Successful Blog

Setting Up Your Business for Long-Term Success

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Robert Cordray

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Setting Up Your Business for Long-Term Success

Start-up business owners learn two things very quickly. First, the idea that launches an entrepreneurship is invaluable. The seed of a business, or the initial idea, provides a source of motivation and initial direction.

However, the second notion often comes as an unpleasant discovery. The grand idea by itself is not enough to sustain long-term growth and success. No matter how great the business idea is, many other factors influence success and determine whether a business will flourish or fail.

The key to being successful in business is learning to make good business decisions. While success cannot be guaranteed, you can start your business with attention to a few important areas and increase your chances of achieving your goals.

Avoid the most common missteps entrepreneurs tend to make by following these suggestions:

Have a Business Plan

A business plan is an opportunity for business owners to understand their market, as it relates to their product or service, and map out their capabilities. Compiling a thorough business plan requires a bit of effort, but as it will serve as a guideline for your financial expectations and keep you on track, it is an essential part of any new business.

The business plan will also help you in the key area of setting realistic goals for when you will achieve profitability. Know how much time, effort and capital it will reasonably take to reach your goal of being profitable. Conservatively scaling your expectations to match reality will keep you on track and save you from disappointment if your hopes of becoming an overnight success are not realized.

Balance Your Capital

Having enough capital to launch your business is crucial, but you will want to avoid the mistake of taking on sizable loans at the outset. Use your business plan to ensure you have enough resources to see you through until you achieve profitability.

Understand Your Market

As a new business owner, you need to understand who your customers are. How large is your market? Who are your competitors? You will need to know what alternatives to your business are already available to consumers or if you are creating a new market. This will help you in your decisions on strategy.

Choose a Go-to Market Strategy

Having a focus on one strategy for your business will enable you to market your business effectively. Without a focus, you are likely to flounder, but attempting to pursue multiple strategies at once will also doom you to failure. Understand your business and choose one as your goal.

In general, there are three go-to market strategies that businesses use. The first is a focus on operational excellence. These businesses emphasize efficiency in their processes to lower their costs and provide consistency to a wide range of customers.

Another strategy is to develop customer intimacy by establishing strong relationships and fostering repeat business through customer care.

Third, businesses can seek an advantage through product innovation. This aspect depends upon the creation of a new and desirable product or service and founding a business where there are little to no existing competitors. This may be the most difficult of the three for a new entrepreneur to achieve.

Build an Effective Team

The path to becoming a successful entrepreneur should not be a lonely journey. Many businesses fail because the owner tried to manage too many decisions and responsibilities that could have been delegated to others. Find good support for your business such as those you can trust with general tasks while you focus on your role as an executive.

Seeking advice will be necessary, and finding a reliable source for information and direction may seem intimidating. However, there are several people who specialize in guidance and helping entrepreneurs maintain their focus. Through their services, you can rest assured that your business will profit from your well-directed efforts.

Author’s Bio:

Robert Cordray writes about business, entrepreneurship, and living better at noomii.com. He has acquired over 20 years of entrepreneurship and business consulting. You can find him on Twitter @RobertCordray

The Difference Between Wrong and Different

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Learning, Innovation, Collaboration

They Weren’t Wrong

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When I first became an editorial manager, it took me a while to realize that if I asked 25 people to revise a paragraph I would get back 25 versions, each version uniquely worded by the unique editor who did the work. I even did a test.

Not one of the edited paragraphs were exactly as I would’ve done it.

They weren’t wrong. They were different.

Difference Between Wrong and Different

Ask 4 people how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and you might be surprised to find that three of them make a pbj quite differently from the way you do. It’s true. People have at least four ways to make something as simple as that.

Even more interesting is that most people have never considered another way to do it.
And when you suggest a different way, you might hear, “That’s just wrong!”
But every way works. Every way brings about a positive outcome — something great to eat.

For the record, I like my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches grilled.

Rules of how we learned tend to tell us that another way — an other way — is wrong.

Check the etymology, wrong comes from words that mean …
“not right, bad, immoral, unjust”
“crooked, twisted, ”
“that which is improper or unjust.”

The sandwich making method that’s not mine results in the desired outcome without being bad, immoral, unjust. It’s not really crooked or twisted in the true sense of the words. So, other methods aren’t really wrong — they are just different from how I do it.

What about the Rules?

I suppose you could argue that a sandwich “rules” dictate bread and filling.
I have trouble with dictates and the dictators who dictate them.
It’s easy to close our minds and our thinking by sticking too tightly to traditional rules.

Every creative person, every jazz musician understands the value of tradition, but also understands when to stretch to innovate or invent something new.

Then would an ice-cream sandwich — cookies with ice-cream between — be wrong?

I don’t mind if you say it is.
But I won’t agree with that premise.
To me, it’s just different.

Wrong needs more than different to be wrong.
Different isn’t wrong.
It’s just not the same.

Learning, Innovation, Collaboration Thrive on Different

In fact, different is where learning, innovation and collaboration begin. Learning, innovation, and collaboration, thrive on different. They wither when held to the binary judgment of right or wrong. When we begin to see different as neither good or bad, we can get to seeing new ideas, trying new ways of doing what we’ve always done, finding new ways that old things fit together to make new things.

What makes us valuable is our differences — the different ways we think and do things. Celebrate, welcome, and explore the differences we bring to the table. Bring your differences gently and with respect, but please bring your differences. We need them.

Different can be irresistible in the way it pushes us to rethink, rebuild, and grow.
Without different, an ice cream sandwich would never have happened.

We’re all the same in the fact that we’re all different. Don’t hide your difference. Different is not the same as wrong. Different is a value of it’s own. Find the thoughts behind different and get the learning, innovation, and collaboration going. Make a sandwich in a new way.

What’s the most innovative sandwich you’ve ever made?

Be different. Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Influence: 5 Ways to Check Whether Your Online Business Relevance Is Eroding

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Offering Value and Meaning

As more tools and algorithms surface for the purpose of rating influence, across each measure and metric the hardest factor to isolate and measure is topical relevance. I may be influential to the SOBCon on the subject of strategy, small business, start ups, and entrepreneurship, because I’ve established expertise in the area of starting and growing a business. However, I wouldn’t have the same influential relevance on the topic of gourmet cooking or restaurant management.

Without relevance, there is no influence.

5 Ways to Check Whether Your Business Relevance Is Eroding

Eight to ten years ago, the social business Internet was centered in the blogosphere. Blogs were the most common vehicle by which online business people established their identities, connected, and conversed. Individuals picked up the tools and learned the culture from the people they met while using them. Now, this Insane Infographic-of-the-day: Social Media shows the complicated space the social business web has become. …


Click the image to view a larger format.

Blogging platforms have become one unit on a hugely varied landscape for sharing content.
Blogs were once a highly relevant main idea in a chart like that.
Now they are more of a secondary detail in relevance.

Keep up with the changing landscape or lose relevance. Keeping up requires participating and adding unique value to channel and enhance opportunities as the environment changes. Here are 5 ways to check whether your online business relevance is eroding.

  1. You (your brand or your business) spend more time sharing content than reading it. Strategic sharing can enhance relevance. Through focus and filtering, a business can underscore brand identity, values, expertise, and a service ethic. All of which builds trust and attracts a self-sorting group of ideal customers or clients.

    Oversharing without filtering, such as retweeting without reading first, adds noise not value and erodes relevance. Promiscuous sharing destroys relevance.

  2. You (your brand or your business) value social scores and metrics, such as Klout and follower counts, MORE than conversations with the people who help your business thrive. We can use metrics to fine tune our relevance. Metrics can reveal “who, what, how, when, and how many”.

    All metrics and algorithms carry the bias of assumptions about what is being measured. Beware of how metrics flatten data by removing individual particularities. To stay relevant, keep a continuous dialogue with individuals represented by the data. Balance in the people-data equation is foundational to relevance.

  3. You (your brand or your business) make decisions and develop expertise based on 2nd-hand experiences. Research and reading focused on current cases, predictions, trends, cycles, and conditions can increase relevance. Understanding the breadth of an industry environment extends our ability to recognize and leverage opportunity. Still vicarious knowledge is shallow, fades quickly, and lacks insight.

    Turning acquired knowledge into experience by applying it, trying it, testing, and measuring our outcomes increases relevance exponentially. Through application we develop the intuitive detail of experience and the ability to recognize nuance. In that way it erodes relevance.

  4. You (your brand or your business) have more answers than questions. Sharing answers and solutions is highly relevant. Doing so in the spaces where customers meet to talk — in their language — makes those answers even more relevant.

    More powerful than answers are the compelling questions that keep us connecting and searching. Working out and working on deep questions that are critical to our customers’ mission — how they will raise their families, how they can grow their business — offer the people we serve the most relevant connection to our business.

  5. You (your brand or your business) develop social marketing plans around “online and offline channels” rather than using connect more deeply with the people who build your business. A well-designed outreach strategy can spark relevant human connections.

    Reframing social business as customer connections rather than channels, we can build true “other-centered” intimacy into the way we reach out, A view to why people meet in each space changes the way we talk and the topics we talk about. Relevance online and off starts with caring about people.

As information and technology change at the speed of the Internet, staying relevant is a constant and always current criteria of true influence. Focused attention to the new problems, new solutions, and new opportunities that surround them is essential. Without that focus and a clear intention to acquire new competencies, internalize current culture, and cultivate new thinking, that same speed of the Internet can erode, as we continue to do what once made us successful but is no longer needed.

How do you stay irresitibly relevant to the people who help you thrive?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Choose Your Winners Wisely and Invest Unconditionally

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Relational Reciprocity

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I don’t play with every new social media tool. In fact, I ignore most of them. I’ve decided my view is that tools are vehicles for problem solving or uniquely rare opportunities for new learning. The former I go looking for when I need them. The latter show up without warning, but are few and far between.

Once the decision is made to participate, I’m in with “both feet.” I’m a saturation learner, always have been. It shows in my 14+ years of dance training, my 8 years of theater, my 35 years of education and educational publishing … even in the way I took on blogging.

Reciprocity is Relational, Not Transactional

I’ve been exploring EmpireAvenue for one year now. The game and the sociology caught my attention and offered me something new worth exploring.

The premise of Empire Avenue is that a player buys shares in other players’ participation on social media platforms across the Internet. So at first what fascinated me was the idea of getting a more rounded picture of the people who were playing the game and what was driving them — and also what would drive me.

Soon enough the game pushed the question of reciprocity.

The way the game is engineered, the currency I spend to purchase shares in your activity doesn’t flows through to you at much less. Basically, if I buy 100 shares in you, you’ll get a deposit worth about 10 of your shares. So complete reciprocity — for you to buy 100 shares back — is nearly impossible, even if my share price is WAY less than yours.

Yet some folks hold an unrealistic expectation of reciprocity — one that hurts their own success.
Their expectations seem to me out of balance with their best interests.

The reason I invest in your activity is because your shares earn value and deliver daily dividends. If I buy you I grow and pass on that growth to my shareholders. It’s a perk if you buy my shares too.

If I wait for every winner in the game to come back to buy equal shares in me — some never will. Their share price will get higher as they grow. I’ll lose the dividends I could have been earned while I waited for some transactional reciprocity.

Who loses in that scenario?
Me … not the winners I believe are ignoring me.

It works that way in everything. If I invest in you as a person, it’s because you’re growing, you add value by who you are and what you’re doing. By investing in you, I grow too!

Reciprocity is relational. Not transactional.

Plant a seed.
Watch it grow.
Enjoy the flower.

Reciprocity is the flower — color, beauty, fragrance.
It’s not “I cared for the seed. Now the seed cares for me.”
The act of helping the seed grow provided a far more powerful payoff.

It’s the same with people.

Choose Your Winners Wisely and Invest Unconditionally

An unforgiving belief in transactional reciprocity is a skewed form of not seeing the whole picture. When we close our eyes to seeing all point of view, we defeat ourselves — or as my mom would say “Cut off own nose to spite our face.”

And you can’t smell the flowers without a nose.

So if you’ve been hoarding your attention because someone’s not paying attention to you … could be you’re at the losing end of that idea. Look for the flower in the attention you’re giving. Not the seed of attention that you think you’re owed.

Build relational reciprocity by investing in what you’re willing to grow.

Choose your winners wisely and invest in them unconditionally.

Value the resources you’re investing dearly. Then offer them without fear.
For the most important, don’t hold back the blood, sweat, and tears.

See the flowers in the seeds even before you start helping them grow.
And keep your nose.

Be irresistible.
— ME “Liz” Strauss

3 Things I Learned, Lost, and Earned Being Off Social Media for 10 Days

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People or Screens

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Every morning for almost a year, I’ve been publishing photos of the sunrise over Lake Michigan. Sometimes when the afternoon is worth a photo graph I also publish a photo of the sunset too. On Twitter I greet my friends with a “Good morning, Twitterville” and a kind word. I try to check in with them via Facebook and Linkedin too.

Many of my online social interactions help me keep my day moving … as I transition from one task to another, it helps me to stop by Twitter to give my friends a shout out or to take time for a short read and a retweet. Being social online is a natural part of how my day goes by when it’s just me and the keys.

But when I’m with people, I like to be with people.
I find it hard to be where I am, if I’m looking at at screen.

What I Learned, Lost, and Earned Being Off Social Media for 10 Days

The theme of #SOBCon this year was Creating and Leveraging Opportunity. I challenged myself to do what I believed.

  • Be balanced. In this case, have my head and heart in the same place as my mind and my feet.
  • Go deep. Be a saturation learner. Meet people where they “live and think.”
  • Build a business not a birthday cake. Allow for the fact that a business is not a closed system — that flexibility is a key component to strategy.
  • People ARE the opportunity. Buildings, companies, products, technology do not have the stability or the reach of human-to-human relationships.

Last Wed., May 2, I left home with a suitcase to head downtown in preparation for our annual #SOBCon event in Chicago from there I would be speaking at CMSExpo in Evanston to arrive back home on May 10th. But things being what they are it ended up that I was hardly around on social sites until the 12th.

Before I left, I loaded up my blog with the blog posts that I had planned for the week. I also loaded up my Twitter account with some great posts I’d been reading on other blogs — articles on small business, strategy, weird science, and cool brain stuff — my favorite information to share via tweets.

When I got down to the hotel, I did some last minute planning. I went over to the event center to check a few things and pick an HP Folio Ultrabook that the Small Biz Folks at Hewlett Packard had sent for me, thinking maybe if I set it up, I’d be able to Tweet some, or post some, or connect some like a good social media do-bee. I got the computer up and rolling in no time. It’s light, intuitive, and has a huge battery life — can’t say how long it lasts yet, because, well, once I got it going, I kept turning it on and then getting involved in other things.

And in the course of 10 days, here’s what I about social media, the Internet, and me.

  • The social is more important than the media. When the choice comes to talking to the people live and in person, take it! Be where you are. Look them in the eyes. Listen actively. What I saw and experienced in the richness of a hug, a tone of voice, smiles shared, and glasses clinked is something I carry back to the Internet. I hear the voices of those same people when I see them again this week on Twitter.
  • Being in the story is faster, easier, and more meaningful than reporting it. I can only speak for my experience, but seconds I spend trying to share something with people online turn me into a reporter. When I shed the reporter’s role, I see, hear, and feel so much more. I am mindful and present. I am also calmer, more flexible, and more fluent because I can attend to and respond to the world I’m in rather than trying to translate to the world I can’t see.
  • The Internet got along fine without me. As far as I know, no one suffered greatly by my absence. The world didn’t stop turning. I had no more than 3 “must respond to” emails daily – I’m just not THAT important.

What I lost is easy to measure …

Yes, my blog traffic went down a bit. I didn’t attract as many Twitter followers as I had in the previous 10 days. My stock price on Empire Avenue dropped. My stats on Facebook now need some attention. My email inbox took about two hours to get back in order.

Laura Fitton and Liz Strauss, SOBCon 2012 by @adrants

What I earned was more lasting …

Deep real connections.
Deep real memories.
A whole lot of learning and fun.

The actual business directly attributable to these particular 10 days outpace ANY 10 days ever.

Working or playing, showing up is most important.
How can they see you, if you don’t stop long enough to be you?

#justsayin’

Be irresistible.
—

Buy the ebook. Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

I Can Show You How to Do That in Less Than 20 Minutes

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All you have to do is ask.
People say that every day.
But you ask and it doesn’t work. Why is that?

I remember when I wanted to learn how to set up an ebook, I asked and asked and asked. You might think with the group of friends and connections that I have i might have been able to find one, two, or twenty, who already had dome something like that. In fact, I did.

And I asked.

But what happened next … became 6 of the most frustrating weeks of my life.

The 7 or 8 people I asked all told me the same things …. things like

  1. what a great idea
  2. it’s easy to do
  3. I can show you how to do that in less than 20 minutes.

Then they talked about random things for over an hour and still never showed me how.

I’d see them on Twitter and say hello. We’d chat. We’d update each other on progress. I’d mention that I’d still not figured out my way through the ebook maze. And again I’d hear something like

  1. what a great idea
  2. it’s easy to do
  3. I can show you how to do that in less than 20 minutes

But they never did.

All you have to do is ask.
It’s more complicated than that. What I’ve learned since then is that

  1. people like to help people who help themselves first.
  2. when you help yourself first your questions are specific and answering them doesn’t feel like work
  3. helping someone is even more meaningful when it moves our own cause forward too.

Now, before I ask, I learn all that I can learn on my own — read all my friends and connections have written about what I’m trying to figure out. Then when I still have question I can start with

I’ve read your blog and there’s one part of this process I don’t understand. Could you help me with it? You might get an idea for a new blog post out of it. I might even offer to write that blog post in return for the advice that I’m getting.

It’s always more attractive to help someone who has started by helping herself.

Be irresistible. Help yourself first and show how helping you will move them forward too.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!