3 Tips to Help Entrepreneurs Keep Focus on Driving Big Picture Success

Far too often, entrepreneurs accidentally hurt the growth of their businesses through good intentions by focusing too much of their energy on work that does not need it. This work includes many small and menial tasks that entrepreneurs often choose to perform themselves in the name of efficiency and displaying multitalented competence. But while being competent in many fields can be useful to entrepreneurs in getting their businesses off the ground, some of these fields, such as cleaning and repair work, are better suited to somebody else’s time. Those individuals who sit at the heart of a company and make it successful should devote their time to increasing this success, not fetching office supplies or dealing with plumbing problems.

Core Entrepreneurial Work vs. Everything Else

The problem is that entrepreneurs tend to want to be self-sufficient as much as possible. And in the early days of a business, this is entirely rational.  When a company only has three employees it makes sense for each of them to divvy up the tasks to whoever is able to do them.

But once a business moves beyond its initial startup days it is important that business owners keep their jobs and the work thereof in perspective. Entrepreneurs are in charge of tasks that, when done correctly, can bring in significant dollars in profit to the business with each completed instance. This includes things like negotiating and closing contracts and talking with clients about company business. This is the high-level work that entrepreneurs should be focused on, not on tasks that some one else can perform more competently.

3 Tips to Quit Compromising Time Well Spent

1. Load Important Work into a Productive Time Slot

Everybody does his or her best work and is most productive at a certain point in the day; and this time is different for each person. Some people are early risers who work best in the morning at the start of their days. Some are night owls who hit their stride shortly before going to bed. Entrepreneurs are no different.

The key for entrepreneurs, though, is to find this golden time in their day and plan their work accordingly. If you know when you’re going to be at your best then save your most important work, the work that only you as the business owner can do, for that time. Don’t waste it taking out the office trash and organizing your inbox.

2. Outsource Small Jobs by Hiring Help

The high-level work that entrepreneurs should be focusing on can run in value anywhere between $100 and $1,000 an hour. Meanwhile, the smaller jobs that eat up an entrepreneur’s time like cleaning and organizing, are $15 to $20 an hour jobs at best. So rather than devalue the business owner’s time to this level, it makes more sense and ultimately costs less to simply hire on people specifically to perform this lower-level work.

Hire a personal assistant to take care of all of the fetching and organizing work that an entrepreneur may otherwise need to do. Virtual assistants are a cost efficient option and may prove to be a great solution. They can handle many small tasks.  For any repair work, or cleaning, hire a professional – it pays to get the job done right.

3. Quit Dwelling on Efficiency

This may seem counterproductive, but too much of a focus on planning an “efficient” day every day can hurt an entrepreneur’s work in the long run. More often than not business owners try to increase their efficiency by filling every small gap in their schedule with some new task, even if it’s not necessarily worth their attention otherwise. They end up making themselves busier just for the sake of being busier. If you’re busy because you honestly have a lot of important work on your plate, that’s fine, but don’t give yourself more work just because you’re afraid of seeming inefficient.

It’s okay to relax without guilt now and then. It’s okay to have some free time in your workday to clear your mind of stress and psyche yourself up for the next important task. If the work that you do is worth $100 to $1,000 an hour, some empty time in your schedule here or there is permissible. And if it helps you to do that work better, free time is put to better use with relaxation than with adding more unnecessary stress.

7 Check Points for Improving your Email Campaign.

According to research, email marketing remains consistently ranked the most effective digital marketing initiative with increased budgets forecasted for 2015.

Here are 7 key tips to help you get more success from your email marketing:

Know your Legal Limits

Before beginning any type of program, the absolute most important step is to understand legal requirements and ramifications. There are regulations that, if not abided by, can lead to budget-squashing penalties. Marketers are not able to use misleading, untrue, or deceiving subject lines or header information. They must also mark all emails as advertisements, and always include the business' location in the message. These emails must also have unsubscribe or opt-out opportunities. This allows recipients to stop future emails from a company. Understanding the laws involved in these programs should precede any advancement in email marketing efforts.

Don’t Over-Send

Email marketing can deliver immediate and measurable results. This can lead many entrepreneurs to up the frequency, in hopes of increasing their ROI. Unfortunately, it is easy to send too many emails, which can lead to diminishing returns. A large number of recipients unsubscribe from email lists, simply because they receive too many messages, or emails are not relevant. 

Keep your Email List Tidy

There are always emails that never make it to a recipient's inbox. This can be due to email deactivation, a full inbox, or a blocked IP address. While bounce rates of up to two percent are fairly normal, anything more can suggest a problem. Regularly clean up email lists, and look for the cause of problems. Emails that are never delivered are never read, and will never lead to a sale.

Measure Performance

Measuring performance can give marketers an edge. It helps to find opportunities, as well as identify problems. Always measure open rate, click-through rate, and conversions. An open rate refers to the number of messages that were opened, divided by the total number of messages delivered. Click-through rate is found by dividing the number of clicks on a link by the total number of emails that were opened. Lastly, conversion rate is the total number of people who took a desired action. This may include purchasing goods or services, or filling out a lead form. Conversion rate is found by dividing the number of sales or leads by the total number of recipients who opened the message.

Optimize Campaigns and Techniques

There are countless opportunities to optimize marketing efforts, especially in email. Marketers tailor subject lines, body copy, and calls to action for each unique audience. In addition, the time of day and day of the week can affect the success of a campaign. Consider reaching out to optimization professionals to help improve the effectiveness and success of a campaign by integrating proven optimization techniques.

Never Stop Being Engaging

To keep readers engaged, marketers must constantly change and alter their tactics. In many cases, recipients sign up to take part in a single promotion, like a product discount. Other users may sign up accidentally, if email subscription was a default option on a website. For these users, emails were not actively wanted, and can become nuisances. On the other hand, those who had intentionally subscribed may get tired with the content a marketer puts out. To keep them interested, it is important to tweak and adjust messaging, promotions, imaging, and other key elements.

Check your Appearance

Servers, computer settings, and other factors can completely change the way an email looks. Depending on a user's resources, various and unexpected alterations can happen, such as text changing location, or images not coming through.

To avoid these mishaps, take the time to ensure code translates to basic processing systems. If needed, leverage the help of a technical professional, or a reputable marketing firm.  Professional help can also assist to advance, promote, and optimize a campaign to deliver superior results.

Business Culture Basics: 5 Tips to Cultivating a Culture that can Impact your Bottom-Line.

The phrase business culture has generated a lot of buzz in recent years, and while some may write it off as just another example of corporate jargon, it can be an important concept for businesses to address. If you need proof that business culture is more than just some meaningless thought experiment, simply look at all of the uber-successful companies that have made business culture development a priority. IBM, Apple, Google—these are companies that have invested a great deal in developing corporate culture—and you can see where it has gotten them.

Study after study has confirmed exactly that corporate culture can make a bottom-line difference. A Harvard study has shown that more than half of a company’s operating profits can be traced back to its corporate culture. In other words, this is not just an HR or a morale concern, but something that sets the tone for what kind of success your business is able to develop. An investment in corporate culture is an investment in the future of your brand, period—in higher sales, higher employee retention levels, lower marketing costs, and more.

Here are 5 steps that companies can follow as they seek to develop their business culture:

1. Decide on what that culture should be. When it comes to establishing the culture of your business, you don’t have to feel bound by what other companies are doing, but rather, you can really take ownership of. What’s the difference between companies with strong, robust cultures, and the ones without? Often, it’s a simple matter of those former companies deciding on the kind of culture they wish to possess, and then moving forward with it.
2. This, in and of itself, may sound like it is easier said than done. The key… Keep it authentic. If you try to force unnatural values on your business, it’s only going to cause friction. Impose a culture that flows naturally from your products and services, from the makeup of your core team, even from your own personality traits.
3. An important step in the cultivation of business culture is getting it down on paper. You do not necessarily need a formal ‘statement of culture’ for your brand, but you should have some written collateral that provides some insights into what your corporate culture is. Your company’s mission statement, or its vision statement, should denote the objectives and values that your company holds dear—and of course, that points toward the nature of your business culture.
4. Involve members of the team—to an extent. You don’t necessarily want to take the committee approach to this, because doing so could result in a hodgepodge of ideas, or a culture that doesn’t necessarily hold together in a cohesive fashion.  However, your company culture will more likely work out if you take into account the needs, values, and personalities of your team members.
5. Create positive and motivational rituals. Rituals and mile-markers can help you to really formalize and codify your cultural values. For example, maybe your company buys lunch for employees on their anniversary dates, or offers incentives for sales quotas exceeded. All of this reflects your corporate values, and thus your corporate culture.

An important facet of sustaining company culture is hiring people who seem like they will fit right into it. When making hire, look beyond on-paper credentials. Also consider how well the person’s personality will fit in with your business culture.

One thing to remember as you build your culture, it is not necessarily set in stone—and trying to keep it static can prove counterproductive. You should aim for consistency while also remembering that businesses evolve—which might mean modifications need to be made to maintain a positive impact as the business grows.

Assessing the Potential of a New Business Venture

Got an idea and trying to weigh up the risk vs. investment vs. chance of success? Taking the time to analyze the strength of a new business idea can help you determine if and how you wish to proceed in bringing that idea to life.

Analyze the feasibility of the idea

While you may have a terrific idea for a business venture, feasibility will determine whether this idea can actually be executed effectively. For instance, if the idea requires millions of dollars worth of equipment, or knowledge that you do not possess, it will become difficult to make it happen. However, if the idea requires little to no equipment and is in a field in which you are already familiar, the chances for positive outcomes increase. Be realistic in assessing all the working mechanics and opportunity variables that make the difference between presenting roadblocks and providing a clear and focused path to success.

Consider the demand

Prior to investing time or money into an idea, it is important for any entrepreneur to take an analytical approach to the situation. It is often hard to look at an idea objectively, particularly when convinced it is a great one. However, a completely fair and balanced approach is a must in order to ensure that the entrepreneur does not end up wasting time or money.

For instance, while a person may love the idea of creating makeup for dogs, if no one else wants to buy this product, then it will become a waste of time and money. Instead of just assuming that there is a huge demand for makeup for dogs, it is necessary to take a step back and do some research. Talk with people who own pets. Would they buy makeup for their dogs? Is there already a makeup line for dogs that exists? If it becomes clear that there is a real desire for this kind of product and that it does not exist yet, move forward with the business. However, if the marketplace is already cluttered with similar ideas, or there is simply no interest in such a product, move on.

The Dos to Differentiate

What already exists in the business arena that you wish to operate; and how are you going to make your business stand out from the competition? Take the time to analyze your competition as a means to determine your best practices and fit in the marketplace.

Key questions that will help you build your points of differentiation:

• What is the immediate market for your business?
• Who will be your immediate customers? How will you reach and attract them?
• What kinds of products does the competition sell? Do they have a diverse line or are they single-focused? What is their pricing structure? Their customer service practice?
• How will your business impact the market in a new way? How will it stand out from the competition?
• What kind of team do you need to build to ensure quality operations at all levels of the business?
• What will be your point of difference from the competition and how will you maintain your unique position?

Taking the time to take a focused look at the competition, and how you plan to take your stand against the competition, will help you get clear on which way you wish to proceed (or not) with your business idea.

Easy Tip Offs to Tune Up your Marketing Plan

Marketing is never an exact science. Although there are common guidelines that all marketers and companies should follow, every audience and every business is different. The best way for the latter to interact with the former depends on many different factors and can often change over time.

The result of this is that every company, even the firmly established and successful ones, has room to review and fine-tune their marketing initiatives.

Here’s a few quick and easy “biz tip offs” that any company can apply to their own marketing endeavors, whatever their marketing plans may be.

Opt for Original Content Over Reposts

When it comes to online marketing, content holds the key. This is especially important to remember when it comes to social media marketing, a major trend and powerful tool for businesses everywhere.

As Forbes online marketing writer Jayson DeMers asks, why would a company want to share another brand’s content when they can share their own? As DeMers points out, research on online content marketing has shown that “created posts – as compared with shared posts – receive far more viral reach, organic reach and engagement than those that are simply shared.”

This, of course, does not mean that companies should take credit for content that they did not create. Instead, it means that companies that take the time to create their own blog posts, photos, social media messages and so on will experience drastically improved marketing attention as a result.

If you’re not sure what content to create, you can still take pointers and ideas from other companies’ content.  For example, if you read a breaking relevant news article on a news website, don’t just repost it. Instead, write your own take on the story and reference the site that you heard it from. Your audience will appreciate a fresh voice on a subject more than they will your ability to copy and paste.

Follow and Favorite Content Sharers

Once a company has created and released social media marketing content to their audience, this does not mean that they are done and can forget about it. Companies need to keep track of how their target audience reacts to, and shares, this information.

One great way to do just this while also gathering more followers for the company is to follow individuals who share and repost the company’s content. As content crafter Belle Beth Cooper explains, taking the time to show appreciation to marketing audience members is a great way to entice them to follow the company even closer in the future. It will also help boost a company’s reputation amongst audience members as a business that pays attention to them and takes an interest in what they have to say.

Double Check Consistency

With any type of marketing endeavor, online or offline, consistency is an important consideration. A lack of consistency is also one of the easiest marketing mistakes to make without noticing, which is why all businesses should take extra care to make sure that they are presenting a steady marketing image.

To help companies with their marketing consistency, Bozeman Daily Chronicle marketing writer Doug Weber advises companies to double check that they are using the same tagline throughout all of their promotions and a color scheme that is consistent across their brand. It is also important that companies use the same logo, or family of logos, in each of their marketing efforts. The more consistent the marketing, the better idea customers and other audience members will have of who the company is and what it does.

Stop Marketing to Unprofitable Customers

At first glance this can sound like counterproductive advice. After all, ignoring customers to chase profits is an easy way to paint a company as cold and uncaring, a reputation that will definitely not help marketing efforts.

But on closer inspection, this advice proves sound. After all, if a company stops spending time and money marketing toward customers who do not respond well to their advertising, then they will have more resources to direct toward those customers who do.

Top Line or Bottom Line Growth: How to Decide which Strategy for your Business.

Growth and development boils down to one simple factor – sales. Business growth means more sales made, and sales are also what fund business development. As such, any business looking to grow, spread, and succeed needs to focus on its sales and how best to make bigger sales, more sales, or both.

When it comes to development, though, there are a number of ways that sales can be increased. One important distinction to make is whether a development strategy works to increase sales top line or bottom line.

Top Line vs. Bottom Line

Top line and bottom line refer to the direction and method of sales growth initiatives in a business. Depending on the type of business, one of these strategies may prove more appropriate and effective than the other.

•      Top Line – A company’s top line refers generally to its gross revenue and/or sales. In other words, top line sales for a company refer to the amount of sales being made. For most businesses, improving the top line means getting more customers in the door or on the website. This typically leads to a greater number of sales being made.
•      Bottom Line – A company’s bottom line refers to its net income and profits. It takes the top line, the number of sales, into account, but also subtracts any expenses that may be taking away from those sales. For many businesses, improving the bottom line has less to do with generating higher numbers of sales and more to do with decreasing the amount of expenses taking away from these sales. In other words, it means creating a more beneficial sales-to-expenses ratio.

How to Decide Between Top Line and Bottom Line Growth

Both top line and bottom line growth are important and can obviously prove beneficial to any business’s development efforts. However, companies generally achieve the best results when they focus their efforts efficiently on one direction or the other with an effective strategy.

Factors in Making the Decision

Before a business decides on which path of sales growth to pursue, they must first consider a number of different and important factors. These factors are as follows:

- The amount of money available in the company’s development budget

- The number of customers that the business is currently receiving 

- The business’s current conversion rate between customer visits and sales made 

- The amount of time that the company has to achieve their development goals 

- The overall objectives that the company plans to achieve with their development strategy

Creating a Strategic Plan

With these factors in mind, businesses should then establish a development plan that follows the direction which best suits their situation. Creating and reviewing this plan is critical before implementing any new growth strategies, particularly as you will need some way to measure the effectiveness of your strategies once you implement them. If you haven’t set clear steps toward clear goals, then you may not know if your plan is working or not until it’s too late.

Out of all of these factors a business’s development budget is one of the most important. A lot of bottom line improvements can be made relatively cheaply with the right strategies. Top line improvements, meanwhile, often mean implementing more or bigger marketing strategies, which can eat up a company’s budget more easily.

Another of the most important of these factors is the timeline that a company has to work with. As a strategic factor, time has the opposite effect on top and bottom line strategies as money. While bottom line improvements tend to be less expensive, they do take a good deal of strategic thinking to be able to identify areas where the customer-to-sales conversion is least efficient, how it can be made more efficient, which expenses can be cut or reduced, the effects this will have, and so on. In comparison, top line improvements usually take much less time, as strategy is often reduced to simply pulling in more and more customers.

What’s the Bottom Line?

Both top line growth and bottom line growth can benefit any company that undertakes them. How much benefit they bring, though, depends on the company involved. Before diving into a development plan, take the time to examine which of the two will prove best for your business’s situation. Then focus your development plan on just one of these two areas and watch your sales growth increase much, much quicker.