Best Business Books

Posted on May 18, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

Sometime back, the Wall Street Journal put out its list of the best business books, which we thought we’d repeat (along with a shameless plug for two of our companies), so you’d have it. Here’s the list:

1. The E-Myth, by Michael Gerber. This book has been in print a long time, and is a good tome on how to overcome fear in starting your business, but we have a free entrepreneurial questionnnare on our site (www.theasoe.com), which will  help you determine if you’re really right for entrepreneurship. And, a book summary is available on this book if you’re a subscriber to the CEO Reading Room at www.thesolutionsforum.com.

2. Who: The A Method for Hiring. One of the listed authors is Geoff Smart,who must be Brad Smart’s brother, because the book emulates Brad Smart’s hiring method, that A people will hire A’s, Bs will hire Bs, and so forth. What’s not mentioned is how a A or B is determined: we at ASE do it by profiling the traits that successful job candidates have, and hiring people that have the same traits.

3. Start with Why: Simon Sinek. Probably an excellent book, but Sinek’s short TED video is available all over the internet, and basically tells you everything you need to know about ‘why’ you’re in business.  Sinek might well have some good insights about hiring in his book, however. They’ve gotta believe in the ‘why’ if they’re gonna work for you.

4. The Art of the Start: Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki is very well known, and it’s probably a good book, but we maintain there’s only about 20% art involving in starting….the other 80% can be done by using our forumlae in our idea validation courses, cash flow courses and the implementation courses. Now this is about $87 in all, which is more that Guy’s book, but we might have higher success rates.

5. Little Bets: Peter Sims. The author makes a valid point, in that don’t wait around for a homerun idea….get out there and do even a little idea. If you look at the history of many entrepreneurs, many of them started other companies that may have had small ideas, but they worked, they got sold, and it’s on to the next idea. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started designing traffic software.

6. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: Verne Harnish. Good book, mostly about developing disciplined habits, like John D. Rockefeller, so one stays on track. Harnish is also a founder of one of the national CEO consulting firms, so he’s got credibility.

7. Street Smarts: An All Purpose Tool Kit for Entrepreneurs: Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingame. Brodsky is a serial, successful entrepreneur, and Burlingame is a well known business writer, so the book should be good.

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Lee Steele’s Tips for When to Post on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr for Max Effect

Posted on May 11, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

Lee wrote these in a blog earlier this week, and we’re repeating them. Lee cites an informative study that shows you when to post on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to the maximum exposure for your postings:

1. The best time to post on Facebook is 1 pm to 4 pm EST mid-week (not weekends, and not Monday-Friday.

2. The best time to tweet on Twitter is 1pm to 3 pm (EST) Monday-Thurs.

3. The best time to post on Tumblr is AFTER 4 pm EST, any day, especially Fridays.

Read the complete study at http://searchenginewatch.com/article 2173631/When-toPost-on Facebook-Twitter-Tumblr-for-Maximum-Effect-Study

Ed Note: Take Lee’s course E04 on Advanced Search Engine Marketing, too, for the fine points of how to do SEM.

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Evaluate Right, Hire Right Part Two

Posted on May 8, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

One of our blogposter rightly asked what our sources were for our conclusions that if a firm doesn’t evaluate its present employees correctly, hiring new employees based on this template is difficult, if not impossible.

Actually, when Julie Fletcher and I developed these two courses (A14 and E10), they’re original source material that Julie has used for years in her consulting practice. I added a few things to E10 based on my Solutions Forum practice of consulting business owners.

The point is, we know these profiling practices work, and work far better than other templates. We don’t know what our success rate is on the use of our templates, but we assume it’s pretty high, otherwise given our money back gurantee, we’d either hear about failures or be refunding some course costs, and we’ve done neither to date. We also know that people who don’t use the the profiling practices have a much lower success rate in getting the right employees and retaining them.

Sooo….depending on your situation (startup or established), take one of the courses!

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More Lending by Banks and SBA

Posted on May 8, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

Recently, there was an article on Entrepreneur.com that said banks were going to step up lending to small business. We have seen some movement in Phoenix by Meridian Bank, b ut the Entrepreneur article was rather vague about which banks might be lending and whether the terms had eased at all.

In the past, the only banks doing small business lending were the smaller banks, such as Meridian and MidFirst. These two seem to be relatively accomdative, but you still have to have a plan for the money (product introductions, capacity expansions, etc) and give a lot of documentation (usually three years tax returns).  And, we don’t know what worldwide conditions might be like for our worldwide readership. We’re sure they vary from country to country….we’d be delighted to get any input on this subject from other countries. We do know that crowdfunding over the internet is much more prevalent in other countries than it is in the U.S., although the Securities and Exchange Commission recently announced plans to get into the crowdfunding business.

The other interesting development came from the US Small Business Administration (SBA), which announced plans to match $1-4million in funds for qualifying Early Stage Innovation companies and funds that invest in such companies. For more information, go to www.sba.gov/inv/earlystage.

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Should You Give Your New Top Sales Rep Top Accounts

Posted on April 29, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

Our buddy Don Gray is occupied with some family challenges, so I thought I’d comment on a post that appeared recently by Scot Guber at Sales Benchmark Index’s Sales Force Effectiveness blog.

Scott’s point was that you should automatically give your top accounts to your new top sales rep, and we don’t entirely disagree, but we think there are a lot of facets that you must consider.

Don may well have different comments on this particular topic than I do, because his sales force consulting operation works with larger clients than I do.

1. Top accounts always want to see the President or the CEO, so there might be a limited amount a top sales rep, even and possibly especially a new one, can do. He/she can certainly help with top accounts, so some sort of shared account relationship might be in order.

2. In our experience, just because you’ve hired what should be a top performer, and are probably paying he/she accordingly, there’s not going to be evidence for several months whether he/she is going to fit in with your company.

3. We think that giving a proven top rep a top account should be something like a reward for becoming the top rep that you thought he/she would be when you hired him/her. This suggests doling out top accounts as the new person fits into the job.

4. Fitting in is a loose term, because top salespeople aren’t necessarily best at fitting in…they may not ‘get along’ with your sales and or marketing people, for example. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because he/she was presumably hired to fill a role in your company that wasn’t being addressed, and the upshot of this is that there will be some new attitudes and opinions coming out of the newbie.

5. So there are no misunderstandings, when you hire what you expect to be a top producer, you should set your expectations with him/her about what is expected on turnover of top accounts. Sure, the lure of top accounts is a great carrot, but there has to be, in our experience, some stick, too, because without some goals, many top producers might back off for a bit.

But, none of us in the sales business is exactly a potted plant,  so here are my comments.

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Customer Feedback and Customer Service

Posted on April 25, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

Saw a blogpost this morning on customer feedback, and how critical it is, but a couple of salient points were missing, so I thought I’d elaborate a bit. These points are all in our Customer Service course (E21), bu here are some high points:

1. Customer feedback helps customer loyalty. If customers know that they can pick up the phone and talk to a live person, or voicemail, or send an email, and know that it will be responded to, (AND THE RESPONSE IS KEY) it makes a great deal of difference to the customers.

2. Customer feedback helps firms determine what they could and should do differently in their product and service offerings. Loyal customers, and even disloyal ones (as they’re going out the door) will probably have something to say about your offerings. LISTEN and don’t be defensive. At the same time, you have to evaluate what customers are telling you, the cost of improvement and how broadbased the acceptance of the improvement might be. You can’t do everything for everybody, although you’d like to. If you decide against doing a customer suggestion, call the customer back or send him/her an email about your decision…maybe another solution can be thought up, and will be more broadbased. Either way, you customer will appreciate the time you took to call/write them.

3. If you’re the head of a small firm, or even if you’re not, make sure you get to at least see adverse customer comments, because it’s a good way of staying in touch with those who put the bread on your company’s table. Make yourself accessible; I recently read that Howard Schultz of Starbucks even sits in on shifts in the customer call center from time to time. Not a bad practice.

4. Take feedback on customer service, too, because customer service is a powerful differentiator of both goods and pure services. There’s always a service component to a goods purchase, and again, the effectiveness of the service component sets your goods apart (for good or bad).

5. All your customer service people should ask the customers they serve for a rating on their service, say on a scale of one to five, five being the best. The ‘feedback loop’ is how you develop good service, by hiring good customer service reps.

6. Give your customer service reps a lot of latitude in settling customer issues. You might find their mistakes painful at first, but the best reps show good judgement and don’t make the same mistake twice.

Customer service and customer feedback are huge issues, and we’ll have more to say about it in the future as other blogs pass our electronic desk.

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Startups: Build a great culture, fail small and pay what you owe

Posted on April 23, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

This blogpost was written by Barb Darrow on gigaon, which is a webposting site I’ve not seen before. The post was centered around a talk by Clarence Wooten, at the inaugural MIT Sloan High Tech Conference, by one who’s done his share of startups. I thought the comments were good, aside from the missing market research caveat, which we could outline, or you could just take our course on the subject. Here are Clarence’s comments:

1. Paycheck is an addiction. Entreprenturs have to break that addiction to build an asset that will pay off long-term, not in a weekly paycheck.

2. Beware of naysayers. Because 99% of this country works for the 1%, they have risk-averse mentalities. Don’t listen to them.

3. Just do it. Be like Nike. There is no roadmap (I guess Clarence didn’t take our course on how to get things open and find funds). If you don’t do it, it won’t get done. Work lean. Corporate people are used to resources — HR departments, assistants, etc., but entrepreneurs do it on their own.

4. Fail fast, fail cheap. You will fail a lot, because you’ll need to try a lot of things. So do that on the cheap. Clarence’s first product failed, but they distilled that app into its bare essence, and it caught fire as Instagram.

5. Partner pitfalls. It’s scary to be out there alone. You want someone to share the ups and downs. Often one partner will work harder than the other, but share the same upside. Share the downside as well, and don’t necessrily split equity equally. Set up reverse vesting: when you issue founder’s stock, make sure it vests in case someone leaves they don’t leave with all the equity, just what with what has vested.

6. Be naive. Unlearn what you learned in Corporate America about hierarchy. Being naive means being ballsy. Facebook turned down a $1 billon offer from Google, and people though Zuckerberg was crazy. He wasn’t, but he may have been naive. That paid off pretty well.

7. Challenge your comfort zone. I knew I had to put myself out there speaking in public, and I wasn’t comfortable with it, but I did it.

8. Business is a team sport. Would you rather own 100% of a $1 million a year business, or 20% of a $100-million a year business? Everyone needs equity. You need as much brainpower as possible.

9. Image matters. People judge you when you talk about your company, and you have one chance to make a first impression. If you’re not a design person, don’t do your own logo. Crowdsource if you need to.

10. Shadown of a leader. You determine what your company culture looks like. Build it as a place you want to work every day. People watch you.

11. Investors want their money back. This is important. Investors back you. Your integrity is on the line. So know your exit strategy. I’ve nevery lost an investor’s money, and I carry that chip with me every day.

12. Cash and customers. Lessons 1 through 11 you can learn on your own, but for #12, it helps if you have some education and understanding of finance and marketing (that’s what we’re here for).

You can also check out the audio version of Wooten’s speech by Googling it.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Finance, Hiring, Marketing | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

7 Dumb Leadership Mistakes Smart Managers Avoid

Posted on April 20, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

Marty Zwilling had a humous post about a month ago, derived from Daryl Rosen’s book, ‘Table for Three?’. All of these are descended from the old leadership maxim ‘blame everything on others’ which is all too common. The mistakes below are not only prevalent in startups, but also in ongoing enterprises. Here they are:

1. Blame others for everything. Rather than blaming yourself for setbacks, blame someone else….a coworker, the venture capitalists, whatever. This is known as ‘attributional bias’, and even though it might be understandable, it’s perceived as poor leadership.

2. Worry and fret about everything. Precious little about what we worry about ever happens, so don’t worry about it. How many times have you as an entrepreneur stayed up all night worrying about something, only to find out it didn’t happen? So, don’t worry about it, don’t share your worry and don’t worry about things you can’t control.

3. Criticise others and the company. Managers and others that criticise the company have something else negative going on in their lives. Make it constructive, put it in a suggestion box. Real leaders look in the mirror when they’re criticizing something.

4. Complain about being overwhelmed. Overwhelm is a feeling that always precedes growth, and it’s a state in which your brain is developing new pathways and connections. Starting a new business is always nerve racking. Again, work on what you can control, not the stuff you can’t.

5. Do 10 things at a time in a mediocre fashion. Sure, you can multitask, but you might be doing them all badly. If you do things badly, customers and associates will think you tolerate mediocrity. Focus on one thing at a time, although interruptions are inevitable, try to keep your focus.

6. Appear disorganized and manage haphazardly. See number 6. Stay focused. Mistakes will appear more frequently.

7. Fail to see the positive in others. If you hire well, your employees and coworkers will be good, positive contributors to your organization. Work on your personnel development.

Leadership and improvement is about taking small steps forward, and evolving a little each day. Think evolution, not revolution. Anyone can change one behavior every month.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Hiring | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Choosing the Right Website Developer

Posted on April 13, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

SCORE, in their Small Business Success blog, published a bunch of tips for hiring a website developer. We don’t have a course in internet development, only marketing, but we’ve seen hundreds of websites over the years, and have very seldom not made a comment on what the developer has done. So, here are our and SCORE’s accumulated wisdome on the subject. In addition Chet Holmes and has recently weighed in on the subject on radio ads, but knowing who we are, he’ll not send us his tips. We need to train Chet on playing nice with the competitiors.

There are millions of website developers out there, around the world, and 90-95% of them just aren’t that current on what’s going on digitally, or are out to lunch on SEO, or are bad designers to boot.

1. Make sure the site represents who your company really is. It should have a clear USP (Unique Selling Proposition) that separates your company from the rest of the pack ,whether the pack is around the block or around the world. We have a course in USPs, A03, and it’s worth thousands, not just the $29 we charge. The lack of a USP, or a bad one (‘we put our customers first’ is a favorite offender; well, of course you do).

2. The developer should have some expertise in meta tags, which are the phrases that web search engines use to find you. For example, we use ‘online business schools’, among others. You can look at these for any site by using ‘view’ and ‘source’ on older MS programs.

3. HTML (hypertext markup language) or CMS? For most sites, HTML, although old, is fine. For sites with a lot of content, your developer should write in a Content Management System (CMS) so you can make changes easily to your site. Word Press is probably the leading one, along with Tumblr, Drupal or Joomla.

4. Make sure you have an exit questionnaire on your site, so you can get a feel for what kinds of customers are looking at the site, and whether they’re your target market. The questionaire should be no more than 3-5 questions.

5. If people register on your site for something, give them a gift of some sort. Free assessments are good. Gift certificates, too. You should be able to register via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. for retail-oriented sites.

6. Make it easy to navigate around your site; navigation bars should be easy to find and use. Page links should work!

7. Make it easy to buy products on your site if that’s what you’re selling. Amazon is a model. But, they don’t have an 800 number if you run into problems or have a question. Microsoft and Google are terrible at selling products over their sites. If you do a questionnaire, you’ll keep track of what’s going on on your site.

8. Don’t be entranced by the next shiny object. Put new technology on your site when you think it will influence your customers to purchase. Generally, videos are good, especially when a relationship is important or product use difficulties arise.

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How to Know the Sales Person You Are Interviewing is a Superstar

Posted on April 13, 2012 by asechmentor@gmail.com

This blogpost was originally written on the ‘A Sales Guy’ blog by Keenan, and is interesting because we all want to hire a superstar or two. Here are his comments:

1. The guy or gal should be slick, especially if you’re hiring for an outside sales position. You might want to make this one of your highly ranked attributes. Also, in this era of relationship selling, too much slickness might be undesired.

2. You have to assume that all sales people are good at aceing the interview. How do thei

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