One of the fun things about the internet are all of the unusual (and sometimes clever) names that companies have developed for their products.  Some are fairly obvious (like YouTube or LinkedIn), some just sound interesting (like Squidoo or Gumshoo).  Somewhere in the middle is Delicious (originally Del.icio.us) a Social Bookmarking application that I’ve found to be a great tool.

Delicious solves several problems:

1. Bookmark a website and be able to find that bookmark from any computer.
2. Easily find your book marked site by using your own descriptive tags.
3. Find relevant and popular data submitted by millions of other users.

Delicious solves all of the above and more.  Save interesting sites to your Delicious account with tags that are meaningful to you.  Share those sites with co-workers or friends (and check out the sites they shared with you).  Need to find a site later – just log into your account from any computer and search by keyword or tag.  Doing research on something?  Do a search overall on Delicious and find the most recent pages, the most popular pages or just what people are saving the most of right now.

Delicious – You’ll wonder how you managed with out it.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Plan for success photo by WorldIslandInfo at FuturistMovies

About 1/3 of Small Businesses fail in the first 2 years, and just over half fail within 4 years (according to an SBA Study done in 2005).  These are always controversial studies – how do they define Small Business?  How do they define failure?  Wouldn’t there be a big difference (higher?) failure rate in the last 2 or 3 years?  All great points, but in general we can agree that there are a lot of businesses that don’t make it.

On the other hand, there are also lots of examples of businesses that are still in business but aren’t really making it.  I ran across an interesting article in Fortune Small Business that initially caught my eye because it was about a local Kansas City business.  The article on ‘Why Small Businesses Fail‘ is about a home furnishings boutique in Prairie Village called the Curious Sofa (caution the site loads with music on).  If you haven’t been, Curious Sofa is a great store with lots of interesting stuff  to look at.

Here’s the part from the article that I thought was really interesting:

Dusenberry’s financials explained clearly why her business has potential – and why she’s in trouble….But here’s the thing: Her statements show that she’s lost money eight years in a row.

Every year, Dusenberry said, she told herself that she was going to work harder and sell more stuff, but working harder doesn’t fix a broken business model.

Working hard, loving what you do, and having a skill or product that other people want enough to pay for are all part of the puzzle, but there are other things that are even more important and if you don’t figure them out, it can be a long way down.

Part of why this story caught my eye was because I had a very similar conversation with a business owner last week.  They had been in business just over two years and had started out of the gates with a lot of money in their personal bank account.  Their operation grew quickly, had a lot of happy customers and is generating decent monthly revenue.  The kicker is that the owner has yet to take a salary and is now out of money in the savings account – they have lost money every month for 2 years!

What are the missing ingredients?

Every business is different (which is why my job is fun), but I think you can summarize the biggest missing ingredients into 3 areas – People, Systems and Planning.

People

One key area that small business owners often overlook is the importance of the people around them – employees, vendors they buy from, advisors, people they network with – all of these have a huge impact on overall success.

If you’re not going through a thorough process for most of the people that you hire, you are probably destined for a rough ride.  Small businesses don’t have the luxury of easily handling a bad hire – best case it’s an expensive mistake (to the tune of $30,000 or more depending on the position – see this calculator from ADP).  Potentially it can sink your business.

Equally important are the people that you are networking with and getting advice from.  If you are not routinely being challenged, receiving candid feedback and brainstorming with people that have a different background than you do, then you are not performing up to your potential.  There are a lot of ways to a address this – whether it’s meeting with a group or with an advisor, I have some suggestions that might be worth considering.

Action Point – What are 3 things you could start doing to improve the people that you’re hanging out with or working with?

Systems

A system is a set of steps and procedures that you or your employees follow to get things done.  You can (and should) have a system for how you order office supplies, how you market your company, how  you create your product, etc.

The benefit of a formal written system is that you can easily get other people to operate the system once it’s created (so you can move on to other things) and by having it documented, it becomes possible to incrementally improve the system over time – which is where the real long term benefits come in.

I wrote a post last fall that spelled out how to get started with systemizing your business – it’s not rocket science, but it is amazing the number of businesses that don’t routinely use documented systems and just make things up as they go.

Action Point – What are 3 processes that you or your team do routinely but isn’t documented?  How could you get started implementing some system improvements?

Planning

I probably have these in the wrong order because Planning needs to come first.  The single biggest issue with 2 examples above is that neither business had a clear plan on how they make money.  One of my coaching colleagues in the PBCA is Adam from Cleveland and he recently wrote a great article on the Profit Planning approach they do with their clients.

The Profit Plan is the answer to how to make money in your business. If you can’t plan it out on paper, chances are you won’t be able to do it in real time with your hectic business.

I’ve been working with my clients on this approach for quite a while as well, but I really like the terminology of the Profit Plan (thanks Adam).  The key point is that you should be able to clearly state your plan for how much money you are going to make (and spend) in the next 12 months and just as importantly, where that money is going to come from.  If you’re in early growth phases or if you are launching a new product, then you may have to guess more than your comfortable with, but a guess is better than not having a plan at all.

The other important point of the plan is to remember is that it’s not how much you make, but how much you keep that really matters.  You might have great revenue coming in, but if that’s not translating to profitability, you are still destined to fail (it just might take longer).

Action Point – Can you create a monthly projection through at least the end of the year that includes costs and revenue (and where that revenue is coming from)?  If not, what would it take to do that – contact me if you’d like help on that.

What are other key ingredients to business success?  Do these match up with your experience – share your comments below and start a conversation!

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business CoachSimilar Posts:

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In case you’re wondering – this is what it looks like…it’s a meatcard, more specifically it’s a business card made out of meat.  I was just in the process of ordering new cards, but decided these weren’t really what I was looking for (although they would generate a lot of attention…).

I’ve needed to order new cards for quite a while and finally last week I managed to get that done.  The actual ordering part isn’t hard, but I knew that I wanted to make some sort of change to my cards and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.  The Meatcard is too much for me but it is important for your card to stand out in some way.

If you’re like me, you likely have a stack of business cards somewhere near your desk from past meetings that you’ve had.  If you spread all of those cards out, how many of them actually stand out?

More importantly, if you threw your own in the pile, would it stand out?

So what should you do for your cards?

You don’t need to be Gimmicky!

When I say stand out, you don’t need to go super creative and come up with something really quirky.  Although those that can pull it off deserve a lot of credit, it’s clearly the exception rather than the rule and a tough idea to shoot for – as an example, here’s one that’s clever:

It’s for a divorce lawyer and the card splits apart so both parties have the contact information (handy and clever!).

Does that mean that this lawyer is generating a lot more business than anyone else?  Not necessarily, but I imagine that people tend to remember the card (and therefore the lawyer).

If you’re looking for more gimmicky ideas, I did find a great site that has a lot of different cards that you can check out – I especially like the other divorce mediator cards that were designed to be left at certain types of hotels!  Go to where your target market is hanging out!

It does help to have a point

More important than gimmicky is to use the valuable real estate of the card to give people some idea of what you’re about. 

You should only be giving out cards to people that have requested them and have some sort of interest in what you do, but even in those situations, it’s a good idea to reinforce a key point or two on what you really do (as opposed to your company name or profession).

This one is still a little gimmicky, but I really like the emphasis on the tag line.  I know they have something to do with Search and my expectations are set that they are doing something different than everyone else.

Here’s what I ended up with

I decided to not particularly rock the boat with a new design – the front of my cards stayed the same and is fairly traditional, with my logo, name and contact information and website listed with a lot of white space. 

The tag line on the front of my cards has been helpful when I’m having introductory meetings – “Work ON your business, not IN your business”.  It’s cliche, but it does resonate with people that are frustrated with not being able to move ahead.

I did change the back of the card – most people tend to leave the back of the card blank (and there is some benefit to giving people a place to write) but I wanted to reinforce one of the themes that I see a lot with business owners, so I went with this as the back of my card:

It’s really difficult to make changes, but the reality is that your results are based on what you’re doing – if you want to change the results, then you’ve got to change the other stuff!  I have a variation of this conversation almost every day with a business owner, so I thought it would be worthwhile to include with my card.

I thought about going with an image or an outline of the process that I use, but with limited space I thought this quote would be more effective.  What do you think of it?

I’d love to hear what you’re doing with your cards (or what you’d like to do).  Share your thoughts below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Although it’s starting to get too hot, it’s still gardening season and my wife has been doing a lot of work on our yard and flowers.  Some of it’s clean-up and the stuff you have to do every year, but a lot of it is finding new plants and flowers and figuring out what’s going to live and what’s not (and why).

We’re within a 5 mile drive of at least 1/2 dozen places that sell plants – several big box type of stores and a few local nursery operations.

The big corporate stores compete almost entirely on price – although they’re not necessarily the cheapest across the board, they are generally going to have lower prices.  However the overall quality is pretty suspect (unless you get there the day of a new shipment) and you are unlikely to get any real help or service.

It’s tough competition for the local stores…or is it?

Earning the business

We were joking last night that the local nursery has become a daily stop, but the truth is that we have gone there a lot lately – partly because it’s that time of year, but mostly because they’ve really earned the business.

On a typical visit, my wife will locate one of the several wandering employees and ask several questions (“The Coleus we planted 2 weeks ago is getting shredded by something, what’s doing it and what can we do?”, “We’ve got a dry shady corner – what’s likely to do well there?” – etc.).

Not only are the employees happy to answer her questions (even sometimes spending 15 to 20 minutes going into details) but they’ve all been very knowledgeable – clearly they enjoy what they do, they take it seriously and they like to help people.

So the prices might be slightly higher (although not always) but the service, the expertise and the selection make it a really easy choice to pay a bit of a premium.  And…not only are we loyal customers, but my wife has probably shared her experience with a dozen people (all of them interested and looking for a better place to shop for plants) in the last 4 weeks – I have to believe that’s helped their business.

What are you doing in your business?

When you look at how you interact with your customers, are you generating loyalty and stories they’ll tell to other people?  Are you training and incenting your employees to go out of their way and really deliver value and good will with every interaction they have?

I’d love to hear other examples or ideas of companies that are getting it right – share  you thoughts in the comments below!

By the way – in case your interested, it turns out that caterpillars love Coleus and about the only thing you can do about it is pick them off.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Over this past weekend, Facebook launched the capability to claim your name as a vanity extension (i.e. www.facebook.com/yourname).   To give you an idea of what this means – Facebook had 200,000 names registered…in the first 10 minutes (launching at midnight).  Within an hour, over 1 Million names had been claimed and over the course of the weekend, more than 3 Million names were claimed.  Facebook has over 200 Million profiles, so they have a long way to go, but it’s still a big number!

Here are a lot more Facebook details from Mashable on how big this was from Facebook’s point of view (they were concerned the system might crash).

Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter also allow you to claim your name – the questions I’ve had from a few folks are “So – What’s the big deal?” and “How do I do this?” 

I’ll try to answer both of those here.

Building the brand of you

In terms of why you want to claim a personalized URL, it’s an opportunity for you to further your brand – whether that’s your name, your company name or some combination in between.

If you’re in the corporate world right now, then getting your name out there might not seem very important…right up until the point where you join the millions of other people that have had to start looking for their next thing (whether that’s due to a layoff, company going under or just time to move on).  The days of most people staying with one employer for most of their careers are over – it can happen, but it’s probably not a good idea to plan on it.

If you own your own business or if you’re out networking and selling then you probably understand the benefits of continually developing your Personal Brand.  Using tools like LinkedIn or Facebook are great ways to extend that brand.

Finally – think about it this way.  If you don’t claim your name, someone else will and as Social Media continues to grow you will find yourself being lost in the shuffle.

Getting Found

An even more practical reason to claim your name is that you want to be found when people are searching for you.  Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter all rank very highly when it comes to search results.  Here are the recent results for my name:

My blog and website are first (which is good because that’s where most of my effort is), but LinkedIn (with my name as part of the URL is next) and my Twitter profile is below that.

Do you show up on a Google search for your name?  Could people find you if they needed to, but didn’t actually know you?  If you have a common name, you might have a problem, but all the more reason to claim it (or something like it) as soon as you can.

How to Update Profiles

Google:  A few months ago, Google allowed a lot more information and personalization surrounding your Google Account, including the ability to claim a profile name that would show up on Search (at the bottom of the first page).  It’s a quick process – you can learn more from Googles at Google Profiles.

LinkedIn:  The LinkedIn process for creating your personalized URL is also straightforward.  It’s an option when you edit your profile – here’s a link that will give you more information on how to customize your LinkedIn profile.

Facebook:  I did the Facebook update over the weekend and it was very simple.  You can also ‘brand’ Fan Pages, but you have to have at least 1000 followers before you can do that.  Here’s the background on updating your Facebook Username.

Twitter:  The twitter process is simple, your twitter URL is directly tied to the username you select when you create the account in the first place (www.twitter.com/AspireShawn ).  Here’s a link to an earlier post I did that gives a lot of background on Twitter.

Other Social Media sites also allow you to claim or create your name (or they likely will soon).  You don’t need to belong to every social media site out there, but it will be important to be on at least a couple of them so you can be found.  You might also want to consider registering your name as a domain name (i.e. yourname.com ) – it would require you to build a blog or a website to really use it, but it gives you a ton of power and flexibility for branding.

What could you do to claim your name?  When’s the last time you Googled your own name (even better, set up a Google Alert for your name, your company name, any topic that you’re interested in).  Can people find you?

Other ideas or questions?  Share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade – Kansas City Business Coach

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