Small Businesses in the Year 2013 : Small is Big and Less is More !

2013 is here and we are all Still Alive! You are alive but what about your Business ? Is it alive and kicking ?

If you are small (to medium) business owner, We bring you here some ‘Less n More’ that you should be doing in the coming year to transform your Business. What you should be doing less and what you should be doing more. Let us begin.

The typical wish list of Small businesses would look like

 

For that matter, not just small businesses but all businesses want to do the same. But in case of small businesses with limited resources (funds, time, people, etc.), the odds against are way too high, the risks way too real!

So what’s holding you back from doing exactly what you want to do ?

 

Spend Less. But How ? I cannot just wish away the cost

How about changing some of your fixed cost into operating cost. Will that help ? Certainly, as it will free up some cash currently tied up in these. With that the risks too go down. How ? Go Cloud.

Instead of using

Licensed copies of Software + Your own machines + Servers + Keeping them up to date + virus free + spending some on back ups and various other costs of managing such infrastructure

why not Go Cloud ?

• Want to do mass emailing or send marketing campaign ?
• Want to do accounting ?
• Want to do e-commerce ?
• Want to do Project Management ?
• Want to work on documents of all kinds ?
• Want to connect with customers thru CRM ?

 

For each and everything that you do, there are many Cloud Services available. How does that change my costs ? Most of these services are priced at Pay per Use basis. Pay only as much and as long as you use. You can stop and start anytime. Viruses, Data backups, upgrades will be history. You don’t need to invest in any infrastructure. Come to think of it, that’s a lot of cost saving with some side benefits like peace of mind.

 

Make More. Ok, but How ? That’s a million dollar question. Literally.

You are Dangerous when you are organized.

Organize your sales efforts. Use ready to use (many of them FREE) Cloud CRMs. That will free up your mind to do real work i.e. Talking to your (future and present ones) Customers more and more often. With Cloud CRM once you automate many mundane repetitive tasks, you can work on improving quality of your sales pitch, spend more time researching a customer before meeting him, think about your customers more. That’s whats going to boost your sales graph.

 

Build Future Revenue. Today.

I am talking about Marketing. With limited bandwidth in small businesses, when immersed in sales, it’s easy to ignore Marketing. Remember these marketing campaigns are going to make a mark on the minds of your Future customers. Marketing efforts put today are going to bear fruits in next couple of quarters in the form sales. If you have limited bandwidth then how do you do both sales and marketing ? You gotto automate them.

 

World is Flat. Really. Even for small businesses like you.

Look around you. The phone you are using, the computer screen in front of you, the softwares that you are using…chances are that you are not even sure where 7 out of 10 things are coming from. Is it China, is it Australia, is it India or is it USA. Everything and everybody is going global. Why? Because it makes sense.

So why are you limiting yourself to some region? …. Distance ? Costs ? Ignorance ? Fear ?

Whatever they are, Iron those things out. In this intricately connected world, you don’t have to be physically there to sell your stuff or sell yourself. Try Skype for business if not already using. Make a list of countries. Follow their business scene on web. Venture out.

Do Less but Do More. Yes. You read it right.

How ?

Automate is your best mate!

I already talked at length about how you can use Clouds to automate your Sales, Marketing and many other business processes. Automation is One time efforts, every time dividends. With so many free and low cost tools easily available at your finger tips, why not automate menial tasks out of your To Do Lists.

Lighten up and Sharpen up your To Do List to include the Most important (for revenue) tasks. You can and you should and you must automate the rest of the menial tasks.

 

Delegate. To Win.

You cannot and you don’t need to be at every place doing every damn thing. Learn to Trust people around you. No matter how small SMBs are, the successful ones have a strong team behind them. It’s not a one man affair. If you cannot trust, you cannot build a team.  Without a team, your growth is very limited.

Delegation not just frees up your time but also gives others a sense of responsibility, a chance to learn and grow. God lies in details and that’s why you might feel compelled to micro manage tasks that you ‘delegate’ to others. But while doing so, you ruin it. How ? Because now, neither person really owns that task. The person doing it will just ‘follow’ your instruction while you don’t really have a total control over the task as you are not doing it.

Build a team if you are really serious about your Business.

 

Outsource

Welcome to the Global Village. As I already pointed out that when you can have Global Customers then why not Global Vendors. Have relook at your cost structure. As I said, Do Less but Do More.

Find out what are the Core tasks of your business and what are ‘other’ stuff. Spend more (time, money, brains) on Core Tasks. You don’t have to do ‘other’ stuff yourself, always.

Once you can split apart different tasks, different business process, you will be pleasantly surprised to see there is really a lot of scope for “permanent” cost reduction. Go for it. Outsource. Start Small. Do it in a planned manner to enjoy best results.

 

Go More Places

Earlier Business was mainly carried out by ‘Traders’. They used to travel extensively during their whole lifetime. Because they knew intuitively that the more places you go, the more people you meet, more business you will get.

If you just list down the places you have been in the last year, you will see you can certainly do better. By the way, I don’t just mean geographic places. I mean many places like

• Frequent Online Forums that you have never been before
• Join LinkedIn Groups of your line of business
• Add yourself in Google Plus Circles and Communities of your interests. Not necessarily business interests.
• Join the Local chamber of commerce and industry
• Meet all sorts of business people – those struggling more than you,  those more successful than you and many others
• Join an NGO. You will be surprised to see how different kind of people you will meet over there.

 

I am sure that once you start Doing Less and Doing More the right things, they will make all the more sense to you than they make now. Check out some services below if you don’t believe some of the things I have been asking you to do.