Erich Stauffer

Tag: Business Consulting

  • Business Plans – Are They Worth It?

    I’m not a big fan of business plans, but apparently that’s not always been the case. In my Google Drive there is a folder called “Business Plans”. Inquisitively I clicked on the folder to see what it contained.

    Business Plans

    My last modification was on April 10, 2008 (6 years ago). None of the five businesses listed are still in existence and only two of them ever made money. I thought it’d be fun to open them up to see what I wrote.

    Able Trainers

    The idea was to create courses on basic computers, the Internet, and Microsoft Office applications. Our target market was “small businesses and suburban schools.” Phonebooks. Business cards. Paper flyers.

    Comp LubeComp Lube

    This business plan contains a logo and the words, “Sustainable computer repair.” I’m not sure what that means. I ended up giving the rights to this company to a former employee, who never used those rights.

    Telablue

    This plan is 9 pages long, 2,250 words. The objective was, “User-friendly, professional, sites with personality based on customer needs and desires. Generate Profit. Grow at a challenging and manageable rate.”

    Turn FilmTurn Film

    Like Comp Lube, this plan is nothing more than a logo and the words, “Film editing and conversions.” At least it actually described what it did. The idea was a “VHS to DVD” service, which dates it pretty well.

    Watershawl

    Watershawl was a “new media company specializing in computer services and design.” That’s pretty much true to what it was. I did a lot of web design and IT work, but what I loved doing was process management.

    Are Business Plans Useful?

    Planning is useful, but I’m not so sure the actual document is useful. It can be used as a way to flesh out ideas, but it doesn’t have to be a long document. One page should be enough to state what you’re doing, how you’ll make money, and who your target audience is.

    A business plan is usually all made up numbers, but it’s easy to feel like you’re building your business by writing a business plan instead of actually trying to Sell First. Customer development is one way to figure out whether or not someone will buy what you are selling.

    I’ve spent the last year and a half helping one of my customers develop a business plan while another customer has already sold tens of thousands of products. Not all companies can be bootstrapped I realize, but the sooner you can validate your idea, the better.

  • How Can I Better Market My Business?

    One of the questions I often get asked is, “How can I better market my business?”

    How Can I Better Market My Business

    10 Things You Can do to Market Your Business

    1. Remove obstacles stopping customers from giving you money – How can someone buy your product or service? How many clicks does it take? How many forms do they have to fill out? How many emails do they have to respond to? How many phone calls or in-person meetings does it take? Ask yourself why you’re making it so hard for someone to give you money and then think about the ways you can make it easier on them.
    2. Lower the risk involved in choosing your company – How can you make is so the client literally feels foolish for not choosing you? Are you showing ROI? Are you providing testimonials? Do you have examples of your work? Are you using a SSL certificate? Do you have trust icons in place? Remove all hesitations to the sale.
    3. Start with value and prove value or savings – How does your product or service move the customer closer to pleasure or farther from pain? How does it provide value (ie. give back more than what it costs)? What case studies do you have to show this value? What videos do you have to show the value? Do you even have a brochure? Pictures?
    4. Start with the familiar (Think “Cover songs”) – If this is the first time someone has seen your product or website, they are going to latch onto anything that looks familiar. That’s why symbols like “As seen on NBC and Huffington Post” as well as trust symbols like “Trusted by McAfee” are so important. It’s the difference between starting your set with an original instead of cover song.
    5. Be consistent – waffles are delicious, but nobody likes a waffler. McDonalds is a force to be reckoned with because they are always the same. Seth Godin’s blog is so powerful because you know he’s going to post everyday. While pivoting can be good, it’s not something you should do every day. People crave consistency and it helps to sell. Marketing supports the selling process.
    6. Be transparent – show your processes as much as you can. People now expect it and when you don’t it makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. Your picture should be on your website and marketing materials. No stock photography! “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
    7. Email marketing – nothing converts higher than email marketing, but you’ve got to actually do it. Reading top 10 lists like this is easy. Collecting email addresses and consistently sending out weekly or monthly emails is not. Thankfully there are systems that can automate some of this for you, but it doesn’t do all of it. You’ve got to want to grow your business. This is one of the best ways.
    8. Social proof – famous marketer, Gary V says “social media is the Internet” and while that’s not entirely true, his point is still valid. Go where the people are. They may not be on your website, but they are on social media. And the more Likes, Followers, or Loves you get is social proof to customers that buying from you is probably a smart thing to do.
    9. Video marketing – Youtube’s been out for a while now, but there’s even better options now for marketers such as Wistia which can work in conjunction with your email marketing to get more opt-ins or conversions. Like email marketing, the key here is to just do it. It’s not as hard as it once was, but there is still a big fear of video that a lot of people have trouble overcoming. Start small. Get going. You can delete your old, bad stuff once you get better.
    10. Measure what matters – candy metrics like unique visitors do not likely matter to your business. What matters are conversions, email signups, and sales. What are you tracking? It matters. What you ask about leads both your mind and your employees down a path so it better be the path you want to be on. If you’re not on the right path, turn the ship around, Captain.

  • Be the Benefit, not the Butler

    How can I move away from ‘being the butler’ to ‘being the benefit’ to my client?

    When you’re a business consultant who works on retainer without any long-term project goals, there is a tendency for the relationship to become more responsive and less proactive. Instead of always ‘seeking to add value’, it can trend towards ‘waiting to add value’. The latter is like a butler who stands beside your client, dutifully waiting for their client to request a website update or to fix their computer systems.

    Contrast this with a business consultant who is more agile, who works in sprints, who has clear objectives laid out on a project plan. The progress they are making is track-able, and like a lean waterfall, is continually making iterations on an ever-improving product. Which do you think adds more value to the client? The always available butler or the constantly improving business consultant?

    Which of these is more like an employee and which of these is more like a business owner? While a business owner would love for their employee to always be improving the reality is that they may be perversely incentivized to do as little as possible in order to maintain the status quo and ‘not rock the boat’ or ‘work themselves out of a job’ whereas a business consultant should always be striving to add value or reduce cost for the client.

    You Are Who You Think You Are

    How are you spending your time as a business consultant? A large part of that is dictated by how you view yourself, your role in the organizations you serve, and what value you provide. The negotiator who is most willing to walk away will most often win the negotiation. The employee or business consultant most worried about losing their job or contract is always the one who gets let go first. This isn’t playing ‘hard to get’, per se, but is more like playing ‘hard to lose’.

    The primary difference is the mindset.

    As a business consultant, it’s easy to think of yourself as being better than others, but doing the work is hard. Business owners expect to pay you a bigger check for a less-risky or less-timely result that they would get from hiring, training, or using an employee to do the same set of work for the same outcome. They are paying for results, not for your time and as a business consultant, you should price accordingly.

    Business consultants are people – people who are known to either undervalue their services or mistakenly charge for time instead of value. This is generally a result of the people we hang around and the type of upbringing we’ve had. Most educational systems are setup to create employees who will show up to work each day and do what they are told. Business consultants who do this are more akin to a butler or an employee than to a trusted advisor.

    Permission to Speak

    Who am I and what right do I have to say these things? What proof do I have? I can only write of my own experiences and what I am learning. I have been blessed to have been raised in a safe environment, been educated in a standard way, and surrounded by people who encourage me. I have only relatively recently entered into a new world of business owners and other ‘doers’ of the world and this has made all of the difference.

    James Altucher recently released a new book called Choose Yourself which is premised around the idea that you shouldn’t wait for other people to give you permission or to choose you for their team. You should instead choose yourself first. To use dating as an analogy, let’s say you’re asking someone out. Instead of saying, “Will you go out with me to the park?” you say, “I’m going to the park. Why don’t you come with me?”

    Be the Change You Wish to See in the World

    “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” is a quote often attributed to Gandhi, but what he actually said was, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him…We need not wait to see what others do.” This reminds me of another quote, a poem by an unknown monk around 1100 A.D., which one of my clients keeps up on his desk, right in front of his keyboard. Here it is in full below. I’ve hyperlinked how it’s affected me:

    When I was a young man,
    I wanted to change the world.
    I found it was difficult to change the world,
    so I tried to change my nation.

    When I found I couldn’t change the nation,
    I began to focus on my town.

    I couldn’t change the town and as an older man,
    I tried to change my family.

    Now, as an old man,
    I realize the only thing I can change is myself,
    and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself,
    I could have made an impact on my family.

    My family and I could have made an impact on our town.
    Their impact could have changed the nation and
    I could indeed have changed the world.

  • One Dozen Rubber Ducky Ducks

    This past week I sold One Dozen Rubber Duckie Ducky Ducks in a nativity scene (set includes: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, 3 wise men, angel, lamb, cow, donkey and camel) without ever linking to the product. It would make most sense if it came from this website since I talk a lot about Erich Stauffer figurines and other collectibles, but it wasn’t. It was clicked on through my site on Coby Kyros Tablets. That’s right. Someone looking for information on Android tablets bought a nativity scene made of rubber duckies. But that’s not all. I have a site that exclusively promotes learning sets like science experiements for kids and yet MID Tablets sold a child’s microscope. Who did sell a Coby Kyros tablet? A page about technology consulting. This goes to show, it pays to post (and post often) #myBody. Here are some of the systems I use to use affiliate marketing to help transition to a full-fledged ecommerce company or “etailer“.

    Systems for eCommerce/Affiliate Marketing

    To run a successful online business probably requires some systems so I’ve been developing some and thought I’d share:

    • Review Amazon Best Seller lists and curate new items to add to your site(s) – (Daily)
    • Review sold items that were not linked to and create posts for them accordingly – (Daily)
    • Review Google Analytic trends for top content and keywords on your site – (Monthly)
    • Review Amazon sales clicked, but not sold* – (Monthly)
    • Review Google Adsense reports for trends – (Weekly)

    Posting Routines

    • Post SEO optimized title and META description, reviews, a picture, and some original content (I use WordPress SEO by Yoast)
    • Install “Social” plugin by MailChimp + “Twitter Tools” to not only display tweets, but post to Twitter
    • Post also on Google+ and Facebook (and any other social network you can systematically stay engaged in)

    How to Read the Amazon Associates Orders Report

    *When I download the Orders report, I get a view of what people are clicking on, but not buying. I think the “Product Link Clicks” is a better metric for us to track since we can’t control what they do once they are on Amazon, but let’s read what Amazon Associates says:

    Orders Reports display number of clicks for each product via a Product Link or add-to-cart button, number of orders placed through the Product Link, and the resulting Product link conversion. You can also see other items that were ordered after customers clicked through to other Amazon pages.

  • Plans

    “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

    It’s easy to get caught up in the notion that a sound business plan and a strong marketing strategy will ensure your success in business. We’re taught in business school and in the media that if you want to be successful, you have to plan, but how often do things go according to plan?

    Business Continuity Plans

    Its wise to plan for various environmental or social events that could seriously impact the ability of your business to continue on afterward. Is your data backed up? Have the backups been restored to test? Would you be able to function if 30% of your staff became ill? How long could you remain in business without electricity?

    When I was a business analyst, I was responsible for helping department heads create business continuity plans that outlined what their department would do in the event of a disaster. Hundreds of pages were printed, placed in a plastic tub, and never touched again. In the event of an actual disaster, the plans were not what mattered, it was the act of planning.

    As an Internet Marketer and Technology Consultant, I help business owners create a plan for how they are going to use the web to market their business, be more efficient, and lower costs. We create a roadmap for how we think things will go, but things don’t always go as planned. The key is to know how to pivot and planning helps with that.

    Does your business have a disaster recovery plan for business continuity? Do you know what your company would do if a single workstation, a server, or the entire building went ‘down’? These are the plans that are above and beyond baseline data back-up, which you should be doing anyway. If you’re not doing that, stop reading this and back up your data! It should always be in at least two locations with one copy preferably stored off-site.

    Disasters such as earthquakes, fires, and floods are all too common in today’s world, but sadly, business continuity plans are not. Be prepared for not only a loss of data, hardware, and facilities, but also the risk of a pandemic where a third to half of your work force either can’t come in or are sick. How would your business continue to function? Would you still be able to serve your customers? What sort of steps are you taking to prepare for a scenario like this, or worse?

    It’s easy to create a plan, the hard part is executing it. One trap a lot of people fall into is creating the structure around innovation or a new project in the hopes that once the structure is in place the new product will almost make itself. “After [that] it’s just ‘plug and chug’,” they say. Executors know that you have to do the plug and chug part too even if that means hiring or outsourcing to do so. The ‘plug and chug’-level work should be a matter of following procedures in a well-defined structure. The creators, designers, and innovators at a company usually like to create the structure, but have trouble filling it in. Either learn to get around this psychological gap or find someone else to finish/maintain the job for you.

    Business Plans

    Business plans are important because they summarize both your vision for the company and your blueprint for the company’s operating success. The business plan is a written guide that details the start-up and the future direction of your company. Who should write the plan? You, the entrepreneur. No one else knows your business idea and goals better. Yes, there are services that can do the work for you. However, you must present this business idea to bankers or other investors. Therefore, it is best if you are very familiar and comfortable with the plan.

    Although there’s no set format, a good business plan typically includes:

    • Cover page—Identifies your business
    • Table of contents—Organizes information for the reader
    • Executive summary—Provides a “big picture” view of the plan, highlighting the factors that will lead to success
    • Business background—If it is a brand-new business, include your background and skills
    • Marketing plan—Relates the business’s marketing strategy
    • Action plan—Summarizes how you will create and deliver your product or service
    • Financial statements and projections—Illustrates how the business will perform financially based on the plan’s assumptions
    • Appendix—Includes statistical analyses, marketing materials, résumés.

    Business success requires the ability to adapt to changing situations. Nothing ever goes as planned (SEE Business Continuity Plans). The world of business is full of surprises and unforeseen events. Using the habit of adaptability allows business owners to respond to circumstances with the ability to change course and act without complete information. Being flexible allows us to respond to changes without being paralyzed with fear and uncertainty.

    Problems are a regular part of business life. Staff issues, customer misunderstandings, cash crunches- the list is endless. To achieve business success, look at both sides of the coin. Every problem has an opportunity. Being opportunity focused makes the game of business fun and energizing.

    Marketing Plans

    When creating a marketing plan, keep in mind the four P’s of marketing:

    • Product—What good or service will your business offer? How is that product better than those offered by competitors? Why will people buy/want it?
    • Price—How much can you charge? How do you find the balance between sales volume and price to maximize income?
    • Promotion—How will your product or service be positioned in the marketplace? Will your product carry a premium image with a price to match? Will it be an inexpensive, no-frills alternative to similar offerings from other businesses? What kinds of advertising and packaging will you use?
    • Place—Which sales channels will you use? Will you sell by telephone, or will your product be carried in retail outlets? Which channel will economically reach your market?

    Regarding “Price”, I recenly got an email from a customer who told me a story about a friend of his who confided in him, his friend said, “I was desperate. I had to sell out my women’s apparel store, so I did a lot of expensive advertising at 50% off. I was going broke so in total frustration one day I said ‘Oh, #@& it, doubled my prices and sold right out!” I liked the story enough, but it didn’t really sink in until I ran across a similar story the next day.

    In the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, author Cialdini tells the story about a turquoise jeweler out West who, in the peak of tourist season, couldn’t sell her jewelry. The owner had priced the jewelry reasonably. She had placed it in a central display location. She’d even asked her staff to point it out to browsers. Nothing worked. Finally, the owner gave up and decided to sell the jewelry at a loss. On her way out of town for a business trip, she dashed off a note to a member of her sales staff – “Everything in this display case 1/2”. When the owner arrived back at her shop she was surprised to find that all of the turquoise jewelry had been sold. Puzzled, the proprietor asked her staff what happened. She had misread her hastily-scrawled note (deciphering the “½” as a “2”), and doubled the price of each piece rather than cutting it in half, making the jewelry seem better and therefore worth paying for. The logic from both of these stories follows that, “If it’s expensive, it has got to be good.”

    A marketing plan should summarize your findings about the key target buyer description, market segments the company will compete in, the unique positioning of the company and its products compared to the competition, the reasons why it is unique or compelling to buyers. Determine specific goals, set a deadline for these goals to be achieved, then write them down. The old saying, “Its not real until its written down,” is true here. Next, share these goals with your employees and any invested partners. Get everyone on the same page so that they can all help work towards the goal.

    Determine which tools can best help you meet your goals and how they will be used. These can include, but are not limited to, the web, direct mailings, email newsletters, hosted events, relevant trade shows, outdoor or print advertising, or social media. Next, create a plan for use of each tool. Projects are best not left open-ended. In the same way you assigned a deadline for the goal as a time restraint, the goal should also have a financial restraint. Work with your team to create a budget that reflects your vision and achieves your goals. If you end up under-budget, that’s one more thing to celebrate when you achieve your goals.

    The easiest and hardest thing to do sometimes it to delegate responsibility for implementing each part of the plan. More than likely you won’t be able to do all aspects of the plan and so you’re going to have to divvy up the responsibilities. Make sure there are built in accountability measures to check performance. Monitor the results of your team members progress and the goal in general. Beware of project creep. Weekly meetings to remind those involved about the plan and its deadlines may help. Lastly, don’t be afraid to make adjustments as necessary. Being an agile company may be what sets you apart from your bigger competitors.

  • How to Succeed and Grow through a Slow Economy

    Are your company leaders keeping an eye on the traffic patterns in the economy? Are they doing what most companies do during a down economy? Does your company have a culture of innovation?

    It doesn’t matter if your company has 10,000 employees or you are self-employed, the economy affects us all. How we react to it and lead our companies through it will determine our success or failure over time. Here are some things that successful companies do to succeed and grow through a slowed down economy:

    1. Don’t be afraid to change the company or it’s core products. I’m not talking about changing the dress code during the summer time or preventing overtime, I’m talking about examples like Scott Paper becoming a consumer products company rather than a paper mill or General Motors becoming a transportation company instead of a vehicle manufacturer. Listen to what your customers are asking of you. Mine your customer service data banks and don’t assume that what has worked for the last hundred years will work for the next ten.

    2. Create a culture of innovation and creativity. Leadership needs to be the most innovative and creative at all. It’s time to go back to what you learned in Kindergarten and stop being afraid to fail. Don’t kill the messengers. Reward those who speak up with new ideas even if they are bad. Things will beget similar things and ideas will beget new ideas. This is the essence of brainstorming, but glacial drift of a company’s mentality has a way of leveling off those who are non-conforming. Instead of being a hive of solidarity, consider being a greenhouse for growth.

    3. Keep an eye on the future, not just the next payroll. Companies can be pac-managers too, knee-jerk reacting to any wave or fluctuation in the economy as it comes, but a macro view of the economy, realizing that precisely because it is a wave, what goes down, must come up, decisions need to be made about the future, not just the short term. This doesn’t mean staffing for an eventual, but currently non-existent work load, but being more fluid in the utilization of human capital and creating ‘pressure valve’ positions and opportunities for adaptable workers and ways to recognize and insulate top performers.

    If your interested in economics, you might also check out my post on Ex Forex about Vibration Economics.

  • Indianapolis Technology Consulting

    We recently updated our parent company’s website, Erich Stauffer, Inc., with a new WordPress theme featuring fast-loading rollover image hyperlinks, custom widget placement, and new content. Erich Stauffer is an Indianapolis business consulting firm that has several professional services brands and a publishing arm.

  • My First Day of Work After Quitting My Day Job

    I’m on a boat!

    While I started my own business in 2007, I have been working full time since 2001 doing various things for banks and other institutions. However, my heart was almost never in the work I was doing. I was doing it, but without joy. Eventually, I didn’t feel right thinking about my ‘other life’ for most of the time while I was at my day job and so on August 1, 2011 I quit my day job.

    There were various reasons for doing this, but none of them involved having a plan or saving up an emergency fund. I had trained and outsourced every function of my job until there was nothing left of my own job to do – and nobody noticed – so I left to grow my side business into my full-time business.

    This is a story of how I spent my first day after quitting my day job

    The first thing I did was to make a schedule of tasks. I came up with a rough outline for how I thought I would spend my days. It didn’t include time for service calls or meetings with clients, but since everything I do is modular, I can just pick back up after going to do one of those things: (more…)

  • Should Amazon.com Go Brick-and-Mortar?

    Those who remember walking into a Service Merchandise may recall the assortment of toys, electronics, and fine goods where the selection was larger because there was only one of everything. That’s because you ordered your item in-store and picked it up from a warehouse in the back. It was the pre-Internet version of Amazon.com and it could be Amazon’s next move.

    On May 15, 2001, Steve Jobs led a group of journalists from a hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia to Apple’s first store in the second level of Tysons Corner Center for a commemorative press event. The first two Apple Stores opened on May 19 in Tysons Corner and later the same day in Glendale, California at Glendale Galleria. Around the same time Service Merchandise was going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and by the beginning of 2002 they would be out of business. Apple now has over 200 stores and Service Merchandise is now online-only. So what can we learn from Apple’s success and Service Merchandise’s failure and what does it have to do with Amazon?

    Service Merchandise was a catalog showroom, which meant it showcased a lot of high-end goods and sold them to people who may not have bought them otherwise. I can remember salivating over their boomboxes and Casio watches, things I would never have been exposed to otherwise. This is how the Apple Store has leveraged their retail outlets. Apple used the iPod to get people familiar with Apple products and to come into the store. There they were exposed to Mac computers and any new innovation that came along (think iPhone and iPad). By situating themselves in high-end shopping centers, Apple made sure that the trend-setters were well taken care of and that is partly why there are sometimes more employees inside an Apple Store than customers. What if Amazon opened a catalog showroom in upscale malls around the country like in Glendale, California, Carmel, Indiana, or Manhattan, New York, and showcased their upscale goods – the ones they stock, but people don’t see – and helped change the way people think about Amazon from being an online bookstore or even an online version of Wal-Mart to being the best way to buy anything – including high end goods like watches and jewelry. Could a retail outlet store like Service Merchandise do that for Amazon.com?

    Let us know what you think in the comments.