One thing that is very common with my clients is that when I start explaining to them the fundamentals of internet marketing, search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising etc, they seem very embarrassed that they do not know who everything I’m telling them about. They may be an expert in deep sea fishing or selling automotive parts and accessories, cutting hair or they may run at the ski lodge in the Japanese ski fields, yet they are still embarrassed that they do not know everything about the industry I am in.
I think this is common because as small business owners we all seem to want to be able to do everything and to control everything in our business. It’s very typical for a small business owner to feel this way, but when you think about it, it is not a very clever business attitude to have. It doesn’t matter whether our businesses are small businesses, medium businesses or big businesses, we really need to approach our businesses with a business mindset. We need to stop approaching at businesses with an ownership mindset or a job mindset.
This means we need to recognise where our core skills are. We need to recognise what tasks are crucial for us to undertake in the business and which tasks are better outsourced to others. The problem we face by trying to do everything and trying to be expert in everything, is that when we do this our time is not used efficiently. And this becomes the greatest cost to running a business. Our time is the most important asset we bring to our business. Sure we may save a few dollars on the input side of our business here and there by doing everything, but the cost of this is always the additional dollars we lose that our business would have earned if our time was being used more efficiently. Remember, running a business is about making money, it isn’t about saving money. You cannot run a business’s budget in the same way as you run your personal budget. The purposes of the business budget and a personal budget are two extremely different things.
For example, you may be a plumber also doing all your own bookkeeping. Because you are not an expert bookkeeper, it may take you five hours a month to do what an expert bookkeeper can do in two hours and charge you $20 per hour to do. So by spending the five hours by doing your own bookkeeping, you save $40. But the cost on the other side is the money you could have made if you spent the five hours doing plumbing work. Now I am not sure how much you charge for your time, but I know that a plumber charges more than $20 per hour. Given also the additional time taken to complete the task due to a lack of expertise, the cost becomes quite large.
But you might say, you did the bookkeeping after hours. It doesn’t matter – you are still working. If you were spending this time doing plumbing, the thing you are expert at and probably enjoy, you could probably charge penalty rates and therefore, doing it after hours is even more expensive. Also, did you go into business on your own so you can spend your leisure time doing business administration? If you did, you need to look at your standard of life my friend.
If we are serious about running a business, we need to understand that our time is the most precious thing we give to our business. We need to understand that where possible, spending money to outsource tasks that we are not qualified for, or spending money to outsource tasks to someone whose time is a lot cheaper than ours, is an efficient use of the resources we have available to us in our business. It is not a waste of money. It actually makes money on the other side.
Sure, you need cash flow to pay for this type of thing and often small business owners find it difficult to free up cash to pay for other people to do the tasks that they should not be doing. This raises a different point though, an issue which is part of the same mentality that many small business owners have. If you’re running a business, you need to run it like a business. This means you need to plan your business cash flow separately from yours, you need to plan your time, you need to work out your business priorities and goals and you need to pull it all together in a fashion when you are directing it from above, rather than doing everything from below.
I say this often to my clients. If you are not prepared to plan your business properly and allocate cash flow to outsource tasks in your business, tasks that waste your time because they are outside your expertise or just plain time-consuming, why are you in business? You should just get a job with someone else’s business. The reason you should just get a job is you will still get paid the same amount of money, but your will free up much of the time you are currently wasting doing administration tasks, learning about all the areas of expertise that you try to keep abreast of, and that’s not to mention the heartache and stress you face when sales aren’t necessarily coming through as quickly as you’d like them to.
So starting from today, think about all the parts of your business that you are spending your time on, that really are things that are distracting you from adding value to your business. Write them down. Then work out with each one of them, how you are going to get someone else to do all these tasks. Work out how much it will cost you. From there on work out how much more money you will make in your business with the time you have freed up, given the assumption that you will use that time effectively to make your business a better business, a more profitable business.
http://www.smallbusinesswebsitesadvice.com.au/18_Advertising_On_Google.html Do you have an adwords account that is not selling your products or services? Don’t switch it off, watch this video instead
http://www.smallbusinesswebsitesadvice.com.au/17_Email_Marketing.htm Are you afraid of bulk emailing clients as you fear your emails may be perceived as spam? Watch this video then.
One of the things that I always find interesting with my small business clients, is the attitude some small business owners have with their business. This attitude quite often becomes apparent right at the start of my dealings with them, when I am going through the pre-sales and sales stage of my offering. Very often, it becomes clear very quickly, that the business owner I’m dealing with does not approach their business with the mindset of the business owner, rather they approach their business with the mindset of someone who has a job. It is as if in starting their own business they have simply purchased a guarantee to have a job out into the future.
There is a big problem with this approach to small business. The problem here is that whether you like them or not, as a small business owner, you own all the risks and responsibilities of a business owner. You are not actually guaranteeing yourself a job into the future as your job into the future also depends upon your ability to sell. You still need to sell yourself and your services to ensure there is work there for you to do.
If you want to do a job or have a job it is far easier to be employed by someone than to prop a job up in a small business. If you want to be a small business owner is important to approach your business as if it is a business. This means you need to take risks, business risks. This means you must have a plan for the growth and development. This means you must consider advertising and other means to reach your target audience, knowing full well that the advertising may fail. If an advertising campaign fails, as a small business owner it is your job to measure the results of the advertising campaign and make the decision regarding the continuation or discontinuation of the campaign.
It is in this simple process that so many small business owners that I meet, fail. All they really want is to have a job. As such any spending on their business they see as money out of their own pocket money, that should not have to be spent, money that would much rather be spent on their lifestyles. They actually resent the fact that they have to spend money on marketing and advertising. They do not realise that every dollar they spendon marketing and advertising, could very well put three or four or five dollars back into their pockets. And this includes every dollar they may spend on their website or internet marketing efforts. As such, they have no budgeted cash flow to advertising or marketing. So when it comes to the crunch of doing something about their business and increasing their reach to more customers, they always say “I can’t afford that now I have no cash for it”.
You are in business now, you need a business budget and part of this budget must be growing your business and finding new clients using marketing and advertising techniques.
I find much of my time with new clients is spent in educating them on the simplicities of business. A website is nothing more than a medium for advertising and marketing your business and your brand. You need to be prepared to commit to the advertising campaign which means developing a website and marketing it properly in the search engines. You need to commit some of your business’s budget to ensuring that campaign is executed in a robust manner. You must measure the results of their campaign to decide whether it needs to be refined restructured or continued as it is.
If you are a business owner of a small business and you cannot commit a few thousand dollars to get a website created and marketed properly, you really should ask yourself whether you want to be in business or or whether you have just bought yourself a job. If you don’t want to be in business and just want a job, why do you want the hassle of bookkeeping, tax accounting, finding clients, GST reporting, etc, when all you’re getting for it at the end is a job. You can always find someone who wants to be in business to take care of all those administration tasks while still doing your job, so you won’t have to spend all the extra time you’re standing at the moment doing all the administration tasks in your business. Just go to seek.com.au and start applying.
If you want to be a business owner though and run a small business, run it like a business. Allocate a budget to marketing and advertising. Find the experts in the industry of advertising and marketing. Have a plan for business growth, have a plan for increasing your workforce if your business growth exceeds your capacity to match the demand on your own. Have a plan for removing yourself from the business, so you stop working in the business and rather work on the business. That is what every good business owner should do and what all successful business owners do do.
