Less is More

July 17, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I find myself watching some strange reality shows at times and last week I was watching Kitchen Nightmares. It’s hosted by that British chef who’s always swearing at people in his “game show”. The premise of this show is that he goes into a restaurant that is failing for some reason and some drastic changes, brings it back to life.

Don’t Give Customers What They Want
In the show that I was watching last week, he visited an Indian restaurant that was bleeding money. The biggest problem he found in the restaurant is that they gave their patrons too many options. The customers were able to customize the sauce that they wanted. The owner came from a sales background so he had a noble strategy – he just wanted to give the customers what they wanted. Great intentions but bad results.

The problem with this strategy is that everything suffered in the business because their was no consistency:

  • The customers thought they knew what they wanted but the fact was that the experts (the chefs) could put together a better combination of flavors that the customers would enjoy
  • The orders would not come out in a timely matter because there were so many different combinations and the chefs could not operationalize the preparation
  • The waiters could not stand behind and recommend different dishes because they were all just slight variations of each other and could not be differentiated from each other in blind taste tests
  • The customers were left paralyzed with too many choices and felt unsatisfied that they weren’t getting what they want (having too many options is a classic in limiting sales because of “paralysis by over-analysis“)

Less is More
The lesson in this when running your business is that you should limit the options for your clients. Too often, we try to satisfy the wants and desires of our clients and what we end up giving to them is something that they don’t really want. They may think they want it when they “order” it but they leave our “restaurant” unhappy with the whole experience.

Even worse than a restaurant, we get clients who just get up and leave. If we don’t present a clear offer with a limited number of options, they’re less likely to become our clients.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,

No Business Is Successful Right Away

July 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Chances are, you’re going to fail a lot before you build a successful business. Everyone has heard the numbers before:

95% of all businesses fail within their first 5 years

If you know people who started their own businesses, they are probably just getting by or they have already boarded up and shut down their business. It’s just the reality of running a business.

Why Do Most Businesses Fail?
I’m sure that there has been plenty of research and analysis into why businesses failed but if you just look at it objectively, I think it makes sense.

  • Most new businesses are coming into an existing market and their competitors have a big head start on each part of the business
  • Any obvious profit opportunities have probably already been discovered and exploited by these competitors
  • Competitors in the market have real experience with what works and what does not
  • While the product is the most important part of the business, entrepreneurs need to know how to do everything in a business (accounting, marketing, sales, customer service) and there is a bit of a learning curve with these activities

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
One of the biggest things to remember when setting up your business is that you don’t know what you don’t know. As much as you plan, you can’t plan for things that you don’t know you need to care for.

You Need Money
One of the things that I get asked the most is how to take some of the first steps without any money. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s very possible. With all of the mistakes that you make, you’re going to need money to help get you through the bad times until your business finds its way. Your competitors probably have more experience, more time, and more resources than you so you need some money to keep up with them.

The advantage that you have is that you’re more nimble and don’t have as much of a cost structure that they do. It is much easier for you to change direction until you find what works for you and your business. If you’re using your only resource, time, instead of money, you lose that nimbleness, your only advantage.

Some Businesses Get Lucky
Some businesses are successful when they start but this is usually because they were able to change their direction as they went. If you look back on them, they didn’t have the answer but they were able to buy enough time to figure out how to get their operation running successfully:

  • TiVo’s initial business model was based more around of the concept of being able to apply super-targeted advertising options to clients. Now, they’re more of a subscription-based option, which is much simpler than the original vision
  • Google was always a search engine from the beginning but there was never any plan on how they would capitalize on their search engine for several years. Even their Adwords program, which is their primary revenue stream, took several iterations before they got it to work successfully.

If you talk to just about any successful entrepreneur, I’m sure you’ll find that there original vision didn’t match up to what they became. There were changes that they made along the way to get to that point.

Accept that you will make a lot of mistakes (whether it’s multiple decisions in your businesses, or multiple failed ventures) until you gain the experience you need to be truly successful. And don’t be afraid to drop some of your ideas as soon as you realize that they aren’t going to work.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Easily Replaceable Employees

June 30, 2010 by 1 Comment

If you’ve been running a business for any length of time in Kenya, you probably already know that it is extremely hard for a small business to get good employees. Yet, a business needs skillful and dependable employees to succeed. However, one of the keys to running a highly profitable and low-headache business is not depending on key individuals to make or break a business. While it would be nice to hire a bunch of overachievers to build and run your business, it’s a shaky strategy to rely on.

Searching for a Sales, for example, All-Star is not easy or cheap. The process to find good candidates and put them through the interview process can be very expensive and time-consuming. Even if you take months to go through a rigorous hiring process and think you found the person you were looking for, there is no guarantee that that person is even going to live up to expectations.

But let’s say that you do find that “diamond in the rough” – someone who is highly energetic and can bring in new business for you. You will have invested a decent amount of time training them and getting them ramped up. Everything has started running smoothly. Your new employee is bringing in a ton of new business and you don’t have to pay any attention to what they are doing or how they are doing it.

All of a sudden they drop a bomb on you. They got a better offer at another company and will be leaving in 2 weeks. You’re frozen in panic. You knew that it took 2 months to find this person and you were extremely lucky to find them. You went through 2 other people and wasted 8 months to get your “All Star”. Now you have to start all over again and be ready in 2 weeks. On top of that, you just kicked off a huge new marketing campaign that’s going to run but not have anyone to follow up and do the sales work. There is no way you’re going to be able to get new clients any time soon.

Enter The Real “All Star”
Here’s a slightly different situation for you. You’re tired of going through the crapshoot hiring process and praying that you get lucky and find a salesperson that can keep your business afloat. Instead, you decide to take matters into your own hands. You’re not going to rely on having the best talent, which is extremely hard to retain and keep happy. You’re going to depend on more readily available resources – lower wage employees.

How can your business do as well with someone who isn’t as talented compared to a rainmaker? Simple – you create processes that anyone can follow. You don’t leave your business up to chance. You create systems that you can constantly modify and tweak to make better and then you find people who can execute them.

Humans aren’t robots so you need to provide motivation to ensure that they do their job well. You can start providing incentive-based bonuses that are tied in with your revenues and profits so that everyone wins.

Now you have employees who are sufficiently motivated and happy because they are making more than they would with other similarly-paying jobs and you have turned a risk and a headache into a reliable and consistent system within your business.

What Kind of Systems Should You Put In Place?
Throughout this post, I’ve referred to salespeople when I talked about employees. That’s because they can have the biggest positive or negative impact on your business because sales and marketing for a small business has the biggest impact on the success of the business. And what we’re trying to avoid is the unpredictability that good and bad employees infuse into your business.

Your Sales and Marketing is the first part of your business from which you should remove the unpredictability of star employees. Here are some suggestions how to do that:

  • Create a Follow-Up Sequence that details every single contact you will have with leads from the day they become a lead, until a year later.
  • Write scripts and create every single marketing/sales piece that goes out to prospects. You should drive the sales message so that it’s not who gives it but what’s being communicated.
  • Add “Call-To-Action” in every sales and marketing piece that goes out. You shouldn’t have messages that say “are you ready to buy yet?”. They should spur on the prospect so they are calling to purchase from you.
  • Automate your sales presentations. Create web bases sales presentations that prospects can view at their leisure. This removes “bad days”, “being off your game”, etc. that affect even the best of employees. Nickel Pro can help with this, incidentally.
  • Create targeted marketing campaigns that deliver interested prospects. This way, you aren’t dependent on your employees ability (or inability to generate leads).

These are just a few examples of how you can replace highly skilled, valuable, but hard-to-find salespeople with replaceable, easy-to-find, and less expensive employees who provide the benefits without the headaches. Many of these ideas can be applied to your operations, customer service, and accounting. It’s all dependent on YOU setting up the repeatable systems that anyone can execute and not relying someone to just “get it done”.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,

Making Money Online

June 16, 2010 by 3 Comments

Written by guest contributor Jennifer Gorton from Forex Indicators.

If you haven’t thought of putting some of your paycheck into a savings account, there is no better time to start then now. Having a savings account will provide a cache of money that is stored away in case of emergencies. The money can also be used down the road as a down payment for your dream home or renovations of your current home. At the moment, the interest rates banks are offering are so low that the return you are getting by keeping your money in a savings account is minimal. Even though the return is minimal, your savings will slowly build up over time to a significant sum.

Interest rates that everyone is receiving right now might be just too low to justify keeping your money in a savings account. If you feel this way, there are other options available: there are stock brokers that will allow you to buy and sell stock online, charging little in commission. Some banks even offer their brokerage services that will allow you to make commission free trades up to a certain limit. This is a nice service to have as many investors that do not actively trade enough to warrant opening up another account with a different broker.

Having your checking, savings, and brokerage account all with one company makes transferring funds between your accounts easier. You can still keep some of your money in the savings account while adding small amounts to the brokerage account to buy stock. Buying stocks with higher dividend yields than the current savings interest rate might also appeal to you as an investor. With your money earning more, there might be an added incentive to add more of your paycheck to the brokerage account.

Opening up a foreign exchange account is another alternative to a savings account or buying stock. The foreign currency market, or Forex market as it is referred to, is the largest market available to invest or trade. With over four billion dollars changing hands each day, the currency market is a viable alternative that could produce a higher yield. If you are looking to trade to currency markets, be warned it is not as easy as letting your money sit in a savings account. The price of currencies will move quite substantially throughout the trading day and night. The Forex market is open 24 hours a day 5 days a week, so it is possible to trade or make longer term investments at a time convenient to you. The big swings in price could cause the average investor anxiety as your position might be profitable one moment and showing a loss next.

The big swings, however, are the reason that big profits can be made investing in currencies. All Forex brokers will introduce you to the latest strategies and ideas through training videos. The online retail currency brokers have these videos on their web pages for new investors to watch and learn from. These videos will tell the investor what the best Forex indicators are, and when and how to appropriately use them. There are many indicators out there that will help to predict the future price of the currency. If you utilize this, then these big swings in the price won’t give you as much anxiety because you will be able to understand at what time to close out your positions.

Currency positions can also be used by the more sophisticated investors as a hedge for another open position. Say the investor has bought shares of a company that is paying a high dividend, wants to hold the company for a few years, and then collect the quarterly payments for income. If the company is based in the United States and the market starts to go south, the stock has the potential to lose value.

The investor still wants to hold the stock for the dividend, but would like to make sure that the loss in share price is offset by a gain in another asset. If the U.S. market is going lower because of economic issues, he can then take a short position in the U.S. Dollar. If the U.S. economy weakens and the market continues to go down, the investor will profit from being short the currency of the country. He can then continue to collect his dividend payment without feeling as though his stock position is costing him in the long run. All reputable online brokers have investment advisors that are more than happy to talk to you about investment ideas. Make sure you talk to them so you can be confident that your investment decisions will make you money.

Filed Under: Make Money Tagged With: ,

How To Run a Virtual Business

June 8, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I hate to call our business a virtual one, but that really is what it is. We don’t have a bricks-and-mortar office location (unless the post office counts) besides our home offices. Some clients might consider it unprofessional but by running our business remotely, we are able to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost. We have created systems to allow us to operate our virtual business with the same effectiveness if we had an office full of people.
The Advantages of Operating in a Virtual Business

  • The biggest advantage of running a business is the significant cost savings. Without having to pay tens of thousands per month in rent, we have more flexibility in our cash flow and a much lower overhead costs.
  • We can run the business remotely. We are not tied to a particular location. We can quite literally work from anywhere in the world.
  • No one has to be in the same location. For instance, I study in the US and only come home occasionally but the business still runs smooth! We talk often and e-mail several times a day, but we aren’t forced to be in the same location. We can also hire employees and sub-contractors from different locations.
  • You can live wherever you want. This is similar to the last one but it’s a bit different. When I come back home I do not want to live in Nairobi. If our office was based there, this would not even be an option.

Running our Virtual Business
Creating a virtual business was a necessity based on how we started – part time. If we weren’t working on the business full-time, there was no way that we could have justified creating a bricks-and-mortar office for a business in which we almost never meet our clients. Once we went full-time, there was no need to change what worked. Here are some of the simple steps we took by necessity and now, by choice, to run our “virtual busines”.

  1. Don’t Look like a Virtual Business – A business without an office, doesn’t always inspire the most confidence in potential clients, so make sure that you have all the outward appearance of a professional business. This is pretty easy and usually just means having office phone lines, publicly displayed physical offices (which my actually be your dad’s), normal office hours, etc.
  2. Always Choose Online Software – By necessity, we have always gone with online applications as opposed to desktop applications so that we could access the same information from multiple locations. For example, we are a huge fan of Google Apps over any of the other applications. We are also thinking of going with the online version of Quickbooks over their standard desktop applications. One of the other advantages is that it provides more dependability. Even if a computer crashes, we have nothing to worry about since it’s just a web site away.
  3. Make Sure Your Tools Work Remotely – Similar to the last point but one of the first things that we did when setting up our business was to get a VoIP business line. It’s not that big of a deal now but it was pretty new then. We wanted something that we could operate from anywhere and that was configurable and accessible from the web. We also use tools like eFax so that we can both receive faxes and we have an online version, which is much easier for us to operate with. We also have e-mail accessilbe phones so that we aren’t tied to our computers (which need to be laptops, of course!)
  4. Keep Soft Copies of Everything – Again, by necessity, we have been forced to keep things online instead of printing them out and dealing with them by hand. Instead of filing cabinets, we try to keep everything on an online back-up site.

The Future of Our Remote Business
Someday, we may get a formal office location, and that’s only because it will be more cost advantageous when we bring some of our outsourced work in house. However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t still run a virtual business. Since I’m so lazy, there is no way I will be able to make it into an office everyday or have less than 2 vacations a month. Therefore, we will still need to run everything remotely.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Make Money, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With:

Earn From Resume Writing

June 1, 2010 by 4 Comments

At some time, it’s better to leave your brain on the loose – right? It’s better to give it the greatest freedom it deserves and it’s then and only then, that it will pick up many ideas – both dirty and fresh. At this point, you don’t need to care what it picks up, you will sort good from bad later on. It is under this principle that My brain picked up as many ideas as it could and when I started separating the good from the bad, I realized I was almost throwing one important idea to the dust bin, so I quickly picked it back, dusted it and decided to research more about it and I realized, wow, you can actually earn from writing professional resumes – God! ever thought of it?

Come on let’s face it, Times are tough, and we’re moving ever deeper into the age of specialization. Employers are demanding to know more about the applicant – their work record, natural talents and personality traits. They want more information upon which to base their interview selections than just the cold facts on the application form. Personnel managers are placing a higher premium on their time, and delegating to others the job of “weeding out” the unqualified applicants from those whose backgrounds and goals come closest to fitting the needs of the company.

To get in to see the person doing the hiring nowadays, the job applicant has to “sell the short-stopper,” and that calls for a professionally written resume. More and more firms are demanding resumes. Prove me wrong on this one. Most of the jobs worth having will require a written resume before even an initial interview is granted. On the other side of the coin is that Probably 80 percent of the people searching for jobs don’t have a resume. Of the 20 percent who do have resumes, many are ineffective; they simply do not adequately present the applicant’s total qualifications. Everyone – with or without a resume – is looking for this key: A professionally written resume, a sales presentation of their qualifications and experience that will get the job for them – the job they want. The job hunters are wound up in their own specialties and problems. They don’t know how, and they don’t have the time – AND they’re willing to pay you to put it all together for them.The demand for this service is growing daily. Here’s a business you can start for virtually nothing, parlay into a million dollar enterprise in less than two years – trust me!

Setting Up a Resume Writing Business
There is no special knowledge, education or experience required. Knowing the general format of a “modern resume,” and the ability to keep yourself up-to-date on new resume formats is the only qualifications you need. There are so many newsletters, websites, blogs and short courses on resume writing, you can consider signing up for some.

You’ll need a computer, professional quality printer. You can begin, with a lower quality printer but “think big” if you’re to survive in any business. You don’t have to book a big office at the city center or so, just start from the comfort of your bedroom.

Invest in a good book on how to write “job-winning” resumes. Select a book or eBook which discusses both the cover letter and the format of the body of the resume. You can also find free articles on the internet. Also study different types of modern resumes. You can check some here, www.bestsampleresume.com

In addition, you probably, at some point, will need a resume writing software that will help you. If you need a free software to get you started you can e-mail me on resumwriter@gmail.com.

Now that you’re set to go, there comes popularizing your services. If you have an e-mail list, you can send this to your subscribers explaining your services in details. You can also print posters and put them in relevant places. The notice boards at Odeon Cinema is a good example. You could also consider running an advert in the local newspapers or websites like Career Point Kenya depending on your advertising budget. Aside, you can print business cards and circulate them around. you can also create your blog and explain your services.

You’re now done. From there, you should start thinking of how to organize interviews with your future clients and establishing competitive prices that will keep you in business.

If you would like to get more tips on resume writing and frequent updates on online resume writing jobs plus other online money making opportunities, send the word, “money” to 4445.

Good luck!

Filed Under: Lazyweb, Make Money, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , ,

Lessons learnt while dyeing my hair

May 31, 2010 by Leave a Comment

For a while now, I’ve been trying to get my hair purple. I’ve dyed it three times, and it ended up blacker than when I started. Aside from being terribly frustrated, I’ve learnt a few lessons for life and business.

1. Always do your research

I went to five or six shops looking for the perfect shade of purple. Turns out shops in Nairobi don’t stock much beyond brown, black, blonde, and grey.  Apart from realising that someone should stock strange hair colours – even if it’s only on demand – I discovered that Nakumatt and Uchumi sell half a litre of Ooh yoghurt at 73 bob while Ukwala sells it at 95 shillings. Interesting.

2. Get dizzy-proof

The thing with servicing clients, no pun intended, is that sometimes, you’ll go round in circles and end up right where you started.

The first colour I bought was aubergine, and after several sessions using varying degrees of it, and going through black, red, blue, and several purples, I’ve ended up with plain old aubergine. Come Saturday, I’ll put it on my hair undiluted, and drive my hairdressers off the edge of sanity.

In business, be prepared to spin on the spot with a client, and when you walk past the same signpost for the millionth time and client says ‘that’s exactly what I want!’ do some yoga, smile, and remember that it’s worth it in the end.

3. Failure isn’t always a bad thing

On the assumption that the Saturday dyeing will work, it will have taken me two weeks, four sessions, three thousand shillings, 6 to 7 hours, and six pairs of gloves to get my hair the right colour. But, I now know 3 ways not to dye my hair, and next time, I can do it using 200 bob and one go.

4. Improvise

At one of the shops I went to, they didn’t have purple dye, but they suggested I try powder food colour. I laughed at the idea, but apparently it’s a popular one, and it gives you a much wider colour range. Plus, it’s temporary, so if it doesn’t work out, it’ll be gone in a few weeks.

As a business person, you should always give the client what he wants. But if you don’t have it, sell them a Plan B. Just be sure it’s one that works.

5. Know when to stop tweaking

The thing with artists is we never know when to stop. We always want to put in one more word, take a comma out, change the shade of blue, twist a bit of code, make everything just perfect.

During my multiple sessions, I started out ultra-violet black, which was too dark, so I added some aubergine, which was too light. I put in a bit of food-colour purple … which took me back to black. Very frustrating. If I’d just left it at bright purple, it would have darkened with time.

Good business is like dyeing hair; you get your hands messy, you don’t know what to expect, you use a lot of resources [and water] and your hands get really, really hot.

So remember to have a tank, a long fuse, a borehole, a source of emergency capital and a brilliant assistant, even if that assistant is you.

And always, always, always wear gloves.


Crystal Ading’ is a professional author, editor, rock lover and mother. Her work is available through www.threeceebee.com.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: ,