to create a picture of the future during circumstances of greater uncertainty than we are in now. I imagine that to those either going through it or preparing to go through it, you may feel like buying lottery tickets has just as much potential of accuracy as this process.”

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How to Create Buzz-Worthy Content for Your Website

By Devlin Smith , November 15, 2011 in Business Resources

The success of your shop’s website, blog and social media efforts depend largely on the content you’re posting. Is it interesting to your target customers? Do they want to share it with their friends?

Creating the kind of content that gets passed around the web and brings more attention to your shop can be simple and inexpensive, according to Michael Durwin, director of user experience at Boston Technologies, whose seven essential steps for creating buzz-worthy content were recently discussed in an article on Open Forum by Erica Swallow.

Durwin’s essential steps include:

  • Leverage your resources. “If you can find the people in your company that love to do things like tweet, update Facebook and take pictures around the office, grab those people and deputize them,” Durwin said. “Empower them to publish more content about your brand.”

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5 Ways to Generate More Online Customer Reviews

By Devlin Smith , November 5, 2011 in Business Resources

As customers more and more rely on the Internet to find and research the brick-and-mortar shops they want to do business with, making sure your current customers are writing online reviews of your shop is key to bringing in new business. How can you make sure your best customers are telling their online community about you? The upcoming holiday season is a great time to encourage your customers to do just that, according to a recent Small Business Trends article by Lisa Barone.

In the article, Barone, co-founder and chief branding officer at Outspoken Media, Inc. an SEO consulting firm, shared five tips for encouraging customers to write those online reviews.

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