small business

There are 6 posts tagged small business (this is page 2 of 2).

#21/111: Guerrilla Marketing

What is it about?

Guerrilla Marketing introduces you to marketing basics and a lot of different forms of marketing (e.g. newspapers, billboards, fliers). It focuses on small businesses and tries to show how to use your dollars more effectively.

Key points?

Focus: At first you should find out who your prospects are. What do they like? What are their hobbies? Where do they live? This allows you to spend your money better than trying to convince everybody that they need your product/service.

Be persistent: If you start your marketing champaign you should be able to run it regularly. Furthermore, it is important to stick with your campaign even if it doesn’t deliver immediate success. Marlboro stuck with their cowboy campaign for 30 years although it haven’t worked in the first year.

Market to your customers: It is about six times more expensive to market to prospects than to your customers. Therefore, try to sell more to your existing customers who already build confidence and trust with your company.

Test, Test, Test: If you’re not testing, you’re guessing. Test as much as you can and discard your losers and put this money in your winners.

Conclusion

The first part, which is about 80 pages long, was really useful and great. Sadly, this don’t apply to the rest of the book. A lot is just too shallow to be useful and other parts consist mostly of repetitions. You can see that this book is revised but not in-depth. There are statements which are certainly 30 years old and should be deleted by now.

#19/111: The E-Myth Revisited

What is it about?

Michael E. Gerber reveals an important fallacy of being an entrepreneur. He thinks that most entrepreneurs are technicians (e.g. engineers, copy writers, biologists) who think that they just have to do the work they’ve done before as employees. 

Key points?

You should work on your business, not in it: The problem, so Michael Gerber, is that most new entrepreneurs just do their old job. This mostly leads to exhaustion and too much time working. The solution is to work on your business, i.e. building a business model which could be replicated even without you.

Establish a culture: The first thing to do is to find your biggest aim. What do you want to do? What should your business do? It’s about building a culture which lives in every employee and every product.

Make yourself futile: Before you hire people you should try to document as much as possible. Start out with your organization chart (yes, even for solo founders) and define what each position have to do. You could build checklists with each step that has to be done. Eventually, you built a documentation system, which allows you to run the business without you.

Hire open and inexperienced people: You could hire some experienced managers or technicians but they maybe too expensive. Rather aim for open and inexperienced people. They will rather accept your culture and learn how to do things by your company manual.

Test, Test, Test: If you documentation leads to garbage your employees will deliver garbage. You have to test as much as possible to achieve the highest success. What should your employees wear? How should they welcome people? To whom should they sell? Try to find the best solution. Though, the world isn’t fixed. You/your employees have to test new methods and update the manual if these new methods are more successful.

Conclusion

I would call me a non-bureaucracy guy but I’m kind of falling in love with the concept of scaling businesses. It’s about the simplicity of using checklists instead of 1500 pages forms ;). Seriously, this methods allows even disorganized people to work in a business and deliver constant results. Furthermore, he wrote the book as a conversation with a woman who runs a small bakery, which helps to learn the main points of his book. Lovely!