Can Your Customers Live Without You?

Is the recession over?  I keep hearing that it is, but I don’t believe it (that’s my issue).  But what matters to our businesses is how our customers feel.  In and out of recession, they still have needs and wants, and if we meet those desires, then we are still in business.

The Product

In “Are Consumers Ready to Start Spending?,” Anita Campbell says, “While it is possible that consumer spending attitudes will loosen up as the recovery strengthens, it’s also possible this may not happen for some time.”  So what’s the small business solution to encouraging customer spending?

Anita gives three suggests to help us do this, including the recommendation that you “position your products and services as good value.”  She explains that value “mean(s) your products or services are high quality and lasting, making them a good value for the money.  With consumers spending less often, they are being more critical and cautious when they do buy and looking for things that are worth spending on.”

Sometimes, it’s easy to hear advice and move past it without applying it effectively.  But take a minute and think about your own spending—especially if you are your target market.  Note your behavior, then pay attention to your clients’ behavior.  What type of product combination does your client need—what type of product combination do you need—to make spending worth it? Now put a strategy in place to create that combination  In your niche, hopefully, your customers feel like they can’t live without you and your targeted solutions.

The Marketing

Keep this in mind, not everyone has been in a recession.  It’s our responsibility to know our clients and adjust accordingly.  But understanding your client base is just the beginning.  You still have to market to them in a way that appeals to that particular group because it’s your marketing that will get them to your doors (off and online).

In the article “Attention Small Businesses: You’re ALL in the Marketing Business,” Ivana Taylor says,  “You’re in business to make money (and, preferably, you keep more than you make).”  In order to make that money, Ivana believes you need to employ an “attractor strategy.”   She adds, “Throwing salespeople out there WITHOUT a marketing strategy and marketing support is what we do when we think we’re in the widget business.”

It’s our job

• to know our business and our clients
• to speak a language that connects with our (potential) clients
• to understand the strategy behind the business, which includes the marketing that keeps us connected to our clients

Put in the time to learn how the marketing piece of your business works. Then establish a system and team to support that strategy.  After all, it’s hard to stay in business when very few know how great you are or that they need and want what you have.  It’s your marketing that lets them know.

The USP

When you finally decide to put on your marketer’s hat (and keep it on), Susan L. Reid, in “5 Steps to Determine Your Unique Selling Point,” has a few tips for you.  Your Unique Selling Point (USP) is the thing that makes you stand out.  Without it, your potential clients cannot understand the difference between you and everyone else who does what you do.  Without it, they can’t understand why they should choose you over anyone else.  Without it, they can’t justify the ongoing spending to themselves nor the others on their team.

Susan urges you to find your USP and:

• “Stop putting your business at risk.”
• “Put an end to getting lost in the crowd.”

Plus she gives you five clear ways to get it done.

In the end, your business is about the people you serve, and it’s your marketing that connects you to them.

 

by Jamillah Warner

IRS Increases Business Mileage Rate to 55.5 Cents

The Internal Revenue Service announced a midyear increase in the business mileage rate you can claim as a business tax deduction.  Effective July 1, 2011, the rate increases to 55.5 cents per mile.  This is a 4.5 cent increase.  For the first half of 2011, the rate still remains at 51 cents per mile (January 1, 2011 to June 30, 2011).

What this means is that if you or your employees use a vehicle for business purposes, and claim the miles driven for business as a Federal income tax deduction, then you can use the IRS-standard mileage rate to calculate the amount of the deduction.  You multiply the number of miles driven by the IRS-designated mileage rate.

(Alternatively you could deduct the actual costs of operating a vehicle for business.  But many people just use the standard mileage rate because it requires less record-keeping.  Business Toolkit explains in more detail. TurboTax has a great explanation, too.)

This is one of those times when a higher number is actually a good thing for taxes!  Higher equals a bigger deduction.

And if you have an especially economical car, you can really benefit.  The standard mileage deduction may be more favorable than your actual driving expenses.  Even so, it’s perfectly allowable to choose the standard mileage deduction.

This mileage rate increase is good news for those in the United States, as it reflects the increased costs of operating a vehicle as a result of higher gas prices this year.  A number of advocacy groups have been clamoring for this increased mileage rate.  Some people claim that it took too long to raise the rates  –  gas prices were highest early in the year and are now actually falling a bit.  However, the fact is that the rate has been increased.  Let’s be practical — our government just doesn’t move fast (nothing that big does!).  So I am just glad we got a mid-year increase. We got midyear increases in 2005 and 2008, too.

Remember, this mileage rate applies only to business travel.  Other mileage rates apply for driving that you do for medical purposes and certain moving expenses (goes up from 19 cents to 23.5 cents), and charitable endeavors (still 14 cents per mile).

I’m not familiar with the situation in other countries like the U.K., Ireland, Australia, Canada and elsewhere — but perhaps, readers from those countries, you can tell the rest of us.  Have you gotten any tax relief as a result of higher oil prices impacting the cost of fuel?

 

Small Business News, Tips, Advice • by Anita Campbell

4 Ways to Use Less Paper at Your Business

If you look in the trash can or – let’s hope — recycling bins at many businesses, you’ll probably find a ton of paper. Paper is one of the most common waste products at most businesses, and thus one of the biggest sustainability opportunities many small businesses have.

Cutting down on paper waste isn’t as easy as you’d think. For one thing, paper itself is relatively cheap, so business owners might feel like there’s little economic incentive to reduce it. Moreover, it’s hard to change perception that paper use has little environmental impact. But that’s not true: Recycling 1 ton of paper can save 7,000 gallons of water and enough energy to power the average U.S. home for six months, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Reducing paper use in the first place, then, can save a lot more.

Cutting down on paper waste should be viewed as high priority on your sustainability checklist, just like saving energy or reducing water use.  Here are four ways small businesses can cut down on their paper use.

1. Use printers that allow for double-sided printing. You can halve the amount of paper used by printing documents on both sides of paper. Some laser printers offer double-sided or “duplex” printing as a standard feature so you can easily set it up through your computer’s printer option features as the default mode. Others make it more tedious or impossible. Check into this capability before purchasing a new printer.

2. Repurpose used paper into notepads. Despite your best efforts, odds are you still have plenty of paper printed on one side that goes to waste. Collect this paper over time and turn it into small notepads for scratch paper. Many copy shops and office supply stores offer this service for less than a dollar per notepad, or you can bind them yourself by purchasing padding compound.

3. Cut down on junk mail. Junk mail to businesses accounts for a huge amount of needless paper waste. There are several strategies for stopping junk mail from being delivered to a business, which we’ve outlined before.

4. Go “paperless.” More businesses that traditionally rely on lots of paper for transactional purposes are finding ways to greatly reduce it. Some mortgage lenders, for instance, now put loan documents on jump drives and allow for electronic signatures to avoid printing out dozens of pages. Other businesses make PDFs of documents they want to save electronically rather than printing them out.

Of course, you still need paper for various things. So when you do buy paper products for your business, look for paper with a high post-consumer recycled content, such as 60 percent or even 100 percent.  This greatly reduces the number of trees cut down, gallons of water used and amount of carbon dioxide emitted to make that paper.

by Kelly Spors

How to Effectively Communicate Value When Building a Business

Ever talk to a business owner or an entrepreneur about their business and they were not able to effectively explain what their business did?  Maybe they went on and on trying to describe it and the explanation was simply not very clear. Or the explanation was clear, but there was not a real punch in terms of making a strong impression. When this is the case, these business owners could benefit by improving their ability to effectively communicate the value that they deliver to their customers.

What is value?

Value in this context refers to a business benefit that is transferred to the customers or clients that purchase the products or services. Not to be confused with features and benefits of products that are sold, this is actual improvement that results on the customer’s side at the business level.

For example, take a company that sells web-based training software. The features of this software are that it is completely delivered as software-as-a-service with robust recording and delivery options. A main benefit of this software is the ability to deliver education to anyone that has an internet connection. But the value that this business provides is that it helps its clients to effectively and efficiently train their employees leading to a better workforce.

Why is communicating value important?

Effectively communicating value is important because when we talk with prospects, investors, potential business partners, etc., we need to not only communicate what we do concisely, in a brief period of time, but we also need our message to be as powerful as possible. And while you might understand your product’s features and benefits and they may excite you, the main thing your potential customers care about is how you can help their businesses to decrease cost and increase revenue. Effectively communicating value will provide this information.

Identifying the Core Value

Some business owners may know the value they offer right off the bat. Others may find themselves stuck somewhere between summarizing features and benefits. When this is the case, below is a process that can be used to try to identify the core value that the business offers.

1. Outline features: Summarize or outline the key features of the products or services that are offered.

2. Outline benefits: Take the features that are outlined and build a list of the benefits that those features produce.

3. Summarize benefits: Summarize the benefits provided into a concise summary of the improvements gained.

4. Convert to a business standpoint: Convert over the summarized benefit to what it means from a business standpoint.

Producing a Value Statement

Once the core value is identified, we can produce a value statement. A value statement is a one to two sentence summary of the value that you provide. By having a value statement, we can then have that have that ready to be delivered whenever we meet with potential clients or business partners. Whether  we someone in person, make a cold call, or start to build any of our marketing deliverables, when we begin to explain what we do, we can go directly to the value statement and hopefully if built correctly, it will clearly explain what we do in a powerful way.

Moving Forward

How effectively do you communicate value for what you offer?  Are you talking more features and benefits or are you talking at a business level?  Share your comments below!

 

• by Michael Halper

4 Mantras to Personal Branding Success

Today’s marketplace is constantly evolving. It’s vibrant and dynamic, irrespective of the state of the economy. It’s part-real, part-virtual. And this environment has been a breeding ground for independent-minded and independent professionals, making it incredibly important to stand out. Personal branding has become an all-important mantra for those people whose business is all about what they can offer as individuals.

In a cluttered environment, how can you create a personal brand that stands out?

Here are 4 simple mantras that could help you fashion your own unique personal brand. But, remember, this is not a blueprint; just some tried and tested steps. The most important aspect about personal branding is the word ‘personal.’ Create your own unique chart to personal branding success.

Mantra 1: Honesty is the best personal branding policy

You can’t fake who you are, online or in person. Who you are is what the personal brand should be about. People relate to honesty and make long lasting connections based on the real you. When you fake a personality, you won’t be able to keep it up forever, and the followers you have accrued will fall by the wayside the minute the façade comes off.

A great example about honest Personal Branding is Zen Habits’ blogger, Leo Babauta.

After 4 years of blogging about personal goals and realizing his dreams, Leo has some 200,000 subscribers and his blog has been ranked the No.1 blog of the year, two times in a row, by TIME magazine.

Whether you want to start a blog, a small business or become a consultant, you can apply Leo’s approach. By behaving and working in ways that you are truly comfortable with, not only are you happier, but you also help people build trust and confidence in you.

Leo’s cult is only growing by the day, and he’ll continue to wield influence, if he continues to live and preach honestly. A growing number of gurus in the self-help space, where personal branding is very important, lose followers, because sooner or later, they’re ‘exposed’ for being something they said they weren’t.

Mantra 2: What’s your middle name?

Think hard. In high school, did kids call you Tom-cool head-Jackson or Sarah-math wiz-Smith? Or something not so flattering? Whatever your strengths and weaknesses are, they are unique. They will set you apart from hundreds of thousands of others, peddling the same goods as you.

Leveraging your Unique Selling Point, is far more than just having a logo or a catchy slogan that talks about your special quality. It’s living your Unique Selling Point.

Heard of Anthony Bourdain? Sure you have. Gordon Ramsay? Sure you have. They are both loud, angry, and aggressive people but also world famous chefs. Their signature qualities aren’t typically seen as positive or good. But the fact is, these very qualities make them unique individuals with something, unique to offer.

Make the most of what is unique about you. Use it to your advantage. Surely, throughout their careers, Bourdain and Ramsay may have been advised to tone down their ‘loudness’. Ramsay, being more aggressive, might have been branded arrogant and abusive, but it is these very qualities, while making his sous-chefs’ lives miserable, makes his personal brand come alive.

A very important lesson in personal branding is to accept who are, and work on those very qualities to build a brand that’s unique and different.

Mantra 3: No money in anonymity

Online presence these days, involves leaving your personal brand behind, wherever you go – whether it’s posting on forums, responding to blog posts, maintaining a blog, tweeting or creating online profiles on various networks.

There is literally no money for those who want to stay behind the scenes these days.

Increasingly, employers ask for twitter accounts and blog addresses to be mentioned on resumes. In fact, these resumes need to be uploaded on a personal website too!

Establishing online presence or presence within professional networks in your area of expertise is a crucial first step in building a person brand. While social media and the internet are still evolving in many ways, privacy concerns frequently emerge. It may be tempting to share everything about yourself, but in the process of building a personal brand, do remember not to reveal personal information like home numbers and address.

Mantra 4: Look up, but don’t imitate

If you take the blogging world as an example, the phenomenal success that some bloggers have achieved, simply blogging about day-to-day things like personal goals, has spawned thousands of replicas. But, the truth is, there are only one or two stars in the sphere.

Chris Guillebeau is a star ‘travel hacker.’ He travels around the world, at a fraction of the normal cost, by manipulating travel miles, reward points and frequent flyer bonuses. Through his newsletter, where he initially shared travel hacking tips, he has attracted millions of followers. He’s got book deals about living a non-conformist life, his career, is literally made.

But he has also spawned hundreds of other bloggers like him who want to travel, write about it and live off those earnings, but only a very small number has succeeded, and only remotely.

Building his personal brand was an arduous journey for Chris. He shares his difficulties in many blog posts, where he talks about writing assignments at top dailies that paid pittance, about how he shared information for free and relied on donations from readers. Personal brand building is a difficult journey and there is no one road to success, you can have mentors who inspire you but imitating their every move will only make you a rip-off.

With that, we come to not just the end of this article, but also the essence of it. In an effort to build a personal brand, acquire millions of followers on twitter or subscribers to your blog posts, or that big, half-a-million dollar project, don’t forget who you are.

• by Preetam Kaushik

Open files more easily in Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office

One of the key features of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is the ability to easily sync Office documents up to Google Docs and to collaborate on them with others. You asked us to simplify the experience of downloading and opening Office documents stored in your Google Docs account, so today we’re doing just that. Now you can open any Office file stored in Google Docs directly from within Microsoft Office.

From the Google Cloud Connect menu, click Open from Google Docs…

This will bring up a dialog listing all the documents that can be opened with the application you are using. For example, if you are working in Microsoft PowerPoint, you will see a list of all the Microsoft PowerPoint files available in Google Docs. You can then select the file you want to download and open.

If you have lots of files stored in Google Docs, use search to find the file you are looking for. After selecting a file to open, the file will be downloaded to your computer and opened automatically.

When you want to open the file again, you’ll be able to open it from the folder you downloaded the file into. Now you can collaborate, share and access revision history on that file in Microsoft Office.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Posted by: Himanshu Vasishth, Software Engineer

Is Chinese Manufacturing Coming Back To The U.S.?

Posted by Mark Sunshine

Is China still competitive?

At first I couldn’t believe my ears: a U.S. manufacturer was telling me that they were planning on fleeing the high costs of Chinese manufacturing for the relatively lower costs of the U.S.

It’s been years since I heard anyone credibly claim that they could save money by moving manufacturing to the U.S., but just last week I met with a manufacturing CEO who was certain 2012 would be the year they outsourced to the U.S.

I was surprised with the textbook microeconomic explanation of why this manufacturer was leaving China for the U.S.

Long and inflexible supply lines are causing the company, which manufactures replacement industrial refrigerator parts, to finance and store large amounts of goods.  High-energy prices are causing trans-Pacific transportation costs to skyrocket.  And, the not so hidden expense and personal sacrifice needed to manage a large staff 8,000 miles away have worn down the CEO.

Management now believes Chinese manufacturing isn’t a financial elixir and is hurting their ability to service customers.  The deal was sealed when Chinese inflation eroded whatever remaining financial benefit remained and civil unrest terrified visiting employees.

Instead of continuing down the Chinese rabbit hole, the CEO is working on a plan to transport his machine tools to a newly purchased manufacturing plant in South Florida.  With a modest capital investment, he believes that 10 U.S. workers will be able to manufacturer as much as 50 Chinese workers.

Even better, by manufacturing in the U.S. the company will improve customer service and the personal wear and tear not of trying to control quality in a manufacturing operation located in the middle of China will simply disappear.

The CEO is highly motivated and very smart.  His company is growing more than 50% per year and is very profitable. The company generates high margins by packaging the delivery and installation of a basic industrial consumable with superior customer service and customized installation.

In the big scheme of things, one company moving their manufacturing to the U.S. doesn’t mean much, but after listening to this CEO, and talking to scores of others, it’s clear that the Chinese advantage is being eroded by high domestic inflation, rising energy prices and an increasingly unstable civil environment.  Given the choice of having to commute to China or stay in the U.S., the U.S. wins every time.

Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar

Posted by Irene Chung, Software Engineer

Google Calendar has become indispensable for organizing my own time and sharing my schedule with friends and coworkers. But what about letting others know about my preferred availability? Likewise, when I look at my hairdresser's online calendar, I wonder why I can't just book the open slot instead of remembering to call during regular business hours. Now, with appointment slots in Google Calendar, any individual or business can manage appointment availability online 24/7.

Creating appointment slots

To get started, set up blocks of time you’d like to offer as appointment slots. Simply click anywhere on your calendar and then on "Appointment slots.” From there, create a single block of time or automatically split a larger block of time into smaller appointment slots.

Every Google Calendar has its own personal appointments sign up page; you can embed it on your website or give the URL directly to friends and clients. You can find the URL for your appointment page at the top of the set-up page, which you can access via the Edit details link.

Signing up for an appointment slot

When someone visits your sign up page, their calendar is overlaid for convenience and they can sign up directly for any available appointment slot. When they sign up, Google Calendar conveniently creates a new shared event on both of your calendars.

At Google, many people are already using appointment slots to manage their office hours or even schedule appointments with on-site fitness instructors. We’re starting to roll it out widely today, and appointment slots should be available for everyone within the next few days. I'm pretty excited to tell my hairdresser about it, and I can't wait to see all of you start to use it too