On Internet Business

Networking – what it give the entrepreneur

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Every business leader knows they need to network, even if they don’t do it. But what are the personal benefits to an entrepreneur from networking at events and gatherings, and why should he or she focus on this aspect of business life.

Reinvigoration

Being a self-starter is great, but sometimes an injection of outside influence can really boost a business, and entrepreneurs get tired and develop tunnel vision, just like anybody else. You don’t always need to hire a guru or bring in a consultant to reinvigorate your business – you can just soak up the atmosphere, ideas and experience of other entrepreneurs and take all their energy, enthusiasm and top tips back to your team.

Simplification

At conferences and seminars you get business thinking distilled down to nuggets. Not all nuggets fit all businesses, but you can usually find one or two simple ideas that would work for your business and that have somehow passed you by until now. Because the ideas are presented simply and swiftly, they lock into receptive business brains easily.

Identification

When somebody else tells you that your customer service is slipping you might get defensive, but when you hear somebody else talking about how their customer service slipped, and what they did to put it back, you tend to get identification. Learning about other businesses and their learning curves can highlight areas where your own business is under-performing without seeming as threatening as being ‘told’ you have a problem.

Rebellion

Entrepreneurs nearly always got into business because they thought they could do better than the status quo but it’s easy to lose sight of that rebellious streak – meeting others like you can remind you that you’re a rebel, not a suit, and that your business is a crusade, not a day job.

Networking machine by Richard-G

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Making your business newsworthy

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Social Media

Getting good coverage for your business’s successes can be tough unless you have some X Factor feature to catch the media’s eye, but businesses that don’t exploit their PR potential are likely to be missing out on opportunities and brand recognition tools.

Know your media

There are thousands of ways to reach the media, but establishing connections that lead to coverage takes time. Somebody in your organisation has to sit down and work out what the target audience reads, listens to or retweets and then read, listen to or retweet those media outlets until they understand what the themes (or memes) are that work best.  Some radio shows, for example, regularly feature the same local businesses if those businesses have some weird, whacky or other ‘line’ that works for the show. Others constantly seek opinions from ‘green’ businesses on major news stories such as interest rate or legislation changes. Certain newspapers and TV journalists like to have established family businesses to call on for quotes, while others are keen to get the views of entrepreneurs and multi-cultural organisations.

Spin your story

If a company has a new product or service, it might look, at first sight, to have a very limited publicity pull, but that’s when you need to find the right hook. Most journalists will respond to stories that hook into:

•    Public concerns (cuts in government services, economic bad news, long term bad weather forecasts etc) to which your product or service could provide a positive spin.

•    International news (look for new UN or EU legislation and pin your stories to that – it may take a while to get a credible reputation but there are many more businesses competing on the UK stage than linking their development to international stories, so over time your organisation is more likely to become a quotable source on the ‘international business stage’ even if you’re tiny)

Set up a system

Pick national days that are relevant to your organisation and others which are easy to spin off such as National Take Your Daughter To Work day and make sure you have a good PR angle set up well in advance. You can use the same days year after year so that you have a regular PR schedule running. Of course it needs to be a serious story, not a cynical approach to obtaining PR because journalists can see through these and make an organisation regret it ever tried to ‘play’ the media.

Be the squeaky wheel

This is a higher risk strategy but worth it for businesses that feel they have an edgy profile (think Branson rather than Dyson). Just take a big story and offer an alternative viewpoint. If you can make it controversial, and you are sure you can ride that tiger, go for it!

Don’t stop

PR is a process, not a story. Successful businesses expect to get one hit in eight, which means putting out eight press releases to get one into the hands of a journalist who will run with it. It can take years to build a public reputation (but only minutes to lose one) and creating systems like Google alerts allows you to keep up a momentum that will bring PR credibility and coverage in the long term.

Interview image courtesy of Phil_Parker

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How negativity can lead to business success

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Social Media

There used to be a deeply offensive joke that did the rounds in working men’s clubs accompanying a cartoon of a man in a smart suit with a speech balloon saying,  ‘The doctor says I’m impotent, so I’m going to dress impo’tent’. The addition of the missing letter gives the joke some sense: impotent or important?

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to new businesses is the way that issues come up and hit the executive team in the face. If there’s no team, just a solo entrepreneur, it’s his or her face that gets slapped with each new ‘important’ demand. A customer complaint needs handling with tact. A new contact has to be massaged into becoming a client or supplier. A competitor moves into the company’s space, challenging market share (or withdraws from a joint arena, offering the opportunity for business expansion) and a decision has to be made. Something trending on Twitter or Facebook seems likely to bring attention to the company, but somebody has to oversee the engagement process …

Some of these are important, some make you impotent. Focusing on the wrong ones is like stepping into a hamster wheel: the faster you move the faster you have to move, but you’re getting nowhere.

Negate the problem

Negativity means refusing to put time and energy into non-productive areas. Each business is different, and every set of priorities will vary, depending on the maturity of the business and the management style and ethos of the decision-makers, but decisions still need to be made. A maturing business be ready to say ‘No, our Founder or CEO isn’t going to deal with customer complaints, but we are going to invest in a customer service workshop to ensure all managers are ready to resolve complaints effectively’ while a new business might decide the boss’s time is best spent on face-to-face customer relations, so his or her energy will need to be removed entirely from social media. The key thing is that the decisions are made because one of the characteristics of a business that outgrows its success is ‘Founder Failure’ – where the entrepreneur’s inability to be equally focused on every aspect of the organisation leads to decline in the areas where he or she is trying, and failing, to maintain personal input.

It’s difficult for determined, committed, smart people to accept that some things are just distractions from their primary role. It’s tough to give up the personal touch, but business evolution requires certain kinds of negativity. Hiring a speech-writer allows a CEO to focus on business-building: a few personal touches added to a professionally written script are usually all that’s needed. Professional ‘ghosts’ manage social media for small companies, engaging with the public and transferring genuine complaints or concerns to the management team – it saves hours of trawling through tweets and Facebook comments and still gives the organisation a personal face.

Let go of the past

How often do you really need to be up to date with finance? Daily, weekly, monthly? Scheduling a one-to-one meeting with your finance manager (or just time to focus on your accounts for the really small business) is better than trying to stay on top of the money every minute of the business day. If you can’t relinquish that level of control you are building a bottleneck into business growth.

Did you start out as a techie with people skills and are you still trying to meddle with the techie side of business? If you’re the boss, it’s your job to delegate while remaining in touch with developments: trying to ‘do’ rather than delegate is one of the main reasons that new businesses don’t grow. Use your background to hire the best, not to be the best, and keep your energy for what the best techs can’t always do: building relationships, spotting opportunities and planning strategies.

Business to do wall courtesy of juhansonin

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Big Venture start-up funding

Posted by Michael under awards, Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources

The Big Venture Challenge will reward 25 UK-based social entrepreneurs with up to £175,000 business funding.

The awards derive from the Big Lottery Fund and the Millennium Awards Trust, and will be the result of a nationwide ‘Dragons’ Den’ type contest. The chosen 25 will receive a £25,000 grant and then can obtain up to £150,000 of funding as they obtain matched funding in the form of loans or equity from other investors. They will also be given business support and mentoring to enable them to achieve their goals.

The idea behind the Big Venture Challenge is to help social entrepreneurs scale their enterprises up swiftly so that they can improve their social impact in communities where the public sector can or will no longer provide.

There’s going to be a panel of judges including investors, successful entrepreneurs and business leaders. Those taking part include Sinclair Beecham, co-founder of Pret A Manger, and former Dragon and serial entrepreneur Doug Richard. Applications are open now until 30th June and more details can be found here.

Dragon image courtesy of L2F1

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Developing and implementing business strategy

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Following on from the last post, a business needs to have a strategy upon which management styles and decision processes are based, or there’s not a lot of point having a business. Amazingly though, a certain percentage of people begin their business careers with a rough idea what they want to achieve and then adjust their behaviour, investment and decisions as they go along. They may well have written a business plan but the day to day process of ‘running’ a business takes over and they lose sight of the need to work to it, or adjust it according to outside factors.

But strategy is both simple and vital. One of the easiest ways to think about strategy is to work out what you can do differently to your competitors and then work back from that to what you need to do to achieve that difference. This is simply a route to defining the ways you can achieve competitive advantage.

Defining business strategy

Competitive advantage isn’t something the average entrepreneur can define alone – it requires a deep understanding of what current and potential customers want and will pay for.

It also necessitates a broad overview of the market to allow your company to decide where to begin: there may be markets you need to develop, customers you need to win over from rivals, products you need to refine and others you need to abandon – all these are strategic decisions that can only be made when both breadth and depth inform the choices that are made.

Using simple tools like SWOT analysis or hiring a facilitator to help your executive team brainstorm can add the next level of value to strategy by bringing some blue sky thinking to the process, but it’s important not to get into scenario building until you have facts to put under your future projections or it’s easy to end up with unimplementable strategies.

Implementing business strategy

There’s not a lot of point having a strategy unless it informs daily business decisions at all levels of the company. Many people use the SMART toolkit to ensure that strategic directions can be executed effectively and having proper adjustment mechanisms such as customer feedback, internal analysis and training and development structures that support the strategic direction of the business.  Clarity about how these internal systems work is important but even more so is the ability to regularly assess progress towards the strategic aim to adjust the strategy if outside forces impact it.

Battleship strategy image courtesy of john-morgan

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Management style and decision-making for business success

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

The business world is changing fast, and management styles have to keep up or they, and the businesses they are being used in, die.

One of the biggest failure areas  in business is that people think their management style and their decision-making process are the same thing, but they’re not. It’s typical of paternalistic managers (those who treat their staff like a family of which they are the stern but loving parent) that they are also indecisive. Why? Because the paternalistic personality also tends to worry about ‘favouring’ one child over another, which in business equates to giving too much credence and resources to one department or development at the cost of another. This can lead to paralysis in decision-making or procrastination until more evidence is available and that’s nothing like the usually expected decision model of strong unswayable leadership from a benevolent but often old-fashioned decision-maker.

Another management style that often has a different decision-making model is laissez-faire, which is the hands-off approach used in many creative industries – but it’s increasingly common for laissez-faire to go along with autocratic decision-making. Sir Alan Sugar’s style in The Apprentice, is a textbook example: tasks are allocated and then teams are left to get on with it, but his decision-making about the outcomes of those tasks is totally dictatorial with no right of appeal and very little cognizance of the input of others.

Defining styles in a crisis

There are loads of books, consultants and other strategies you can use to define your management style and your decision-making process but the definition isn’t useful unless you have some reason to change or hone your management skills. When a company as a whole is starting to slip, it’s common to focus outwards: more sales, better returns, quicker turnarounds, not inwards on management style, but this can lead to the disengagement of staff who become less interested in the company’s success and more interested in preserving what they have (seniority, resources) for as long as possible.

So what’s the answer?

Looking at participation is crucial. You don’t have to change a paternal or autocratic decision-making process (if it works) as long as the management style keeps employees engaged (which means involved, not happy – staff in paternalistic organisations are often happy right up to the moment they’re made redundant!) but you do have to ensure that the decisions reflect management priorities and that both are aligned to wider targets such as viability, increasing market share and getting and retaining the best team members.

Change will only come when two things happen – there’s a recognition at all levels of the need to move to more effective decision-making and when there’s an agreement on both short and long term changes. Short term changes are necessary to show employees that top management is ready to move forward but long term changes are vital to drive business success and alter culture. Short termism can be purely cosmetic but for managers who are autocratic is often much more difficult to accept as it requires surface changes to be evident before their objective self-awareness has adjusted to the need to do something differently.

What helps change management style and decision-making?

Clarity about the past, alignment with the present need and focus on the necessary changes, step by step are the keys to creating a new culture in which changes in the individual and alterations to group structure can both happen.

Team-building whiteboard courtesy of Robert Higgins

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UK SMEs benefit from natural disasters

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

In a surprising development, small and medium-sized manufacturing companies in the UK had a growth spurt in the last quarter: increasing faster than at any time in the past 16 years.

The business growth came from both domestic and export orders, and was fuelled in part by the paring back of the value of the pound which led to competitive bids for many contracts and robust growth in many markets.

Another cause of the growth surge was the Japanese earthquake and tsunami which interrupted many supply lines and caused many businesses to rethink the length of their supply chains, bringing welcome trade from other European countries back to the UK, which has struggled to compete with the efficient just-in-time ethos of many Asian producers.

However there are warnings that the surge may just be a bubble as the slowdown in consumer spending reported in April acts as a brake on manufacturing growth and inflationary factors, especially the pressure of rising oil prices, cut into profit margins by increasing the cost of productivity in meeting orders.  If the momentum in manufacturing is lost, the domino effect will hit retail sectors and combine with the planned public sector job losses to cause a slump.

Interestingly, some UK online retailers appear to have experienced a growth surge in the days since the Playstation hacking, which may be related to perceived security levels of UK based secure payment systems.

Playstation courtesy of blindfutur3

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