March 22nd, 2012
I love the weekly smallbiz challenges in the Globe and Mail. The issues range from the very serious (e.g. should I take on 100,000 more square feet of space or not) to the incredibly mundane (e.g. my cell phone bills are too high, what should I do? duh. shop around!).
The most recent dilemma is a about a company that has very good success making “children’s toys and accessories using recycled sweaters”. To ensure long term growth, the company is thinking of diversifying and “launching a line of home decor accessories for the adult market, which would be sold under a new brand“.
They think that can leverage their current promotion and distribution networks. The issue is that they are a four person company and the owner/CEO is obviously very involved in everything. To diversify, he would have to divert some (a lot?) of his time and attention to the new venture. You can read the full write up here.
What should he do?
For once, the three experts who are called upon to provide their recommendations are pretty much in unison, as am I with them:
DON’T DO IT!
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: diversify, expansion, focus, product lines
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Small Business Case Studies | 3 Comments »
March 19th, 2012
Word cloud for the content for this week's favorites.
Throughout each week, I share what I consider to be interesting articles, blogs or web pages/sites about B2B and small business. I appreciate quality so I’m somewhat selective about what I pass along.
The best way to keep track of these is to follow me on Twitter at @bizcompare. But in case you missed any, here’s a list of my faves that I sent out this past week.
Sales & Marketing:
Leadership, Management & People:
Web & Social Media:
Thanks for reading my blog and please visit again.
Vincent out.
Authored by Geoff Vincent
Tags: B2B marketing, CMO, Facebook Pages For Business, Google traffic, Leadership, ROI, selling, SEO, social media, weekly meetings
Posted in Small Business, Weekly Favorites | No Comments »
March 15th, 2012
This post is all about B2B Marketing, but first a little background on what I am doing with digest blogs.
I’ve been blogging now for almost 2 years. I subscribe to about 15 other bloggers who specifically write about blogging.
Why? I am constantly working on improving my blog, its usefulness, content, ease of navigation, focus, etc. One way I do this is study other bloggers and listen to what they recommend as best practices and new developments.
Like many things in life, once in while you have to step back and take a look at the big picture which I am doing with my blog right now.
The first thing that jumps out at me is I have too many categories, redundant categories, thin categories etc. So I’m going to start to rationalize these down to key themes and sub-categories so you can more easily find the info you seek.
Another key change I’m going to make is to create “digests”. A digest will be single blog post (that I’ll update continuously) that will group similar, individual blogs posts together. This will enable someone to quickly scan all my blog titles on, say, B2B Marketing and then click through to the ones of most interest.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Branding, LinkedIn, Market Share, market sizing, marketing brief, marketing metrics, MelissaData
Posted in Digests | 4 Comments »
March 13th, 2012
New website for a Smallbiz. DIY or get help?
Situation: You’re a small business and you already have a website. But it’s old or may be on a 3rd party platform like Tumblr and was likely a DIY effort with internal resources. But you know its time to develop a new website. What do you do?
This same scenario is facing a couple of companies in an article called Web site redesign: Go it alone or get help?
After lots of deliberation and research one company has decided to go it alone (with the help of a friend who can code a site) while another is going to spend between $20,000 and $25,000 with a 3rd party to build the site.
My reaction:
The first company’s choice to DIY is probably correct. Their needs are relatively simple and risks are low. The second company’s choice, however, feels like a ton of money to spend on a new site. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: agencies, DIY, freelancers, outsourcing, website design
Posted in Management | 4 Comments »
March 9th, 2012
Word cloud for the 8,205 words of content in this week's picks!
Throughout each week, I share what I consider to be interesting articles, blogs or web pages/sites about B2B and small business. I appreciate quality so I’m somewhat selective about what I pass along.
The best way to keep track of these is to follow me on Twitter at @bizcompare. But in case you missed any, here’s a list of my faves that I sent out this past week.
Sales & Marketing:
Leadership, Management & People:
Web & Social Media:
Thanks for reading my blog and please visit again.
Vincent out.
Authored by Geoff Vincent
Tags: B2B marketing, content marketing, entrepreneurs, facebook timeline, job search, leads, metrics, planning, SEO, SMB, start ups
Posted in Small Business, Weekly Favorites | 3 Comments »
March 8th, 2012
I just read an interesting article in the WSJ called The Risks of Promoting Without Giving Raises which was written from the point of view of a lawyer. While the focus is on the legal side of things (i.e. how to mitigate against some sort of employment suit), the writer does touch on a number of business issues as well.
In general, I’m not a fan of promotions without a raise or some sort of incremental compensation.
The “congratulations, you now have more work and responsibility, but I can’t pay you for it” is an unwise approach to smallbiz management with lots of downside and not much upside.
If you are thinking of promoting someone but not giving them a raise to go with it, there are a whole host of things to consider before proceeding such as: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: promotions, raises, salary expectations
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Human Resources, Management | 4 Comments »
March 6th, 2012
One of the 108 business services industries that we cover on our main site is called Event Planning, Convention and Meeting Planner and more. If you’re into stats and graphs, I encourage you to take a quick look at the firmographic make up of this industry here. Sample graph above.
The event planning vertical is one that I have a fair amount of exposure to during my days at D&B. Every second year, we would host an evening event for 200+ credit professionals. It was a big deal for us with a substantial budget to cover the venue, food, entertainment, gifts and more.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: checklists, event planning, meeting planners
Posted in Management, Quick Tips | 2 Comments »
March 1st, 2012
Full credit to the wrtier of this compact how-to guide to Google’s new privacy policy which kicks in today. Iain Marlow is the technology reporter for the Globe & Mail newspaper. Today he provides a very compact but helpful guide Google’s new policy as well as an explanation why they changed it.
In a nutshell, he says:
What’s changing:
- Google will now share your user information across its various services.
- Doing that will allow Google to more accurately target users with its ads, based on a person’s location, e-mail conversations, search history and preferences.
What’s not changing:
- Ordinary users can still use Google services that don’t require a Google account, such as Google Search and YouTube.
- Google will not start selling your personal information to advertisers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: browsers, Firefox, Google, privacy, privacy policy
Posted in Customer Profiling, Social Media | 6 Comments »
March 1st, 2012
Photo from Hamilton Spectator
A departure from my usual musings about smallbiz and B2B. I write today about flowers and our brief brush with “fame”.
I started my day today as I usually do: While the coffee is brewing, I get the newspapers off the front porch. The local rag is called the Hamilton Spectator and is a fun, informative local read.
Today on the front page above the fold, they featured the photo above and an accompanying article about how our winter has gone AWOL with the proof being in the photo and these plants blooming weeks before they should.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
