Small business ethics

April 16, 2014 8:00 am ,

While talking with an attorney friend of mine, our topic of discussion was about professional behavior in the marketplace. She reminded me that attorneys have very specific ethical and professional standards that are published, plus a well developed monitoring organization, complete with sanctioning authority.

The story is quite similar for CPA’s, architects, medical doctors, or any securities representative such as stock brokers, financial planners, etc. Much of the behavioral track these professionals run on is pretty well spelled out for them. Not that the members of these groups need to be led or coerced into good professional behavior. It’s just that, when in doubt, they have published guidelines with which to refer.

Small business owners operate in the same marketplace as the so-called professionals. Indeed, they are often our clients and customers. We serve the same businesses and consumers as other professionals, plus we enter into similar relationships, contracts and agreements. And we often find ourselves perched precariously on the same horns-of-a-dilemma as other professionals. But here’s the difference: The Universal Small Business Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics doesn’t exist.

Small business owners, like all humans, ultimately behave according to their own moral compass, sense of fair play and inclination to deal in good faith. When we find ourselves in a quandary over how to respond to a difficult situation with a customer that is in the gray area of a contract, we’re on our own. When we are faced with an ethical issue that would challenge King Solomon, there is no sanctioning body or support group to dial up, or to whom we can email a “scenario.”

There are many ancient codes small business owners can turn to for behavioral guidance in the marketplace, such as the last three of the Ten Commandments. But in terms of a handy guide, I think philosopher and 1957 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Albert Camus, may have given us the best ethical vector when he wrote, “Integrity has no need of rules.”

Wise small business owners know that life is much simpler, and exceedingly more rewarding, when we just do the right thing.

Posted in: Business Ownership, Customer Care

The greatest challenges of small business owners today

April 14, 2014 8:00 am ,

Ask any small business owner how business is and even those who honestly report, “It’s great!” will also likely say, “But we can always use more.”

Knowing this about the heroes of Main Street, to find out what’s really going on you have to ask the way we did recently in our online poll: “What’s the greatest challenge for your business right now?” Below are five options we provided, the responses, and my thoughts.

It was surprising to learn that less than 10% reported “Finding qualified people” was their big concern, which was down from past surveys. Some sources estimate there may be 4 million positions going wanting for qualified candidates, so my speculation is that this change has more to do with the economy than talent supply.

And it was interesting that less than 10% of our sample were troubled by Obamacare impacting their HR strategy, also down from past polls. Perhaps the fear factor has diminished since the president delayed the employer mandate to 2015. We’ll see if this response changes next year.

According to Dr. Bill Dunkleberg, Chief Economist for the NFIB, who’s polled small business owners for 40 years, their single greatest concern over this period has been taxes and regulations. But when we offered this option in our poll, only one-fourth of our folks chose it. Since taxes and regulations have actually increased in the past five years, the next response represents what it took to knock these perennial pains off the top.

The big number in our poll came in at 58% for, “We need more sales.” This response has to be juxtaposed over another response we’ve received for the past five years, which is that consistently three-quarters of small businesses feel they’re operating in a stagnant economy. At this stage of a recovery, the economy should be growing at 4%. But when you see this response from the sector that creates over half of U.S. GDP, it’s not difficult to understand why the economy has barely averaged 2% growth per year.

Response to the next option supports the previous one. Only 3% said, “We need a bank loan.” For five years small businesses that survived the Great Recession did so by de-leveraging and learning how to operate more efficiently. Bank loans are the primary source of small business growth capital, but when the economy isn’t growing so goes business loans.

Wall Street, once the leading indicator of the economy is now merely a leading indicator of itself. The new leading economic indicator is Main Street. If you want the economy to grow, create conditions that foster small business growth

If the economy is the chicken, small business is the egg.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Management

Are you an Internet dynamo or a dinosaur?

April 11, 2014 8:00 am ,

Sometime during the spring of 1995, you and I were given access to the Internet for the first time.

Since then, related innovations have produced a new marketplace where businesses of all sizes turn prospects into customers in a virtual, parallel universe. Here is a short list of the significant innovations:

  • E-commerce – the ability to buy and sell online
  • High-speed internet replaced dial-up
  • Search engines indexing a gazillion online offerings
  • Mobile computing from convergence of mobile networks and smartphones
  • Social media transcending websites by connecting participants in online communities

After 10,000 years of the traditional marketplace, these innovations have at once produced unprecedented opportunity and disruption in less than 20 years. But here’s good news for small business: Part and parcel with the new capability is the incrementalization of virtual resources, which means they’re available in units and pricing that fit our focused (niche) applications and diminutive budgets.

We wanted to know how well small businesses are adopting the handy and affordable virtual marketplace tools, so in our online poll we asked: “How much of your sales can you attribute directly or indirectly to your online strategy?” Here’s what we learned:

Only 5% of our sample reported that 100% of their business resulted from an online strategy, while double that percentage said they did “more than half” of their business in the virtual marketplace. Just a few more, 12%, allowed that they got “about half” of their revenue from the Cloud, while our big group, 55%, said “less than half” of their business came from the Internet. And finally, almost one-in-five said the Internet produced “zero” business for them.

It’s good news that 81% of our respondents are experiencing some business from their online strategy. Twenty years after the telephone was introduced in 1877, I wonder how many businesses had adopted that proto killer app?

But another way to look at small business’s virtual marketplace adoption is that almost three-fourths of our folks still associate less than half of their business in any way to an online strategy. Sadly, that troubling news could foretell the unnecessary extinction of way too many small businesses.

After almost 20 years, customer expectations are increasingly evolving in the direction of more virtual interaction. Which way is your business trending?

Don’t act like a dinosaur – execute an online strategy.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Mobile Strategy, Online Content

Find work you can love

April 9, 2014 8:00 am ,

Whether work is a blessing or a curse depends on what you are working on and your attitude about it. James Matthew Barrie, the Scottish novelist said, “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”

Many hard working entrepreneurs were once unproductive employees, but now, with their wagonhitched to their own star, work is the stuff of their dreams. Many productive employees – once unsuccessfully self-employed – now understand the blessings of employment, and become the most valuable of resources: the entrepreneurial employee who loves his or her work.

Work feeds our stomachs with food and our spirit with accomplishment. Work creates, produces, energizes and fulfills all things humans need for survival and happiness.

If work is not a blessing for you – whether owner or employee – the problem is not work itself, but the work you are doing. Lebanese novelist, Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Work is love made visible.”

Life is short. Keep searching until you find work you can love. I did.

Posted in: Entrepreneurship

Business planning will always be relevant to success

April 7, 2014 8:00 am ,

The Age of the Customer is disrupting and making obsolete many older practices, but not the requirement for business planning, especially cash flow.

A business plan is the result of thinking, researching, strategizing, and reaching conclusions about how to pursue opportunities. It may exist only in the head of the planner, but it’s better when written down.

Whether elaborate or simple, a written business plan is an assembly of facts, ideas, assumptions, and projections about the future. Here are three ways to use a written plan:

  1. To document the due diligence on a new business or the future of an existing one.
  2. To evaluate opportunities and challenges, and compare them with your strengths and weaknesses.
  3. To assist when getting a bank loan and essential when courting investors.

So how does a static, written plan work when a business is always in motion? It works when you turn your plan into planning. A plan is like a parked car; planning is taking that car on a trip.

Planning is measuring your business motion against the baseline of assumptions and projections you made in your plan. Planning allows you to see how smart you were when the plan was written, or where your research and assumption skills need work. It also highlights external forces you face.

Written business plans often become collateral damage during challenging economic times. But you can’t allow planning to meet the same fate. Indeed, when things slow down there is even greater need to check your position than when things are rockin’ and rollin’.

Here is a critical two-step planning activity that is the heart of a business plan and the essence of planning. Beginning with these will help you operate more successfully anytime, but especially when things are slow.

1. Build a 12-month cash flow spreadsheet in a program like Excel, so you can project and track the monthly relationship between cash collections and cash disbursements from all sources. This planning tool will provide a rolling picture of cash flow in any given month.

2. Look at the “Ending cash” number at the bottom of each month’s column. A negative number in any month means you’ll need to add cash from sales, reduce expenses, add cash from another source, like a bank loan, or some combination.

A banker once told me that if I could bring him only one financial document with a loan request it should be a 12-month cash flow projection that included both how the borrowed cash would be used and the debt service. I always listen to my banker and you should too.

A business plan is important, but planning is essential.

Posted in: Age of the Customer, Future Thinking

It’s good to be a business owner

April 4, 2014 8:00 am ,

The military has produced many acronyms, one of which is RHIP, which stands for, “Rank Has Its Privileges.”

RHIP is the unofficial way to point out when a person accrues some benefit by virtue of their position. Mel Brooks’ character said it another way in his comedy “History of the World” with, “It’s good to be the king.”

In that spirit, here’s a new acronym for small business owners: OHIP, which stands for “Ownership Has Its Privileges.” Let’s look – sometimes with tongue-in-cheek – at a few business ownership privileges.

By virtue of being the owner, you have the privilege of working all you want. That means you’ve earned the right to work half-days. And as an added bonus, you get to choose which 12 of the 24.

If you so choose, you can brand the company with your name, which can be pretty rich ego food. But it also helps a plaintiff’s attorney – the one who represents the customer who “slipped and fell” in your business – to identify at least two of the co-defendants in the lawsuit: the legal entity and its founder.

When getting a bank loan, almost all small business owners are afforded the high honor of signing their name twice on loan documents. Having perfected the belt-and-suspenders approach, banks provide you with this special moment to acquire not only the business assets as loan collateral, but also your personal estate as a double guarantee.

But seriously folks, as Mel Brooks might say, here are a few real ownership privileges.

Structure your small business as a Sub Chapter S Corporation (S Corp) or a Limited Liability Company (LLC), both non-tax-paying entities, and accrue the benefit of having business income or losses pass through to shareholders or members, respectively. These two legal entities are handy because personal tax rates are typically lower than corporate rates, plus you avoid double taxation of dividends. Additionally, S Corps and LLCs allow owners the privilege of sheltering personal assets from liabilities that may befall the business.

Finally, there is something I call the stealth benefit of business ownership: owning the real estate your business operates in and leases from you.

For example: John Jones owns the property at 21 Enterprise Blvd. and leases it to John Jones, Inc. John receives rental income, tax advantages and asset appreciation. Plus, as long as it can be justified, John can raise the rent instead of giving himself a pay raise because, as passive income, it avoids payroll tax.

So are you taking advantage of all of the “privileges” of business ownership?

It’s good to be the owner.

Posted in: Entrepreneurship

A little knowledge can make you smile

April 2, 2014 8:00 am ,

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond, and cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.– Mark Twain

After all these years there has been no one to compare with Twain, and the light of his wisdom has not dimmed.

No matter what we do or where we go, owner or employee, and now more than ever before, we must continue to study, train, and learn. Everyone in your organization. Everyone. Everyday. Lifelong learning.

Are you feeling threatened these days – maybe even frightened – because of all the changes brought on by the advent of the information age? Me, too. Sometimes it seems we’re like Alice – we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in one place. And in our Wonderland, everything is changing so fast that what we learn today may be obsolete tomorrow.

The irony is that the thing that is creating so much potential for anxiety – technology – is also the thing that can help you stay competitive. And the unprecedented wealth of information available on the Internet is a two edged sword: one side cutting for us, and the other for our competition.

When I feel threatened by all of the new information and capability that’s emerging, I just make a point to learn something new, with emphasis on e-commerce, or the Internet, or how my industry is adapting to the virtual marketplace. And when I acquire that new understanding or capability, I smile like Alice’s Cheshire Cat.

Learning makes me feel stronger, as if I’ve gained a little ground in the marketplace. Maybe today I’ll put the heat on somebody else.

Advantage: Me.

Give it a try. The only thing better than your garden variety smile is one that comes from knowing that you just got a little smarter.

I have to say, however, cauliflower does not make me smile.

Posted in: Future Thinking

What kind of seller are you? Hidebound or Visionary?

March 31, 2014 8:00 am ,

Since 1993, control of the three major elements of your customer relationships—product, information, and buying decision—has been shifting from business to customer. As you may remember, I’ve identified this shift as a marketplace transition from the original age to the new one—the 10,000 year-old Age of the Seller is being replaced by what I call The Age of the Customer®.

As this shift plays out, two types of businesses—Hidebound Sellers and Visionary Sellers—currently exist in parallel universes, but not for long. Which one are you?

Hidebound Sellers

These companies are so invested and entrenched in the old order of control that they deny the reality in front of them. They can be identified by the following markers:

• Misplaced frustration: As performance goals get harder to accomplish, frustration makes those who deny the new realities think their pain is caused by a failure to execute.

• Bad strategies: It is said that armies prepare for the next war by training for the last one. So it is with Hidebound Sellers. Not only do Age of the Customer influences make them think they’re being attacked, but they persist in using Age of the Seller countermeasures.

• Destructive pressure: Convinced of execution failure, pressure brought to bear by management results in an employee casualty list instead of a growing customer list.

• Equity erosion: Defiance in the face of overwhelming evidence sustains the deniers only until they run out of Customers with old expectations, and their equity and access to credit are depleted.

Visionary Sellers

These businesses are adjusting their plans to conform to the new reality of more control by customers. Visionary Sellers are identified by these markers:

• Acceptance: They accept that the customer is now in control and make relevance adjustments to this reality.

Modern sales force: They hire and train their sales force to serve increasingly informed and empowered customers.

• Technology adoption: They offer technology options that allow customers to find, connect, and do business using their preferences.

• Relevance over competitiveness: They recognize that while being competitive is still important, today it’s just table stakes, and is being replaced in customer priority by the new coin of the realm: relevance.

In The Age of the Customer, Hidebound Sellers are dinosaurs waiting for extinction. Visionary Sellers are finding success by orienting operations and strategies around a more informed and empowered customer.

So what’s the verdict? Are you Hidebound or Visionary?

Posted in: Sales

Some thoughts on certainty

March 28, 2014 8:00 am ,

As we conduct the due diligence on what’s next for our business, we seek the information that will help us acquire knowledge and create conditions that minimize the risks and maximize the opportunity. After all, we want to be as certain as possible that our next step is the right one, don’t we?

That’s an interesting word, certain. Webster says it means fixed, settled, determined, not to be doubted. But it’s a word that isn’t often found in business plans.

The 19th century president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, said, “All business proceeds onbeliefs, or judgment of probabilities, and not on certainties.”

What do you think the marketplace – indeed, the world – would look like if business had been built more on certainties than beliefs? I think we would probably be closer to holding a stone ax on our hand than a smartphone.

It’s important to understand that on the entrepreneurial scale, each of us resides somewhere between the foolhardy and seekers of certainty. The challenge for entrepreneurs is to know when to seek certainty and when to move forward with our beliefs.

No position on this scale is better than another – the world needs all kinds of entrepreneurs. But understanding where we reside on the entrepreneurial scale helps us make better business plans.

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Future Thinking

A community bank is not a little big bank

March 26, 2014 8:00 am ,

Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks were the parents of the 2008 financial crisis. But one-size-fits-all reform reaction to the crisis by Congress and regulators is turning Main Street banks into collateral damage, as if they were too-small-to-matter. Here’s why anything that unnecessarily burdens community banks should concern every small business owner.

At the end of 2012, there were 7,092 banks insured by FDIC, of which 6,201, or 87%, were community banks with less than $1 billion in assets. Banks are classified by asset size, and the average community bank has just over $200 million in assets. By comparison, two big banks – Citigroup and Wells Fargo – are each the size of all 6,201 community banks combined.

Small business owners don’t care much about a bank’s asset size. But they care very much about certain bank characteristics that manifest uniquely in a community bank as its special sauce – relationship banking. To a small business owner a community bank…

… is locally owned and managed.

… takes into account a business owner’s character when making loan decisions.

… decides small business loans by a local committee, not credit scoring by a computer.

This definition is important because, by definition, all small businesses are undercapitalized. How this translates out on Main Street is that sooner or later, and more often than not, small business owners will need to avail themselves of a community bank’s special sauce.

According to the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), even though community banks have only 20% of all bank assets, and hold less than 20% of total deposits (FDIC), they make almost 60% of small business loans. This tracks closely with our own research. In a recent online poll we asked small business owners about their banking relationship and 53% told us their primary bank, including for loans, was a community bank.

A recent FDIC study confirmed that community banks serve all Main Streets: Of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., about 20% are represented only by community banks.

Bank loans are the largest source of growth capital for America’s small businesses, which just happen to create over half of the U.S. economy and employ over half of its workers. Consequently, regulating Main Street banks the same as Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks puts in jeopardy America’s small businesses and the economy.

Small businesses and community banks are the twin pillars of America’s Main Street economy.

Posted in: Banking
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