Small Business Minute By Greg Weatherdon

            As business owners, we sometimes forget that every employee can have an impact on sales in our organizations. (TWEET THIS) For example is the shipper receiver courteous to all who present themselves at the loading dock? Do those customers have a pleasant experience that reflects favorably on your organization? There’s nothing worse than going through the sales process only to drop the ball at the last step. Are All Your Employees Motivated To Sell? Are all your employees trained and rewarded for generating leads? Do they let you know about that new b… Read More

            One dreaded and often neglected aspects of being a business owner  (Tweet This) and managing employees, is the annual performance reviews. Although you’re well intentioned and sincere in your desire to perform this exercise in a timely manner, most of us just end up forgetting about them or, because we never get around to preparing the formal review, we just keep putting it off, much to the frustration of the employee. Is this the right attitude? Absolutely not! But it happens all the time. So why is that? Well, as with many HR related issues, few of us a… Read More

            Being a great leader is about helping others achieve, it’s not a position, it’s an attitude and anyone can be a leader, no matter where you are in an organization. Great leaders work hard and are humble. Great leaders are empathetic and they have an uncanny ability to see around corners. Great leaders engage and empower their people. Tweet this! Great leaders act as coaches and mentors, There is this great saying I once heard and it goes something like this: “When I talk to managers, I get the feeling that they are important but when I talk to leaders I get th… Read More

            Entrepreneurship is currently all the rage. It’s the Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s the magic elixir that will fix everyone’s problems and so many people are spending hours daydreaming about the life they will enjoy once they get into business. Unfortunately for the uninitiated, going into business is very hard work and for the most part the reality of being in business doesn’t come anywhere near your dreams. So if you’re bound and determined that being a business owner is on your horizon, you need to have one important ingredient- Passion.… Read More

One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face doesn’t have anything to do with revenues or expenses, but has everything to do with achieving that elusive goal of Work Life Balance. Starting a business requires a total commitment and dedication over an extended period of time because overnight successes are very rare. Fortunately for most of us, we are blessed with a significant other who is willing to support our ambitions for extended periods of time but we must also live up to our end the deal and this is the challenge. If the world was right, we should be able to have equal parts work a… Read More

Successful entrepreneurs rarely engage in the Blame Game. The Blame Game is when anything negative happens it’s always someone else’s fault and never theirs. You see at the end of the day, we make the decision to proceed down a given path even when we’ve consulted or solicited input other professionals. And once we have gathered as much information as we think we’ll need, it is then we make the decision to proceed or not proceed. The operative word is “we”. Right, wrong or indifferent “we” make the decision and as a result we must wear the consequences of that decision. Blame someone else Of course … Read More

            Successful entrepreneurs have long learned that identifying internal deficiencies can increase profitability far more quickly than the chasing new ideas. These owners do not like waste. Wasted time, wasted effort equals wasted profits. Doing something over again because of carelessness, doesn’t sit well with them. We’re all human I’m not talking about the occasional mistake, heck, we’re all human. What I’m talking about is those recurring situations where individuals are just not paying attention, like sending a technician o… Read More

Growth for the sake of growth is a dangerous strategy for most small businesses. By making revenue generation the prime mission of the company, it fails to take into account how the rest of the organization will execute the product or service delivery of the increased sales. Risks Assuming that everything else in the company will expand naturally as revenue grows, is wishful thinking. A small group of people can do amazing things when necessary, but as a company grows the need to add additional staff. This risks destabilizing a cohesive group as new personalities are added to the mix. Addition… Read More

  At one time or another, many owners are faced with a business that has stalled out, and often it’s a simple matter of a sluggish economy and with a little patience things recover and growth resumes. Look under the hood For others though, their business has just plateaued and are at a loss as to how to regain their rhythm and push through to next level. When this happens, the first place I look is under the hood of the business. Is it structurally sound with the right people in place to go to the next level? In other words is the company ready, willing and able? In many situations all the elements are in plac… Read More

Nothing undermines your professionalism more than using one of the many free email services available today. Being in business is hard enough. On a daily basis we are faced with numerous challenges that keep us awake at nigh.  We struggle to take our business to the next level and yet we penalize ourselves by not taking care of some of the simple no brainer activities. Domain based email Domain named email is nothing more than having a company based email address instead of joesmith@gmail or @yahoo you have joesmith@yourcompany.com Registering a domain is a simple process handled online. Ma… Read More

One of the hardest skills business owners have to learn is Networking. People regularly comment on how adept I am at networking and it usually makes me chuckle. Yes I can network now with relative ease but it wasn’t always that way. I used to hate it! The high school dance all over again It wasn’t that long ago that I would absolutely dread going to a networking event, as I would spend most of the event wandering aimlessly through the crowd pretending to be looking for someone or worse stand at the back or the side scanning the crowd hoping to see someone, anyone I knew. It was the High Schoo… Read More

Going into business is easy, running a business is hard and until we get in it we don’t realize how very hard it is. Oh sure we talk a good game by telling people that we know it will be difficult but that the hard work will pay off in the long run. The reality is, we haven’t got the foggiest idea of what lays ahead. For those of us who have made it with most of sanity in tack, it is said that, much like childbirth, that if we knew how hard it was going to be, we would probably never have attempted it. Entrepreneurship is the loneliest job I constantly tell people that being self-employed is one of the loneliest jo… Read More

Validating your idea, is one of the best pieces of advice I can give start-ups as well as existing business owners. This one item should be at the top of your to do list if you’re considering starting a new business or thinking of adding a new product or service to your existing operation. You may think it’s a great idea and all your friends and family nod their heads in agreement, but frankly they don’t matter. The only opinion that counts is those people you want as customers. It’s their opinion that matters, so get out in front of them during the concept stage, to see if there is any interest, would the… Read More

  Building a business is hard work and not for the faint of heart. It’s where Survival of the Fittest rules the day. In an effort to be one of the survivors, many small business owners make the strategic error of trying to make everyone their customer. In other words, trying to be everything to everyone. Although the idea is forged on their belief that having everyone as their customer, will allow them to maximize their revenue when in fact it actually works against them. You see the more specialized you become, the more intimate knowledge you gain on your subject matter. This in turn, allows you to so… Read More