Articles

Small Business Advice

I was thinking last night, which is why a few of you may have smelled smoke. Don't panic.

It was just an incandescent, albeit illegal-and-being-replaced, brainbulb overheating.

Young business owners frequently want to "scale". Seems like a reasonable word to learn. Makes for more intelligent-sounding tailgate talk, eh? But what does that mean? One way to define it is to see and be seen.

1. What's your widget? What goods and/or services do you offer? If the answer is both, start thinking about your resources. What are resources? They are: time, money and headspace. I know all about these things as a small business owner and insist that none of the three are self-replenishing. You need to be able to have an ample supply of all of them.

2. Who's your market? Marketing, according to many, is the act of blasting emails all over the place like a toddler tossing her mashed potatoes. That's wrong, and it makes no hay. The sun is shining, so let's remember that real marketing is identifying who you want to sell to. Selling is totally different.

3. So, how do you intend to sell? I'm not going to teach you how to do that (unless you want to be my client). But I'll leave the decision up to you. Most of the time - nay, all of the time - you need to be available to searches. That means: build a website or get one built for you. Anyone who's going to spend money on your idea needs to see that you're willing to put yourself out there. You have to have a digital billboard. If you come to me and wonder why you're not "killing it" in the marketplace, I don't want to discover that you've just bought a web domain or that you have a social media or Yelp profile. Those are sprinkles to put on the cupcakes later. Get that website up. Then, get prepared to talk with people about what you do or create.

4. Get compliant. Get a company email address. [Wait - you do have a company set up already, don't you?] Show your would-be customers/clients that you mean to do real business.

5. Set your pricing strategy. If it's one thing you do or sell, there's one price. If you make cakes, your pricing will be all over the map unless a. you're a robot or b. you've set your offerings up so that you take a bath on one item and make up for it on another. See, I said "cakes" and insist that no two cakes are alike, that every cake has unique costs associated with it, and that if you need to have four meetings with an indecisive cake fiend about what will make the dream wedding come to pass - that's not going to be something you can just put a generic price on to list on your website, right?

6. Show or don't show your cards. In my world, there's something called "spec work" - it's speculative. It involves putting a good or service together, sometimes over and over, fine-tuning, adding to, subtracting from, customizing until it hurts. It's free. I don't do that any more and neither do dozens of past colleagues, vendors and partners. Bottom line: unless it's one thing you do or create that's ALWAYS going to cost you the same resources, you'd do well to let a potential client kick the tires for free to an extent that's comfortable for you. And then charge for your time, experience, resources and opportunity cost (the actual value of what you're not able to do because you're over-discussing the idea of doing business without a dollar being exchanged). This is just the beginning. I've learned a lot over the years and hope to share useful things with you whenever possible. It should be obvious why I don't "list my rates" on this website. If not, perhaps you can go back and peruse (this page) again. It's not TL;DR. Know this, if anything: I want you to be aware of your opportunity costs and the perils of scope creep. Maybe I should gab about that some time soon.