I accept American Express in my business, as well as other credit cards. Some of my clients like to use their AMEX card and I want to accommodate them, of course. So I got a piece of snail mail just a few days ago from AMEX that promoted November 26, 2011 as “Small Business Saturday, a day when America comes together to celebrate the Shop Small movement and support small businesses like yours.”

They included a small decal I could put in the window of my business that proclaims “Shop Small – support your local small businesses.” AMEX is offering a $25 credit to card members who register their card for the Small Business Saturday and spend $25 or more at businesses like mine. “It’s all about YOU” proclaims their mailing.

Yeah, right.

I admit, I’m cynical on this one. A gigantic corporation is trying to hop on the small business/shop local movement. It motivates me even more to move forward with my idea to develop a local complimentary currency. If you really care about local small business, check out a RelyLocal in your area. Judy McKnight of Rely Local Hendersonville is a genuine LOCAL business person doing a fantastic job of supporting local small businesses. And you don’t even need an AMEX card.

What do I mean – “educate your customers.”? Well, consider this: many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you!

In fact, they are your goldmine.

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

• Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, even by snail mail (yes, it still works!).

• Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.

• Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.

• Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of useless “smoke and mirrors” out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

• Quality product/service
• Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
• Providing products/services in areas that your customers find interesting.

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is!  I can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. I can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay off many times over.

Small businesses always have to be careful about the investments they make. In the manufacturing industry, it’s about having the right tools to complete the job. For small manufacturers, it can be difficult to decide between purchasing new machinery or making an investment in software. The software selection process is never an easy one and with so many options out there, it can be hard to narrow down the choices.

Most small manufacturers are likely to start off running their business using a basic accounting package like QuickBooks or Sage Peachtree. These are great resources for most small businesses but they have limited functionality for the manufacturing industry. As such, most manufacturers will want to upgrade to a more sophisticated program, but one that is still affordable.

Two solutions are particularly well-suited to handle small manufacturers with few employees (50 or less). These solutions are Fishbowl Inventory and MISys. Both of these products can be used as add-ons to QuickBooks to handle the manufacturing specific parts of the operation.

Fishbowl Inventory is one of the most popular add-on’s to QuickBooks in the world and is known for having a very user friendly interface. The software is great for small manufacturers because the business can grow without having to change software. The system can serve manufacturers that make between $1 million and $100 million in revenue. Manufactuers will have to install the software on site but they will be able to access it through their favorite web browser so it is easy to use.

MISys has been around since 1979 and is currently supporting the operations of more than seven thousand manufacturers. Like Fishbowl inventory, the system is compatible with QuickBooks as well as Sage accounting products such as Simply Accounting. The manufacturing package allows modules to be purchased individually so you can customize what your business needs to run successfully. This is a great benefit as it will keep manufacturers from purchasing shelfware, or software that is never used and just sits on the “shelf.”

For more information on these and a few other systems, take a look at Derek Singleton’s article Small Business Manufacturing Software | 5 Affordable Options.

Happy New Year! Here’s my first tip of 2011.

Trying to get more organized? In my small business coaching, it seems that almost all of my clients are working on that! And one of my clients recently introduced me to a cool online service called FollowUpThen.com. As promised, it’s a “free and easy email reminder” system. All you have to do is on your next email just include time-interval@followupthen.com and the system will follow up after the time interval you specify.

I use gmail’s calendar to email me reminders for ongoing scheduled tasks, everything from daily reminders like “clean office for 30 minutes” to one time events weeks or months in the future like “contact Felicia about social media project.”

But what’s cool about FollowUpThe.com is that you can send an email to someone else so they automatically get an email reminder, too, perhaps about a project you are working on together or a proposal you are expecting. In sales there are obviously many applications, since so much of sales is professional and relentless follow up. You can also use the “bcc” field to send the reminder just to yourself. The system has a lot of flexibility.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

I always love when one of my clients gets some great publicity. My long time client, Alisha Navarro, owner of 2 Hounds Design and Wiggles, Wags & Whiskers, has one of her gorgeous dog collars featured in the holiday gift guide  of this week’s People Magazine (the one with Kate Middleton on the cover). Alisha is an amazing entrepreneur who’s hardworking team ( all her products are made in America!) creates beautiful custom dog collars and the best dog harness there is, the Freedom No-Pull Harness. I use the harness on my dogs and no more pulling – what a relief! And my dogs look great in their 2 Hounds Design collars.

Alisha uses www.helpareporter.com to take advantage of possible PR opportunities but this time she benefitted from her amazing “attraction” energy, as she had nothing to do directly with this latest media coup. Beth Ostrosky Stern (Howard Stern’s wife) is a big animal lover and she suggested Alisha’s collars to People magazine for the holiday gift guide.

Congratulations, Alisha!

The kind of people who read Ordinary Brilliance and/or are my clients tend to be very upstanding, high integrity folks. They’re probably not worried about employees or family members committing fraud in their business.

Yet, we all know people can do the most unexpected things under certain circumstances, so it’s important not to get too lax with the controls in your organization.

I know business owners who hand the whole thing over to a bookkeeper, controller or administrator and never check the work or validate the information. Others are so afraid of fraud and embezzlement by employees that they refuse to let anyone else come anywhere near their financial books and systems. Either extreme will be bad for your business.

One of my clients, Carl Shaw, a CPA in Hendersonville, NC, was telling me recently about a fraud situation that had recently been brought to his attention. A senior executive of a local business had been entrusted by the owners with all aspects of the organization’s finances. Cash receipts and deposits, ordering and paying for supplies, reconciling bank accounts, all done by this one executive… for more than ten years! When the owners recently discovered that there was not enough money in their bank accounts to cover their payroll (a nice way to say that paychecks were bouncing!) an investigation into the records uncovered that the trusted executive had stolen an amount totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In addition to his tax and auditing work, Carl is a Certified Fraud Examiner and helps businesses and organizations set up systems of checks and balances to prevent fraud. He gave me some good info about fraud.

Fraud investigators have found that almost every fraud can be found to contain three common elements, commonly referred to as the Fraud Triangle. These three elements are:

1) Opportunity to steal without being caught, (there’s either not a system designed to prevent a fraud, or there’s an exploitable weakness)

2) Rationalization of why it’s OK in the mind of the perpetrator, (examples – I’m not being paid enough; I deserve more!), and

3) Pressure, external or internal that causes a need for money and gets the fraud started (for example an addiction, credit card debt, or a medical emergency).

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the world’s largest anti-fraud organization, does an annual survey to measure the extent of fraud in the workplace. Their 2010 survey showed that the typical organization loses 5% of its annual revenue to fraud. Applied to the estimated 2009 Gross World Product, this figure translates to a potential annual global fraud loss of more than $2.9 trillion!
ACFE reported that the median loss caused by the occupational fraud cases in their study was $160,000. Nearly one-quarter of the frauds involved losses of at least $1 million.

Just who is committing the fraud? The survey indicated the following statistics:

• More than 80% of the frauds in the ACFE study were committed by individuals in one of six departments: accounting, operations, sales, executive/upper management, customer service or purchasing.

• More than 85% of fraudsters had never been previously charged or convicted for a fraud-related offense.

• One of the most common red flags is employees who are living beyond their means (43% of cases) and experiencing financial difficulties (36% of cases).

• The median amount of each fraud is $80,000, much higher if the fraudster is a manager or executive.

• A typical fraud lasts for eighteen months before being detected.

The survey also pointed out that “Small organizations are disproportionately victimized by occupational fraud. These organizations are typically lacking in anti-fraud controls compared to their larger counterparts, which makes them particularly vulnerable to fraud.” Victim organizations that had these controls in place had significantly lower losses and time-to-detection than those organizations without the controls.

The lesson here is to be smart, not fearful. Every business and organization needs checks and balances and a well-thought out system to make fraud and embezzlement very difficult. The honest people will understand and those tempted will find it difficult to pull off.

Although Carl is very busy these days, as a true southern gentleman he offered to talk (no charge) to any of my subscribers who has a question about fraud prevention. (carl.shaw@cshawcpa.com or (828) 698-7725) Don’t let an iron grip on your financial system strangle your growth. With the right system in place you can let others handle most of that work and be free to focus where you’re most needed in your company – marketing and innovation.

Recently, I was so proud of one of my clients that I wanted to share his accomplishment with you (he gave me full permission to share his name and story).

I’m not young enough to know everything, as J.N. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was known to say. But one thing I do know is that if we never take time to stop and think about our business, we will miss out on a huge amount of success and fulfillment.

I work with many of my clients, often using Jim Horan’s One Page Business Plan, to do good planning about their business. Keep in mind, it is the thinking that benefits you, as much as the final document. Few people take the time to get away and really think about their business and plan for their continued success.

We have to physically get away from our business and take time to reflect. Not only do we need to think rationally about our business, we also need to get into a non-rational or intuitive place and let ideas and experiences, opportunities and problems all blend together in order to experience a breakthrough that pure rational thought alone cannot bring. “The ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.” wrote W. Gordon

My client Ron Zasadzinski, owner of the web design firm, codegeek.net , based in Fort Collins, Colorado, took this advice and booked two nights at a nice hotel in Boulder, an hour away from his business. He booked two nights so his one day retreat would be a WHOLE, uninterrupted day. Ron said it was one of best things he’s done for his business and plans to make this at least a quarterly practice.

His fiancée was concerned that he’d spent too much money on a nice hotel for this retreat, but Ron and I agreed that it was the deal of the century given the clarity he got. He sent me his two page write up and it was very exciting to me because it laid out the path for the success he intends to create over the next five years.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Ron’s business has previously had solid success and is very well-regarded in his (highly competitive) field. With the retreats he is now taking, I believe he will be able to take it to that next level that he has been aspiring toward.

Henry Ford said, “The more you think, the more time you have.” Business success is definitely not all about just working hard. We know where that leads all too often: burn out. And sometimes total breakdown and failure.

Taking time to reflect about your business will actually free up time because you’ll come up with ways to be more authentic and more efficient, ways to get more done by using your company resources effectively, etc. You’ll create more time because you’ll find the courage to let go of the products or services or customers that are not really right for your business, and you’ll have the insight to take on ones that will take you to the next level.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes, from George Bernard Shaw, one of the most famous writers of his time:

“Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

A client of mine gave me permission to share this story with you from a recent coaching call that we had. Details are of course changed to protect confidentiality.

My client, let’s call him Mike, has had interns working for him for the past few years. It’s a great way to keep his payroll costs lower (he pays them, but not a lot) and gives a younger person great experience in their new field.

Mike’s most recent intern, “Josh,” has worked with him part time since the beginning of the year. Josh has a professional degree and working with Mike has given him some valuable real world experience in his chosen field, and hopefully a good reference, as well.

Josh had another part-time job to make ends meet. My client had work lined up for him this summer, but just this week, on a day when he was expecting Josh to come to work, he got an email from Josh instead with the subject line:

hey

His message was that he had the opportunity to work full time in food services and so would be stopping his work as an intern with Mike. He thanked Mike and said eventually he would pursue an advanced degree in their field.

You have probably received a few emails like this, often from people in their 20’s (as Josh is), very informal, casual spelling and grammar – the kind you’d typically send to a friend. But, hey, at least he didn’t resign via a text message!

Mike, being the brilliant client of mine that he is, did NOT respond by email. He has Josh’s last check and intends to wait for Josh to come in to pick it up so they can have a little chat about how you resign in a professional manner. Mike is a great guy and a true mentor of young people. He wants to help Josh and will kindly let him know that sending an email is not a professional way to resign from a job and is not very likely to get him a glowing reference from Mike.

On the other end of the continuum is Mike’s secretary, Claire, a competent professional in her early 60’s. Mike was getting complaints from his other employees that Claire was unfriendly towards them, although she had impeccable manners and friendliness toward the firm’s clients.

When Mike sat down to discuss this with Claire, she talked about how she was trained not to speak personally with her boss or other employees. That was often the case 30+ years ago when she was starting out her career, but now the workplace has become less formal and a some friendly interaction with co-workers is the norm.

Mike had to let her know that it is in fact highly desirable that she engage in some informal chit chat with her co-workers. He assured her that he was not worried about any of them losing focus and not getting enough work done.

As is often the case in business (and life), somewhere between two poles lies the best course of action. Ask yourself where you fall on the informal/formal continuum and make some simple adjustments if needed. This can go a long way to improving your professional relationships.

Because, hey, let’s face it, it’s a balancing act.

It’s in the news this week that Newsweek Magazine is for sale. Although I confess that I don’t read Newsweek with any regularity, the mention of it always catches my eye because my grandfather, Thomas John Cardell Martyn, originally founded the magazine in 1933. Clearly, I inherited his entrepreneurial instincts (and also his nose).

However, I don’t talk very often about my grandfather because while he was able to do impressive things in the business world, he failed at what I believe to be one of life’s biggest achievements, one that makes any business success look unimpressive in comparison: My grandfather was a lousy father.

After he left Newsweek, my grandfather for all intents and purposes abandoned his family and went to South America to pursue various business endeavors. My grandmother essentially raised my dad and his sister as a single parent. It was not that acceptable to divorce in those days, and raising her family by herself was not an easy task. My father’s sister, my aunt, never spoke to her father after she left home and refused to speak about him with anyone for the rest of her life.

My father dutifully kept up a letter writing campaign with his father as his father lived out his days in southern Brazil. But the impact on my dad was very deep and, in my view, essentially crippled him emotionally. Of course the result of this wounding affected the kind of parent he was to me and my siblings, as well the kind of husband he was to my mother.

So when you get down to it, I don’t care if you are Donald Trump or Bill Gates and have a ton of money in the bank and all sorts of business accomplishments in your “win” column. What does all that matter if you are a lousy parent, an absent spouse, or if your friendships run fast and shallow? It’s that old question about: what do you want them to write on your gravestone: “I wish I had spent more time at the office” ?

Fortunately, having good relationships is a lot more important for many people these days. Most people want to leave a legacy of healthy, positive relationships with partners, children and friends.

This is an especially hard challenge for entrepreneurs. We have to marshal all our strength, intelligence and heart, as well as tap all the help available in order to achieve a healthy balance and not let our business completely take over our lives. The price is too high. In fact, our businesses have a better chance of succeeding if we don’t become completely obsessed and unbalanced, and shortchange the personal relationships in our lives.

Newsweek may go the way of the dinosaur, but my grandfather has left his legacy. He could have done better.

What will your legacy be?

As a small business owner, you must remember that your employees are not your friends. Don’t get me wrong – of course you want to be friendly and create a relationship based on mutual respect and trust. But so many small business owners fall into the trap of treating employees like friends (or worse yet, hiring family or friends – but that’s another topic!).

It’s not easy taking on the role of “boss.” Unless you have been an entrepreneur from birth, you had a few bosses before you started your own business, so you are well trained in being an employee, not a boss. When it comes your turn to be the employer, it can feel pretty uncomfortable, especially when corrections need to be made and negative feedback given.

One of my clients was quoted this week in the Wall Street Journal on this issue.
Before she started her business, 2 Hounds Design Inc., a manufacturer of designer dog collars, Alisha Navarro had a boss who invasively monitored employees’ activities. So when Alisha started her own company in 2003, she was intent on using a different management style.

In the WSJ article it says, “But Ms. Navarro admits her hands-off approach has backfired on her at times. “I have an intense need to be liked by everybody, which translates into trying to deal with problems in the workplace indirectly rather than directly,” she confesses.”

In fact, with some help from me, Alisha has come a long way in “toughening up” and becoming a stronger (though still nice) boss. If a nice southern girl like Alisha can do it, so can you.

In providing small business consulting services to entrepreneurs around the US and Europe, I am constantly helping clients deal with employee issues. Let’s face it, it’s one of the hardest aspects of running a company, and not nearly as fun as creating new products or services. But your team is your fortune, so take the time to get better at managing them and you will be well rewarded.