Ten Tips for Small Business Owners

Click here to see our membership packages or here to subscribe to our mailing list. Book for our next event here.

Our next event will be at Indigo Blue on 9^th November. The topic will be “having established demand and support for our product, what else should we do to ensure commercial viability”? This should be a familiar question to most small business owners. Once you have an idea, how do you put it into practice? What sets your product apart from others? What makes it unique? How are you going to communicate with your target market?

Take a look below at our ten tips for keeping your small business on-track, innovative and customer-focused.

1. Have specific goals. Break your big goals into small, measurable ones that are easier to obtain. Kn0w what you want, how you’re going to get it and how you’re going to measure success. This will keep you and your employees on-track and focused.

2. Be personal and tell stories.

3. Think carefully about layout, design and photography. Unfortunately, appearance does matter.

4. Do your own PR. People want to hear from you. Make it personal. Tell your story in the way you want it to be told. No PR firm is going to be as passionate about your product as you will.

5. Logistics are key. Customer expectations today have been heavily influenced by companies like Amazon, Netflix and Uber providing products and experiences almost on-demand, smoothly and intuitively. It’s no longer merely about offering the right product, you need to offer the right delivery service too.

6. Free shipping. Customers would rather that the price of the product include the extra cost.

7. Stay networked.

8. Bloggers are your friends. Working with influencers, bloggers, reviewers and journalists is important. This maintains a steady stream of referral traffic from your site, and establishes your product as unique and different. Each influencer will provide a different perspective on your product but also ensures that you target markets in which your product will be well received – they’re not going to promo something they don’t like, unless you’re paying them a lot of money.

9. Listen to your customers. Honest customer reviews provide the best feedback. Make sure you know what your customers like and dislike – respond to those comments and make changes. This will develop brand loyalty because your customers will feel valued. Your customers are the ones who will use the product so let them be your guide.

10. Use social media. It’s free! Everything you need to promote your product can already be found on your laptop, phone and/or tablet from video editing software to apps for managing your social media presence.

Find Out More

10 Things Your Employees Expect You to Know How to Do to Lead Them and Run a Successful Business - http://www.inc.com/thehartford/ten-things-your-employees-expect-you-to-know.html

Olympian Sally Gunnell’s exclusive tips for small business owners - http://businessadvice.co.uk/from-the-top/olympian-sally-gunnell-provides-some-exclusive-tips-for-small-business-owners/

6 Smart Budgeting Tips for Small Business Owners - http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/8323-small-business-budget.html

50 Tips for New Small Business Owners - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140617140953-7089637-50-tips-for-new-small-business-owners

Please comment below with your thoughts on running a successful small business. What would your top tips be? We always love hearing from you!

Event: Exit Strategies and Looking to the Future

We held our October event last night in TateHindle’s beautiful and unique headquarters in Smithfield Market. We’d like to say a big thank you to our host for a lovely event in such an inspiring setting and to all our guests.

Topic: Exiting a business.

Our hotseater was concerned with his planned departure from a business he established with a partner over twenty years ago. How should he manage that process? How can I be sure of leaving a business that will continue to thrive? The challenge for the exiting partners was to ensure an effective handover with the right people in place to take the business forward.

The discussion was wide ranging and passionate, covering everything from giving your people space to grow into larger roles, to how to delegate and manage working relationships so that your business continues to succeed after your departure.

Key insights included:

• People may learn better when you give them space to make mistakes – provide them with clear targets and guidance, rather than instruction.
• The ‘parent/child’ relationship needs to change. At the moment, the company is your baby. The aim should be to nurture ambition in those who are taking over so that you make it their baby.
• Create clear functional roles on the Executive Team so that they take responsibility for the future. And do it now!
• Identify the void you will leave and fill it before you go.

If you want to take part in a similar discussion or have an issue you would like to talk about, please join us at a future event or volunteer to be in the hotseat yourself. Please leave a comment below if you have any insights into this month’s topic!

Next Topic!

Join us at our next event, at Indigo Blue on 9th November, or sign up to our mailing list for more information. Our topic on 9th November will be 'Having established demand and support for our product what else should we do to ensure commercial viability?"

Our final event of the year will be at Devereux Chambers on 14th December. If you can’t make either of those dates our schedule for 2017 is already up on the website so take a look.

“Building a Better Working World” - An Interview with Imogen Hudson from Ernst & Young

Imogen Hudson started her working life as an insurance broker, before moving into management consultancy with Ernst & Young or EY 2 years ago. After moving through a number of roles, she found herself seeking a new challenge and was inspired when her brokerage firm worked with a consultancy, so much so that she decided to make a change. We talked to her about the challenges of changing your career, the value of networking in the management consultancy sector and the ideas behind Ernst & Young's “building a better working world” principle.

Tell us a bit about working for Ernst & Young.

Working for a big brand has its challenges and rewards. Having a brand stamp on you and being endorsed by a real global player is both a privilege and a responsibility. The company challenges and stretches staff greatly, and provides a difficult but stimulating environment to work with.  So it’s a balance; there are rewards and intellectual interest on one side, with the inevitable stress on the other.

Why do you do what you do?

I started working with a consultancy that came in to help the brokerage firm I was at and was inspired by them, the culture and the issues they were tackling. I like solving problems, fixing things and understanding how things work. And I guess I like helping people to make their businesses better.

What are your opinions on the value of networking in your sector?

In my specific sector, the biggest value that consultants can give is a third party perspective on a problem. The more perspectives you have, the easier it is to give advice and see a problem on the wider scale. Essentially, I need to be able to think about a problem more broadly, which comes a lot from talking to other people about their industries to broaden my own knowledge. Networking also helps with learning how to talk to a wide range of different people and learning to understand other industries quickly. It also provides me with loads of different reference points so that I can do my job more effectively.

EY talks a lot about 'building a better working world'. How do you feel businesses like EY can best work towards this goal?

That strapline has to fit for EY within a really broad range of business activities, covering the entire breadth of what EY does, such as both the consulting and audit sides, etc. It's about asking how can we make you function better as a business? How can we make your contribution to the world better? Improvement and change never happened without people talking to each other. Making big things happen, making big companies move, change and grow takes a lot of collaboration and understanding on all sides. It's about perspectives – how can we learn from other people to make you as a client better by helping you?

And finally, what was your biggest challenge when changing career paths?

I went from having a small team and responsibility to being stretched, pushed and challenged every single day. The better you get, the more and more you stretch and learn. It doesn't get more comfortable. However, I get to solve some really intricate and complex business problems and work with a broad range of clients on a frequent basis.

Click here to see our membership packages or here to subscribe to our mailing list. Leave a comment below if you have any more questions for Imogen or to share your opinion on the topics we talked about.

Our next event will be this week at TateHindle on 12th October. We hope to see you there!

6 Top Tips to Up Your Company's Social Media Game

1. Try to insert a call to action into the bottom of every post. This won't always be possible – the character limit on Twitter is often a barrier to this and you can't put links on Instagram posts – but the more, the better. Link to your blog or website, ask questions and invite comments. This allows you to generate further interest without coming across as a constant salesperson who's more interested in profit than customers.

2. Schedule your updates to post just before or after the hour. This targets business people like marketers, office workers and managers who check their social media just before or after a meeting. Sometimes it's all about the timing.

3. YouTube users should check out this post on the Gleam Marketing Blog explaining how to add a small light-box pop-up to your page, encouraging visitors to subscribe to your channel. All you need to do is add the following text to the end of your YouTube URL whenever you share it:

?sub_confirmation=1

4. Use aggregator apps like Tweetdeck to streamline your social media experience, viewing multiple accounts simultaneously without having to log in to each one separately. This saves time and helps to keep your content consistent.

5. Visuals are important. This might seem obvious but posts on social media that include some kind of visual element, either a photograph or video, tend to have a wider reach and invite active engagement with content. Make sure your visuals are relevant, consistent and prolific.

Think about optimizing your visual content with links – an image or video can act as a 'gateway' to more valuable content, such as your main website or blog. For example, place a link to your website in the description of a YouTube video or the profile section of your Instagram account.

6. Post with empathy. Be kind, polite and acknowledge others. Make sure to interact with your followers and other businesses – your social media accounts do not exist in a vacuum. Social networking is by nature designed to be interactive and it's most effective when you use it as a networking tool, rather than a broadcasting platform. This means letting them know that you're reading their posts by hitting the link button, sending them direct messages or retweeting/reblogging their relevant content.

More Information

20 Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-tips-pros/

5 Ways To Cross Promote Social Media Posts – https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/5-ways-to-cross-promote-social-media-posts

3 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Evaluate Your Audience – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-ways-to-use-google-analytics-to-evaluate-your-audience/

11 Creative Ways to Use Live Streaming on Snapchat, Facebook Live & More - http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/live-streaming-ideas#sm.001nxq8xi1ccgcowrmv1pdizwmz22

Click here to see our membership packages or here to subscribe to our mailing list. Leave a comment below to let us know your top tips for a successful social media presence.

Our next event will be next week at TateHindle on 12th October. We hope to see you there!

Event: Building Trust With Your Customers

This week was our first event of the Autumn term and was attended by a diverse range of London's business people from a multitude of different industries. We would like to thank Geri McAndrew and ButtleUK for hosting the event at their offices in Victoria.

This week's hotseat topic was building trust between a business and its customers in a unique way. For our hotseater, who runs his own, one-man financial consultancy, the core issue was whether there were different and more innovative ways with which to build trust with his customers.

Questions

In the exploratory section of the event (where the group asks questions in order to clarify the question and explore the issue) the questions included;

• How do you know when you have won a client’s trust?
• What is the profile of a typical client?
• What do you understand by the term 'trust'?
• Why do you do what you do?
• What separates you out from other financial advisers?

Ideas

Our attendees then discussed the issue and offered advice. Some of the highlights were:

• Identify your unique selling point – if you don't know what it is, then your clients won't be able to see it either.
• Your clients need to know that you care about them, that you understand their situation and that they come first.
• Genuinely listening to your clients is an essential tool to create trust.
• Get some really good feedback – what do clients think of you?
• Aim to show, not tell – this is what will ultimately drive trust between yourself and your customers.
• People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Conclusions

Our hotseater then reflected back to the group. His main conclusions were that he needed to focus on learning how to listen well and tell great stories in order to relate better to his clients.

The main takeaway from the event was that business is always about putting people first, no matter what industry you're in and that it is too easy to lose sight of that fact. When trying to build trust, it's important to be able to engage with your customers on a human level, to demonstrate that you can relate to and are interested in their unique circumstances.

An interesting outcome was that, in a discussion which looked like being about the ‘hard sell’ the group settled on the importance of selling the person, rather than the product. As one participant remarked “we succeed when we show who we are”.

Click here to see our membership packages or leave a comment below.

Our next event will be at TateHindle on 12th October. We hope to see you there!

How to Network Effectively (and Why)

Networking is a term that we throw around a lot in our working lives. It's one of those polarising things that people either really love or really hate. Or really love to hate. So what is networking and why is it important?

In the world of business, networking is essentially the process of connecting and interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional contacts. In other words, networking is about meeting and talking to people who you will be able to work with in the future, either collaboratively to create something new or to problem solve for one another.

If you want to be able to network effectively, you have to be able to ask your self not only “what can this person do for me?” but also “what can I do for them?” If you give as much as you take, then you can build up goodwill. It's up to you and your network to then keep that momentum going but asking 'what's next?”

A lot of people see networking as manipulative and as a necessary (perhaps even unnecessary) evil in the business world. This doesn't have to be the case. Good, effective networking is a symbiotic relationship; two or more parties connecting and creating genuine relationships to get things done.

Is all networking good networking?

It's a common misconception that all networking is worthwhile. Not only do you need to make sure that you aren't wasting someone else's time but also that they aren't wasting yours.

When it comes to joining networking groups, be discerning and never feel pressured to sign up. Some groups have a strong, solid purpose and others are scams, hitting up business owners for joining fees. If it feels right and you want to be a part of it, then jump right in. But if it doesn't, then it just isn't worth your time.

Making sure, going in, that you know exactly what you want and why you are networking in the first place. Don't do it just because you think you're supposed to; it's okay to break the 'rules' if they aren't going to be useful to your business.

Be a Connector

One of the best ways to build your network and to build your personal brand is to introduce people within that network to one another. Not only does this help to improve your relationship with those people – they feel valued and are far more likely to remember you – but it helps them to expand their own network. Often, those will be the people who will offer you work or help you out later down the line.

With this in mind, don't spend all our time in industry specific groups. Diversify the events you attend and the connections you make because you never know when you're going to want to diversify your brand or need that outside knowledge on a project.

Again, good networking isn't just about helping yourself, it's about helping others. Your experiences and knowledge should be as value to the people in your network as theirs are to you. Share you expertise, be nice to everyone and shelve your ego. When people see that you're interested in helping them, they're more likely to trust you and reciprocate.

Top Tips

1. Be authentic, genuine and trustworthy. Not only will this boost your reputation in the long run but people are more likely to work with you in the short term.

2. Consider what you can do for others as well as what they can do for you.

3. Know what your goals are and what you need to succeed.

4. Choose your networking groups carefully. If it doesn't feel supportive, then walk away.

5. Ask open-ended questions in networking meetings to open up the discussion and show members that you're interested in what they have to say.

More Information

How to network like you really mean it - http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/8-things-power-networkers-do-make-connections.html

How to network effectively - https://www.nytimes.com/ref/open/finance/OPEN-NETWORK-EFFECTIVELY.html

Create an effective networking strategy - http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/sales/sales-lead-generation/create-an-effective-networking-strategy