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How To Take a Small Business to the Next Level

By on April 25, 2013 in Business Inspiration, Grow Your Business, Q & A Interview, SmallBizChat

SMALL BIZ CHAT LOGO 20121 e1349098840231 How To Take a Small Business to the Next LevelEvery week as SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9 pm ET. This is excerpted from my recent interview with @AlfredEdmondJr.   Alfred Edmond, Jr. is SVP/Editor-at-large of BLACK ENTERPRISE. He is a content leader, brand representative and expert resource for all media platforms under the BLACK ENTERPRISE brand, including the magazine, television shows, web site, social media and live networking events. He also hosts The Urban Business Roundtable on WVON-AM in Chicago and Money Matters, a syndicated radio feature of American Urban Radio Networks.  Read more from him at his blog. 

SmallBizLady:  What are the top three things a business must do to be positioned for growth?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  First, assess the operational and financial resources of the current business.  Can you draw from those resources without hurting existing operations? Do you have the human capital/skill sets to support expansion?  If not, can you finance the additional resources necessary for expansion? How?

Second, assess your financial resources. What is current cash flow? How much cash do you have in reserve? Third, assess outside resources. Will your banker support expansion efforts? Your investors? Can you draw from your credit line? Finally, what is your end game? What does a “win” look like? Do flow charts of the operational structure of the expanded business. Who will report to whom? How will labor be divided? How will processes change? What key factors will you track to stay on course, adjust goals or abandon expansion efforts?

SmallBizLady:  When should an entrepreneur consider hiring advisors or coaches? 

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  Business expansion may justify hiring an advisor, coach or consultant, with expertise and experience specific to expansion target. That expertise should be industry specific, and could include knowledge of new territory or product segment, such as high-end luxury. Other expertise areas: new manufacturing processes/sourcing for product expansion, such as cuff links for a neckwear company. Before hiring an advisor or coach, be clear on timetable, objectives and how performance will be measured. Also be clear on compensation structure. Payments based on previous agreed upon milestones? Flat fee? Hourly rate?

SmallBizLady:  How important is a strong brand in positioning a business to take it to the next level?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  If you do not have a strong brand in the eyes of consumers, next-level business growth is next to impossible.  You are building from a base of current customers who you will be counting on to communicate your brand promise to others. Current customers can’t communicate your brand promise if they are not sure of it themselves; sign of a weak brand.

SmallBizLady:  How often should you evaluate your pricing?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  On a monthly basis, and sometimes even weekly, you should evaluate your pricing. At minimum, evaluate your pricing against that of the competition, and against your costs per unit of goods/services.  What is the perception of value of your offerings in the eyes of your customer? Can your brand promise command a higher price? Also, explore establishing a premium line of goods/services at a higher price than you charge for your basic offerings. Consider a no-frills line at a lower price than your basic offerings.

SmallBizLady:  What should a business owner do if they want to target an entirely new market for business?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  Consider who is already serving that market. What can you offer that is better or different? Consider the costs of entering that market. For example, what will real expenses be to open a new location in a different neighborhood?  Consider the potential of the new market. How much additional revenue will expansion generate? How will expansion impact existing business?  Is this new revenue sustainable? Does it justify the costs of expansion? What is the exit strategy, timetable, if potential is not realized?  Before you go into a new market, have specific goals and a deadline to abort effort if they aren’t met. Have a plan for getting out as well as getting in.

SmallBizLady:  Sometimes people expand prematurely and crash instead. How do you know if your business is ready to grow?  

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  Is growth being dictated by personal desire or market demand? If the potential growth is being driven by market demand, it may be an opportunity for your business. You may be ready to grow if you are having difficulty handling customer demand with existing resources and personnel. You may be ready to grow if your profits are consistent, but your revenue has remained flat. Growth may be necessary to keep up with expanded offerings/service offered by your competition.

SmallBizLady:  You can’t grow as a solopreneur, how many employees should you have in place to start scaling a business?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  The number of employees you bring on should be measured against the additional business likely to be brought in on a monthly basis. To avoid overextending yourself in pursuit of growth, explore flexible alternatives to permanently increasing your overhead.  Hire freelancers, independent consultants, temporary help, subcontracting to others on an as-needed basis, before adding to permanent staff. Also consider: What positions do you need to fill in order to capture new business? Is it sales? Customer service? Marketing? Start hiring there.

SmallBizLady:  How to do you hire good employees?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  First, be clear on the skill sets you need and what level compensation they command, depending on experience of the candidate.  If you can’t compete on salary alone, consider other benefits, including health care, flexible hours, sales commissions and other incentives. Screen for aptitude, but hire for attitude. Consider the impact of every potential hire on the culture of your company. Chemistry matters. The most skilled person can’t help your business if they are difficult to work with, are unprofessional or lack personal integrity. Look for people with proven ability for the positions you need to fill, but also willingness to wear multiple hats to get business done.  Look for people with the skill to do the current job, but the potential/skills set to grow with your company.

SmallBizLady:  What adjustments does the owner of the company have to make in the face of expansion, especially as a solopreneur?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  CEOs have to give themselves a gut check in the face of expansion. They’ll need to be able to relinquish absolute control to grow the business.

Once you hire the right people, can you trust them to get the job done their way? No one wants to be micromanaged. The more the company grows, the more the CEO must delegate technical, day-to-day operational duties and focus on providing strategic direction. Art of staying engaged enough to keep things on course, but distant enough to stay out of the way of team hired to get things done.

SmallBizLady:  What else must a business owner consider when taking the company to the next stage?

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  At every stage of the business, the owner must have an exit strategy. This will constantly change as the business evolves.  Is the goal to sell the business at some point? Pass it on to a family member? Go public? How does business growth impact those options?

SmallBizLady:  What is the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when taking their business to the next level.

Alfred Edmond, Jr.:  Biggest mistake made by entrepreneurs is expanding just for the sake of doing it. Before getting bigger, get better. Ways to get better: 1) Investing in technology to boost productivity, 2) Find new markets, uses for existing products, 3) Investing in more training for existing staff. Also, train each person to do multiple jobs.  Maximize the productivity and efficiency of your current operation before expanding, or you’ll end up with an even bigger, more inefficient business.

If you found this interview helpful, join us on Wednesdays 8-9pm ET follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter. Here’s how to participate in #SmallBizChat: http://bit.ly/S797e

For more tips on how start or grow your small business subscribe to Melinda Emerson’s blog http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com.

Melinda F. Emerson, known to many as SmallBizLady is America’s #1 small business expert. As CEO of Quintessence Multimedia, Melinda educates entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies on subjects including small business start-up, business development and social media marketing to fulfill her mission to end small business failure. She writes a weekly column on social media for The New York Times. Forbes Magazine named her #1 woman for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. She hosts #SmallBizChat Wednesdays on Twitter 8-9pm ET for emerging entrepreneurs. She also publishes a resource blog http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com. Melinda is also the bestselling author of Become Your Own Boss in 12 months; A Month-by-Month Guide to a Business That Works and the ebook: How To Become A Social Media Ninja; 101 Ways to Dominate Your Competition Online.

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Happy 4th Anniversary #Smallbizchat on Twitter

By on April 24, 2013 in SmallBizChat, Starting A Small Business

Today is the 4th anniversary of #Smallbizchat. I started the weekly live chat on Twitter on April 22, 2009 to help small business owners get answers to their pressing questions.

SBChat Anniversary Timeline Happy 4th Anniversary #Smallbizchat on Twitter


The mission of #Smallbizchat is to end small business failure by reducing the learning curve as you start and grow your small businesses.

The show takes place every Wednesday night from 8-9pm Eastern Time. Each week, I interview other small business experts on a topic related to running a successful small business. I am humbled that we are still at it after all these years. My team and I have conducted nearly 200 shows in the last few years. We only take off four weeks a year for holidays; otherwise you can count on us every Wednesday night.

We started #Smallbizchat to build an online community of entrepreneurs on Twitter. These days, we are a fixture on the vast schedule of Tweetchats that take place every day of the week on Twitter. Hundreds of entrepreneurs join us each week to listen and join in on the conversation and, on an average Wednesday night, the community generates over 1,000,000 media impressions across Twitter.

#Smallbizchat is a peer-to-peer mentoring session each week, where not only does my special guest answer interview questions, but the attendees are free to answer questions and pose follow-up questions to the guest as well. It all moves pretty fast, but we use @Tweetgrid to keep the conversation going. We feature authors, journalists, and small business experts as guests on #Smallbizchat. We also have corporate sponsors that join us each month with special offers and giveaways for our #Smallbizchat community.  Additionally, the chat question and answer session is repurposed as a blog post every Thursday on www.succeedasyourownboss.com, so that if you missed the live chat or don’t use Twitter, you can still benefit from the content and conversation.

To join the weekly conversation you can use the hashtag #Smallbizchat and use your Twitter account to sign in to our preset Tweetgrid link, or for beginners, we suggest using Tweetchat. For the latest information on the weekly chat guest, follow @Smallbizchat for information.

Smallbizchat was created to help with the isolation that many small business owners and solopreneurs feel while running their businesses. What I’m most proud of is the supportive network that has been built, where small business owners can find answers and inspiration for their businesses and practical strategies to advance their business goals.

I would like to thank my co-host Amanda Miller Littlejohn @AmandaMogul and the entire SmallBizLady team for helping me to have one of the longest running and most successful tweetchats on Twitter. Here’s to many more years of celebrating small business success.

As always if you are a small business owner or author with some expertise to share, submit your information to be a guest on #Smallbizchat via our guest intake form. Keep in mind, the more specific the topic suggestion, the most likely you are to be selected as a guest.

Thank you all for supporting us each week as loyal followers of #Smallbizchat, don’t forget to join us tonight.  You know I love to give away free stuff. Happy Anniversary.

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How to Make Sure Your Sales Conversations Close Business

By on April 18, 2013 in Grow Your Business, Q & A Interview, SmallBizChat, Your Small Business

SMALL BIZ CHAT LOGO 20121 300x123 How to Make Sure Your Sales Conversations Close BusinessEvery week as SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9pm ET. This is excerpted from my recent interview with Nancy Bleeke, The SalesPro Insider @salesproinsider about the new conversations buyers need to help them do something or decide to buy. Nancy helps people change the dynamics of their conversations to make them count. This is especially important for small business owners who are short on time, resources, and bandwidth. She’s the author of Conversations That Sell: Collaborate with Buyers and Make Each Conversation Count. For more information http://www.salesproinsider.com

SmallBizLady: Some ‘experts’ have predicted that soon all purchases will be made online and we don’t need salespeople anymore – what does that mean to small business owners?

Nancy Bleeke: It means – don’t believe the hype! Though billions of dollars of commerce are transacted on the internet, people do still talk – buyers still often need someone to help, guide, or lead them to do or decide. TO do – make a commitment to an action of some sort or to decide – decide to make the purchase.

The internet is wonderful, but it can also complicate many purchases. The amount of information, comparisons, and choices can actually slow down the buying process for many people. And if you are selling a service, online buying is even more challenging.

Small business owners need to be equipped to have productive conversations with potential buyers – even if your business is online. You will have conversations with investors, suppliers, etc. and those need to be productive as well.

SmallBizLady: It seems that the consultative selling approach that many of us learned and adopted years ago isn’t enough these days, tell me more about that.

Nancy Bleeke: Consultative selling was and is fantastic. But I don’t think it is enough anymore. I think that the busy buyers, the time-deprived, the overwhelmed-with-information buyers want more.  They need more from us.  They have a lot of information and they want to be part of the solution.  And they want to be acknowledged for their knowledge and for their experience and ideas, too.

It means that salespeople – small business owners – need to be more prepared than ever to have relevant conversation. Instead of preparing for what we’re going to say and how we’re going to convince someone and tell them about what we can do or what our solution does, we need to do it with them and collaborate with them. This is a different skillset. We need to be very flexible, we need to be inquisitive and ask for their ideas, find out where they’re coming from.  We need to start with different questions. We can’t ask the “duh” questions.

SmallBizLady: The title of the book is Conversations That Sell. Why should we think of sales calls as converations? 

Nancy Bleeke: The days of the ‘pitch’ are limited – unless you’re doing infomercials. People conversations are needed – where both parties are engaged. When we think of a sales meeting as a conversation, it changes the dynamics and when we make it all about them instead of the solution it’s even a bigger conversation changer.

SmallBizLady: Why is it important to focus on them in a conversation?

Nancy Bleeke: When we focus everything we do from marketing to sales to serving them afterwards with a “what’s-in-it-for-them” focus, it changes the dynamics.

Let me repeat – all we do/say should be focused on What’s in it for Them – or WiifT (whiff-it).

This focus allows us to, what I call, “right-size” our information.  It helps us not oversell or, even worse, over tell.  We can give too much information and just confuse things.  By focusing everything on what’s in it for them, we do the right thing for them which then becomes the right thing for us because we’re going to get them to make a decision or take an action to move forward.

SmallBizLady: Most of us know how to conduct a needs analysis; you propose that we need to seek more from our buyer.  Why?

Nancy Bleeke: Because I don’t think that just honing in on needs is enough.  We should learn about needs and also focus on their wants – which are the emotional aspects of buying. I firmly believe that most people make emotional decisions and support them with facts so we need to look at wants and needs.  And that’s still not enough.  Your solution most likely helps solve a problem or capture opportunity.  We need to focus on problems, opportunities, wants, and needs.

SmallBizLady: Do you have a FAVORITE question to ask a potential buyer?

Nancy Bleeke: No. Each conversation and buyer is unique. The questions depend on them, the objective of the conversation, and their tribal type. This makes for MANY different effective and productive questions. Too often I am asked for the ‘magic pill’ or the magic wand to wave and get the results. It’s not that prescriptive – great questions seek more from the buyer.

SmallBizLady: What are the Tribal Types how does that concept affect small business owners?

Nancy Bleeke: Think about when you’re in a different country and the language is different, it’s harder to build rapport, to engage and build trust with someone.  But as soon as you know even a few words of that language, you can communicate and move forward from there.  It’s the same in your sales conversations.  You need to be talking the same language and about what’s important to THEM.

Tribal Types outlines the different types of people so we can easily adjust our words, pace, and communication to them. For example, some people use ‘thinking’ words – like results, analyze, “I think this or that”. Others use ‘feeling’ words such as – opinion, suggestion, or “I feel something”.  The more we talk ‘their’ language, the more smooth the conversation and easier the decision.

SmallBizLady: How can we make sure our conversations are productive, effective, and efficient?

Nancy Bleeke: Here are three conversation changers for most small business owners:

  1. First, it’s not all about your solution! It is all about THEM. Keep a focus on them from the beginning of the marketing messages to their conversation with you. Keep a focus on them from the beginning of the conversation until the end.  It’s not about the old adage that I should work with people the way I want to be worked with.  I think that’s ridiculous.  Who else is just like me?  I need to market, sell, and work with them the way they want to be worked with, the way that’s comfortable for them, the way that’s going to help them move to do or decide something.
  2. The second conversation changer is preparation. Get things down on paper, be clear on the outcome, do the research needed so you don’t waste time.
  3. And the third tip is that no matter what you’re selling or how comfortable you are with what you’re doing; remember that every conversation is different because the person you’re talking with is. Adapt each conversation to the person’s tribal type in your communication, working style, pace, and word choice makes you relevant to them, trustworthy, and will help you build your business.

SmallBizLady: Where do you believe sales conversation success begins?

Nancy Bleeke: Winning conversations begin in your head but they also begin in your heart. What’s going on inside us affects our actions.  And so we need to have belief.  Not just belief in our solution – which as small business owners we usually have HIGH belief and passion for what we offer. It’s more – belief in the value the buyer will receive, belief in ourselves – that we have the abilities to build our business because we can sell – which again is nothing more than having conversations that help someone else do or decide something.

SmallBizLady: What do you see as the biggest gap in conversations by small business owners?

Nancy Bleeke: Leaving the outcome ‘hanging’ but not getting a commitment to do or decide something. Many business owners think they are being pushy or they don’t want to be rejected. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know and you can waste a lot of your time and energy chasing prospects that aren’t ever going to buy.

If you believe that your solution is going to help them – you need to be assertive at the end of your conversation to ask them to DO (take an action of some sort) or DECIDE (to purchase, to meet with you, to introduce you to someone else).

SmallBizLady: How can small business owners determine how to have productive conversations without recreating the wheel?

Nancy Bleeke: Observe others or read about selling techniques– and then adopt the actions and practices that you believe will work for you, for your business, and for your buyers. But know that you need to then adapt them to truly make them relevant and ‘yours’.  Of course this means you need to prepare and practice – two of my favorite ‘p’ words. And then adjust.  These are the activities you have control over and that will not only make your conversations count but your build your business.

If you found this interview helpful, join us on Wednesdays 8-9pm ET follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter. Here’s how to participate in #SmallBizChat: http://bit.ly/S797e

For more tips on how start or grow your small business subscribe to Melinda Emerson’s blog http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com.

Melinda F. Emerson, known to many as SmallBizLady is America’s #1 small business expert. As CEO of Quintessence Multimedia, Melinda educates entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies on subjects including small business start-up, business development and social media marketing to fulfill her mission to end small business failure. She writes a weekly column on social media for The New York Times. Forbes Magazine named her #1 woman for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. She hosts #SmallBizChat Wednesdays on Twitter 8-9pm ET for emerging entrepreneurs. She also publishes a resource blog http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com Melinda is also the bestselling author of Become Your Own Boss in 12 months; A Month-by-Month Guide to a Business That Works.

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