12 is a Great Number – Celebrating 12 Years in Business

February 9 is the first day of our 12th year in business!

What comes in a dozen? Doughnuts? Eggs? Cupcakes? Pens? Markers? How about years in business? Celebrate with us!

According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), approximately 71 percent of small businesses don’t make it to this point. J.P. Morgan Chase and BLS report a huge die-off of businesses by the time they reach ten years.

Age of small business chart — 51 percent of small businesses are 10 years old or less, and 32 percent of small businesses are 5 years old or less.

What are our top three tips? How did we get here?

Looking back on our journey, it’s clear that there are things which we believe have set us apart and are bedrock to us.

Respond to inquiries quickly. It is amazing after all this time how shocking it is when people don’t follow up. We get a number of new clients from inquiries directly via our website. Many of those inquiring about our services tell us how few people to whom they reach out, respond. So, a simple lesson…answer your phone. Return voice mails. Email back. And make sure your contact forms are sending inquiries to the right people at a valid email address.
Have integrity. As a business person, you must have a good reputation. Your community must believe you. Always. You must do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. Seems simple, right? But if it were simple, then everyone would be succeeding. And they are not.
Have a quality product. It’s easy for an entrepreneur to go to the internet and find logo development, or website set up or (take your money and do nothing) SEO. What is the difference between your service and another’s? In our case, it is our desire to do it right. To make it work. We have never aimed to be the cheapest web host, the lowest priced identity development or have a flat rate product that can land you first on Google. For each client we figure out what will work best for them. We take every project on with a background of knowledge (which is kept current with lots of time) and experience, and then join that with our client’s insights on her industry.

We had help making it for 12 years — YOU!

We wouldn’t have gotten here without all the amazing clients and support that we have had from colleagues, friends, and family for the last 11 years. Thank you so much for all of the kind words, the encouragement, the business, and the exciting projects we’ve been able to be part of. Here’s to the next year which is going to be amazing.

(Photo by Michael Skok on Unsplash)

What does it mean to take your business to the next level?

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

The office phone rang and I answered. The person on the other end said, “Hi, I’m Phil, and I’d like your help to take my business to the next level.” After a few basic questions, I asked Phil what he wanted to accomplish with his business. He could not answer that question.

So, I asked him, “What does the the ‘next level’ look like to you? Still he was not able to respond. Finally, he said, “Can you help me figure it out”?

The mysterious business elevator

Over the years, I’ve had lots of calls from executives and business owners who want to take that mysterious business elevator “to the next level.” Just the other day I read the following in a press release about the hiring of a new CEO for a breakfast restaurant franchise,

“Having a leader of [Name redacted] caliber and experience will allow us to take the brand to the next level. His particular expertise in helping founder-led, franchised restaurants realize their next stage of growth will be of tremendous value as we leverage the increasing popularity of breakfast-based concepts and attract new franchise partners to our family.”

Even in this press release there was no specificity behind the desire to elevate the brand and grow to the next stage. How can potential franchisees reading this comprehend where the business is headed?

If after a few years in business, you want to surge forward, increasing your business footprint or adding a new line of services, or increasing capital investments, but unless you’re specific, “taking my business to the next level” doesn’t mean anything to a marketing consultant.

How can you help your marketing consultant understand the next level?

In the marketing world, we work with quantifiable audiences and goals. We quantify who we want to receive our messages, where they will find or consume our messages and how frequently we expect they will engage with our messages. So we need to be precise.

You, too, should be precise when consulting us. We rejoice to hear goals such as, “I want to increase my Facebook page engagement 20%,” or “I’d like to gain 10 new customers per month for my warranty service.” This laser-focuses us on your business development goals and allows us to begin honing an audience segment. But to get that focused, you need customer insights.

Customer insights — what are they and where to get them

It’s not simple to arrive as these numbers. You need to track your sales trends by customer, period, service, and product. This implies you have the type of data system to allow you to retrieve this insight from either a CRM system or at least a POS system.

Some industries use loyalty programs to help them get data on a segment of their customers who have opted-in to a loyalty / rewards system. Grocery stores love loyalty programs for this very reason. They provide incentives to customers which cause them to use loyalty / rewards cards and the company then has a meta understanding of their purchasing/shopping behaviour.

In my career I’ve established loyalty programs that allowed us to identify our best customers and get more insights on their frequency, recency and preferences. We could identify those who dined infrequently and incent them to dine more.

Restaurants are generally able to pull up metrics such as how frequently particular entrees are sold and cross reference that with daypart/time. This type of insight can help spot the dogs on a menu or the upward trends in taste preferences. This alone can help identify market segments for a restaurant.

If your company does not have a CRM system or way to extract the data, what do you have? Sales associates. They are a real gold mine when it comes to customer insights. They know about issues and customer satisfaction. And they often have insights into new segments or uses for your product.

Sometimes growth can simply be stopping or reducing the customer churn. Everyone loses customers. It happens. But if you’re not staying level, then you’re declining. Your sales associates and customer service staff ought to be able to help identify the reasons for customer churn.

Ultimately, the best way to grow customers is to provide simply amazing service, so that no one wants to leave you. High customer satisfaction comes at a cost. It implies that you have high quality products and services and are constantly refining or improving every aspect of what you do and why you do it.

So next time you want to take the magic business elevator to the top, stop and determine what all the floors are between you and the penthouse.

Still need help to determine what the next level is?

Here’s a template you can use to be more specific regarding next level growth when you’re going to talk about your marketing with a consultant.

Quantifying the Next Level – A strategic approach to identifying what you’re going to accomplish.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive planning document. This is an outline to comprehend where you want to go and what is required to get there. Obviously greater planning of every component must be undertaken. What would you add to this? Leave your comments below.

Step 1: Identify the Goal

Over the next _____ (months/years) our company will grow. Specifically we will:

Add ____ (number of ) customers for ______________________________ (service/daypart/segment) and we will expect these customers to spend $00.00 per person per ____________ (week/month/quarter/year).

Increase our top line sales by ________ percent

We will open ____ (new storefronts/add new sales outlets/distributors) in ________ (locations).

We will increase customer satisfaction after the sale by ___________ percent. We will measure this using our customer survey.

We will increase customer retention from __________ (months/years) to ___________ (months/years).

Step 2: Outline Your Strategy

Our strategy for accomplishing these goals will be:

Enumerate and outline exactly what will be required to accomplish this growth. Include all necessary components and their expected cost.

Personnel
Bricks and mortar
Technology
Capital
Training
Raw Materials

Photo by andrew welch on Unsplash

Advertising Copy: Avoid Negative Connotations

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

Avoid negative connotations by using positive associations

Years ago, when reading a parenting guide, I learned a bit of sage advice which I paraphrase here:

“When offering direction to children, avoid negatives; e.g. ‘Don′t jump on the couch. Rather, say, “Stay on the floor.’ If you choose negative direction, the child will hear, ‘Jump on the couch!’ and will do precisely that. If you say, ‘Stay on the floor’ the child hears exactly what you want them to do.”

When it comes to ad copy, deliver messages using words without negative connotation. Those negative connotations are easily pulled into the reader’s mind and stick, where they fester and undermine your message.

In the ad below, a health care firm seeks new physicians. However, rather than say that they were growing (and in our culture growth is generally good) and want to add new staff members, they state that they are growing like a weed.

I don′t know about you, but in my garden I pull up weeds: those undesirable, troublesome, unwanted plants. Ken Immer, a chef turned entrepreneur, said upon reading in social media my comments on the ad, “That’s like a restaurant advertising that it’s waitstaff scurries around the dining room as quick as roaches!!”

Simple, direct is best

When you write your advertising copy, it’s best to use simple messages. They can be direct, funny, contain puns or allusion. But when you want a positive association, you must take great care with any terms or phrases which have negative cultural associations — especially ones with deep roots in the psyche.

This ads copy could be restated as: “We′re growing.” Then followed with the message that the organization needs more docs. Enough said.

Oh, and proof read your ads. Docs is plural, not singular.

What are your most nettlesome notes on advertisements? Share your thoughts in comments.

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