Women Owned Small Businesses Enduring The Recession |  |
- Women Owned Small Businesses Enduring The Recession
- 10 Tips for Being More Independent With Your Small Business
- Two Reasons To Check Back In With Yelp
- Electrical Storm, Leap Second Bug Shake Up the Web: Online Businesses Beware
| Women Owned Small Businesses Enduring The Recession Posted: 04 Jul 2012 11:00 AM PDT What strategies did women owned small business owners use to ride out the recession and how are they recovering in its aftermath? Cutting costs was the major focus for most, reports Small Business: Lessons of the Recession, a new study by the NFIB, Chase Bank and the Center for Women's Business Research.
Here's more of what they found: Money matters: During the recession, 45 percent of women business owners said they had focused on cutting costs; 31 percent focused on increasing their sales. Overall, the majority on both sides felt they had made the right decision. Getting social: Women small business owners also began to rely heavily on social media during the recession, which coincided with the growth of many social media tools. More than half say social media is either "very important" or "important" to their companies. Before the recession, just 4 percent of women business owners even used it. Seeking outside help: Women owned companies that got outside help in either boosting sales or cutting costs – whether by outsourcing to consultants, accounting professionals or sales reps – were more successful (by 23 percent) than companies that tried to handle it on their own. Getting involved: Thirty-nine percent of women business owners said they had gotten more involved in local or school activities during the recession to help raise their businesses' profile in the community. Being flexible: For some entrepreneurial women, surviving the recession required a major pivot. Nearly 25 percent of women business owners say they now market to a different customer base than they did before the recession. (However, the majority, 54 percent, succeeded by finding new business opportunities among the same customer base.) Did it work? In some ways, women owned businesses are bouncing back. For example, 45 percent say they are hiring and just 9 percent are reducing staff. By comparison, during the recession, 36 percent report they cut staff and 40 percent cut their employees' hours. But by other important measures, women business owners are losing ground. Forty-one percent of women business owners say they're now working even harder than they were when the recession was at its peak. Despite the extra effort, respondents say, their sales volume is still lower than when the recession began in 2007. Clearly, these approaches and attitudes could easily be very similar for male business owners. Whether you're a man or a woman, how do these figures jibe with your experience? What tactics have worked for your small business in riding out the recession?
From Small Business Trends |
| 10 Tips for Being More Independent With Your Small Business Posted: 04 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT You may think you won your independence from the workforce when you quit your job, but the truth is: running your own business sometimes means you’re dependent on many factors. You may depend solely on the revenue produced by just a handful of clients.You may depend on your vendors to produce products and services to you in a timely manner. Are you really as independent as you think?
Here are tips to help you get your independence back as a business owner: 1. Diversify Your Client List A co-dependent small business owner gets their income from just a few clients. If one of those clients should leave, that business owner is in trouble. They’ll scramble to generate enough business to replace that single client. Instead, work to score a few key clients, as well as smaller ones, and become an independent business so that you’re not dependent on the money you generate with one or two clients. This way, you diversify your client list and if one client should stop needing your services, you won’t be desperate to pay your expenses. 2. Get a Backup Vendor A co-dependent business produces great products…only because their vendors are cheap, on time, make great materials, etc. But what happens if the vendor is late one time, or goes out of business? Your reputation is at stake. Become an independent business by finding a few other vendors you can turn to in a pinch or if your current supplier raises your rates. 3. Don’t Put all Your Marketing Eggs in One Basket If you’ve invested in one or two types of marketing and are waiting for them to pay off, stop being co-dependent, stop waiting and add more tools to the marketing mix. A single strategy won’t net you as great of results as one that plays nicely with others. So yes, take out a banner ad if you think that will work, and become an independent business by also blogging and updating social media so that you diversify how you connect with customers. 4. Get Firm in Your Payment Terms If your customers are all over the place regarding when they actually pay their invoices, leaving you dependent on their wonky pay schedules to pay your own bills, lay down the law. Independent business owners have their own payment terms and clients who don’t follow them pay late fees. This will keep your cash flowing smoothly and keep you from having gaps in your accounts receivables. 5. Learn to Say No A co-dependent business owner has trouble saying no to new business, even if it’s not in their primary line of services. All they see is the money, and they ignore the amount of time it will take to get the work done. Become independent and learn to say no to projects outside of your scope of expertise. This will free you up to take on projects you actually enjoy doing. 6. Be Less Available We’ve all become dependent on instant access to anyone via email but being so accessible isn’t to your benefit. Instead, become more independent and check your email a handful of times a day. Don’t respond immediately if you don’t need to and don’t answer your phone after hours. Your customers will learn your parameters of availability. 7. Take Vacations This ties in to #6. Become more independent, your business will survive without you for a few days or weeks, especially if you set it up to do so. Trust in your staff to handle things while you’re gone. You’ll be better for it. 8. Open Your Mind Don’t become dependent upon defining your company’s capabilities too narrowly, you’ll miss out on great opportunities. Let new ideas come to you through employees, clients and even your own inspiration. See where they take you. 9. Hire Enough Competent People When an employee quits, it can be a shock, especially if you don’t have a contingency plan to replace them. Become independent and prevent this by 1.) having processes in place to make it easy to train a replacement and 2.) ensure you have enough employees to get the work done, rather than having extra strain on one person who will soon quit from the pressure. 10. See the Future Don’t limit yourself by what you want your business to accomplish today. Instead, keep the bigger picture in your mind. Where do you want to be in five, ten or more years? Use this as inspiration for today. Business Independence Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| Two Reasons To Check Back In With Yelp Posted: 04 Jul 2012 05:00 AM PDT Who doesn't love Yelp? As small business owners and consultants, many of us love Yelp. It gives us the ability to advertise and unlock our businesses, provides access to cool tools to learn more about our audience, and it helps others find us by aggregating reviews and giving us social proof. What's not to love? If you haven't taken the time to claim and build out your Yelp presence, below are another two big reasons you’ll want to pay attention to the local powerhouse. There's some cool stuff going on over at the world of Yelp that you may not have heard about.
1. Bing & Yelp Pair Up For Content As SMBs and consultant, it's a constant fight for visibility. We want our customers to find us and to find the information about our businesses that will lead them to want to learn even more or visit us offline. Well, guess what? Thanks to a new partnership between Yelp and Bing, finding Yelp content is about to get a whole lot easier. As of last month, Yelp content will now be heavily integrated into Bing Local pages, meaning that searchers will be able to scan reviews, business information, photos, and more directly from the Bing search results page. To get an idea of what the integration will look like, Bing offered up some screenshots.
As a searcher, this means that now you'll see Yelp-provided content in with the rest of your search results so you won't have to make the extra click and go to Yelp directly. As a business owner, this is means now is the time to go claim and optimize your Yelp listing if you haven't already. This content is being made considerably more accessible to relevant searchers, so you want to make sure they're finding the right business information and that you're getting plenty of positive reviews for Yelp and Bing to show off. Get that review strategy kicked into high gear and show off what you can offer directly from the search results. 2. Pictures Are Alive At Yelp The next interesting bit of Yelp news comes directly from Yelp itself. Yelp recently shared that a picture is worth 1,000 Yelps. What does that mean? It means Yelp did the numbers and found that users searching Yelp spend 2 and a half times as much time on a business page with photos as opposed to one without. Hello, this is your customer speaking. If you haven't uploaded pictures to your business listing, I suggest you hop to it. Now. If you're not familiar, Yelp allows business owners the ability to add photos to their profiles for absolutely no charge. Yelp encourages businesses to share photos of their food, their exteriors and interiors, staff, specials, popular items, renovations, before and after shots, etc. You may remember that Google was also encouraging business owners to add photos to their business listings, so take those photos once and use them all over the Web. If you want to spice up your photos and get lots of different angle, SMBs may also want to encourage customers to upload photos on their behalf and add them to Yelp themselves. This is another great way to make your profile more dynamic and attract more eyeballs. With Yelp content now showing up in Bing, it's just more incentive to flush out your profile and get those eye-catching images into the search results. If you haven’t checked in with Yelp lately, now may be a good time to give that business listing a little spruce. Your customers and the search engines are watching. From Small Business Trends |
| Electrical Storm, Leap Second Bug Shake Up the Web: Online Businesses Beware Posted: 04 Jul 2012 02:30 AM PDT Over the weekend, online businesses like Instagram, Pinterest, and Reddit suffered unexpected problems, the result of a severe electrical storm that took out a critical data center, and a “leap second” bug, the product of attempts to correct the world’s atomic clock. As businesses increasingly use collective resources within the cloud, your company could be in more danger than ever of becoming a casualty. Amazon OutageThe perfect storm. Over the weekend a string of online titans, including Amazon’s cloud customers Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest, experienced outages when a single Amazon data center in Northern Virginia was disrupted by an electrical storm and backup systems failed to function. All Things Digital A knock out punch. Here’s the blow by blow as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud went crashing down Friday, taking a string of high profile sites with it. Netflix and Pinterest remained down until well after 9 p.m. PT, while other services did not seem to fully recover until early the following morning. Venture Beat Working Out the BugsHold on a second. As if Friday’s fireworks were not trouble enough, the Web experienced another technical glitch Saturday evening as software handling operations for sites like Reddit, Mozilla, and Gawker hiccuped on a so-called “leap second” added recently to the world’s atomic clock to put it in sync with the Earth’s rotation. (Who knew?) Wired Stop bugging us! If an electrical storm caused Amazon Web Services’ outage problems Friday evening, it’s looking like some previously unknown bugs in the system prolonged it. If the strength of cloud services is shared resources, this might also be its weakness. It’s important for businesses to know the risks of hosting in the cloud. ZDNet Forecast CloudyDown with the ship. A bit of speculation has some experts asking how to use the cloud’s benefits without suffering its misfortunes. Many businesses depend on cloud services for diverse operations, but this can also make them vulnerable. TechCrunch Prescient predictions. Almost a month before this weekend’s problems, Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford was warning that growing interdependencies within the cloud could lead to instabilities and even potential meltdowns. His research and the recent problems might make any business owner think twice. PC World Silver LiningsOn second thought. The outage at Amazon Web Services has many businesses taking stock. While time and effort are certainly saved by leasing software and computer power from a cloud provider, companies find they have little control over situations when technical problems arise. The Wall Street Journal Getting up to speed. If you’re just now looking into cloud computing for your business, all this talk probably has you a bit worried. Cloud computing holds some uncertainty, true, so it might help to learn more about what the cloud is and what it can mean for your company. Josh Lowry For Better or WorseDon’t get blown away. Once you’ve decided to move some of your computer operations to the cloud, there are some risks you must understand. From service continuity issues to e-mail security concerns and much more, cloud computing means certain sacrifices in return for the benefits obtained. CloudTech A winning strategy. Perhaps the most obvious solution for dealing with outages in cloud provider services is the one many large scale companies are already pursuing. It’s time to follow a multi-vendor solution for your cloud computing needs. SocalTech.com From Small Business Trends |
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