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Do you have a business question that you would like to bounce off of an objective coach? Just post a comment here and I’ll pick one or two daily to discuss!

Chalk Talk: Small Businesses and Scalability

The Wall Street Journal’s “Fast Fixes” feature had a great article today about Stella & Dot’s use of contractors to help manage rapid growth. For most small businesses, scalability (i.e. the ability to handle growth) is a problem because a spike in revenue can wreak havoc in ways that wouldn’t even phase a mid-to-large business. Let’s say you own a $3M business and all of a sudden you land a large client (e.g. the US Government or a Fortune 500 company). The client places an order for $1M of goods or services, which is a spike equivalent to 33% of your revenue. For your larger competitors, this spike might not be anything more than a blip. For you, though, it could have disastrous consequences. Without adequate planning, your quality and delivery will suffer, affecting the relationships with both your new and existing clients.

Loading up capacity before you have the business is a sure recipe for bankruptcy, but at a minimum you should have a plan in place to handle sales spikes. Contractors are an excellent short-term solution. Long term, you’ll need W2 employees to provide sustainability, but identifying a number of contractors who can help you out in a pinch is great advice!

The Wall Street Journal calls this “outside the box” thinking; I disagree. This is Business 101. Jessica Herrin of Stella & Dot wisely applied a sound principle, and she was appropriately rewarded!

Grow Strong!

Coach Grev

Chalk Talk: 3 Best Ways to Win a Corporate Client

This was a great how-to article that I ran across today in the Wall Street Journal. Very simple ideas, and in some ways obvious, but hopefully it might inspire you to break some of your inertia. Sure, there are downsides to corporate clients (take a long time paying, might be very demanding of your limited resources, your company may become too reliant on 1-2 clients for revenue, etc.), but they do great things for your business in terms of credibility, sustainability, and revenue. Landing corporate and government clients has been part of our own marketing plan for quite some time, and several of these ideas have borne fruit for us. The article lists 3 ideas, but provides an important 4^th idea in the second paragraph – registering on the supplier diversity websites of very large companies and – if your business is minority or women owned – achieving certification through a number of groups.

Enjoy the article and use the ideas!

Grow Strong!

Coach Grev

Chalk Talk: Customer Service = Company Value

Your company’s value comes from your customers, especially your repeat customers. Whereas your employees are your most important ASSET – your business value is solely driven by customers. No customers, no cash flow. If you have few repeat customers, your future cash flows are harder to predict, and therefore the value of your business is reduced. As the Kruglak brothers of Genesis Security Systems said in this Washington Business Journal column, “Keep an unrelenting focus on the company’s customers.”

Customer service is one of the big areas where a small business differentiates from a larger business, so how do small businesses blow it? Micromanaging and the fear of giving bad news.

Fear of Giving Bad News: Your customers are planning on you to deliver, and when you don’t, it can cause many other problems for them. If you tell them the bad news, at least they can plan alternatives. Yes, they may still be disappointed with you, but they will likely be FURIOUS if you promised them that you would meet the deadline and you gave them no opportunity to plan alternatives. Good-bye repeat business, good-bye referrals, hello bad press!

Micromanaging: if you are somehow involved in every transaction in your business, then when things get busy – or you get injured and have to go to the hospital – the flow of information to your customers gets constrained or completely shut down. This is what happened to me this weekend – the owner of a small manufacturer suffered an accident and – since his cell phone is the company’s phone -- all communication with his company stopped.

So, tell your customers the bad news sooner rather than later and implement sustainable business processes in your company so that customer communications occur independently of you. If customers are used to dealing with you, then train them to begin working with your staff. As a bonus, here are some insights from today's Wall Street Journal about how entrepreneurs use Twitter to support customer service.

Grow Strong!

Coach Grev

Chalk Talk: The 10 Stupidest Tech Company Blunders

Although there aren't any explicit business leadership lessons in this article, I loved it for its rich look-back on technology deals that happened and didn't happen. Some of these are so good it's almost worth changing the names, changing some of the details, and packaging them as case studies for business school students to see how they would respond.

I urge you to not say the words "how stupid could they have been?" I'm sure in most cases, there were competent managers trying to make great decisions. Maybe not in the IBM deal, but even there we don't get enough of the details to make an objective assessment.

Enjoy the article and learn the overall lesson. Technology is a game changer. Most times it doesn't go anywhere (ask any venture capitalist), but sometimes...

Grow Strong!

Coach Grev

Ask the Coach!

Do you have a business question that you would like to bounce off of an objective coach? Just post a comment here and I’ll pick one or two daily to discuss!

Chalk Talk: WSJ article - "Start-Ups Share Space to Shave Costs in Slump"

Last week’s Wall Street Journal had a nice article about a subject near and dear to my heart – co-working. It’s a concept that I use for my business, as do many of my clients. The DC/Northern Virginia owners of Intelligent Office are clients of mine, just as my business is a client of theirs. Not only do they provide both permanent and temporary office space (including conference rooms), but they also provide what is – in my opinion – the much more valuable service of “support.” From having a live receptionist answer your calls, to having someone plan your meetings, manage your calendar/e-mails, send out thank-you cards, etc., Intelligent Office provides a level of support that would otherwise require that you hire someone full-or-part-time. Now, ideally your business would grow to the level that you would need to hire an administrative/executive assistant, but until that point, companies like Intelligent Office will provide a level of service that will enable you and your staff to focus on what you do best – execute and grow your business – rather than spend your valuable time on administrative work. It’s important to note that this service works even if you have your own office – the receptionist/administrative support is available regardless of your physical location.

Enjoy the article, and think about how you can incorporate co-working into your business to either save money on staff/rent or become more effective by freeing up your time to work on your business.

Grow Strong!

Coach Grev