Small Business Development Blog

The Best Business Websites - Educational Resources Articles Tools

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Here are a few of the best business websites available on the net. They provide a huge amount of quality information and resources (Blog Articles, eBooks, Webinars, Reports, Guides, Videos, Templates, Tools) on a range of business areas:

The Best Marketing Websites

HubSpot - Inbound Internet Marketing

Marketing Experiments - Digital Marketing Optimization for ROI

Social Media Examiner - Social Media Marketing

Chris Brogan - Social Marketing Engagement / The Business of Blogging

eMarketer - Digital Marketing & Media Intelligence

Marketing Sherpa - Marketing Research

The Best Sales Websites

Raintoday - Selling Professional Services

Tom Hopkins - Sales Training [Products]

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Business Strategy Websites

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Business Systemisation Websites

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Business Financial Mastery Websites

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Team Development Websites

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Personal Effectiveness Websites

Steven Covey - Personal Effectiveness [Books/CDs]

Tony Robbins - Personal Management / Change [Books/CDs]

Tim Ferriss - Personal Effectiveness / Lifestyle Design

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

I might not have found the best in all these areas yet however, I have a few ideas and I welcome your ideas and comments. We'll also add further websites overtime to this list.

Other SME/SMB related and interesting fields...

Small Business Websites

mimosaPLANET - Small Business Development & Advice (yes, I think we're pretty special, so we get to be on this list too)

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Technology Websites

TechCrunch - Reviewing new Internet products and companies

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Startup Websites

Onstartups - Business Startup & Entrepreneurship

Business Innovation Websites

Ideas/Comments/Suggestions Welcome?

Increase Profitability: A Process for Small Business

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Overview: Learn a simple 5 step process designed for small businesses to increase profitability

How to Increase Profitability should be right at the top of your Must Do list. Ask yourself this question: What strategies and tactics do I specifically have in place to Increase my Net Profit? Ummmmm… Wrong answer! You, as any smart small business owner, should be reviewing your ‘Statement of Financial Performance’ (Profit & Loss Report, to you oldies) on a monthly basis, correct? If you are doing this then: Do you do the most important thing following that review?  …. TAKE ACTION TO IMPROVE!

Review your financials monthly, identify areas that need to improve, select your strategies and tactics, and then implement. Sounds like a dead easy process, right? Well, my experience from speaking with hundreds of small & medium business owners it is much harder in practice. Why? Normally because many people just don’t have the review scheduled as a MUST DO in their diary; that is scheduled time each and every month.

In this series of articles we’ll cover each step;

Article 1 – An Overview of the Process to increase small business profitability (this article)
Article 2 - How to Read, Understand and Review business financial statements for small business owners
Article 3 - How to Identify areas to improve profitability
Article 4 - Increasing Profitability: List of Strategies and Tactics for Small Business
Article 5 - How to Select strategies and tactics to increase profit
Article 6 - How to Implement profitability strategies and tactics

Increasing Profitability Process for Small Business

Step 1 - How to Read, Understand and Review business financial statements for small business owners

Financial statements don’t need to be rocket science. Business owners and MDs must have competence in reading and understanding them if they wish to increase profitability. It’s not your accountants fault if you don’t understand what you get once a year from them fully. It’s your fault! You should be reviewing YOUR financials each and every month. I say to my clients, “at a minimum we need the in-house financial statements ready for a monthly review by the 2^nd Tue of the month”. As time progresses you would ideally be able to have the financials on the MDs desk by 9am on the 1^st of each month. As a Director, by reviewing your financials thoroughly every month it will force you to increase your knowledge and understanding. Getting smarter makes decisions easier!

Step 2 - How to Identify areas to improve profitability

The simplest way to identify areas that could improve is by having a clear target for; i) each individual line item (a forecast and/or budget), ii) financial ratio, and iii) KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Then you can see very clearly the ‘difference from your target to your actual results’. You can view this as a percentage or as a real figure. Where a gap occurs is your cue to start asking questions…. Think like a three year ago…. “why?”.

Step 3 - Increasing Profitability: Strategies and Tactics for Small Business

With a clear picture of where your gaps are, you need a complete list of your strategies and tactics that you can use to improve the situation. A tool box if you like.

Step 4 - How to Select strategies and tactics to increase profit

One tactic does not fit all gaps. You must understand how to select the right tactic for the right issue. A little knowledge here will go a long way. The more you know about profitability, what affects the Gross and Net Profit of your business, the more likely you’ll select the best tactic…. And get the desired result, an increase in profitability.

Step 5 - How to Implement profitability strategies and tactics

All the analysis and planning in the world is worthless unless you can execute on your planned strategies, tactics, and tasks. The key to effective implementation is breaking each individual tactic down further into individual tasks, and then allotting a person with a deadline for each task. Think of it as Project Management. Whether you have 1 or 100 projects on the go at once, will depend on you personally and your company's resources… but the point is… they must be managed!

Action Points

1. Confirm you have quality timely monthly financial reports (Statement of Performance & Position at a minimum).
2. SCHEDULE the monthly review (even if you are the sole Director, take your business seriously, this is your life… so schedule the monthly review into your diary and NOTHING can break it). Advise people in your team you need the reports by this date every month.

Go for it!

Prospect Target List: Size Does Matter

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When building your suspect list, prospect targeting is everything. Go for quality over quantity, in this case smaller is better. Consider the following example:

Bob owns a PR firm (or a Legal firm, Accounting firm, or whatever B2B services company). He wishes to grow the firm and has highlighted he would like to increase revenue by about 400,000 pa, and he could do that with 12 new clients at £36,000 or $36,000 pa (are there any other currencies? … I await your hate mail). Looking at Bob’s current close rate of appointments to clients of 1 in 10 and the estimates from past direct marketing initiatives we could assume the following reverse calculations;

At first look we might think, ok it can’t possibly cost us 432,000 to acquire these new clients and we haven’t even considered the lifetime value of the clients to the firm. But we need to dig and uncover the true cost…

The obvious:

Marketing Expenses to the 12,000 list of suspects… our huge beloved list of potential prospects. It is easy to determine the cost of Direct Mail or Flyers or Telemarketing or a combination of all these things delivered to any list size, we just need to ask any number of service providers for a quote.

The not so obvious:

The massive point that is often missed is the person hours required to implement each escalation in the sales pipeline. Consider 120 opportunities to deal with…

This could mean for each 1 opportunity a person in the firm will need to do….

• 30mins of discovery phone calls
• 30mins of evaluation meeting preparation
• 30mins of travel to evaluation meeting
• 60mins of evaluation meeting
• 30mins of travel to back to office
• 60mins of proposal preparation
• 30mins of travel to proposal review meeting
• 60mins of proposal review meeting
• 30mins of travel to back to office

This equals = 6 hours, now if we assume you need to complete 120 within 10.5 months (12months – 4 weeks holiday leave + 2 weeks statutory holiday + 0 days sick leave) = approx 11.5 opportunities per month x 6 hours each = 69 hours. That is about 40% of the time in sales, or 2 full days a week selling. Now the firm needs to ask…

1. Who is going to do this? The MD or a sales person? Is this even possible?
2. What is the direct cost of this in salary package?

What about the 1,200 leads that were generated how do we filter this out to find the 120 qualified opportunities? Do we use rules and technology to decide for us or do we use an account manager to do this qualification over the phone? 1,200 at 15mins a call = 300 hours / 10.5 = 28 hrs a mth, almost a day a week when that person is at work? What does this cost?

The Point:

Better prospect targeting through detailed prospect profiling will yield much higher conversion rates. With better conversion rates you need a much smaller prospect list. A smaller prospect list not only gives you immense focus (because you will pretty much actually know who your clients are going to be because the list is so small), but it also massively reduces costs. Both direct marketing costs and internal staffing resource requirements. Consider Bob’s example in two different forms….

Scenario C: What if we, through a much deeper profiling process, uncovered the real key clients that Bob wanted were not the 36,000 pa clients (that was just an average of his top clients, a number he had used for years), the real perfect clients were 48,000 pa.

Conversion Rate Improvement

'But haven’t you just changed the conversion rate to fix the numbers'. Yes, well spotted. But I there is a reason.

Better targeting means rather that have messages and lead generation offers that are very generic and can only be communicated once due to the expense of such a large suspect list, you now have a far smaller list where you can communicate a message and an offer which is less generic and more relevant to that person… oh and you get to increase the frequency with which you communicate… it is better to send 10 relevant letters to 1000 people over the course of a year, than 1 generic message to 10,000 once.

You could communicate 5 times as much, for half the price, to people actually interested in your messages and offers. I mean, hello!!!

I’ve also assumed you will work out what it means to create valuable relevant messages and lead generation offers for the specific very tight profile. Make it relevant, high value, interesting and frequent and people will start putting their hand up, rather then you trying to raise their hand for them when they don’t want it.

Action Points

• Print this page.
• Get out the excel spreadsheet or piece of paper and calculate a couple of scenarios, see the massive difference conversion rate makes, set your ideal scenario.
• Profile the different personas of ideal clients for you and your company. Get super detailed, not just the normal; size, industry, title, location….. go far far beyond that, this is a topic for another article - prospect profiling.
  
  

Go for it!

How to Create a Winning Sales Proposal

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You won’t find a magic template that will make or break your sales success here, you see creating a winning sales proposal is not about the sales proposal itself, it’s more about the entire sale process and conversations that you’ve had along the way…. The sales proposal is nothing more than a summary of what you have talked about. Now, having said that… if you have a poor presentation of that summary information (i.e. you don’t reconfirm what you talked about in visual form), then you will significantly reduce your chances of success and your chances of closing the deal.

So, what should you have talked about during the sales process and therefore what should be in a winning sales proposal?

Winning Sales Proposal Checklist

• Our Understanding of...
  • Your Situation
  • Your Needs
  • Your Objectives
  • The Value (by comparing the Current Situation vs the Future Situation)
• Our Solution
  • The Approach
  • The Outcomes
  • The Specific Deliverables
  • The Timeframe
• The Tangible Impact of the Solution to You
• The Investment
• Acceptance
• Personal Bio
• Why work with US

If you think… gee James this is a lot of information, well yes I guess it is… but each piece is a vital part in the sales process and unless you have uncovered and talked about it with the prospect you can’t articulate a strong compelling proposal that truly helps the prospective client ... and gets you a "yes".

This checklist is fairly generic, and possibly skewed toward B2B service companies however, any business that requires a sales proposal (for whatever product, service or solution) would benefit from this approach as anything proposed is always fulfilling a need and taking a current state to a future state with the aid of some product or service that has the cost compared against the value it brings. Simple! But many proposals are simply 'we'll do this for that amount', no wonder the prospect is not jumping to buy.

Action Points

You are likely in one of 3 states;

1. you are looking at the checklist and don’t know what each bullet point means, if this is you then you need to read or reread some quality sales books, or
2. you’ve read the sales books and done the sales training courses in the past but don’t have all the above information at the time you go to prepare a sales proposal… if this is you, then you need to revisit what you’ve been taught because you’re not executing it in your sales process and conversations with the prospect, ask the right questions and you’ll get all the info you need, or
3. you have the information from your sales conversations but you just don’t summarise it all in the proposal, if this is you… easy… the above list is your new table of contents!

Go for it!

Building a Customer Base for a Restaurant

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How to attract, keep and grow a customer base for a  restaurant and any other business …

Building a customer base, and with it revenue and profits, for any business not just a restaurant requires selecting and implementing marketing tactics. Follow this simple process and you’ll be ahead of the pack…

Step 1 – LEARN:

Once you have read through the below process if you do not understand any terms, you may need to increase your knowledge, fill in those gaps by getting smarter and clearer. Read more, make a plan, take action. 

Step 2 – DISCOVER:

Figure out detailed answers to the below questions, get as specific as you can, write it down:

1. your location (city, retail high st, office park, mall, suburbs)
2. your product/service offering (sandwich shop or Italian restaurant or both and/or ?)
3. market positioning (budget, midrange, premium, or niche),
4. your target customer profiles (e.g. Bob the office worker for a quick sandwich at lunch, Jane the mid level manager to entertain clients at lunch, The Smith family of 5 for Friday night out dinning, etc), and
5. what makes you unique or different.. (i.e why would someone pick you?).

Here’s a tip: if you don’t like your answers, if they seem a little vague or boring or disjointed, then you likely need to improve what it is your business does and how you present yourself. It should all come together in a nice positioning statement.

Step 3 – PLAN:

Build a plan by selecting the appropriate marketing strategy & tactics. To do this you can review a number of different small business marketing tactics listed in the marketing tag of this blog, you’ll get shed loads of ideas. 5 quick points we would recommend would be: 

1. Online Domination: Use Inbound Marketing Tactics. If someone even thinks about searching for ‘Italian restaurant [your local suburb / area / Las Vegas]’ online you want your business to be the top choice. Do a test search as your potential customers online, what pops up, I bet a mix of direct restaurants & business directories & restaurant directories in organic search, … so you need to implement; PPC, SEO, getting listed at the top of Google Local Business (the Map the pops up now for any [profession + city or suburb] search), business directory listing (normally 2 dominant directories which could be nationwide, statewide or only citywide), restaurant directory listings (in most cities there are between 2 & 4 main players).
2. THE KEY TO ONLINE DOMINATION IS CUSTOMER REVIEWS: Just about all directory websites (even the google local listing) have the ability to review and rate your restaurant. Get this right and it will be self fulfilling prophecy. Get it wrong and you are in trouble. Presented with a choice of 10 businesses, if one had 40 reviews averaging 94%, another has 4 reviews at 99%, another 16 reviews at 84%... most people will pick the 40 at 94%. If you are not that business, damn! Tell the whole team, we now live in a world where every customer experience needs to be it’s very best… the more excellent reviews we get the more customers we get, the more successful the business it, the better environment it is for everyone working in / for a successful business! Ask customers to please review you online.
3. Customer Experience Improvement: Give people more of what they want! You can also get valuable information by asking people to fill in a quick customer survey when they come in or dine in. “What 3 things would you like to see improved?” etc…
4. Local Area Promotion: (drop flyers in every office within walking distance, with an opening offer that has high perceived value (cafes can do this by offering a free muffins with every 2 coffees, or something else… give perceived value …not hard value that muffin may cost you £0.15 or $0.25 to make but have a retail value of £1.5 or $2.5!)
5. PR: Whatever you can do to help your small business generate PR is so important. Free advertising is not to be ignored. Tell the world you have a cool new place. (PS: it had better be cool or nobody will care and no publisher will give you the time of day. What is ‘the story’ behind you or your business or your customers?)
6. Customer Details Capture: Use one or all of the following; 1) online booking form, 2) phone in booking form, 3) walk in form, 4) business card bowl for monthly draw, 5) VIP loyalty cards, etc. GET THEIR DETAILS. Required details; first name & eMail address.
7. Permission Marketing: Now that you have your customer details you need to regularly communicate via eMail once per month or so (also by mail if your businesses price point can handle that) to your database. Special offers, closed VIP nights, etc… make them feel special. What you are after is an increase in visits and loyalty.

Step 4 – CREATE:

This is where you or someone in your team or an outsourced professional ‘create’ any required components of the plan… e.g. (flyer, survey form, loyalty card, eMail template, greeting script, etc…)

Step 5 – IMPLEMENT:

Execution and implementation is EVERYTHING. The best plan in the world, designed from the best knowledge in the world, is worthless unless it is implemented. You need to take massive amounts of action. Do whatever it takes to get things done! If they are in your plan, and it is truly important… then nothing else matters more than executing the tasks required to make it happen.

Step 6 – RECORD & REPORT:

Business ownership, and effective management, requires the ability to manage data... to manage measurements. First you need to know what you need to measure and then set target or goal KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Now you need to setup a way to Record your actual numbers and a way regularly Report on those actual numbers against your target numbers. Lastly if you don't like the results, what specific actions will you take to get better results for next weeks or months report!

Action Points

Building a loyal customer base is all about hitting a sweet spot with your target customers. If you hit that spot they will reward you with repeat business, referrals, and great reviews. So, focus on: 1) the customer and there experience, 2) but to build your business fast you also need to tell people about it… use promotion, and 3) you need to be easily found by those actively looking for what you offer… use inbound marketing.

Follow the process.

Go for it!

How NOT to Use Scripts for Customer Services

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Using scripts can equally detract from the customers experience as it can enhance it …

Yesterday I got an excellent smack in the face business lesson in customer service. I walked into the bank, a nearly obsolete experience these days, nonetheless something I had to do. I must say the interior of this particular bank in Mayfair London was well above average, so the environment was adding to a better experience immediately when I walked in. However, someone approached me and what I was greeted with made me cringe;

“Good afternoon, welcome to ABCD deluxe, how can I help you today?”

Now, if you read this greeting script on paper to yourself at first it seems perfectly normal and reasonable opening greeting, right? But clearly the mastermind behind the corporate script had not used this time and time again on a daily basis in branch. You see, change ‘welcome to’ for ‘thanks for calling’ and this is perfect for inbound phone calls… that is because on the phone you are not staring someone in the eyes, you can simply deliver the line in one quick string of words. In person, we don’t deliver a line like this in one quick string of words, we pause and talk a little slower. So, read the line again, this time imagine someone is in front of you.

The problem with this line is it is simply just a little too long. It has 3 parts to it, where it would be better with 2. As the customer I found myself wanting to join the conversation, but she was still talking and delivering this clearly scripted line. Now, perhaps I am just a little more acutely aware of… well… anything business like, perhaps this was just me…. No no no. You see, once I advised how she could help I was politely and professionally shown to a nice leather armchair to wait briefly, I was offered a water, tea or coffee and found ample up to date business and lifestyle reading material in front of me. Ok, very good. But in my wait I overheard that line delivered twice more as the next two customers walked in, and on both occasions each customer tripped over words as they too found themselves trying to join the conversation and say what they wanted.

Each time I heard that line I felt a little less special, and thought to myself anyone sitting in this chair would hear that and think the same thing. I mean, HELLO… we are not stupid… we are humans and we look for two way natural communication.

How the script could improve my customer experience

Any of the following would of delivered a better experience;

“Good afternoon, how can I help you today?”

“Good afternoon, how can I help you?”

“Welcome to ABCD deluxe, how can I help you today?”

“Welcome to ABCD deluxe, how can I help you?”

Conclusion

Scripts can help businesses deliver a consistent customer experience, but without letting the whole team use their brains, and provide feedback about what works and what doesn’t, you can risk detracting from that experience and not enhancing it. I’m a massive fan of business automation and systemisation, in small business this is the only way to scale beyond the business owner doing everything, but come on … remember to keep your teams brains turned ON, don’t turn them into stupid mindless robots!

Action Points

Scripts can help businesses! Empower your team to at least provide feedback to enhance the scripts you have, if not create them in the first place.

Go for it!

Business Strategy – Cause A Revolution With Your Business Model–Business Model Ladder-Level 6

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What is the Revolutionized Business Model? How is this significant to Small & Medium Businesses?

Finally, we reach Level 6 on the Business Model Ladder, Revolution (see the Overview of the Small Business Model for links to all articles). Revolution is a pretty strong word for small business. For most small or medium businesses the idea of causing a revolution with their product, service, or business is but a distant dream. If you’re in the start-up phase, you’ll likely be wide eyed full of ideas of changing the world. Great. Get out there, I encourage that. However, only a very, very small percentage of businesses will ever be REVOLUTIONARY.

Most SMEs (SMBs) will simply be going about their daily lives providing an average product or service to an average person or company in an average way. Most won’t be remarkable let alone revolutionary. So….. Why on earth should business owners care about causing a revolution with their business model? I‘m talking about changing the market place, and the world, with a new way of doing things; why should any of us care?

2 Reasons Why SMEs Should Care About the Revolutionised Business Model

1. If no one cared then we would never advance technologies, processes, thought and with it increase quality of life for all. The more people that do care, and do challenge the status quo, the bigger and more frequent the advances. So, we should encourage and foster a society that develops these radical people who want to change the world and setup the system to reward their huge, game-changing efforts. We can ALL at least encourage and foster, if not do ourselves.
2. Lucky history shows us that there are always some who are willing and able to change the world. If you live your life without stopping for a second to take a look around you, you might miss what the heck is going on. Let’s say another business starts up that now offers a replacement service or product to what you do. However, they do it faster, better and cheaper. In the past, many would argue that in business it is impossible to do all 3 at once; faster, better and cheaper. But this is the point, revolutions are when the game changes… and at this point your whole business model is at risk. If you leave it this late, you have three choices:
   1. arrogantly ignore it at your future risk. Or
   2. at some point play follow the leader and change to this new business model to become a competitor or add value in the supply chain somehow. For most this will happen only when the early or late majority of people now use this product or service or way of doing things. So in fact your business is once again in the death battle ground of the average business providing average people with average products. Or
   3. differentiate your business and find a profitable niche in either the old business model or in the new business model.

What is a Revolutionised Business Model?

The best way to talk about this is with an example industry or company. At the risk of stating the obvious example that nearly everyone would of either heard about or can closely relate to….let us use the Music Industry!

Example

Check out this timeline of the history of music media players.

If your business produced gramophones, unless you woke up, you are likely to have been put out of business by a business that produced record players. Then record players got displaced by tape players, which got replaced by CDs, and obviously we have seen the iPod & MP4 displace CDs. We are now seeing the mobile phone take over and displace the need for separate portable media players.

Just think of all the thousands of businesses in the supply chain of music and CDs. Unless they stopped complaining about how the industry is changing and that it is all someone else’s fault, and adapted their business model to the new world they would be gone now!

The point is we are all affected by businesses improving their business model slightly (be that a very small amount). We are all affected by innovation, but mostly we are all eventually, massively impacted by business models that cause a revolution and change in the market place. Are you going to: i) ignore that, ii) adapt quickly to it, iii) be one of the revolutionaries?

How to Create a Revolution?

When I do it myself, I’ll consider a practical step by step process until then all I can offer is…. 

If you are reading this you will be in the very few that do care and do want to create something amazing that changes the landscape and by being in this limited group you’ll go out of your way to figure this out for yourself.

Find that advice a bit woolly? Fair enough, I bet you want more substance, right? Well, 4 books I have read which I found very useful in this area of business, all for slightly different reasons, are:  

• iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey S. Young & William L. Simon 
• The Google Story by David A. Vise, and Mark Malseed 
• Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age by Tom Peters 
• The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

If you’re passionate about your business and doing something amazing, I highly recommend reading these 4 books. You might also find some of my articles on business systems useful, in particular Initiate a Business Revolution.

Action Points

Buy the books, get reading, then do something crazy.

Go for it!

Business Strategy– Innovation and Your Business Model–Business Model Ladder-Level 5

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Why is Innovation important? How is it different from Improvement? And what practical steps can you take to Innovate your business model?

Level 5 of 6 on the Business Model Ladder is Innovation; more specifically an innovative culture and/or process that goes beyond the constant never ending improvement of level 4 on the ladder. The different levels once again are:

• Overview of the small business model
• Level 1 – the undefined business model
• Level 2 – the defined business model
• Level 3 – the improved business model
• Level 4 – the constantly improved business model
• Level 5 – the innovation centered business model
• Level 6 – the revolutionised business model

Why is Innovation Important?

Ok so.... 95% of small business owners are not interested in level 5 and 6, and that is fine, but it still pays to consider and comprehend. You see, even if you find yourself in that 95%, eventually a level 5 or 6 business will force you to take notice, as they will leap frog you and your way of doing things…. and make you and your business model obsolete. They could put you out of business altogether. Think about that for a second? …..

How Does Innovation Affect Your Business Strategy & Business Model?

Well, just in case the last point of the previous paragraph didn’t smack you in the face…. Innovation affects everything! Your overall business strategy and the business model you have mapped out.

How Does Innovation Differ From Improvement?

Business author Seth Godin in his book Purple Cow would say something similar to; to succeed…do something truly ‘Remarkable’.  Wow, remarkable, big word… much bigger than improved. I’m not going to put some text book definition on this because the line is always grey and not black and white, but if pressed for our purposes I’d default to something like…

Improvement – Incremental enhancement of an existing process or product.
Innovation – A vast change in the process of doing something for the better or inventing something new and useful.
Revolutionary – Radically changing the way of things. Affecting the whole market or creating a new market making another obsolete.

Simple Practical Steps You Can Take to Innovate Your Business Model

There are a heap of business books on Innovation. In fact, the last 10 years or so has seen a wave of books with ‘Innovation’ in the title, they use a bunch of buzz words and I bet most SME owners, MDs, CEOs & Managers, outside of well funded potential high growth & tech start-ups, haven’t read. I haven’t read enough of them myself to recommend one over another. However, what is clear is that in some way most advocate a mix, with undefined weighting, of; nurturing an innovative culture & a clear innovation process.

The massive challenge small businesses face is a HUGE lack of resources (i.e. money and people power) to do someone truly innovative.  So knowing that for most small & medium businesses they are not going to have millions of dollars, pounds or euros of capital injected into the business, what can we realistically do to drive innovation?

1.  Culture
   1. Foster Problem Solving not complaining.
   2. Weekly Team Training (NOT work in progress meetings)
   3. Foster Idea Generation and capture. Have somewhere people can record and submit ideas to the innovation manager. Have an idea of the week or month. 
2. Process
   1. Create or redo your Organisational Chart, add a position for Innovation Manager or similar. Make someone responsible.  Obviously in small business it is not going to be a new person, it will either be you or another member of your team already have a role or two.
   2. Determine a short Position Description for this new role and how much time is to be allocated to it each week. E.g. 1 day per week.
   3. Determine KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for this role. How do you know as the manager, and how does the person performing the role know if they are doing a good, bad or ok job?
   4. Set Goals & Milestones. Remember why is it that we want an innovation manager in the first place? What are your goals? To achieve those goals, what milestones must you hit along the way?
   5. Create a Weekly, Monthly & Quarterly Reporting Schedule. E.g. The Innovation Manager presents for 20mins weekly to the owner / MD / CEO on progress. They also present for  30mins monthly against the goals, milestones. And last quarterly against KPIs.

Take Away Action Points

Logic tells us that all things being equal the greater the quality and quantity of resources…. PEOPLE… you can invest in Innovation then the greater the likelihood that you will produce an Innovation – A vast change in the process of doing something for the better or inventing something new and useful. But just sometimes, all it really takes is one person with one good idea that is able to EXECUTE it. In business Implementation and execution is EVERYTHING. If you want to innovate, and you’re a small business, give yourself a chance by using simple and practical steps to innovate your business model.

Go for it!

Business Strategy– Constantly Improve Your Business Model–Business Model Ladder-Level 4

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How to use the philosophy of Kaizen, Constant Never Ending Improvement, with your business model …

In the first 4 articles in this series on the Business Model for Small and Medium Businesses, and their owners, we explored an overview of the business model, the impacts of an undefined business model, how to first define your business model, then improve your business model. Now we want to know how to have a process or system for ongoing improvement. Enter the well known Japanese theory for constant never ending improvement, Kaizen. 

What is Kaizen? Constant Never Ending Improvement

A term made famous by authors and the success of companies like Toyota in the 1980s. Thousands of management consultants and business leaders have used the term since. For more info see Wikipedia.

For our main purpose all we really need to understand is that it is better to always be looking to improve your business model, by making constant adjustments and fine tuning…. Makes a lots of sense I guess (although my coming articles about Level 5 on Innovation & Level 6 on Revolution I’ll challenge this theory somewhat…. Note: level 5 & 6 will never apply to the majority of SMEs, so it is Level 4 which is often the pinnacle of the business model ladder!)

So, assuming Level 4 is where you want to be, how do we ENSURE WE CONSTANTLY IMPROVE THE BUSINESS MODEL?

You Need a Simple System or Process or Schedule to Constantly Improve Your Business Model

Why do the majority of SMEs not constantly improve their business model? Well, other than the fact that many don’t even think of the possibility that things could in fact be better and that they are actually completely able to make that change, other than that…. It is a question of TIME MANAGEMENT. In fact, getting results in any area of business is always a question of time management or TIME CONTROL as I like to call it.

• How much time is required by someone to focus ON THIS ONGOING PROJECT per week?
  
  Learning new ideas, discovering & analysing current information, planning a new reality, creating components of the plan, implementing the plan, recording and reporting on new results…. And on and on in this constant cycle. How much time must SOMEONE dedicate to this each week?

 Without answering the above question, and without considering each of the 6 elements (Learn, Discover, Plan, Create, Implement, Record & Report) required to fulfil this project, it will be very difficult to ALWAYS allocate resources to this project each week.

• How much time do you personally need to focus ON THIS ONGOING PROJECT per week?
• How else can do it?
• When will I and/or others focus on this each week? (Mon afternoons, every day 11-12, etc????)

Hard questions of your time, your schedule and your teams schedule will be tough to answer. In fact you may even get disheartened and think “it is all too hard, I don’t have enough time as it is let alone focus another 5-10 hours a week on this ongoing project” . If this is you, STOP, this is the entire point, if you don’t have time your business model is broken, it doesn’t work…. And by not focusing on it, you won’t change your situation. Think about that for a second!

But how then do we do it? You may ask…

1. You must first run a time control process, to eliminate the rubbish from your day, automate the routine, and delegate as much as possible.
2. Now, with more free time you must use this time wisely. First use your time on business model improvements each week. Ultimately large parts of this become another one of your tasks to delegate to another member of your team. Create a schedule of activity (based on the 6 Elements), doing what when. Now you have a system for business model improvement.

Action Points

Decide, if I don’t make this a priority nothing will change and I may never get the business & lifestyle I desire. Then make it happen by following

Go for it!

Business Strategy–Improve Your Business Model–Business Model Ladder-Level 3

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What are the important factors to consider when improving your business model ...

The whole idea of improving your business model sounds almost obvious. Of course you, as a small or medium business owner, want to improve your business model, right? Improve the business model and get improved business results which yields improved owner benefits. That's the thinking, right? Well, it should be. If you own or manage a business, it has a business model, whether it is defined or not is the key. As we previously discussed, define your business model first, then you can work on improving it. But once you've defined it, we can then rightly ask... 'what are the important aspects involved in the improvement process?' Enter, the Key Factors to Improve Your Business Model;

The Key Factors to Improve Your Business Model 

Using the mimosaPLANET 6 element growth cycle as a format to follow;

1. Learn: Ignorance maybe bliss, but knowledge is power. The more knowledge you have the easier and clearer getting better and improved outcomes will be for you. Read more on business!
1. To Do - Buy a business book in a related topic about business strategy and/or read more articles online and/or attend in person events/seminars, etc.
2. Discover:
1. Review Answers: Revisit answers you completed when defining your business model. Re-read your answers. 
1. To Do - Note down any obvious improvements you know can be made, improvements that instantly come to mind.
2. Review Financial Results: Bring up your current financial results, view as monthly and/or quarterly results (Statement of Financial Performance, also called Profit & Loss Report). Focus on reviewing the Gross Profit from each different main Revenue Activity or Department (e.g. Service A vs Service B vs Product E etc...). To do this your financial reporting will need to be detailed enough to have this level of separation, if it is not (typically in SMEs it is not) you will have to get someone in your team or yourself to manually calculate this detail (Gross Profit per Revenue Activity) by going through the invoices. Manually calc = nightmare!!!
   
   To overcome this nightmare, setup your reports so you have better information, the better info you have the easier it is to improve EVERYTHING in your business, including the Business Model. Information makes it more obvious what you should do. You may get some semi-ok information from sales reports, but normally you can't see the GP, only total revenue.
   
   
1. To Do - What is really going on in your business what activities make you all the profit and what just costs you money and forces you to resource up (employ extra staff and have a bigger premise) to handle it?
2. To Do - Sort out your reporting. Be honest, it's just not up to scratch, is it?!
3. Plan:
1. Questions to Answer:
1. What are our goals with this development/enhancement we are doing?
2. How will we know if it is a success or failure?
3. Does it indeed ‘improve' the business model?
4. Describe success, what does that look like? Describe failure, what does that look like?
5. What are the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) for this? i.e How do we measure success or failure? What are the tangible metrics? (I think we ultimately should use the 3 original goals we first talked about in the overview article in this series on business models, 1) Net Profit Target per Mth, 2) Weekly Working Hours Target, 3) Location Flexibility & Business Owner Dependence Target)
6. The Action Plan:
1. What needs to change?
2. What specific things are we going to change?
3. Overall - When by & Who by?
4. What needs to be ‘created'? i.e. a new form, or checklist, or target suspect list for new revenue stream, etc.
5. Map out a Creation Schedule.
6. Once ‘created' what does implementing or rolling out this Plan entail?
7. Map out a Implementation Schedule
4. Create:
1. Execute the Creation Schedule
5. Implement:
1. Execute the Implementation Schedule
6. Record & Report:
1. Recording System Check: Do we have good enough systems or processes to automatically or manually record the information we need to know whether or not our changes have been a success or not?
2. Reporting System Check: How will we report? How often? On what dates? Who is responsible? Who need a copy?
   

Action Points

The thing is, you could very easily read this and say "Oh, I can't do this yet, as my reporting is not good enough. I'll get my reporting up to scratch first, then I'll focus on this process". Well, I'd say, start doing it anyway! Yes, you'll see your reporting may need to improve, but in my experience if you wait to get the report first, without even starting to improve your business model, NOTHING WILL HAPPEN FOR MONTHS OR YEARS! Get started now, and even if you only improve a little, it will help. You'll also build a greater level of frustration with your reporting and you will therefore be MUCH more likely to follow through and indeed improve your reporting. The bigger your pain and understanding about the value quality reporting will bring you, the more invested you will be in getting them sorted and fast!

Go for it!