10 Quick Tips for Small Businesses in the 21st Century pdf

10 Quick Tips for Small Businesses
in the 21st Century
by Al Bryce
www.wordpress.21stCenturySME.com
Copyright 2013 by Al Bryce
Smashwords Edition
Introduction
Business is just common sense
Set yourself goals and targets
Research your market and keep researching it
Find a niche
Get help where it’s needed
Justify spending every penny
Nothing is secret
Marketing is about volume sort of
Embrace online
Monitor your marketing
Be proactive
Introduction
Over the last 5 years working as an advisor to start-up businesses I’ve met with over 1,000
people to advise them about starting and running a small business. I’ve seen people from all
sorts of life, with all sorts of skills and all sorts of reasons for becoming entrepreneurs. I’ve seen
businesses start-up and flourish and I’ve seen them stutter and fade away. I’ve watched good
business ideas fail to launch and I’ve seen some poor ones (in my opinion!) go on to success.
This first hand access to SME successes and failures has allowed me to develop my own theory
on the correct way to run a winning small business strategy in the digital age. In the middle of
2012 I setup the 21st Century SME blog to share these ideas. Both before and during this
period I also created and ran my own SMEs, which have been invaluable in allowing me to test
out my theories of running successful small businesses. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t,
so that when I speak with people about starting up and running their small business, I can do so
out of a position of practical experience rather than one of theoretical knowledge.

Over this same time I’ve further developed my love of digital marketing techniques. Techniques
that I believe all SMEs need to start understanding and implementing, not in isolation but as part
of their overall strategy,. To ensure their business is found by prospective customers, to ensure
these prospects can be converted into paying customers and to ensure these customers will
become repeat and referring customers. The integration of these digital and non-digital
techniques are fundamental to my philosophy of what makes a 21st Century SME.
This basis of this whitepaper was originally written and delivered as a 10 minute presentation to
the Haddington branch of 4Networking in 2011, entitled 10 Business Lessons I’ve Learnt
from Being a Start-up Advisor.
Business is just common sense
I’m not for a moment saying that business is easy. For most of us it’s not. It will be frustrating, it
will be challenging, it will be rewarding (hopefully) but it will almost certainly never be easy.
If you break business down into its purest form it’s selling the right product, to the right person
for the right money. It’s common sense. The real difficulty lies in the ability to make common
sense decisions. Often we can get so caught up in the business, so involved in all of the tiny
details of the day to day running of the business that our perspective becomes flawed. We
become inwardly focused and can lose sight of our goals.
You need to ensure that you take the time to recognise when you are in this bubble and take
measures to step outside of it and see the bigger picture. You need to be able to step away
from your business, and look at it from the customer’s point of view rather than your own. One
of the biggest fallacies is that being self employed means you don’t have a boss. You do, you
have loads of them but you call them your customers. No customers means no business. So
you need to always think about what they want from you rather than what you want to give
them. This sounds so obvious but there are many businesses out there who focus on
themselves. They don’t step out of their bubble and so they miss the obvious and they carry on
making decisions they think are the correct ones.
So how do you ensure you’re making common sense decisions; that you’re perspective is
correct? For some people this may mean having a mentor, someone outside of the business
that can help you to identify flawed logic. It may be regular catch-ups with your customers to
ask them what it is they want. Some people I’ve spoken to use a recurring diary note to remind

themselves to self-analyse. It could even be a post-it on the wall asking “What would my
customer think?”.
We all have the ability to make common sense decisions, we just need to ensure we’re making
them for our customers rather than ourselves.
Set yourself goals and targets
“An archer cannot hit the bullseye if he does not know where the target is” Anonymous
Why are you setting up or running a small business? There could be a number of good
reasons. You might like to keep your own hours. Maybe you want to get rich and retire early.
Could be that you love the thrill of creating something or solving a problem. Perhaps you’re just
unemployable! Whatever it is, you should ensure you’re acutely aware of what that reason is
and what you’re in business for.
There’s no right and wrong answer to this one. It’s entirely dependent on you but it’s amazing
how many people I’ve met who haven't taken the time to think this through. Not only do I think
this is an important exercise, but I think you need to expand on this further and set out not only
why you started in business, but what your business goals are. Write them down. Only then
can you accurately plan how you’re going to achieve them.
I’m not saying you need to write a business plan (that may sound odd from a professional
business advisor but I’d rather create a kick-ass marketing strategy than a business plan). But
you should at least right down a list of your top business goals. Once you have these, you can
break these top level goals into smaller targets that have deadlines and explanations of how
you’re going to make them happen.
Remember to make your goals SMART:
● Specific - what exactly do you want to achieve?
● Measurable - How can you tell when you’ve achieved it? How can you chart your
progress?
● Achievable - Do you have the resources to reach your goal? There’s only 24 hours in a
day.
● Relevant - Getting 100,000 visitors to your website may be a good achievement but
unless you’re converting them into paying customers then it’s pointless
● Timely - Specify when you will achieve your goals by. We all work better when we have

a deadline, otherwise where is the motivation to take action today?
It’s all too easy to set your goals and never look at them again but you know what will happen;
you won’t achieve them. Add a note to your diary so that every Sunday evening, Monday
morning or whatever time works best for you, you review your goals. Measure how you’re
performing against where you should be by that stage. What can you do to get back on track or
blow them out of the water.

Research your market and keep researching it
Many people that start a business have some experience within the industry already, usually
through employment, but don’t let this lull you into a false sense of security. Being employed in
an industry can be very different to running a business within an industry so you need to act as
though it’s an entirely new area and do your research.
There are many different ways to access customer data but here are some of my favourites:
● Google Keyword Tool - don’t accept what this tells you as 100% accurate, but the
Google Keyword Tool allows you to get an overview of Google searches for keywords
and phrases. This can help give you an idea of 1) how many people are actively
searching for your product or service and 2) what the most popular keyword phrases are
for your industry (they aren’t always what you maybe think they are!)
● Facebook Advertising - you don’t need to actually run an advert but the Facebook
Advertising process lets you get a nice overview into their demographics. If you’re a
business that sells to consumers (rather than other businesses) then you can gather
some good data from this (i.e. the number of females aged between 18 and 35 that have
listed golf as a favourite activity? 163,000 *at time of writing*)
● British Library - if you’re looking for market data or information then the British Library
have an online resource to help you out (non UK based businesses should have a local
equivalent)
● Local Enterprise Agency or Authority - in the UK there are organisations set-up to
help advise and support SMEs. They can often access market research data on your
behalf.
● Trade Organisations - there aren’t many industries around these days that don't have

an industry body set-up to support their members. As well as other benefits, they often
have access to the latest industry information.
Much like a business strategy, you need to ensure that you treat market research as an active
task. It’s easy to get caught up in a bubble when you’re running a business but remember that
over time customer’s demands shift, products and services change and your competitors are
always evolving. You need to ensure you’re ahead of these changes and there are tools
available to help you:
● Community Network - as part of your marketing efforts you’ve probably set up a
community somewhere be it a Facebook page or a Twitter feed - make use of this one-
to-one access to customers and ask them for their thoughts on the industry, your
competitors and your own company
● Google Alerts - set up alerts for your competitors (so you can keep tabs on what they’re
up to), your product or service (to hear about any new advances first) and your key
phrases (to keep in the loop of the public’s latest thoughts)
● RSS Feeds - another great way to quickly and easily keep up to date with the latest
movement of your competitors and the leading industry authorities. Google Reader is a
free tool that allows you to see whenever any website or blog you choose to follow has
added new content - it saves you navigating separately to each website you’re interested
in.
● Survey Monkey - if you’ve built up a mailing list of customers then every so often you
might want to ask them for more in-depth feedback. Survey Monkey allows you to set-
up questionnaires that you can easily share to your networks and analyse the data they
provide.
Your Mouth - most businesses have at least some face-to-face contact with their customers.
Use this time to ask them for their thoughts - people tend to be receptive when asked for their
opinion!
Find a niche
When you start up a small business the temptation is strong to try and make your business
appeal to as many people (i.e. potential customers) as you can. But is this really the best
approach?

Ask yourself this – “Am I more likely to choose a photographer that handles all types of
photography for my upcoming nuptials or am I more likely to choose the photographer who
specialises in wedding photography?” I know which I’d go for.
It used to be difficult to get your business in front of potential customers, or at the very least it
used to be expensive. You’d have to take out an advert in the newspaper or rely on word of
mouth or a few other slow or expensive methods. So you would try and appear to be all things
to all people otherwise the majority of your costs or time would be wasted. These days it’s never
been easier to access your customers. Using the Internet you can almost access the entire
world. So we can now afford to focus our businesses on a niche area because that niche could
still be huge.
I’m not saying you should ditch all the services you currently offer to focus on just one. But you
should at least be working out your key services and treat each one differently when promoting
them. If I was a photographer I would make a list of all the types of photography that I provided
(i.e. wedding, family portraits, events and products for example). I’d then pick the top one or two
with the most potential and focus on them. I’m not suggesting that I’d turn down other work if it
came along, but by being more specific about my services I think I’ve got a better chance of:
1 Being found online – it’s all about the keywords right?
2 Converting an enquiry into a sale – because I’m the specialist in the area!
3 Gaining referrals – because I’m the ‘go to guy’ for wedding photography*
*Don’t hire me for your wedding photography. If you do, I’ll be using my iPhone Camera!
Get help where it’s needed
I’ve never come across a small business where costs aren’t tight. Part of the pleasure out of
running an SME is the variety of the work you get to do. You’re the boss, the teamaker, the
salesperson, the marketer and the accounts department all in one.
There’s a few reasons this is the case but I think the three key ones are:
● There’s a control element - you want it done the way you want it done
● You’ve got the time to do it - part of being an SME is knowing that sometimes you
don’t always have sales work to see you through all day every day
● You want to keep costs down - taking on staff or hiring in a professional is costly,
sometime more than the business can afford

There can be a downside to all of this however. Think if you’ve ever come across any of these:
● a poorly made, evidently homemade website
● a terrible logo that looks like it was made with Microsoft Word
● email newsletters that show the email of everyone it was sent to
● late invoices or payments from an SME because they are too busy to get it sent out
So what I’m trying to get at is there are some occasions where stubbornly refusing to pay
someone else to do something for your business can harm your brand and end up costing you
more than you would have paid in the first place.
Think about you financial books for a second. How long do you spend doing them yourself?
Let’s say it’s a fairly conservative two hours a week. That’s 104 hours a year, or to put it another
way, three full 8-hour days a year. If you spent those three days a year out actively selling your
product or service, could you create more value for your business than the cost of a
bookkeeper? I bet you could!*
In the very early days, it might just not be possible to outsource because of limited funds but if
the aim is to build a business then very quickly you need to consider outsourcing the elements
that you don’t have the time or the skill to do effectively.
*This doesn’t include the potential tax efficiencies and benefit from prompt invoice factoring it
could bring you either.
Justify spending every penny
Businesses need money in order to survive. If you can’t pay your bills or pay yourself then you
don't have a business. It doesn't matter how many orders you have unless you’ve got the cash
in your bank account. Unless you’re a millionaire starting up a business for fun then it’s more
than likely that you need to get a handle on your costs from day one - and that can mean
making decisions you don't necessarily want to make.
It’s tempting if you’ve never been your own boss before to say “I will buy the latest Apple iPhone
for my business because I want it and I’m in charge”. What you should really be thinking is “can
my business afford the expense of £500 per year on a phone or will I get the older model and
pay half that?” There are a few techniques you can try to change your mindset:
● Work out how many products you need to sell or how many billable hours you need to
charge to pay for a purchase and you might start to look at things differently. The 40

products you need to sell to pay for that iPhone might make you change your mind
● Add up the annual cost of your regular purchases, it may just surprise you that the daily
latte you buy on the way to the office costs you over £500 per year
● Think like you have a boss. Whenever you're faced with a purchasing decision, think
what you would do if you had to justify the expense to an employer
Nothing is secret
These days we in order to effectively promote ourselves online we need to become content
creators. We need to increase our ‘digital footprint’ by creating and publishing information that
we hope our potential customers will find, read and then be convinced to buy our product or
service. But it can be hard to speak regularly about your business without giving away any
trade secrets isn’t it? Yes.
But here’s the deal - it’s okay to give away your trade secrets!
Let me explain. You can find out anything on the Internet. So in the time it takes me to enter a
query into Google I can find out your trade secrets because someone is bound to have
discussed it somewhere online. Don’t believe me? Unless you’re Coca-Cola or NASA then I’d
be pretty sure it’s true. There’s two sides to this as well.
Firstly, by sharing your trade secrets, you’re demonstrating that you’re an expert in the field.
Just because I could look up Google and find out how to do something doesn’t mean I have the
time or the inclination to actually do it. I want someone who can do it quicker and more
effectively than I could do because I want to concentrate on my business or on my life. Despite
the global economic downturn, many people are still cash rich, time poor and willing to pay for
goods or services that they value. By giving away your knowledge to many through a blog, you
are promoting yourself as someone that knows their business and is worth paying for.
Secondly, let’s look at a case study of a plumber who gives out tips through their blog on how to
stop your water pipes freezing up in the winter, or how to repair a broken tile in the bathroom. It
may mean that they lose out on the job to come round and mend the burst pipe on a frosty
January day, but next time the customer decides to refurbish their bathroom suite who do you
think they're going to call By sharing the knowledge, you’re helping people save time or money
and banking goodwill for when they come to a job that they can’t or don;t want to do
themselves. Heck, they may even get you round to fix that bathroom tile because they decide

it’s too fiddly a job for them to do and they know you can do it right.
So don’t be afraid of giving away your insider knowledge, because someone somewhere will
already of done it. And by doing it yourself you can build up your reputation and start storing up
goodwill for the future.
Marketing is about volume sort of
As a marketer myself I have no problem in sharing my belief that the fundamentals of marketing
are pretty easy. Find your customers, find out what they want to buy and try and sell it to them.
But we know it’s a bit more complicated in practice. With the rise in online marketing we can
now tailor our marketing towards individual customers. But I believe it still holds true that:
the more people you can get your SME in front of, the more you will sell
I can almost hear the screams of seasoned marketers after reading this but I’m not saying that
you shouldn’t have an idea of your ideal customer. The type of person or business that will buy
from you is an important determination. However, once you’ve figured out that you want to
market to female golfers living within 25 miles of Edinburgh (or whatever it may be), you surely
want to promote your business to as many of them as possible?
And not just the volume of target customers but the frequency of your communications. ‘How
often?’ is an obvious question, but unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily have an obvious answer.
Ask yourself this: how often do my target customers want or need to hear from me (even better
go out and speak to them and ask them!). For many businesses, quarterly is a pretty standard
timeframe. It means that if throughout the year they decide that they need the product or
service you provide, it hasn't been longer than 12 weeks since you were in contact with them
but you haven’t been inundating them and creating a negative vibe.
Claiming that it’s about the volume of communication isn’t a very scientific standpoint and may
find me ostracised from the marketing community (if I was ever actually in it) but do you want to
be a successful small business or a successful marketing consultant?
Embrace online
It really amazes me how many businesses still don’t have some sort of web presence these
days. I know that many SMEs don’t necessarily need a fancy website or a Facebook page but I
struggle to understand why any business working in 2013 can get away with ignoring the
Internet. I mean, when was the last time you looked up the Yellow Pages to find a business

service rather than searching online? I’m sure I’m in the majority here.
I’m willing to concede that there are probably some tradesmen or shops out there who have
been going for a good number of years and have built up a great reputation and network of
regular clients who will laugh at this section and say “I’m doing quite alright without the world
wide web thank you!” and I applaud them. Well done on your years of hard work to get to this
position. But I bet that they couldn’t do it again if they started up today.
Like it or not, if you are starting a business today or are trying to grow your business then you
need to accept that embracing online is just one of the things you need to do. Here are my top
five reason why you need to get online:
1 An online presence means you are marketing your business 24/7 - even while you
sleep. Your competitors are online so if you’re not then they are out-marketing you.
2 People like to browse and compare before they buy. Your competitors are online so
if you’re not then you’re missing out on potential sales.
3 People search online for businesses, especially local businesses (at last count
around 33% of internet searches on mobile phones were for local services). Your
competitors are online so if you’re not then you're not getting found. by your prospective
customers.
4 The massive growth of smartphones means that more and more people are
searching online. Your competitors are online and even more competitors will be
joining them over the next few months and years - don't get left behind.
5 Marketing online allows your customers help you to market your business. Your
best customers can leave you testimonials and help to share your website and social
media updates. Your competitors are doing this so you need to compete and let your
current customers find your next customers.
It can look confusing and complicated but it doesn’t need to be. Help is all around to get you
started. Check out your local Enterprise Agency or Chamber of Commerce to see if they run
workshops to get you started. Go to your local college and see if there are classes that need
business case studies for project work. Hire someone to help you. Watch YouTube videos to
learn how to. Just go out and find out how it’s done. Just get your business online.
Monitor your marketing

Marketing isn’t an exact science (although perhaps many may disagree). So however targeted
and planned a marketing campaign is going to be, there are no guarantees. There’s a famous
quote by John Wanamaker who is regarded as the father of modern advertising that says “half
the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
That may be true in the days of mass media, where you spent your money on a billboard and it
was read by perhaps thousands of people who would never buy your product but these days we
can be a lot more focussed and measure the effect of our marketing to help us make better
decisions in the future.
Here are my top five tips to measure your marketing:
1 Ask the customer - anytime a customer makes an enquiry with you you need to find out
how they heard about you. If, after 6 months, not one person has mentioned the leaflet
you spent £200 on printing and an hour a day delivering then it’s not working so you can
divert your energy into other marketing. Over time you’ll build up a feel for what is
promoting the most customers to purchase.
2 Analytics - Install the free Google Analytics programme onto your website or use your
built in analytics (most website have them) and get to know them. The amount of
information they contain is staggering. At the very least you want to be able to find out
where the traffic is coming to your website from. If you use social media channels then
knowing which are most effective can be a timesaver.
3 Stats - keep an eye on your number of twitter followers, facebook fans, website visitors
or email subscribers. The goal is usually to grow them (with the focus on quality not
quantity) but looking our for patterns or spurts of growth will give you indicators of the
types of marketing that sits well with your prospects
4 Tracking codes - if you do lots of online marketing then you can use a tool from Google
called URL builder which allows you to create unique weblinks that you can use for
specific campaigns. At the end of the campaign you can simply check how many
specific actions your campaign generated.
5 Campaign Phone Numbers - maybe not one for very small businesses but if you’ve got
a decent marketing budget then it may make sense to buy a block of 0845 (for example)
phone numbers. They all divert to your main office number but by assigning a campaign

a unique phone number then you can easily track how many calls were generated by
each campaign. You could have one number on your website, one on your leaflet, one
on your business card and another on your Facebook page.
10+1 Be proactive
I’ve left this one until the end because if there is one word that I keep returning to time and time
again it’s ‘proactive’. Very few businesses these days can launch and then sit back and watch
the enquires flooding in. For most of us, it involves getting out there day after day, searching
out leads, refining our marketing constantly trying to improve our offering. It’s about speaking to
people, finding out what product or service they want, trying to provide the very best product
and the very best level of customer care that we can. It’s about being energetic and
enthusiastic about our business.
I mentioned in the opening section about how I’ve seen many businesses start up and that I’ve
seen many of them go on to succeed and many of them fail. If there has been a common
theme that runs throughout all of these businesses I have to say that it’s the ones which have
been proactive that are still here and the ones that didn't make enough effort have gone by the
wayside.
So don;t just sit there and wait for the phone to go or an email to come in
be proactive!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this short eBook. If you’d like to see more then head over to my website
at www.wordpress.21stCenturySME.com
Thanks
Al Bryce