Top 3 Productivity Tips For Small Business Owners

Productivity guru Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” popularized the idea that many seemingly difficult pursuits — running a business, getting in shape, learning a language — can be achieved in much less time than most of us imagine.

 

Ferriss started out as a small business owner working 90-hour weeks to grow his online supplement company, Brain Quicken. Dissatisfied with his workaholic lifestyle, he transformed the way he used his time and spent his days. Focusing in on the effective use of his time quickly increased sales and helped him drastically cut his hours.

He’s exploring this time-use theory again in a new television show, “The Tim Ferriss Experiment,” which premieres on Sunday on HLN. On each episode, he uses rapid-learning techniques to master a new skill, such as learning to play a musical instrument and competing at the professional level of a sport, in just five days.

We caught up with Ferriss to get his advice for small business owners who want to be more productive and effective with their time. Here are his three best tips:

Create a new category rather than try to dominate an existing one.

“From a positioning standpoint, if you’re undifferentiated in a crowded market, it’s going to be a race to the bottom, in terms of lowering prices and increasing hours per week,” says Ferriss, who adds that attempting to dominate an existing category will only result in small incremental improvements. “From the outset, positioning yourself intelligently can save you a ton of work and make it a game that’s easier to win.”

Schedule an 80/20 analysis of your efforts once a month.

Doing a regular 80/20 analysis helps you identify the most important things you should be focusing on. Essentially, you determine the 20% of activities that are producing 80% of results that you want, as well as the 20% of activities that are consuming 80% of your time. 

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Squaring the Circle, a Venture Thriller by Rachid Sefrioui

Small business: Tips to start the new year off right

This time of year, many small business owners are looking at how their business performed last year and trying to figure out how they can improve in the New Year. Here are some tips to help you start the New Year right with your small business.

Look at how you operate your business and be sure you are truly focusing on your customers. Most small business owners would say of course they focus on customers. But it is easy to get busy with day-to-day demands and let yourself get into a rut when it comes to your relationship with customers.

Work to understand thoroughly who your customers are and what they need. Realize this does not always stay the same and you must be vigilant if you are to keep customers happy and coming back.

One way to do this is to seek feedback from customers often and in a variety of ways such as email or paper surveys, social media, or just asking them while they are in your store. Look at your competition and ask yourself why customers would come to you instead of them and vice versa.

Use this research and the customer feedback to sharpen your competitive edge and deliver outstanding customer service this year.

Put to use the financial information based on your business operations. Too many small business owners keep financial records just for tax purposes. But accurate and current financial records can be invaluable as you make business decisions.

So take time to organize and analyze your financial records and do not be afraid of the numbers. You need to understand and use your business’s financial statements to have a profitable and growing business. This year, use the insightful information in your financial records to better manage your business.

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Tips for Starting and Succeeding in Your Own Business

Want to see your business idea become a successful reality? These 13 guidelines will help you focus on what's important when starting a new business.

What do you need to do to start a business? There are dozens of sites on the web including ours that have checklists that remind you of the many tasks you should perform to start a business. While such checklists will help you remember a lot of important steps you might otherwise overlook, they are rather impersonal To Do lists. They won't make or break your success.

What will make or break your business? Here are 13 important guidelines for turning your business idea into a successful business.

1. Know yourself, your true motivational level, the amount of money you can risk, and what you're willing to do to be successful.  Sure, we all want to make millions of dollars. But what are you willing to give up to reach that goal? How many hours a week will you work on an ongoing basis? How far out of your comfort zone are you willing to stretch? How far will your family stretch with you? To be successful, keep your business plans in line with your personal and family goals and resources.

2. Choose the right business for you. The old formula – find a need and fill it, still works. It will always work.  The key to success is finding needs that you can fill, that you want to fill, and that will produce enough income to build a profitable business.

3. Be sure there really is a market for what you want to sell. One of the biggest mistakes startups make is to assume a lot of people will want to buy a particular product or service, because the business owner likes the ideas or knows one or two people who want the product or service.  

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Top 5 Tips for Entrepreneurial Success

The people factor appears over and over on my list of top five tips. It is the basis of many entrepreneurial successes and, because many business leaders discount it, innumerable failures.
While the current thinking in business schools holds that all someone with an idea needs to succeed are focus, clarity and a good business plan, I have found that bringing together a great team that’s united by strong motivation, determination and bravery is much more important. Let’s look at how to get started.

1. Find good people.

The successes of Virgin businesses such as Active, Atlantic, Money and Mobile were all based on our assembling a great management team that had a vision, passion and a real sense of ownership.

Specifically, we look for leaders who have the ability to listen to feedback from employees and customers – this is crucial to keeping a service or product fresh and innovative. Often, when things start going wrong, you’ll notice that the staff members feel they are being ignored and good ideas are not bubbling to the top.

Leaders should have the character to make tough decisions and the passion and ability to inspire their staff and carry them through difficult times. Our best CEOs tend to be unconcerned about the size of their office or the thickness of the carpet.

2. Realize that the employees are the business.

A successful business isn’t the product or service it sells, its supply chain or its corporate culture: It is a group of people bound together by a common purpose and vision. In Virgin’s case, we fly the same planes as our competitors and our gyms offer much of the same equipment as other gyms. What separates our businesses from the competition? Our employees.

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10 Tips to Become a Successful Entrepreneur

Many people dream of someday becoming an entrepreneur. Although the title sounds lofty, any person who begins a business and assumes some or all of the risk for that business is an entrepreneur. Many different types of entrepreneurs exist and they can all benefit from several tips to make themselves and their business more successful.

Attitude

The attitude of the business owner largely impacts the business. According to Entrepreneur.com, business owners must have a positive attitude and accept complete responsibility for the results of their business. Accepting responsibility allows the entrepreneur to make changes when necessary and not displace blame on staff or other factors.

Passion

Choosing to become an entrepreneur is quite vague. A business owner must have a specific business or goal in mind. According to MarieClaire.com, a discussion among a group of entrepreneurs ended with the advice: follow your passion. Money and a business plan are only factors; the desire to achieve a specific outcome is the real motivator for success.

Discipline

Reaching a goal demands some element of discipline. For entrepreneurs, this factor is especially important. Starting and running a successful business takes time, planning and patience. An entrepreneur is ultimately responsible for the success of his business; therefore, he should expect to work, especially in the beginning, more than anyone else to ensure success.

Improve

Every year, thousands of new business and ideas surface. Successful entrepreneurs know how to set themselves apart from the competition. WiseTechnology.com uses Galileo's invention of the telescope to illuminate how an individual must take existing technology and improve it. When Galileo invented his telescope, a Dutchman had already created one, which inspired him. Galileo created his own improved version and found greater success.

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10 Business Etiquette Tips for Entrepreneurs

Have you ever experienced a business situation or witnessed an event that left you thinking, “Really? You’ve got to be kidding me!” Has someone ever called you thirty minutes late, looped in a third-party to a private email conversation or said something terribly inappropriate in a business meeting? You’re not alone. We have all run into our fair share of bad business etiquette.

Most people operate with an unspoken code of behavior that delineates expectations for social behavior. While, this code may be a lost art form to some – it is deeply engrained in others.

A sale, a partnership and even the long-term growth of your small business is often hinged on how well you understand the importance of business etiquette. If it’s so important then why do most entrepreneurs ignore it?

Some entrepreneurs are etiquette pros, while others live by the adage, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” Whichever the case may be, we’ve asked entrepreneurs to share their woes and offer up their #1 tips to help you master etiquette in professional situations.

Here are 10 business etiquette tips to help you operate your small business successfully and confidently – without pissing people off.

#1 – Don’t Be a Social Spammer!

“Don’t go around posting your sales pitch on a company’s or individual’s Facebook wall. Social media is for connecting, but after discovering a prospective client via social media, it is then time to approach them privately and personally, not publicly.  Not only will approaching them personally increase your chance of a sealing a deal, it will prevent you from looking spammy and unrespectable to onlookers.”

#2 – Keep Email Short and to the Point

“Email etiquette has eluded many otherwise successful entrepreneurs. Emails should be kept short and to the point. Everyone is busy, and forcing them to sift through irrelevant information to find the point to your email is both disrespectful of their time and could result in lost business. Take the time to edit your writing after you finish it. Your recipients will thank you!”

#3 – Save the Sales Pitch for Later

“Don’t try to sell your services to someone from the first moment you meet them. Networking is about meeting potential connections, partners, and developing quality relationships- it is not about closing the deal at that moment.”

#4 – Let Me Opt-in to Your Marketing List

7 reasons why you should run your startup remotely

When thinking about startups, I’d like to add my two cents and argue that running a young company remotely is a very real and attractive option for many an entrepreneur. Not only because the technological tools exist to share and collaborate on documents, communicate in real time (even face-to-face) and meet those all important deadlines, but also because there are practical advantages to running a startup remotely.

By remote startup I’d like to work with the definition of ‘location independent’, not necessarily just ‘working from home’. Lets have a look at seven reasons why you should run your startup remotely.

Lower Startup Costs

A bit of a no brainer but an important practical advantage. Lower starter capital requirements and initial overheads are a dream scenario for any young company. Besides legal and registration fees, saving on office rental and running costs means you are free to hit the ground running at a minimum expense to yourself.

This means you can use those extra funds to develop your product or service and enter the market quicker. You can lower the barriers to entry earlier, thus making you more competitive. The cherry on top is that there is less need to seek out Angel or Seed investment, liberating yourself from potential equity-traps and bad decisions.

Extend your Reach

Not having a localised office gives you the freedom to travel, and to employ people across the globe. If you don’t have time or money to attend conferences yourself you’re more likely to have someone employed who will be nearby to attend on your startup’s behalf at a cheaper cost to you.

Having people employed, and a presence across the globe, gives a diversification to the well you can tap into to solve problems as well as expose your product or service to more markets giving you more research to work from.

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10 Ideas For Those Critical Early Startup Sales

Closing your initial sales at a startup is one of the most challenging parts of building a company. Many startups die before they ever close a deal.

Unless you’re entering a well established market there will be uncertainty with your product, approach, and timing until you have enough customers to prove that you have a good business model.

When Brendan and I started Wistia, we had questions about how the sales process should work, what kinds of documents we needed in place, how long things should take, and where we should look for potential customers. Through sheer will, conviction, and lots of failure, we found our way to where we are today. Here are the 10 principles we learned along the way.

1. Don’t wait to sell

You should start selling as early as you possibly can. Do not wait until your product is polished and launched. We changed direction and started heading towards Wistia about a year into startup life. How’d we know to head towards Wistia? Because we had a real potential customer that was interested when we had NO PRODUCT. We talked to them about what we thought Wistia could be. They liked the concept and we built the first version of Wistia in two weeks. A month later and we had our first customer.

We had just spent seven months building a portfolio website and four months trying to get people on board while our bank accounts shrank and our time to live decreased. In the course of a month we sold our first customer, decreased our burn, and realized that selling early was possible.

2. Do things that don’t scale

We learned an enormous amount from our first customer. That first sale gave us a benchmark for what people were willing to pay, how long it would take to close a deal, and how easy it was to use the product.

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