Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

SMB Group Interviews KikScore – Why Small Businesses Need Help Demonstrating Trust Online

I met the fantastic Laurie McCabe at the Small Business Summit in New York last month.  Laurie and her partner Sanjeev Aggarwal run the very influential market research company, the SMB Group, that focuses on studying the small and middle market business.  Laurie alone has over 20 years of experience in studying this market and conducting in-depth studies and competitive analysis.  The SMB Group is only growing in influence as a research group that knows the ins and outs of the Small Business space. In fact, Laurie and Sanjeev just last month authored the 2011 Impact of Social Business on Small and Medium Companies. Earlier this year they published the 2011 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions and have a number of other studies coming out soon.

Just one of the many great items that came out of the Small Business Summit was that Laurie wanted to sit down with Mike and I to learn more about KikScore and how KikScore helps small businesses take information about their reputation and track record of reliability and trustworthiness and display that to shoppers and leads so the small business can sell more.

We want to say thanks to Laurie and Sanjeev for sitting down with us on this podcast.  Please check the KikScore interview (and the other great podcasts too) here.

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Top Ten Reasons Small Businesses Fail, part one: Procrastination

Procrastination

You’re only as good as your word. Missing deadlines, arriving late for meetings, forgetting to follow up or follow through – these are all symptoms of procrastination, and key factors of Small Business failure.

As a Small Business owner, operator or employee, you cannot afford to slide down procrastination’s slippery slope. Since word of mouth is the most effective low cost marketing strategy (and a rich source of revenue and referrals), you must be perceived as someone who:

1. Keeps their word
2. Honors their commitments
3. Values their customers’ and clients’ time

You may be familiar with the expression “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail“. Here is its procrastination-related corrolary: “If you fail to show, you show to fail“. Free yourself of the voice in your head, which is telling you some variation of the following: “I work for myself, therefore:

1. Noone is the boss of me
2. I set my own schedule
3. My time is my own
4. Why must they nag me – I’ll get it done (eventually)”

The phrase “it’s only time” is a complete falsehood: time, to a great extent, is all there is. As an independent entrepreneur, or as an employee, you either bill for time directly, or the time required to perform your task (or make your goods) is a major factor in your compensation. Time is, in many ways, your most valuable asset.

Timeliness is also an aspect of quality, which is a perception in the client’s or customer’s (or employer’s) mind, NOT an objective quality of the work performed or goods created. As a computer service professional, a hard-won lesson is that the job isn’t done until the client perceives it as done. I could have fixed it weeks ago, but if I wait for weeks to tell the client, only at that moment is it done as far as they’re concerned.

And let’s face it — the person paying for the job, not the one performing it, is the one who must be satisfied. Don’t take too long to understand that, if you want to stay in business…

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Facebook and Twitter: Parallels and What Can SmallBiz Learn From Them?

According to Cnet, Twitter is disorganized. Now I’m not entirely sure the article is true, but I figured that I could trust Cnet and since they included a link to a Fortune article it looks like it checks out. So, what’s going on with Twitter? Some claim they don’t, exactly, know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of speculation going on, such as some higher-ups spying. Cnet seems to speculate that Twitter is trying to emulate  The Social Network. That’s probably not the case. So, what’s really going on with Twitter?

So, Twitter has trouble amongst the higher ups. That’s not surprising. Many startups seem to have that happen especially during a meteoric rise. Remember Facebook? There was some serious chaos going on at Facebook a couple of years ago and Facebook was about the same age as Twitter is now.

However, the difference between Facebook and Twitter is that some argue that Twitter lacks a powerful visionary heading the company. Facebook has Zuckerberg, who, practically, built Facebook according to his vision.  Observers claim that Twitter does not have that. Facebook has apparently learned from it’s mistakes and has become a stronger company. Twitter is trying to get there, but some may be fearing that it doesn’t look like anyone wants to take charge.  In some ways, Twitter’s investors seem to have more influence over what the company does.

Twitter’s problem seems to be that there are too many men (they’re all male) in positions of power and from the outside at least not a single one of them has been willing to take charge. There are other issues that Twitter has to deal with too, such as the need to sustain growth, prove themselves as a sustainable revenue generating company etc. However, these issues are common for nearly every young company.

Is Twitter a service that is being kept afloat by a trend?  From the outside some say it looks pretty unstable and this management issue could distract it further. Like any company, Twitter needs practical and strong leadership. However, whoever takes that position will have to deal with another problem: balancing Twitter’s malleability, where it’s users decide what they want to do with it and what Twitter’s users want out of Twitter.  That will ultimately prove whether Twitter can succeed.

So, what can a small business learn from all of this?

First, that it’s important to have a clear plan and vision of where your company is going.

Second, make sure that there is someone who is clearly in charge and providing leadership as we discussed in a previous post about 10 leadership traits in a startup or small business.

Third, know that problems will happen. Almost nothing goes smoothly when running a business. Factor that in when making plans.

Lastly, in tough times work to pull teams together to focus on the future rather than start finger pointing about what happened in the past.  Here is a prior post we did on building the right team at a startup that discusses the importance of having a good team at your business.

What do you think about all of this?

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

The Magic Behind the Thin Mints: What We Can Learn from the Business of Girl Scout Cookies

It’s a familiar scene: a group of elementary-aged little girls set up a card table in front of the local Giant with every intention of guilting you into buying a box (or three) of Tagalongs or Samoas.  Okay, we might as well admit to ourselves that we wanted those cookies anyways.  But what is it about those Girl Scout cookies that keep us coming back for more?  What may seem like a couple of innocent girls selling door to door is actually a hugely successful $700 million cookie empire.

Here are some simple tips for applying the strategies behind Girl Scout cookies to your own businesses:

1. Make your brand recognizable and familiar. There are hundreds of thousands of independent Girl Scout troops across the nation.  Yet, customers know exactly what to expect when they open a box of Girl Scout cookies.  The packaging, the pricing, and ultimately, the quality of all Girl Scout cookies are uniform across the nation.
2. Keep up with the times. The organization has recently unveiled the Girl Scout cookie app for the iPhone.  An organization that is so historic gets bonus points for embracing a society where customers automatically assume that “There’s an app for that.”  The Cookie Finder app makes it easy to locate places where customers can purchase Girl Scout cookies.  Which brings me to my next point….
3. It’s all about the convenience. Even though concerns for the safety of young children have slowly eradicated a door-to-door selling culture, people don’t typically have to look too hard for another box of thin mints.  Girl Scout cookies still tend to find you, whether it’s at a local grocery store, or through an order form at a Girl Scout parent’s office.
4. …Except for when it’s not convenient at all. Girl Scout cookies are not available in stores.  Nor are they available all year round.  The only place to buy them is directly from a Girl Scout (or her parent, when he or she inevitably brings that form into the office).  When customers know that they can’t just stop by the store for another box, they will inevitably start stocking up for the year.
5. Appeal to the goodwill and emotions of the public. The Girl Scouts of America is an organization that is widely recognized for its part in empowering girls across the country.  The mission statement cites goals to build girls of “courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.”  People are more likely to support a business that they believe is doing good deeds.  Of course, there’s also the fact that sometimes it’s just hard to refuse that little girl.  And that might just be the Girl Scouts’ greatest advantage.

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Your data IS Your Business: Dynamic data

In my previous post on data protection, we discussed the three types of Small Business data:

1. Dynamic data
2. Active data
3. Archive data

There are different methods required to best protect the different types of data your Small Business depends on. Note that I said “protect“, and not “backup” you data. Backing up your data is the most important part of protecting it. But steps must be taken before and after backup to make sure the process actually provides protection, and not just repeated activity.

Before backing up your data, you must determine two things: 1) which data will you backup? and 2) how frequently will you backup that data? The answers vary depending on which of type of data we’re considering.

After backup, the most important questions are: 1) how long will you keep that backup? and 2) how many different versions of this backup do you want, and why? These questions, no doubt, are answered differently, based upon the type of data being considered.

Dynamic data, being the most important, comes first – it’s what your Small Business is working on right now. Today’s email correspondence, the document that will become an email attachment as soon as it’s completed. Even your web browser bookmarks have a greater business impact than you might realize. It’s “Dynamic”, after all: you must have the current version of whatever document, diagram, link or bookmark you depend upon for your Small Business to compete and function effectively.

The fact that is often overlooked by Small Businesses is that dynamic data not only has to be backed up, but backed up dynamically. Last night’s version of a file you’ve been working on for hours is no help if your computer’s disk dies, or you corrupt or overwrite the file. Scheduled nightly backups are fine for protecting active data, but to protect your dynamic data, you need more frequent backups.

The problem with this suggestion is that you are simply not going to perform  six, eight, ten or more backups a day… you’re too busy running your business, and the backup process is too complex and involved to justify the distraction and disruption. Fortunately, this issue has been confronted by the huge mega-corporations’ IT departments, given a name – Continuous Data Protection – and more importantly, they’ve given us a solution.

What you need is a program that will backup your dynamic data either at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the day, or as the data actually changes. Or one that does both, like IBM Tivoli CDP for files. Now, while I do prefer to recommend Open Source software when it provides the best solutions for your Small Buiness, sometimes, the best solution is a commercial product.

With IBM Tivoli CDP for files, you can:

1. back up all your dynamic data, both on a schedule and whenever it changes.
2. backup to as many as three different locations, for extra protection.
3. start protecting your data instead of spending hours learning how to setup the program.

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Ever Wonder Why Small Businesses Need Internet Merchant Accounts? – This Post is For You!

What is an internet merchant account? It’s an account that allows you to have customers enter their credit card information directly on your website.  This means that customers don’t have to call, mail or fax their orders in.  When customer’s credit cards are accepted through an internet merchant accounts, they are immediately processed. An internet merchant account is only used for online transactions. If you have a regular merchant account, you will need to get an internet merchant account if you want to do online transactions. An internet merchant account provider such as North American Bancard is a one option to look into when searching for a provider.

Why do you need an internet merchant account if you already have a merchant account? Internet merchant account rules and regulations differ from merchant accounts.  You cannot process internet orders through a merchant account; you need an internet merchant account for this.  Since the merchant almost never sees the customer’s card, there are more stringent rules and regulations to protect against fraud for internet merchant accounts. To get started with an internet merchant account, it’s best to get one from a merchant account provider such as North American Bancard.  Why should you get an internet merchant account from a merchant account provider? The providers know the rules and regulations and can help you navigate the system.

How much does it cost? An internet merchant account costs the same as a mail/telephone order account.

What if you are using electronic checks? If you want to accept electronic check orders, you will need a separate internet merchant account called an electronic check internet merchant account. You will still need a regular merchant account.

Why is it beneficial to get an internet merchant account? If you do most of your business online, it is beneficial because it is a safe and easy way of allowing your customers to pay online. Internet merchant accounts are especially beneficial for small business who do most of their transactions online. Do you sell jewelry online? Then you might want to think of getting an internet merchant account. Using an internet merchant account means that the process of paying for a product or service will be faster than phone/fax/mail orders, which means happy customers!  Also if you have an internet merchant account, your business seems more reputable because your customers will know that their transactions are safer.

If you are using or have used an internet merchant account, what is your experience with it?

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Your Data IS Your Business

Even if your firm or organization doesn’t “do computers” by trade, computers are probably more important than you realize to your Small Business.

A lot of key information that was once kept in metal filing cabinets and on cardboard Rolodex cards is now more easily and accurately stored on computers.  Large amounts of information – data, in geek-speak – are stored primarily – if not exclusively – on your Small Business computers. E-mails. Electronic documents of all kinds: contracts, proposals, invoices, resumes, receipts. Contact information for clients, vendors, and other business associates.

To avoid finding yourself and/or your Small Business exposed to the sudden loss of critical, irreplaceable data, you’ve got to determine what is important data, and make certain you protect it. A blog can’t identify all of your critical data for you, but it can help you discover what the three main categories of business data are, and get an idea of the best methods for protecting each.

1. Dynamic data
2. Active data
3. Archive data

In short, there’s the information you’re working on right now (Dynamic data), the information you consume and create in the course of working (Active data), and finally the information your store for reference and compliance purposes (Archive data).

Dynamic data is stuff like: your email Inbox; the draft of a proposal to a potential client; digital photographs newly transferred from your camera or cell phone for business purposes. This data may be so new, it isn’t in it’s finished state. Should you lose it, you’ll most likely be unable to reproduce or precisely recreate it.

Active data is more stable, but no less important. It’s information like your central contact list – with all the important names, addresses, emails and phone numbers (you do have one, yes?); templates for the often used documents that are particular to your Small Business or tradecraft; your QuickBooks company file(s), financial spreadsheets, bank account information; access information for the essential online accounts – URLs, login IDs and passwords. Digital scans of physical items and documents.

Archive data is the information you may no longer actively use or consult, but still need to have readily available. Tax and other financial information. Old emails, completed To-do list and calendar information. Old contract agreements. Former employee data.

None of this information (except the QuickBooks files, of course) are specific to any program. Or any particular computer platform – Windows, Mac or Linux – for that matter. ALL of this and more make up the vital, mission-critical data most Small Business don’t even realize they depend upon. Until it’s damaged, or it disappears.

In the next post, we’ll discuss how to protect your Small Business from exposure to such risks by learning how to identify the data in each category, and adopt simple methods to protect against loss or damage.

See you soon.

Cornell Green is Your Open Source CIO, premiering his guest blog for KikScore. Visit him at https://opensourcecio.blogspot.com

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Show Shoppers Your Online Business Can Be Trusted: KikScore Your Trust Solution

PROBLEM: Online Small Businesses lose billions in dollars a year in sales because shoppers do not know if they can trust those small businesses.

SOLUTION: Trust Seals – But which one?

It is established that small businesses, especially ones just starting out, can have a difficult time conveying to the public that they are trustworthy and reliable.  As a result, small businesses often lose significant sales because of this concern that the public has.  One of the primary ways that small businesses address these concerns is putting a “trust seal” on their website.  The trust seal is supposed to denote that a third party validation has occurred in some way and that third party therefore “vouches” for that small business so shoppers can then trust that business.  There are many trust seals out in the market that do different things and some of the providers of those seals include Verisign, TRUSTe, BuySafe, Trust Guard and the Better Business Bureau.

So we at KikScore often get the question: Why should a small business use KikScore and how is KikScore different than the other trust seals?

This post is not going to bash other seals, but there are critical differences between the KikScore seal and other seals that are on the market.  This post points out those differences and is meant to educate the community about why these differences are important.

1) Empowering Small Businesses To Show Their Track Record – A fundamental concern that shoppers have is can they trust a business?  Many businesses and business owner have an actual track record of reliability in paying their bills, having a strong financial history, reliably delivering products and services and historically being responsive to customers. Typically that has been built up over years of being responsible, reliable and trustworthy in the market.  So isn’t that track record work something? We say YES!  KikScore allows small businesses to take their own great track record and communicate it to the world and visitors to their website.  No one else allows a small business to take their business history and communicate that to the world so shoppers can get more comfortable with that business.

2) Promote Your Own Brand Not Another Company’s – A lot of other trust and verification seals do much more to promote their brand name on your website than actually assist in promoting a small business.  This is especially the case with some seals with lots of money behind their brand name that are widely recognized. Again these may be good trust seals that have a limited purpose, but they each miss out on a critical element to the trust equation.  They essentially are saying their brand name is more important to have on your website that your own brand name. At KikScore we do not believe that is the case. In fact, our seal is structured to take extensive amounts of information about the small business itself such as the management team’s names, their financial reliability, business policies, locations and website information and promote that information rather than our own brand name. We do this because we feel that information is more important to a website visitor or shopper in their determination of trustworthiness of a website.

3) KikScore is a Multi-Dimensional Trust Seal – Some trust seals try to do and message different things to the public. For example, some seals check for certain types of malware, some collect comments, some convey that an secure connection (SSL) is on the website, etc.  KikScore deliberately leaves those tasks to other folks because again in some instances those functions serve a purpose.  Those seals/services are, however, typically a one-dimensional service that only communicate that a small business website site gets a periodic and limited security scan.  You should note that based on our extensive information and first hand experience those scans can be helpful, but by no means are comprehensive and historically have not caught major pieces of malware that have resulted in some recent data breaches. KikScore’s seal actually incorporates all of these seals in our Certifications tab in our merchant report card, called a KikReport, in addition to providing the other wealth of information about a small business, its management and website history. Taken together this creates a multi-dimensional seal unlike others in the market.  This multi-dimensional seal allows small businesses to have one comprehensive seal that addresses the trust and reliability equation from a variety of angles.

4) Give Shoppers Dynamic and Continually Updated Information About Your Business – As small businesses know, their historical track record for reliability and trustworthiness always is being updated with new data and information as more transactions occur and a business grows.  Kikscore’s seal addresses this by being dynamic and continually updating a small business and their merchant report card (KikReport). The KikScore seal is set up to continually be updated and our own databases and data providers are scanned constantly for new information about a small business site.  So for example, when a small business website’s traffic increases meaning that business may be growing, that is reflected in the KikScore seal and the KikReport.  Also as a small business becomes more financially viable, that also gets reflected in the KikScore seal too and again helps demonstrate trustworthiness and reliability to shoppers. We do this, others do not.  Most other trust seals are static meaning they do not update information presented on a seal besides perhaps a change in the date of a scan that is performed – otherwise other trust seals just present static information.  That static information really does not do a lot to help address the issue of building trust for small businesses.

5) You Get a Unique Trust Score for Your Small Business –  Unlike anyone in the market, KikScore takes information, data and merchant provided information, analyzes that information and presents to the public a completely unique and dynamic trust and reliability score.  This trust and reliability score takes into account literally hundreds of data points and indications of trustworthiness in order to compute the trust score.  The trust score which in some ways is akin to a credit score except that the KikScore trust score is made available to the public so a small business can communicate to customers that they have a high trust score and therefore can be trusted.  Even better is that the trust score is based on data and information that is verified by KikScore through our systems and automated processes.

6) KikScore Helps Small Businesses Giving Wary Shoppers Transparency Into Your Business – KikScore attacks the heart of the trust issue for small businesses by giving small businesses a way to make themselves, their business and their management more transparent to shoppers.  We have seen that when shoppers are provided more information about an online business their level of comfort and likelihood of buying from that website increases.  Without this important transparency, sales are lost and shopping carts are abandoned.  Instead of empowering small businesses to provide this transparency, other trust seals merely provide a very small, isolated and static piece of information about a small business (a malware scan, etc). Those seals are just not comprehensive enough to fully address the trust issue.

7) Encourages Interaction with Your Customers – KikScore’s seal incorporates an interactive feedback platform within the seal.  This permits small businesses to interact in real time with their customers.  This also allows these small businesses to have other shoppers review the comments that are posted inside the KikScore seal about the shopping experience with that customer.  KikScore even incorporates these comments into the trust score for the small business.  One additional benefit of the interactive feedback platform is that it helps bring customers to the small business website to post comments instead of having those customers post comments on various unrelated sites around the internet like Yelp.  Now granted their are a few other seals that include comments sorting and response functionality, none of them have the comprehensive trust building solution that KikScore includes with the items listed in 1-6 before.

So I will leave everyone with the following:  We rarely and I mean rarely overtly talk about the KikScore product on our blog.  Instead, we use this blog to communicate with the community and provide valuable small business tips.  That being said, we thought that this would be a good time to take the opportunity to educate small businesses on the critical differences between KikScore and the many other seals that claim to address the trust concern that shoppers continually say are a barrier to buying more online.

We would love to know your thoughts on the differences we have identified.

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Always feel like you are short on time? Maybe you should take a pay cut!

I was reading this post on the Wall Street Journal blog yesterday and it really made me think about how some people I know always seem to be stressed out.  After reading this blog and thinking about it a little bit, I really agreed that more often than not it seems like people that make more money in their day jobs seem more stressed out and are always saying they wish they had more time for their personal lives.  While there are likely multiple factors at play in these situations that are making these people feel like this, it seems like there are now a few different studies that are starting to link higher rates of pay to a perceived lack of time in their work and personal lives.

According to this post, there are now multiple studies that have compared a group of people that are paid very little for a day’s work and then another group of people that are paid a much higher hourly rate for the exact same work.  The results of these studies showed that the people that were paid a higher hourly wage felt much more time pressure than the group that was paid less.

I thought that these studies were interesting because they really seemed to show a tangible link between a person’s perception of their value relative to the amount they are paid to complete a task.  Sometimes people put this time pressure on themselves only because of their pay and not because the pressure to complete the task really exists.

Looking back on it now, have you ever felt like you put too much pressure on yourself to complete a task for your business when this pressure may have never really existed?

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

5 Reasons to Go to Friday’s Small Business Happy Hour in DC

Our good friend of KikScore, the Swami Shashi B is organizing a fun night this Friday for small businesses in the DC metro area.  It will be a night of networking, learning, probably one or two tweets, maybe even some tweets while folks are networking and learning.  The networking happy hour is for small businesses in the area and it is at the fabulous Indique Heights in Chevy Chase, Maryland.   Indique Heights is also metro accessible and is located on the Red Line.

So for those who need some convincing here are 5 reasons to attend the small business meetup/happy hour.

1. You get your chance to have a drink with THE Swami.

2. It is a long three day weekend for many so you have an extra day to shrug off that hangover from too many Taj Mahal beers.

3. You get to celebrate an assortment of birthdays from Paris Hilton, Dave Klingler, Denise Richards, Michael Jordan, Lou Diamond Phillips, Cleveland Brown legend Jim Brown. – Ha I fooled you, all of these people were born on Thursday the 17th, but lets celebrate them on Friday!

4. Its Pluto-palooza meets Motley Crue – We can all celebrate the anniversary of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovering the planet Pluto in 1933 or better yet the anniversary of Pamela Anderson & Motley Crue’s drummer Tommy Lee getting married in 1995.  Fun fact by the way about myself. In 1992, as a part of my final exam in Aerobics 101 at Miami University, I had to lead an aerobics class to the classic Motley Crue song Kickstart My Heart!  Yes, the beats per minute for that song are insane and I nearly had a heart attack after the first 45 seconds!

5. Drinking red wine can cut rates of heart disease so do your part to help your heart!

So if you have a small business, startup or an aspiring entrepreneur or just want to join a good group of people for some drinks, we hope to see you there on Friday! Here is more information about Friday’s happy hour.

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