by John Grey on May 19, 2012
So you have a product that you sell locally, for now. Whether it is a local cupcake business, bread producer, toy manufacturer, etc. this will apply to you because your goal is success and the more success, the better…right? Growing your business requires incremental dollar sales month over month, year over year. Holding everything constant (product, price, distribution, placement, etc.) there is no reason to believe that the customers that you currently sell to or the shop that you currently sell at will produce more sales one year over the next. Therefore, the only way to grow when holding everything constant is to increase the number of stores that you are selling to. There are two ways to go about this: continue to sell locally or expand into national or regional accounts such as Costco, Target, Toys R Us, etc. In either scenario from the above and similar to what [...]
by John Grey on May 11, 2012
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article called 3 Keys for a Service-Driven Small Business. These 3 keys are most important before and during a job. However, today I want to expand upon how to succeed as a service-driven small business by discussing one of the most important thing to do after the job. Similar to sales or selling, the job is not done and the relationship is not locked-in once contact information is exchanged. Likewise, your job as a service small business company is not complete once the job is done. You must continue to follow-up after the job multiple times to check that everything is still good, everything has gone as planned, etc. Following up on a completed job is one of the most important things that you can do to solidify word-of-mouth referrals by taking your company/brand from ordinary to extraordinary. Furthermore, aside from checking to [...]
by John Grey on May 5, 2012
Here me out for a second: quality assurance is one of the greatest challenges of small businesses. I know that some of you might not agree with this statement because small business owners take pride and ownership in their business and are producing their products/services in a much smaller quantity than any large business would therefore, you assume that lower volume equals higher quantity. However, my argument is that this is not the case. Although lower volume should equal higher quality, the issue that small businesses have is a limitation of resources, which impacts quality. Take the example of a bagel shop in New York City – on a few occasions, if you ordered a bagel with egg, cheese, salt, pepper, and ketchup, they might forget the cheese. For the amount of volume that a small bagel shop does vs. a large scale breakfast egg sandwich manufacturer (a product that [...]
by John Grey on April 28, 2012
Have you ever wondered how large brands such as Popchips, Virgin America, Kraft, etc. have maintained a steady conversation flow on their social media accounts? There is more to social media conversations than posting on the whim. Although posting on the whim is within the rulebook, there is a deeper strategy to the daily tweets or posts that your favorite brands make. The best thing about this is that you can take this social media marketing strategy right out of the playbook of these large brands so that you can adopt these for your small business social media strategy. What is the secret? A social media calendar of course! It looks something like the following (this example could be for a local catering company) – click to enlarge: The conversation calendar is simple in form: assign a post type (i.e.: Image, Recipe, Trivia, Poll, Fact, etc.) to each day and [...]