Susan Solovic's Blog, page 3

6 personalization strategies to supercharge your marketing

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie That truth is a cornerstone of Dale Carnegie’s timeless advice in his perennially bestselling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is just as true – and important – today as when […]

You’ve got a ton of personality…but is it the right kind of personality?

Have you met some people in your life that you just seem to “click” with and others that – no matter how hard you try – you never seem to get along with? In your personal life this is often okay; you can minimize your contact with the people who don’t “get you.” But in […]

When watching pennies will cost you dollars

Do you ever come across a Facebook post and resulting thread of comments that makes you want to pull your hair out? Of course you do and I want to share a recent one I saw with you. (Don’t worry, it’s not political at all!) A self-employed accountant was having fits with his Windows PC. […]

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough!

Ain’t no mountain high enough. Ain’t no valley low enough. Ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you, baby. You may remember this song popularized by Marvin Gaye in 1967. For some reason the lyrics keep running through my head -- not about my husband (although I do love him), but rather about my business. And not just my business, but every successful small business out there. I realize the song is about personal relationships, but aren’t our relationships with our business ju...

How to avoid this big company’s customer service fiasco

“I bought an HP all-in-one printer through Amazon the other day and encountered a problem when I set it up. During setup, the small touchscreen on the front of the printer – which is called the control center – stopped working. “It froze at one point. I uplugged and replugged in the printer and the […]

This week in small business: Creative and practical advice for 2018

Creativity and thinking outside of the proverbial box is on display this week, especially in our curated collection of marketing articles. You’ll also find ways to beat your self-doubt and cope with the EU’s new data regulations.

Leadership, management, and productivity

In this USA Today article, Rhonda Abrams delivers seven solid rules for small business growth. Make sure you aren’t breaking any.

At times we’re all riddled by self-doubt, so we can all use Ruth Umoh’s four ways to get our co...

How to fill your tanks to propel you through your day

Are you a morning person?

I don’t think there’s any doubt that productive mornings are a recurring theme among the most successful individuals, so I always like to read recommendations about ways to squeeze the most productivity out of my mornings. That’s why Benjamin P. Hardy’s Medium article, 8 Things Every Person Should Do before 8 a.m., caught my attention.

Hardy outlined his morning routine and it included one item I found especially interesting: Get inspired.

Frankly, I don’t believe that inspiration is one of the things most people typically seek in the early morning hours. However, the more I considered his idea, the more I appreciated its importance. Inspiration is what fills our tanks. If you insist on operating without inspiration, every task you do can become brutally oppressive work.

If you watch one of the physically exhaustive reality shows, like Survivor, you’ll often hear contestants say that they are doing it for their children, or their spouses. Their inspiration is the desire to set a good example or provide for their families.

A guy on the National Geographic show, Life Below Zero – it follows the daily lives of people who live above the Arctic Circle in Alaska  – once simply said, “Everyday I have to do something that benefits my wife and family.”

We might discuss whether or not that qualifies as inspiration, but if you heard the tone of his voice, I think you would agree that it was.

Yet inspiration can come in a wide range of forms, among them:

Inspirational quotes,
Biographies,
Works of art,
The desire for material gain, and
An encouraging word from a friend, family member, or respected colleague, such as a coach or mentor.

This list is far from exhaustive. I’m sure you’ve experienced all of these at different times in your life and you probably have some others that you would add to my short list.

The danger is that “inspiration” is an intangible asset. Organizing your morning with a to-do list is tangible. Downloading the latest, greatest productivity apps is tangible. Discovering the sources of your greatest inspiration is more personal. But if we overlook this important human need, our lives – both personal and professional – become devoid of meaning.

The biggest question we face as humans is the “why” question. Why are we here? What is our purpose? When you’re being powered by “inspiration” that question, starts to take care of itself. You have things that you know you must achieve.

Sometimes when we are inspired by the greatness of others there is something inside ourselves that tells us that we can do it too. Sometimes being inspired by the beauty of art will flip a switch inside us that empowers us to strive for perfection and completion.

Physics tell us that there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Energy from an outside power source is always required to keep a machine running.

For the human machine, that outside energy source is inspiration. Grab some inspiration every morning so you can power your way through your day.

Ouch! Only 1/3 of sales time is spent selling! How to fix the problem

What if you owned an auto repair garage and your mechanics only spent about 1/3 of their working hours actually fixing cars for your customers?

It would be an intolerable situation, wouldn’t it?

That’s essentially what a Hubspot survey discovered when it inquired about the ways sales professionals spend their time. On average, they devote only 34 percent of the time to actually selling. Here’s the breakdown the Hubspot survey revealed:

When presented with information like this, one of the f...

Can you balance these two opposing requirements for business success?

Are you a fan of the KISS – keep it simple, stupid – approach to life and business?

I love it when situations, challenges, or problems can be boiled down to the proverbial brass tacks and as I was recently reading an article written by AP and USA Today small business writer, Rhonda Abrams, I think she hit on two principles that are yardsticks for measuring your ability to achieve notable success in your business. Or if you’re a prospective entrepreneur, if you can’t operate within these two principles, you might want to consider a different career path or strategy.

Her article was headlined 7 rules for small biz growth and the two rules I want to highlight are these:

Take care of your bread-and-butter business first, and
Don’t bet all your money on one horse.

These two business principles are multifaceted and as you can easily see, they pull you in opposite directions. The first point I want you to consider is your ability to hold two opposing goals in your mind and operate on both of them at the same time.

You might quickly jump to the conclusion that, yes, you can pursue both your core business and expanding into different areas at the same time, but I urge you to think a little more deeply. Will you end up merely going through the motions on one while your heart is fully invested in the other?

I’ve heard a lot of people I respect say something to the effect that you can’t have more than one priority and I also know that our productivity goes way down when we multi-task. Further, experts like Shep Hyken will tell you horror stories about companies that drifted out of their “lane.”

This is all to say that finding and “training” another “horse” to ride – to use Abrams’ language – is not easy: But it’s necessary.

As I’ve wrote elsewhere on these pages, I think we’re in a special economic era right now and the surveys prove it. Small business optimism is at an all-time high. A growing economy combined with tax reform should keep the optimism high for the medium term. This means that the coming months are the ideal time to place a few bets on other horses. These pro-business growth conditions, when they are gone, might not come back for a long time.

Let’s discuss some ways you can find other horses to ride:

Expand your customer list. If you’re overly dependent on a handful of legacy customers, get creative about adding names to your list. Expanding your geographic reach is, of course, one way to do this. If you’re hyper local, go statewide; if you’re statewide, go national; if you’re national, go global; if you’re local, go ecommerce; or if you’re soley ecommerce, devise a brick-and-mortar strategy. Also, some of the following points can expand your customer base.

Acquire a related company. Perhaps the easiest way to expand into a neighboring state is to buy a company there. This acquisition can be a company like yours, a supplier, or a related industry. Amazon’s profits come from its web services, not its retail sales. I believe that as they developed their fantastic ecommerce system they realized that they had created an incredible Internet infrastructure, so why not use that expertise to spin off a web service? In a similar way, Uber expanded to deliver restaurant food.

Integrate vertically. Whether through acquisition or expansion, consider how you can apply the principle of vertical integration to your company. What are you paying to have done that you could do yourself? Also, when you establish this new operation, are there others you could sell the service or product to?

But let me end this by wrapping back around to what is really my central theme: Are you the type of person who can balance these expansion tactics while continuing to provide the right level of care and feeding to your core business?

Many of us lean heavily to one side or the other. Some are wired to doggedly manage the core business, while others love to be pursuing new opportunities. After honestly assessing your position in the balance between those two competing success rules or principles, if you conclude that you’re deficient in one, perhaps it’s time to get help.

You could bring on a partner whose strengths complement yours. A higher-level manager might be a possibility as well, perhaps even a short-term project manager to handle an expansion project. If you feel your strength is in opening new doors for your company, bringing in strong operations managers to keep the core business moving forward could free you up to do what you enjoy most.

What do you say? Do you have what it takes to be successful while balancing these two goals, or do you need to come up with a plan? Don’t wait too long to answer those questions. Opportunity is knocking!

Blockchain, Bitcoin basics and their place in the future of your business

The other day on Fox Business, Charles Payne noted how the Long Island Iced Tea Corporation changed its name to include the word “blockchain” – it’s now The Long Blockchain Corporation – and its stock price tripled overnight.

Such is the power of blockchain.

Okay, I’m kidding about the “power” of blockchain; what was demonstrated here was the weakness of investors’ minds. However, there are three things every business owner (and investor) should note here:

Names can be deceiving. The ice tea company hadn’t fundamentally changed anything about its operation when it changed its name. They were still brewing tea.
Blockchain technology has created a lot of buzz. This is because it’s essentially a computer network database system that is impervious to hackers.
Blockchain technology does – or at least will – have practical applications for businesses of all sizes.

Blockchain is getting well more than its 15 minutes of fame because it’s the data backbone of Bitcoin. It is secure because the entire array of Bitcoin computers across the globe has a copy of every transaction. Imagine the old days of keeping accounting ledgers in large books, ala Bob Cratchit working for Ebenezer Scrooge. Now imagine 100s of Bob Cratchits around the world instantaneously entering identical transactions. Further, these transactions can only be entered using a private secret code or key. Every computer on the network has to agree on the transaction and its results.

These transactions, by the way, are grouped together in blocks and ordered (by time) like your kids would create a choo-choo train out of blocks. The coolest technology comes in at this point; A mathematical question must be solved to place a block in the chain and it isn’t easy. One computer would be too slow, but with many computers testing different solutions at the same time, it takes about 10 minutes to get a solution, according to what I’ve heard.

In any case, the important thing to understand is that blockchain is a secure system, its weakness is in that it’s not scalable…at least not yet (people are working on it).

Startups are busy brainstorming and developing applications that utilize blockchain technology. (Harold Stark has a good rundown on several blockchain startups in this Forbes article.) Businesses of all sizes will eventually benefit from its robust security. I expect you’ll soon see apps and cloud services available in areas where money, inventory, data, and contracts are involved, such as:

Payments
Financial markets (any marketplace really)
Insurance
Healthcare
Record keeping
Shipping and receiving
Peer-to-peer exchanges

If you look at this list, you’ll notice that there is an underlying similarity between most of them and it’s most obvious with my last entry. Anytime you have dealings between two individuals, two companies, or individuals and companies, blockchain could be part of the infrastructure that handles the process. After all, that’s really what’s happening when today’s cryptocurrencies are being bought and sold.

I have no idea if the recent incredible increase in the value of Bitcoins represents a bubble or is an indicator of its long-term value – or even if cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I’ll let the market figure that out. However, creative entrepreneurs and technology experts will certainly find some great ways to use blockchain in coming months and years. I’m sure that it will become, in the long run, as user friendly as PayPal, Quicken, email, and other apps we use daily.

Finally, if you’d like some “fun facts” about BitCoin, check out this infographic, 58 insane facts about Bitcoin.

Update: Not only are many startups working to commercialize blockchain technology, info-giant IBM and global shipping power Maersk are teaming up to develop a blockchain based business.