Small Business Development Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t try to be Superman or Superwoman! An ideal Small Business Development program requires a team of dedicated and capable individuals. Hiring an assistant and/or working with interns are great ways to increase productivity while being cost effective. With diligent planning and follow through, your concepts and ideas can turn into reality.

For a solid Small Business Development strategy, focus on planning, marketing, and financial management. Pay close attention to all the details from the beginning; learn all you can about running a business before hand.  “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Would a home developer build a house without a blueprint?

Why build a business without a Small Business Development plan?

If you don’t have the overall picture/end result in mind, your efforts will be average at best. Average is not necessarily a bad thing. But why sell yourself short when you are capable of greater success.  

Your Small Business Development blueprint should be well thought out; who are your customers? A challenging part of building a business is establishing your target market. You should view your market as inclusive, not exclusive. Think of your business as a support group. Your customers want to go to a business that understands their specific concerns, needs, and wants. Make sure to look out for any niche market opportunities.

When creating a Small Business Development plan, don’t forget that everyone accesses the internet for “everything.” If they can’t find your business on the web, you are losing out on potential business. When developing your website, remember that people look to their mobile devices for easy on the go information. This means that your website and online destinations should be mobile-friendly. Don’t launch a mobile marketing campaign that leads consumers to your website that doesn’t work well on mobile devices.

Remember, it takes just a few seconds to visit your website from a smartphone or tablet device. Experts say people are shifting from the computer era in to the mobile device/tablet era; especially in the younger demographics and in some Asian countries. The most interested consumers will visit your website, and your website needs to be ready for that traffic.

Business advice can be like trees in a forest; there’s so many it’s hard to know which ones are important. But consider this: advice you hear repeatedly is probably important, so keep listening, learning and evolving your business by taking cues from other’s. This list of business advice includes some basics and just may help you get through tough times.

1 Have a Plan: And use it. A good rule off thumb is to plan out a whole year in advance: When are you going to offer specials? How much do you hope to clear by certain dates? When do you want to hire? Whatever it is try, follow the habits of many successful people and write it down.

2 Change Your Plan: That’s right, the plan you wrote down six months ago should be used as a guide to measure whether your ideas and predictions worked or not. Change things not working by re-doubling your efforts or perhaps using new strategies.

3 Always Ask Questions and re-evaluate what you’re doing. Don’t sit back while your competition finds new ways to out-compete with you. Scour the Internet for ideas to improve your business; join local business associations and compare notes, trends and strategies with other business people around you. Ask your clients how you’re doing. 

4 Always Try to Improve. If you think your business is perfect, you’re making a mistake. At least try new things once in a while to see if your marketing, or your website, office procedures, etc. could be made to work better for you. A deal site (like BizSaves) might make it cheaper to find and try new ideas

5 Trust Your Customers and listen and look for trends in buying or repeat purchases. Abandoned shopping carts, returned items, no referral business or a host of other things are people trying to tell you something. Be aware and change.

6 Be Kind to Strangers: OK, the customer is not always right, but it behooves you to take the high road and never be angry or mean to anyone; you never know who might hear about your outburst.

7 Love Your Clients: Speaking of strangers; remember they are the reason for you being in business; they make your business happen. Cherish them secretly; be gracious publicly, and always try to make their experience with you so rewarding they’ll tell all their friends.

8 Love your Vendors: More people without whom your business would not work. Someday you may need a favor or a special delivery; never overlook the importance of good relations with the vendors you count on.

9 Love Your Employees: OK, promise, this is the last “Love” one. Most employees work harder, stay more committed and produce more with praise and constructive criticism. Sure sometimes you have to straighten someone out and even fire them, but coaxing people to excellence is almost always more effective than threatening them or yelling. 

10 Connect With Your Competition: This may sound strange, but reaching out with a phone call or note to a new competitor is a good way to measure the threat they pose and if they have some secret weapon. At the least it will let them know you’re watching them, and you’re confident enough to not be afraid of them.

11 Support Your Community: It never hurts to hug back the community which has given your business a chance. Sponsor a holiday food drive; give a free lecture about your field at the local library; join the local Lions club or business organization. Be visible.

12 Talk Up Your Business: Always have business cards; at gatherings give friendly advice in your field, use email signatures that have links, etc. Don’t overlook the contact that might refer your next big client.

13 Know When to Stop. Don’t talk people to death: you want to quickly inform and tease them about your business, not drone on. It’s always better to leave them wanting more; not wishing you would go away.

14 Volunteer a Class: Teaching a class about running your own small business could be of real use to the community. It can also help cement you into the local landscape.

15 Use Your SBA. Your local Small Business Administration office is full of seasoned business people in your area that are a wealth of helpful information, contacts and resources. Contact them and participate.

16 Stay Positive. Sometimes easier said then done, but studies have shown that optimistic people tend to handle conflict better and make wiser decisions (as well as live longer). If you’re naturally a gloomy person, at least don’t let your clients see it. A smile actually makes you feel better. Any problem can be solved.

17 Don’t Do Everything. Unless you’re a solo violinist, learn to trust people and benefit from their strengths, especially to compliment your weaknesses. Seek out a great accountant, or carpenter or marketing expert to guide you. You can’t be the best at everything. Focus on your core business.

What’s your best advice?

Mark Hess is a marketer specializing in helping small businesses find and use modern, growth enhancing marketing, products and services. His company, BizSaves.com offers the best of the web.

• Write it Down & Make It Real – Create a list of ideas which you feel will have enough appeal to create demand (translation: profit in your bank account). Bounce these around your R & D department; if you’re a one-person band, solicit feedback from some of your most brutally honest friends/relatives & see which ideas are most popular. Hone that short list down to a single brilliant concept & apply your best efforts to it. You can always repeat the process for runner-up ideas, but focusing on one idea/product/service at a time is one key to success.

• If you’re staring at a blank piece of paper instead of a fleshed-out idea list, there’s still hope. Create a checklist of activities you perform daily, particularly things you do more than once per day. Odds are if you’ve wished there was a way to improve whatever the process/service/product, other people have, too. Think multi-tasking – like whomever first came up with the idea of the hands-free phone so you could drive & literally simultaneously be a wheeler-dealer.

• Monitor Amazon’s top-sellers. Once you’ve identified products that are raking in the sales, wrack your brain for a product which would be complimentary or an enhancement to that bestseller. Otter’s cases for iPhones is one such piggyback “stairway to success.” .

• Watch social media venues to see what’s selling & being talked about on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Oftentimes what people complain about gives you a heads-up about the need for a new product or service.

Got the $1 Million Idea, Now Where are Customers?
Now’s the time when your desire to start a business can really can go into overdrive. Pinpoint where you can tap into enough prospective purchasers to make your concept skyrocket. Stay mindful of current trends with similar products/services, and watch how they’re doing. In short, make sure your market is viable – not shrinking.

Facebook ads, Google Trends (for multiple website comparison) & Google Insights (which allows you to check volume patterns, search opinions and much more) can all offer valuable stats to help you track the growth potential of your target market.

If there’s a wildly successful money-maker out there that your million dollar idea can piggyback off of – sweet! Go for it! In other words, think like a mogul. Also, study your competitors – the ones whose businesses are most similar to yours. If they’re generating high numbers of prospective customers, your idea stands more than a fighting chance.  

For example, you could go to Crunch Base and use their free service to help determine which successful business’s model has the best template to use as an example and then tweak it to your business. If you’re a statistic geek, you might enjoy creating a Google spreadsheet of your competitors’ key numbers for their businesses. This is not an exact science by any means, but it can give you a good ballpark idea of your business’s potential.

Determining The Value of Your Customer
All right, so you’ve got the elementary components of your Primer to Entrepreneurship lined up.  A) Your Million $ Idea ready to go and B) Your Prospective Customer Database from which to pull. Now you’re ready to figure out C, which is how much each customer is worth to you in potential annual income.

When you start a business, all kinds of business advice from everyone from your family on down the line to your grocer  seems to run as rampant as wildfire. Only take advice that really resonates with you and let the rest go. Figuring out your “C” will not just help you figure out the likelihood of “B” actually buying your product, it will also assist you with pricing. Here’s a formula for determining “C”:

1. What’s the base cost of a “widget?” In a nutshell, how much is the average price of purchasing said widget (make sure it’s one comparable to yours) For this formulaic example, let’s say $500 base cost per widget.
2.  Recurring maintenance costs – how much does it cost to maintain the widget annually? Again, for this example, let’s estimate a yearly maintenance cost of $1,000.
3. Determine the “life expectancy” of the widget – how long will it last, on the average. So the last component of the formula example is that the product/service tends to last 10 years. So your formula goes something like this:

One more formula will help even further – that’s the TAM formula (which stands for Total Available Market).Here’s how that goes:

Validation of Your Idea – Take it One Step Further
Give yourself permission to feel pretty great right about now. Go ahead – you’ve worked hard to get this far. Now, let’s just tweak things a wee bit more.

• Drive traffic to a simple Landing Page using something like Instapage or Unbounce
• Put together some ads & run them on Facebook and/or Google, then evaluate your CR (conversion rate) for collection of email addresses & ad-clicks.
• Do a mini-email campaign – Solicit about a dozen friends who would desire your mock product & ask them to send payment via Paypal. If a few actually bite & pay – that’s the best validation. Then either refund them or give them something of even higher worth.

Final Frontier – Give Your Wantrepreneur the Axe
Last step – create your product, build your business & you’re officially on your personal road to riches! Stay focused, upbeat & positive. Stay the course, and if at first you don’t succeed, do try, try again. Persistence is 9/10ths of the battle – go get ‘em!