Basic Biz Dev

I have recently moved and what that means for me as a consultant is that I must build my network of local contacts again the old fashion way: get out there and meet people. I can still service my clients who are geographically far away but I do best when face to face for that initial meeting so a client can asses for themselves my ability to help them grow their business or streamline their workflow.

Social Media is wonderful and contributes greatly to foster relationship building but I think that face time must also be a component for small business to succeed.

With out the face time you have, Manti Te’o! Ouch.

The US Postal Service is doing away with Saturday delivery, not a terribly big surprise. As a small business how are you preparing for the inevitable 3 day a week service schedule? They cannot continue bleeding money forever.

We do not use the mail anymore. 80% of what comes in our boxes is junk solicitations. We pay our bills on line or through a company web site (if you are still doing this switch to DOXO where you can keep all your companies in one place with one log in), we send Evites, E cards & Amazon gifts to those we love. My favorite gift da jour are Ebooks directly to someone’s Kindle, no wrapping required.

While paperless adoption has leveled off the past few years our payment systems are migrating rapidly toward online tools. Too often small business fails to plan for options when a something in no longer available.

Why not get ahead of the curve and make it obsolete for the success of your operations.

Most small-business owners pride themselves on having some kind of strategic plan when they start their business. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs are so busy investing in their small business, they fail to put money aside to invest in themselves. A recent study by The American College revealed that 40 percent of small-business owners have no retirement savings. In fact, 75 percent  of the  people surveyed have no plan on how they will even fund their retirement.

Many small-business owners are depending on the sale of their company to be their nest egg. But as Tim Masset, regional president of BMO Harris Bank,  says, “It’s important to have personal retirement savings outside of your business because the value of that business can fluctuate significantly over the years.”

Every small-business owner needs to set up a retirement vehicle such as a SEP, 401(k) or IRA. The best savings for retirement are made on a monthly basis. These should be invested conservatively, since being a small-business owner is so risky. Talk to a financial advisor for a tax-friendly plan.

Read the full article in Black Enterprise.

Read more Leadership Watch articles.

I come from the belly button of the Bible Belt: Kansas. I distinctly remember starting my first “real job” post college in Irvine, CA for a Civil Engineering firm. I was one of two women in the office and the other gal 15 years my senior didn’t wear a slip under her dress or panty hose! I was mortified, my almost southern senses were rocked to the core and to top it off I seemed to be the only person who knew that “ladies” did not wear white after labor day. Her shoes most definitely did not match her purse…this must be what people were always talking about in California with leftist hippies! lol

Well times, they are a changing. No longer are hose and heels de rigueur in most offices and for that I am truly glad. Purging for an upcoming move I have rid my closed of the black suit and the black suit dress. I still have 3 pair of black pants (with heels, with flats, casual travel) I have my limits people.

I still giggle inside when I go to a meeting with a client in jeans. I think to myself, “Wow! They are taking me seriously in denim. Man I hope no one tells my mother I am doing real business in jeans she will KILL me.”

All of that to say I LOVE LOVE LOVE Scottvest clothing. Technology Enabled Clothing is their tag line. For travel there is nothing better. It lessens the amount of stuff you have to carry with you when you can just wear it on you.

For daily use it is priceless. Meeting with clients requires cell phone, pen and pc, if I use an iPad instead I can walk in carrying nothing and have these essentials and more tucked in my jacket. The Women’s trench has 18 pockets with a special place for your water bottle! Head over to Scottvest and check out the best functional piece of clothing you will ever own.

The following information was provided by Karen Mills, the Administrator of the SBA, Skagit Valley, WA. 

America’s 28 million small businesses are the backbone of our economy. This past week, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 delivered them some really good news.

The solution reached by the President and Congress included extensions of several small businesses tax incentives designed to spur innovation, support capital investment, and make it easier to hire new workers.   In fact, the legislation extended some of the most important tax credits that the President signed into law during his first term.  In addition, under this law, more than 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses will not see their income taxes go up, avoiding a negative impact on small business revenues.

Our economy is gaining momentum. Small businesses continue to drive innovation and job creation in industries across the country. Our goal is to make sure these entrepreneurs have the wind at their backs and the access and opportunity they need to grow their operations, reach new customer and create jobs in our communities.

Below are some of the key tax incentive extensions your business could be using today. Whether you’ve made R&D or equipment investments or hired veteran employees, you stand to benefit from one or more of the extended tax incentives.  What’s more, small businesses looking for investors can benefit from the 100 percent exclusion of gain on small business stock.

R&D Tax Credit. The law extends the research and experimentation tax credit (popularly known as the R&D credit), which had officially expired at the end of 2011, through 2013.  In addition the law allows businesses to apply the credit retroactively to investments made in 2012.

Section 179 Deduction. Section 179 of the tax code permits small businesses to deduct the cost of certain new and used property placed in service for the year rather than depreciate those costs over time.  The new law extends the maximum deduction to $500,000 for the 2012 and 2013 tax years for companies with under $2 million in qualifying capital expenditures.

Bonus Depreciation.The bonus depreciation provision enables small businesses to recover the costs of qualified new equipment faster than the ordinary schedule, by permitting the depreciation of 50 percent of the cost in the first year. The provision was set to expire at the end of 2012, but has been extended through the end of 2013 (and 2014 for certain types of property).

Work Opportunity Tax Credit. The new law extends through 2013 the tax credits for employers who hire military veterans or individuals from underserved communities that have faced barriers to employment.

Other Small Business Tax Credits. There are a handful of other targeted tax credits that were extended for 2012 and 2013, including: the new markets tax credit for businesses that invest in certain community development entities and other qualified investments; a reduction in the recognition period for S-corporation built-in gains tax; and a reduction in the time from 39 years to 15 over which a business can recover the cost of certain leasehold improvements and restaurant and retail property; among other targeted provisions. 

I am guessing a failed marriage replaced with an almost perfect one is not the answer you are looking for, so let me dig for something a little more businessy (yes it is a word) and pragmatic.

Outlook for me is a fail. I HATE it, I do not know why, it just irritates me. In this world where we all do 100 things at once not only in our business lives but our personal as well, we need some kind of planning tool.

That is where asana comes in, with so many To Do’s in all areas of life this makes sense. Elegant design (it matters if you are going to spend time with it) and intuitively easy.

If at first you don’t succeed: give up and try something else! lol There is no failure only those people who refuse to keep after it until they get it right.

When you think of “women” and “customer service,” is the first image that comes to mind a smiling, headset-wearing woman in a low-level customer service job meekly taking guff from a grumpy caller? Think again. With women now making up the majority of the U.S. workforce, enrolling in and graduating from college at higher rates than men, and owning 8.3 million businesses that employ 7.7 million people (according to American Express OPEN’s study The State of Women-Owned Businesses), they are also leading the way in developing new approaches to customer service.

How are women business owners and managers driving the changes in customer service, and what can other small-business owners learn from them? “I hate to generalize, but across the board I think women are generally more nurturing, and tend to be more customer-service centric,” says consumer advocate and social media expert Dave Carroll, who earned fame with his United Breaks Guitars video and has since co-founded Gripevine.com, an online social media platform for consumer-complaint resolution.

All About Empathy

Along with that customer focus comes a strong sense of empathy. “A great component of engaging employees and customers is empathy and walking in the customers’ shoes to drive the operation from the way the customer experiences the company,” says customer service expert Jeanne Bliss, author of I Love You More Than My Dog: 5 Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. “That can be found in both great male and female leaders, but what we see in female leaders who excel at driving great customer experiences is a keen ability to coach on empathy.”

That empathy is tied in with a holistic approach to life and business. “My research shows that women often don’t separate home from work. They are in-born multitaskers—brain research shows both hemispheres light up when women are multitasking—so work and personal life just all blend together,” says Elaine Allison, a customer service expert, speaker and trainer and author of The Velvet Hammer: PowHERful Leadership Lessons for Women Who Don’t Golf. “When customers have problems, [women] often have a broader empathetic understanding, and quickly look for ways to fix not only the initial problem but also other areas surrounding the issue.”

Most Customers Are Women

“Since women make up 80 to 90 percent of the customers in a lot of industries, I think they have a greater sensitivity to the needs of the customer, and greater appreciation for what customers are looking for and how they want to be treated,” says Nell Merlino, founder and president of Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to help women create million-dollar businesses.

Merlino cites retail as one industry where women’s approach to customer service is making waves. “So many things are going to apps and digital. A different shopping experience is developing, and it’s driven by women in leadership positions, as well as changes in technology,” she says. While women have always enjoyed gathering and sharing information about products and services, Merlino says, technology is now enabling that curation and conversation, propelling women who know how to harness it—like Daily Candy founder Dany Levy–to the forefront of the customer experience.

More Than Just Service

“We use the term ‘customer experience’ rather than [just] ‘service’ to define the fact that customer experiences a journey across the silos,” Bliss explains. Successful women business owners focus not just on the service department, where problems end up, but on all aspects of the business.

“Leaders who embrace a comprehensive process for building the business are establishing a differentiating approach to business growth,” Bliss says. One aspect of this service orientation is hiring for cultural fit, says Bliss, who cites Colleen Barrett at Southwest Airlines and Amy’s Ice Creams founder Amy Simmons as examples of women business leaders who excel at finding service-oriented employees.

Once that team is in place, a coaching approach fine-tunes customer service. Bliss says successful women leaders invest two to three times more than the average company in employee selection, training and development, and building tools to support frontline employees.

Why Collaboration Matters

“Building what I call ‘the collaboration muscle’ in connecting the silos is another key element of [customer service], and is a strong common denominator in great female leaders,” Bliss adds.

Collaboration not only helps companies correct service problems, but also prevent them, Allison says. “Using their innate talent of nurturing, women can look at service breakdowns as opportunities to prevent the breakdown in the first place,” she explains. “Using [collaborative] teams to brainstorm what is going on and how to fix it will help them win every time. With service breakdowns, it’s almost always a system problem, not a people problem.”

Being Systematic

If there are any weaknesses in the female approach to customer service, it’s that your empathy can sometimes get in the way of creating systems. Bending over backward to help the customer is all well and good, but if you spend more money repairing customer service issues than you do preventing them, you’ll quickly be out of business, Merlino points out: “Getting systems in place is critically important.”

Combine systems with empathy, however, and you’ve got the double-whammy Bliss calls “operational reliability plus humanity. That sounds vague, but here’s what it means: language on a packing slip written for the common man, with humor or at least everyday language. It means hiring people for empathy and the ability to connect with the customer.”

Moving forward, providing standout customer service will become even more complex and require every company, big or small, to pay attention to what women in leadership roles are doing. “Women naturally want to ‘tend’ to people, and if customers feel tended to, they will come back and refer new business,” says Allison. “The bar will rise.”

What can all businesses learn from women’s approach to customer service?

• Create a unified service experience: “As customers ‘voices’ become stronger and they voice their opinions louder through the Internet, leaders must be able to connect the experience across channels,” Bliss warns.
• Get in on the conversation: “The conversation that goes on about products and their attributes is very important,” says Merlino. “Men tend to talk more about the attributes; women are more focused on how products fit into their lives.”
• Balance your act: “Look after your people first, and they will look after you,” says Allison. “Financing, marketing and operations are important too, but it’s all intertwined.”
• Don’t give up: Business owners often feel like Sisyphus, pushing that rock up the hill and gaining a bit of traction only to have it tumble back again. “My experience is that most women leaders who excel have a big ‘Sisyphus’ component in their DNA,” says Bliss. “It’s a character trait I recommend to anyone trying to improve the customer experience.”

Rieva Lesonsky, Recent Posts

As 2013 is off and running, once again I vow to “keep better financial records”! Which is as much fun as a colonoscopy, for me anyway. There are great free tools available and that helps but much like anything else I have to actually USE the tool for it to be effective. I bill with Feshbooks and use Xpenser to track cost.

Happy New Year! Write a letter to the 2012 you.

Reflect on lessons learned in 2012 and how you will apply your new knowledge to 2013.

 2012 will be the year of ….Just Do It! You have to try, fail if you must, get up and keep going. If at first you don’t succeed, give up and try something else! lol

Seriously and not so seriously. It’s OK to fail and it’s OK to not rocket to Richard Branson status overnight. The media bathes us in instant success stories and leaves out the dutiful who keep after their dreams daily and reach their goals on their own time table.

2013 will bring great change with a mid-year relocation to Las Vegas. 2012 has taught me to challenge myself to learn new things, to reach out to to others in my field and to let go of dead weight. You can’t win a marathon lugging 100 lbs of dead weight. Get rid of those in your life who drain you.

If you don’t have positive forces around you go chase some down on line, in books, on podcast; turn over every rock until you find people who inspire you to be more of you, not copies of themselves.

I could have never imagined I would be where I am. I know that what ever 2013 holds, I will be amazed at the unfolding of a life lived moving forward, being present in the moment, leaving no regrets behind me and not hesitating for a future “something” ahead of me.

Melinda F. Emerson, known to many as SmallBizLady is one of America’s leading small business experts.View all posts by Melinda Emerson →