Author Archives: Kathleen

Bring Customers Inside

For any business, your customer is the life-blood of that business.

You know that you need to treat them well in order for them to return, but aside from that how do you get them to come back? In today’s economy, everyone is really watching their pennies. Let’s talk about ways to get your customer to return to the store without costing you anything but a little bit of time and creativity.

Evaluate your business and what you do to serve the needs of your customer.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Does my typical customer have a common problem that could easily be solved with my know-how?
  • Can I create some type of instructional material that would explain this to them?
  • Am I comfortable writing a brief instruction manual?
  • Could I talk about it, record the instructions about how to solve their problem?
  • Does it have to be seen? Can I create a short video that would help them solve their problem?

Here’s where your list is going to come in handy. Hopefully you’ve been building your customer database with not only their names and contact information, but their interests and problems that they may have that need solving.Select the group of people who have expressed an interest in solving a problem. For example, let’s say you’re a woodworking shop and you’ve sold a brand new piece of equipment to a hundred customers, but you’ve been getting a few returns and even more complaints that the equipment is too difficult to operate.

Create a short video demonstrating the proper use of that piece of equipment. Explain what the most common problems are that new users may encounter, and then show them how it is done right. This puts you head and shoulders above your competition, because what you’ll do now is email a link to this video to everyone who has purchased this piece of equipment.

Not only do you send that email, but the following week, you call each one of those customers and ask them if they received the email, and whether they viewed the video. If they haven’t, encourage them to do so and promise to call them back the following week. (Make sure you DO call them back.)

If they have received the email and viewed the video, ask them for honest feedback. Find out whether that video helped them to overcome the problems you’ve been hearing about.

By taking the initiative to anticipate the need of a group of your customers, and then fixing the problem easily and with little or no cost, you have ensured that you have a group of highly satisfied customers. These customers are the ones who will remember the extra steps you took to take care of them. The next time they need something, they’ll buy it from you.

K Birmingham

Do You Know Who Your Customers Are? Use Your List

You need to check your customer database.

What? You don’t have one? It isn’t up to date? It didn’t seem important to you?

Your customer database is worth its weight in gold. Without it, you might as well just plan on going out of business…if not today, then soon.

Your existing customers are the most important source of income for any business. Knowing who these people are, understanding why they have chosen to work with you, and catering to their needs, wants, and desires must be your priority.

What amazes me is how many small business owners fail to exploit their very own customer list. You gained those customers at a relatively large cost. To retain them is critical because of the following reasons:

  • If a customer has bought from you once, chances are very excellent that they will do so again.
  • Recruiting a new customer costs much more than it costs to retain an old customer.
  • Catering to your existing customers is the wisest business decision you’ll ever make.
  • Selling to an existing customer is easier than selling to a new customer.
  • Selling to an existing customer is more profitable because you don’t have the cost of acquiring that customer this time.

The problem, however, is that once many businesses make a sale, they’re just looking over that customer’s shoulder to see who is next. Failing to try to make any type of follow-up sale to a customer who has recently done business with you can cost you thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in lost income.

If you do not have a way to get the contact information for every customer you have ever had in your place of business, you need to get a system in place today.

The best information is to have name, address, email address, phone number, purchasing history, ads and promotions that each customer has responded to.

You can recreate some of your customer lists by getting software and putting the information in by hand from past transactions, credit card receipts, etc. Whatever you do, start on it today and get that information into your database.

The LIST is GOLD.

Teach your customer service reps and salespeople to get the contact information from every person who comes into your store. Larger companies have rewards programs. The customer feels as though they are getting a benefit from the discount they receive, but the business owner is building their list daily by soliciting this information from each customer, and then tracking their purchases and ad responses.

There is no reason that a small business should conduct business in any other way.

Kathleen Birmingham

Shop Local Initiatives

Buying from him today could keep him in biz tomorrow.

For anyone who reads this, consider making a pledge to yourself to shop locally for a period of time. I have heard initiatives from around the country where people are trying to shop locally for the entire holiday season.

Others want to try to set up a single day a month where customers will buy locally. This requires a little bit of organization on the part of the biz owners, but they might consider doing it.

The payoff could be huge!

Spending money in your community helps to pay for services such as police, fire, emergency personnel, to say nothing of our schools, roads, and infrastructure.

More and more communities are discovering that they don’t have money for such essential services, and even more of them are discovering that they aren’t going to be able to afford the pensions of their current workers a few short years down the road.

When you spend money in a big department store, most of the money leaves your community (and oftentimes even your country) by the truckloads. We have to stop sending our money to other countries.

The more we do that, the more grim our future is going to be.

Little by little we are draining our communities dry. And yet, it only takes just a little bit of a change, perhaps spending $50 to $100 locally that you would normally have spent in a big store or online.  You will also find that when you shop locally you have a lot more choices.  Do we really want to be so universal that everyone, everywhere buys exactly the same thing?

What are you going to do today to try to support your local biz?

What Makes for a Good Entrepreneur?

There are a lot of “beliefs” about what makes for a good entrepreneur. Here’s a great article talking about the 5 Myths About Entrepreneurs that should either support or dispel most of them.

Are you an entrepreneur?  Or are you a victim of circumstance? Did you choose the biz you’re in or did it somehow choose you?

Some might say that doesn’t matter, but I think deep down, everyone knows that it does matter.  Some of us find ourselves running a business that we somehow inherited, and we’re not really even sure we like it.

The problem is, if you don’t like it, your lack of passion and interest can impact how your clients and customers see you and your business.  So you’re going to have to ask yourself a really hard question: “Do I stay in this business or not?”

If you decide to stay in the business, then you somehow have to figure out how to fall in love with it and your clients and customers. Is there a micro-niche that you could serve that would be more interesting to you than those you currently serve?

Could you put a slightly different spin on the business, making it uniquely your own? Can you educate yourself about your business, products, and clientele so that you become the expert they’re looking for?  Once people begin to come to you as the expert, helping them to solve their problems, you might change how you view yourself and your business.

If, however, you answered, “No!” to the above question…the why are you still in business?  You really should either sell the business, or get someone else to run or manage it for you, because your lack of interest and desire to run it will eventually drive it into a slow death spiral.  Without that spark of entrepreneurial enthusiasm, innovative thinking, and deep interest, the business is lifeless.  Your clients and customers know that, too.

This isn’t something you need to decide in the time it takes to read this article. But you do need to do some heavy thinking. Seek guidance from someone who is not financially or emotionally involved in the business.  A business coach is a good place to start to see if you are in the right place, or if you need to make some big changes in your life.

Scary thought, but in the long run, life’s too short to do something you hate for the rest of your life.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

The Birth of Our Nation

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

That they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

That among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness.

~Declaration of Independence, 1776

We live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Do you know your history and appreciate the significance of this beautiful flag
of ours?

We might be taking the 4th of July a bit for granted, so let’s recall the important events of 1776 and what they meant to us. Prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Americans had been chafing under the rule of Britain’s King George who wanted not only to rule and tax the people of the new colonies.  He also wanted to keep them well under his thumb, limiting their ability to expand territories and to export all our natural resources. The Revolutionary War is the result of that desire for Independence and the signing of the Declaration of Independence was merely the beginning.

It would take six very long and painful years before we broke free from British rule. The Revolutionary War pitted families against one another long before the Civil War ever did. Some people were content to remain loyalists, but I am
glad that the Patriots held fast.

Hurray for the USA!

Here is an article on Independence Day that summarizes much of what went on in 1776 and the subsequent six years.

It is good to recall that the 4th of July is about a whole lot more than fireworks and BBQs.

It really IS a day to celebrate the birth of our nation, and the beginning of an entirely new way of life.

We are, indeed, fortunate to live in the USA!

Checking in……

Checking in…

Say it Isn’t So!!!

I have committed one of the worst sins in the blogging world there is…I haven’t blogged on this site for over six months.

Ridiculous!

Horrifying!

What was I thinking?!!

Guess what…it was an experiment.  I wanted to see what happened when I left a blog to just “be” for a long period of time, completely unattended, uncared for, and lost.

Consider what would happen to a beautiful rose plant, you put it in a gorgeous pot, you use the best potting soil, you fertilize it, you water it, you weed it, (for a few days) and then life happens, you get busy, and you FORGET you have a rose plant out there on the patio, and whether the temperatures are cold, blowing, and freezing, or they’re hot, still, and drying…the same result occurs…

…the rose plant dies.

I checked my site stats…let’s have a recap here…I started this blog in November 2010, and I posted a total of fourteen posts, my last one toward the end of December…so I didn’t even blog for two full months.

As you can see from the following table, I had about 40 hits  for November, December, January, February, and March…and then things really tumbled…until I got to, well…FIVE! in June 2011.  Six months and my blog is virtually dead!

What this tells me is that you can’t just start a blog, put up a few articles (even if they’re REALLY, REALLY great articles) and expect anything to happen.  I have my Twitter account connected, and that seems to continue to grow slowly (very slowly) because I’ve let that go as well just to see what happened…but the hypothesis has been proved.

I think we all knew it…we just needed the proof.

There you have it, folks. Your blog is an excellent marketing tool, ONLY IF YOU USE IT!!!!!

I’ll be working with one of our local Chambers of Commerce, talking about this very topic…teaching small biz owners how to promote their own business.  Everything I cover with that group, I’ll be posting here for everyone to learn from.

Hey, this is going to be a really GREAT ride folks.  Stick around and prepare to take notes that will take your business to the next level.

Until then,

~Kit Birmingham

Rural Business Must Not Be Forgotten

Carrot varieties horizontalWhile I frequently write about business that you may find in your city or town, we can’t forget that our most basic roots are in our rural communities.  I grew up very closely associated with the land.  My mother grew up on a farm and as a result I worked on the farms of my aunts and uncles from the time I was young.  I learned that you picked what was available and ate it.

Sometimes you picked corn at 4:30 am, and if you were hungry, you ate raw corn as you picked for the Farmer’s Market.  I learned that produce doesn’t keep.  It must be eaten as fresh as possible, because that is when it tastes best.

Our rural businesses have a very unique set of problems, and yet in order for our country to survive, for our cities and towns to survive, our rural business cannot be left behind. Without our local farms, we wouldn’t have local fruits and vegetables, local farm-raised meat and eggs, local milk and cheese. What would life be like if all the food we ate and drank tasted like cardboard?

There are several grass-roots movements afoot about supporting local agriculture such as Farm to School, Community Supported Agriculture, Farm to Table, Locavore, etc. I will be covering these topics in greater detail when I have the opportunity.

Update: 9/2012 Here is the link to my Farm to School Article in Acreage Life Magazine.

Every Entrepreneur is in the People Business

http://chialichien.com/cal/blog/242-a-living-lesson-in-integrity.html

When you are in business, no matter what it is, you are in the people business.

What people, you ask? Every person you interact with.  And this may seem counter-intuitive to you, but treating your employees better than your clients and customers will result in a better business all around.  Treat your employees like family and they’ll return the effort a thousand-fold.

I have a friend who works for a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and she works hard. They work very long hours both in the fields where they tend to the vegetables, planting, weeding, and harvesting. They also work very, very hard preparing the bags of produce for the end customers (people like me who like to support locally and eat delicious organic local food). The last time we spoke, I asked her why she was so willing to work so darn hard and she said it was because she and her co-workers are all treated like family. Everyone works hard, TOGETHER!

That was a telling statement. I’ve known people who seemed to have truly “cushy” jobs and yet because they weren’t treated well by their bosses or managers, they were willing to just up and leave for the next possible opportunity.

Being in biz means you are in the people business  and in order to stay competitive, you must treat your people well.

Client/Customer Retention

It appears to be another “slow” season…

What exactly does that mean?  For some, it means that weather or circumstances prevent clients/customers from visiting your place of business.  Right now we’re between the holidays (when people typically spend more money than they’re comfortable spending) and Tax Day…April 15 (18 THIS YEAR!!!)

With this economic environment, a typical slow season is even worse now.

You can do what you’ve always done…say, “Well, it’s the slow season…hopefully we’ll get an increase in business soon…hopefully.”

However, most people who wait for that sudden change in the number of people coming in are usually destined for disappointment. Unless you do something BEFORE the slow season, you may be putting up GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs during the slow season.

Take a look at your business for the past year or two (or five!) and establish when you are “slow”. The gift shop business that we run has several slow seasons.  After the holidays, we see a very slow season between January and Easter (that’s a LONG slow season, folks!). Then we have a little slump around June into July, and then another one during late summer, end of August until the beginning of November.