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5 Holiday Cash Flow Tips

Shawn Kinkade — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:40:34 +0000

The end of the year is a great time to think about money – today we have a guest post from Carolyn K. from the BlogContentGuild.com – take it away Carolyn.

The holidays have descended upon us, and the end of the year is rapidly approaching. If you are a business owner, you’ve probably noticed how difficult it can be to manage cash flow around this time of year. One of the greatest things about November and December is that your sales usually go up during these months. One of the worst things about this time of year is inventory management and order management become more difficult largely because of all the sales you you’ve made.

Here are some tips to help you control your cash flow this holiday season:

1. If you sell goods, double-check your inventory every day. Don’t solely rely on the stock information logged in the computer. Clerical errors are easy to make, and you could end up thinking you have enough of a product to go around when you simply don’t.

2. Make sure you ship orders or deliver services to customers in a timely fashion. Customers don’t want to wait around for you just because it’s a busy time of the year. They expect what they ordered to reach them as soon as possible, just as they would expect any other time of the year. You and your employees may need to work overtime around the holidays to ensure that customers are satisfied with your swift service.

3. If your customers pay you on a monthly basis, make sure you call or email them to remind them about their payments in November, December, and January. These months are when customers are least likely to pay you on time because they have a lot going on in their lives and many of them are low on cash. However, the health of your business during the holidays may depend on payments received.

4. Have a talk with your employees about stepping up their game around the holidays. Everyone at the company needs to be on the same page and devoted to accomplishing all necessary goals before Christmas and in between Christmas and New Years. You might want to ask employees to work overtime for a few Saturdays just to make sure everything gets done.

5. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Mistakes happen. If you and your employees work your absolute hardest during the holiday season, your company’s cash flow situation will remain favorable.

Some great ideas from Carolyn – we’d love to hear your thoughts on holiday cash concerns. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by TibChris

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25 Great pieces of Advice for Start-ups

Shawn Kinkade — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:11:51 +0000

From the Kauffman Foundation’s Sketchbook – Three Things!

This week we are celebrating the 3rd annual Global Entrepreneurship Week, started by our hometown Kauffman Foundation. With all the focus on generating great ideas and starting up businesses, I wanted to pass along some great advice from business owners and entrepreneurs who made their jump in the last few years.

Making that jump to start your own business takes a lot of guts and the more you can learn from those who have done it, the better off you’ll be. To that end, I did an informal interview with a few of my Peer Group Advisory Boards and asked them simply:

“What’s the best advice you would give someone who’s planning to start a business now?”

Here’s the summary of their responses in no particular order.

Enjoy the upside to owning your own business – you’re in charge and you get the freedom and control to do what you want to do. Additionally you have the opportunity to build something that’s all yours.
Building a business is complex and you aren’t going to be an expert in everything – don’t be afraid to ask for help along the way.
Find a mentor. Someone you can bounce ideas off of, who can help you get perspective and hold you accountable.
You’ve got to be flexible…the market will change and your understanding of the market and your business will change as well. Be prepared to adjust your course.
Do what you can to find multiple revenue streams, more ways to generate money. If you only have one product or service, it’s likely you’ll get stuck and it’s good to have something to fall back on.
Even though you’re in a hurry to get started, take the time up front to really plan things out. Your upfront costs and decisions can make or break you. Take the time to make sure it’s money well spent.
Understand your financials and get accounting and payroll help as soon as you can afford it.
Have patience, things will take longer and cost more than you think
Make sure you have enough financial runway so you’re not panicked or have to shut down if things take longer than you expect to get off the ground.
Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the business of marketing first – if you can’t position and market your product / service effectively not much else matters.
Make it your focus to add value with every contact you have (clients, networking contacts, pretty much everyone).
Be clear on what you’re getting into when you start a business: Long hours, challenges outside of your comfort zone and a lonely path. It’s a tough challenge (but worth it when you succeed).
Get comfortable with risk and uncertainty. It will be a while before you can count on a regular paycheck (like possibly 12 to 18 months).
Make sure you’ve got family support and they’re excited about what you’re doing.
Build connections (real relationships) – networking and building the right win-win relationships is crucial to long term success.
Give yourself a clear go / no-go date to help you manage the bumps in the road. If you have a bad month early on, you still have time to recover because you haven’t hit your date yet.
Be clear on why you want to create your business…if you’re not excited about what you’re doing, no one else will be either.
Make sure you create and work off of a written business plan (can be as simple as a couple of pages, but a plan that covers where the money comes from and where it’s going).
Starting something isn’t easy and it isn’t quick – it takes hard work to succeed.
Have faith in yourself, when things get tough you have to push through.
Your business has a gestational age…despite your full commitment few will take you seriously until you’ve been around at least 9 months…sometimes much longer.
Read the E-Myth and be aware of your mix between Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician (and understand what that means).
Setup an advisory board for your business – people you trust who will tell you hard truths and encourage you.
Figure out if you have the disposition to be an entrepreneur. Look for clues in your past – if you’ve never taken ownership and pushed to make money independently it will be tough to succeed in your own business.
Passion trumps perfection, you can’t wait for it to be just right you have to get out there and start making things happen.

There’s nothing as challenging or as rewarding as creating your own business. And a big part of that challenge is getting your new business off the ground. It’s not for the faint of heart, but the above advice can help you succeed in the critical first year.

What advice above resonates with you? What’s the best advice you’ve heard for entrepreneurs? (Or business owners in general?) Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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Are you using LinkedIn’s Company Page?

Shawn Kinkade — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:28:33 +0000

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. They have a clear focus on professional business networking and they’ve created an extremely effective tool that every business owner should be using. In fact if you’re not using LinkedIn, now’s the right time to create a profile and start linking!

One of the things I really like about LinkedIn is the steady pace of innovation they’ve had over the years. They don’t score a hit with everything they roll out, but they are constantly improving and adding new useful functionality. Considering LinkedIn is a free site that offers a ton of value for business professionals, that’s a pretty good deal!

Just in the last year or two, they’ve made changes to groups, the advertising functionality and even some minor profile changes, but what you should really check out as a business owner is how they’ve been quietly adding stuff to the Company page functionality. It started when LinkedIn added the ability to follow companies and more recently they’ve added several other worthwhile capabilities worth checking out.

New Company Page capabilities from LinkedIn

- A Careers tab that allows you to centrally post for jobs at your company along with lots of other customization and capabilities (some of which cost money).

- A services tab which allows you to create detailed descriptions of the services you offer (and allows people to post recommendations / testimonials for those services directly.

- An analytics tab that gives you a breakdown of page views, unique visitors, and a trend on followers. (We would love to have more followers at Aspire…here’s what our page looks like. We’re still adding some things to it).

Finally – LinkedIn also just added the capability to do Company Status updates. Note – you have to edit your company page and specify who is allowed to make an update in order for the field to show up.

Kind of unrelated, but LinkedIn also just added a Classmates feature which helps you find anyone who went to your college at the same time you were there. There was always a way to do this via search, but they’ve done a nice job giving you information and the ability to filter a lot of different ways. Check out LinkedIn Classmates

Have you created and updated your Company page lately? People are looking for you and the more positive information they can find, the better off you’ll be. What do you think of Company Pages? Any success stories or concerns? We’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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7 Incredibly Useful™ things I’ve learned…

Shawn Kinkade — Tue, 03 May 2011 01:57:25 +0000

photo by chuckyeager

I started Aspire 4 years ago, give or take a couple of days, and it’s been a fun, exhausting and enlightening ride so far. Not only have I had a chance to learn a ton of great things through my own business efforts, but I’ve picked up a lot of amazing things from my clients as well.

When I started Aspire, I didn’t realize I was ramping up my business a few months before the ‘Great Recession’ started, which has led to some really strong lessons as well (things like living within your means, slow and steady, bootstrap wherever possible, etc.). It hasn’t been easy and certainly there have been plenty of stumbles and frustrations over the years but there’s also been steady growth and I’ve gained a lot of clarity with each lesson.

As they say…”If I only knew then what I know now…!”. Which brings me to the point of this post – I wanted to take a shot at sharing the most useful things I’ve learned over the last few years – hopefully they’ll be helpful to others…and if you’ve got some useful things that I haven’t learned yet, then share them in the comments!

What do I mean by ‘Incredibly Useful™’? I could do a full post just on the technology tools I’ve picked up – stuff like Dropbox, Xobni and Pandora that I use all the time. But what I wanted to cover here were some of the ideas that I either didn’t know or didn’t appreciate when I started. I’m trying to read a new business book every few weeks…and some of these ideas came out of those books, but they also came out of real world application…practical (and Incredibly Useful™) ways to grow your business now…

1. It’s all about Marketing Consistency

One of the secrets of marketing that most people don’t pay much attention to is consistency. Way too many business owners will spend money to make a big splash, but it’s a one and done approach…and they get frustrated when that doesn’t work very well. What does work is getting in front of your target market on a very regular basis…in fact I’ve found that consistency is even more important than having a perfect message. It’s your consistent presence over the long run that opens the doors…without consistency, you’re just floundering.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: Try this – Find at least 1 (preferably 2 or 3) marketing tactics that you can apply consistently every single month. Newsletters, blog posts, post card campaigns, ads, events, meetings…if you’re not doing anything on a regular, repeatable basis now for marketing…you have to start…this month!

2. Use a Calendar not a list

One of the biggest challenges facing business owners (or anyone else for that matter) is the ability to consistently get things done. Where most of us fall short is having too much to do and not enough time to do it. We start with a list of really important things to do…start working the list and life happens and more stuff gets added to the list. We reprioritize, work on some other stuff and more life happens! Bottom line – not much gets done, which is why putting the important stuff on the calendar will help you actually get it done. There was a study done a couple of years ago that showed that critical things that needed to get done where 75% more likely to actually get done if they were scheduled on a calendar!

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: Try this – take a look at your to-do list and transfer the most important items to your calendar. This will require you to estimate how long it will take and to find an open block of time to actually do it…which is why it works so much better. There’s only so many hours in the day and this calendar approach will force you to honor that law of nature so you don’t kid yourself into thinking you can do more than you actually can.

3. It’s all about (well placed) Confidence

Picture this – you’re having a bad day and you are totally unprepared as you go into a sales meeting with a prospective client who would be a great fit for what you do. You approach the meeting with a real lack of confidence…saying things like “I don’t know” or “I wish I knew the answer to that…”. How well do you think that meeting is going to go? It’s going to poorly – people are looking for answers they can trust and if you don’t display real confidence, you’ll get eaten alive. That lack of confidence comes shining through and you become extremely unattractive!

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: Try this – Focus on building confidence going into sales meetings. Confidence is the secret to success, but it has to be confidence that’s earned. Here are some things to keep in mind to build up your confidence: Let yourself take pride in what you do, make sure you’re overly prepared for the meetings and spend time visualizing a successful outcome. Finally – when you head into that meeting, pretend like you are independently wealthy and don’t need the business.

4. You’ve got to have Focus

At any given time, you and your employees should all be very clear on what’s the MOST important thing you need to get done right now. Outside of the day to day business operations, you should all be on the same page of what needs to get accomplished next. Without that shared focus, the odds are very high that different people are working on different things or that things will change from day to day. Either way, you’re not getting things done that way!

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: Try this – take an hour or two of time and write down the 5 most important things you need to do this quarter – be specific and measurable. Now out of those 5, pick which one is the most important thing. Write the top 5 (and top 1) down, put it on your wall and give a copy to each employee and have them post it as well. Rinse and repeat at the end of 90 days!

5. Be Really Visible

People will buy when they’re ready to buy (sadly not when you’re ready for them to buy). So that means if you want to sell to people you either have to get really lucky and call them on the day that they’re thinking about buying…or you have to be top of mind when they’re ready to start looking. The way to stay top of mind is to consistently keep your visibility up, make sure people know who you are and what you do and do it in a memorable way…consistently.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: This is where a tool like Social Media comes in. My preference is LinkedIn, but Facebook can be effective for the right kind of business as well. Make sure you are continually building up your connections with people you Know, Like and Trust…and that you are updating your status with useful and interesting information – if you blog (and you should consider doing that, link back to a blog update). You could also answer questions online or reach out to people you know…bottom line, spend 30 to 60 minutes a week, be active and stay visible.

6. It’s not about you…it’s about your clients

This can be a hard lesson for some business owners. It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of the cool things you can do and to want to share that endlessly with whoever will listen (we’ve all been trapped in that conversation at some point). Don’t take it personally…but your prospective clients don’t care about what you do. They ONLY care if you can solve their problems…how can you really help them? Focus your efforts on what’s in it for them.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: Try this – Next time you meet a potential client, do everything in your power not to talk about yourself. You don’t have to be weird about it, just ask a lot of questions on what they are struggling with, what the implications are and really (really) listen to what they have to say. If you do this the right way and you can help them, then it’s no longer selling, it’s just educating them on how you can make their lives / situation better, but it starts with their problems, not your stuff!

7. Project your Profits

If your like most business owners, you probably have a good idea of how much money you’d like to make this year. Unfortunately if you’re like most business owners, that’s about all you know…you don’t really know when that money will come in (i.e. what month), where it will come from and how all of that works with your expenses, cash flow and profitability. In essence you are flying blind…and eventually that will get you in a LOT of trouble.

Incredibly Useful™ Tip: Try this – create a Profit Plan for your business. Keep it simple, but lay out a month by month projection of your planned revenues and costs for the year. That alone is a worthwhile exercise, but where it really gets fun is when you start figuring out how you’re going to generate the planned revenue…what marketing needs to happen, when, is it reasonable? There’s a lot you can learn from this kind of projection – if you want a template to start with Contact Me and let me know what you want.

Any of these resonate with you? What did I miss? What incredibly useful things have you learned in the last few years? I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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Can an Elephant teach you about change?

Shawn Kinkade — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:03:10 +0000

photo by 9-lives

Imagine a large elephant and a relatively small rider, making their way through the jungle. Now imagine the elephant sees something they’re interested in and heads that direction…at that point, the rider is literally carried away, even if that’s not where they wanted to go!

That’s a key premise in Switch (How to change when change is hard) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. As the title suggests, this is a book about effecting change…within yourself, your family or your business and it’s full of great stories and a lot of practical ideas.

What’s the deal with the elephant and the rider? They’re part of an analogy originally developed by Jonathan Haidt – author of The Happiness Hypothesis. The elephant represents your emotional side and the rider is the analytical / rational part of you. Think about it this way – it’s mid afternoon, you’re kind of hungry and you know there’s a leftover doughnut laying on a plate in the other room. Rationally you know you don’t need to doughnut, they’re fried rings of death! However you also know they taste great and emotionally that doughnut would make you feel really good. For most people, the elephant is going to win that battle fairly quickly and you are going to eat that doughnut!

That’s what really cool about Switch – they give you a practical framework to not only understand why we act the way we do, but also tools that can help you do something about it.

There are actually 3 components to the framework they use to describe why people do what they do:

The Rider:

The rider is all about rational analysis, logic and the long term view of things. Unfortunately the Rider is pretty small compared to the Elephant and wears out fairly quickly. In other words, pure rational willpower can work…but only for a little while…eventually you’re going to get tired of fighting and end up going where the elephant wants to go!

The Elephant:

The elephant is all about emotion and the here and now, instant gratification. It represents the subconscious part of you, which means it’s the elephant that will try to stick with habits you’ve already got in place…the elephant doesn’t like change and tends to build up a lot of momentum. However it’s the elephant and the emotional response that also motivates you to do a lot of things that you rationally might not want to do.

The Path:

Finally, the 3rd component of the model is the path. The path represents the environment…let’s say you really love a particular ice cream that’s only sold at your local ice cream store…in fact you’re addicted to it. You’d like to stop eating it, but you find yourself stopping at the store every few days because the elephant loves ice cream! Now imagine that the store closes…goes out of business. Your habit, your addiction to the ice cream would be broken, not because the rider finally won the argument, but because the environment changed. There was no more ice cream on the path! Sometimes you can force a change just by switching up the environment.

Using the framework listed above, the authors then go through more than a dozen examples of how people have made important changes by focusing on different aspects of the framework. The examples range from a technique that’s used to help people learn to develop a habit of cleaning up – the 5 minute Room Rescue (minimizing change so the elephant doesn’t get scared away) to changing the company culture at Rackspace to one of Fanatical Support (changing the environment to force personal service).

Additional examples talk about changes ranging from individual changes of habits all the way up to major changes in government policies! But what’s really valuable is the analysis on each example that explains the approach used to make these changes and how it fits into the framework of the Rider, Elephant and Path.

This is one of those rare business books that’s interesting and really practical in terms of teaching you a process you can use to figure out how to make the changes you need in your business (or your life).

If you’re looking for a great business book to read…or if you’ve got some things you’d like to change in your life or your business (and honestly, who doesn’t?) then you need to check out Switch! Highly Recommended!

Have you read Switch? What did you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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