small business marketing – Small Business Odyssey

May 9, 2012May 9, 2012

Developing a Small Business Plan in Times of Economic Crisis

A silver lining behind every economic crisis

It’s difficult to develop a small business plan when you are confronted with an economic crisis which impacts differentially in parts of your market. Some aspects of your marketplace may suffer severe downturn while others experience growth. Even in our marketplace, the public sector, you can experience severe downturns. The challenge is to develop flexibility to build organizational resilience. However, as the image above shows, behind every dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

One of the results of an economic crisis, is that you are forced to go back to basics and rethink why you exist, who you serve and how you are doing things. This was what we experienced in the Global Financial Crisis when our human resource consultancy business lost 50% of its income in 6 months owing to expenditure constraints imposed by the State Government and the loss of a major client.

What I found sustaining in that situation (and in our current economic crisis) is our vision – to enable the public service to be the best that it can be. We pursue that vision through the human resource services we provide – recruitment and selection, psychometric assessment, career development, development of HR policy and practice, organisational design, training and development, organisational development, research and analysis, management development and team building.

We are very conscious that if the public service delivers effectively and efficiently, the quality of life of many people in the community will improve – whether in transport, child safety, education, economic support, childcare, health, public safety or other arenas impacted positively by quality public services.

[Photo: Copyright Ron Passfield – Sun breaking through dark clouds in an autumn sunrise in Brisbane]

Options for a small business plan in times of economic crisis

When we were confronted with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) we adopted two core strategies for our business:

broaden our client base
broaden the range of services/products we offer.

These are classical strategies frequently discussed in the strategic marketing books and articles. When we adopted these strategies for our human resources business, we were able to rebuild our income after the GFC. What we did not do enough of, is expand our client base within the public sector and this has left us more vulnerable to the current economic crisis for our small business resulting from budget measures introduced by the new State Government in Queensland.

The State Government has introduced a freeze on public sector recruitment, travel and non-essential (non-front line) training and conferences. This effectively freezes our major sources of income and is likely to have an even more dramatic result on our income than the GFC had.

When considering expanding your client base, you really have to revisit why you exist as a small business and who you want to serve. We had explored the idea of expanding into the private sector but decided that the public sector is the client group we want to serve because this group is more closely aligned to our values – including service to the community.

When you are considering expansion of services/products, it is important not to over-extend yourself beyond your areas of competence. We were lucky enough to have untapped core competencies amongst our human resource consultants to make this service expansion an easy transition. The challenge has been to extend our branding to incorporate these new services.

A small business plan when your business-to-business market dries up

With the freeze (of indeterminate length) on recruitment, travel and non-essential training/conferences in the State public sector, we are confronted with a short-term drying up of our business-to-business market. The challenge for us now in our small business planning is to find innovative ways to provide our services and products to a wider client base.

Some of the strategies that you could adopt in this kind of constrained environment are:

switch from a business to business (B2b) focus to a business to consumer (B2c) focus
offer free seminars/workshops/e-books to retain and build client loyalty and expand your client base
expand the geographical offering of your face-to-face services (e.g. offer them interstate)
offer your services in a different format (e.g. by webinar instead of face-to-face)
develop products such as e-books, podcasts and videos that you offer globally rather than locally (break through the local geographical barriers)
explore under-utilized capacity
develop capacity in anticipation of the release of pent-up demand.

Every economic crisis forces small businesses to build flexibility and innovation into their small business plan if they are to survive and grow their income.

March 29, 2012

Eckhart Tolle: Aligning Outer Purpose with Inner Purpose

Eckhart Tolle discusses the need to align your outer purpose (taking action in everyday life) with your inner purpose. He describes this ‘awakened doing’ as a means to transforming your life and work. The secret to achieving the alignment is consciousness – in this way your daily activity can be infused with your inner purpose.

Aligning your outer purpose with your inner purpose through consciousness

Whether you are a small business owner engaged in small business marketing or an Internet marketer, the same principles apply. There are some clear lessons for small business marketing in Eckhart Tolle’s work. He specifically talks about the limitations of your thoughts and emotions (the EGO) on your capacity to take right action in any circumstance. Eckhart Tolle argues that creativity is released through consciousness.

In a previous article, I identified ways to develop consciousness while using technology. This article drew on Eckhart Tolle’s discussion with Google staff about Technology and Consciousness and provided some concrete recommendations for tapping into the energy of the present moment.

I have taken these recommendations further in another article where I describe five ways to develop consciousness. I also illustrate the power of consciousness through an example.

You might ask, ‘Why develop consciousness?’ The answer lies in the improved quality of life that you will experience. Not only will you be able to access your creativity but also be able to enjoy peace, tranquillity, joy and happiness. When you bring your outer purpose (your daily actions) into alignment with your inner purpose, you will also experience a renewed enjoyment and enthusiasm for what you are doing.

Awakened doing – the three ways to gain alignment with your inner purpose

Eckhart Tolle describes these three ways as ‘the three modalities of awakened doing’. While they represent ways to achieve alignment between your outer and inner purpose, they also represent states of being – ways of being in the world. I will describe each of the three ‘modalities’ below:

1. Acceptance – at peace in an unwanted situation

You will often find yourself in a situation that you do not enjoy. It may be a testy customer, a computer breakdown, spilt soup over your work, lost papers or any other situation that tries your patience. You can rant and rave, blame others for the situation or become frustrated and unfocused…or you can surrender to the situation and accept it with calmness. This alternative is what Eckhart Tolle calls acceptance. He argues that acceptance brings peace which has its own vibrational energy. Through acceptance, you are attaining consciousness in the moment and taking responsibility for your own life and its quality. I have found that this simple state of acceptance has enabled me to be at peace when I would otherwise be in turmoil because of my thoughts and attendant emotions. An associated benefit is that because acceptance requires you to access your consciousness, you are open to creative ways to handle your undesirable situation.

2. Enjoyment – the joy of being conscious

There is so much that you do that you may find boring or tedious. It could be social bookmarking, travelling to your work, taking out the rubbish, clearing the dirty dishes or even writing. You could focus on how life will be different in an ideal future or regret how much better it was in the past – and exacerbate your unease. Alternatively, you could develop consciousness in the moment and enjoy being fully present to what you are doing. Consciousness gives you access to joy – the joy of being fully present. So it is not the action that brings enjoyment but accessing the power of consciousness and enabling it to pervade what you are doing.

3. Enthusiasm – energy through realisation of your outer purpose

Have you ever found yourself highly enthusiastic in undertaking some task or project? What was driving you to renewed levels of energy? Eckhart Tolle suggests that if you continue to pursue the awakening of consciousness (your inner purpose), you will eventually gain a realisation of your outer purpose – what you are meant to achieve ethrough your life and work. Your activity then becomes infused with more meaning and you exude enthusiasm and new found levels of energy. At this stage, you have achieved an alignment between your inner purpose and your outer purpose and the outcome is renewed enthusiasm for, and creative pursuit of, your vision.

March 15, 2012

Small Business Marketing: Lessons from Eckhart Tolle

As far as I know, Eckhart Tolle does not write about small business marketing. However, his focus on creating a better life through consciousness has profound implications for small business owners and their marketing efforts. So profound, in fact, that I am unlikely to offer more than a surface exploration of Eckhart Tolle’s writing and its implications for small business marketing.

Photo credit: The birth of consciousness by Kevin Dooley

Small business marketing: Being controlled by your thoughts

A fundamental principle espoused by Eckhart Tolle is that you spend so little time in consciousness, if at all. He talks a lot about the tyranny of your mind and emotions – often the emotions are generated by your own thoughts.

So his proposition is that you are captive to your own thoughts and these, in turn, are driven by Ego – a hard proposition for anyone to swallow for sure. However, just reflect! – when was the last time that you were free from the tyranny of thinking about the past or the future? When are you just conscious of the present moment, your own existence, your breath, your surrounds (including the sounds)? Even when you see something or hear something, you immediately attempt to interpret it or categorise it.

The march of the Ego – non awareness

When Eckhart Tolle explains what he means by Ego and its impact, it is easy to understand and relate to what he is getting at. He suggests that much of your thoughts flow from the need to justify your actions, compare yourself with others, strengthen your perceived position relative to others or delude yourself by ignoring the hard realities.

It is a useful practice to just listen to your own thoughts – what messages are you giving yourself. Is it that you are not good enough or recognised enough? Is it that you cannot tolerate someone ‘junior’ pointing out mistakes or another way? Is it that you refuse to explore other options for marketing your small business because you ‘think’ that it might not turn out well and show you in a bad light?

It is very enlightening to listen to your own self-talk and to become aware of how your self-talk sabotages your own efforts. It is particularly instructive for you to listen to how you justify your actions and to identify what is the reference point for those justifications. It is even more instructive to explore why you ‘feel’ a need to justify yourself at all.

Small business marketing – the impact of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘being conscious’

Eckhart Tolle argues that you are not your thoughts, you just ARE! Your thoughts, along with your derived emotions, are part of your external reality – they are not ‘who you are’. Being conscious is a state of stillness – of awakening to your inner reality.

He offers you ways to be conscious, to awake to the power of your present moment – to break free of the limitations of your thoughts and emotions. Eckhart Tolle argues that it is only through being conscious that you can tap into your creative spirit. It takes but a moment to be conscious – and a series of conscious moments to start transforming the way you live.

Eckhart Tolle has some sobering lessons for small business marketing – it is not in frenetic activity or thought, but in conscious stillness, that true creative endeavour is realized.

February 21, 2012February 21, 2012

Force Field Analysis: A Strategic Approach to Goal Planning

Force Field Analysis is one of many goal planning techniques that you can use as a small business owner or online marketer.

Often you will find that your approach to goal planning and goal achievement proves to be inadequate or incomplete (the evidence lies in the fact that you may not achieve your goals). The beauty of Force Field Analysis for goal planning is that it offers a strategic way to approach your goals. It is easy to use, but incredibly powerful. It can give you new insights into what is getting in the road of your goals, including lack of awareness of your strengths and the inability to capitalise on them. It will also help you identify the things that you need to work on and strategies you need to employ to achieve your goals.

I’ve used this approach, as an organizational consultant, since the early 1980’s with small business owners, managers in organisations (public and private sectors), university faculties and doctoral/masters students. I have also used Force Field Analysis with colleagues in action learning groups as we planned our career transitions.

[Image credit: Goal by Sean MacEntee]

How to use Force Field Analysis for goal planning

Force Field Analysis was first used by Kurt Lewin in 1946 when he was working with minority social groups. What struck him was how people were becoming stuck in their disadvantaged position in society. He needed a way to help them move beyond where they were now – to achieve their life goals.

Lewin was acutely aware that many things conspired to maintain the status quo. He realized that what gave effect to the current situation for these people was a group of hindering and helping forces that created the current equilibrium represented by the status quo. He recognized that if you analyzed these forces and put in place strategies to address them, you could change the equilibrium and move towards your goal. Hence the name, Force Field Analysis – analysis of the helping and hindering forces within a particular arena (field). Lewin was able to create major social change by using this method with people who were suffering social disadvantage.

So it is with any goal you wish to pursue, whether expanding your small business, developing your small business marketing online or improving personal productivity. Once you identify what is helping you move towards your goal (helping forces) and what is hindering you (hindering forces), you can plan concrete strategies to address these forces.

Specifically, you can work out ways to strengthen the helping forces and weaken the hindering forces – thus changing the equilibrium of the current situation and enabling you to move towards your goal. It’s this two-way approach that creates the major shift. So it is not enough just to work on the hindering forces, you also need to strengthen the helping forces.

Force Field Analysis: An Example of Goal Planning

Let’s assume that you have set a goal, “To be effective in small business marketing online”. I have developed an example Force Field Analysis based on an imaginary set of forces (helping and hindering) that are impacting on your goal achievement. Ideally, you would do this analysis with at least one other person, but you can definitely do it by yourself.

So what you have here is the second rung of goal planning – you have a goal in mind and now you have to establish sub-goals and strategies to move forward. Force Field Analysis helps you to do this as illustrated in the example below:

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS

GOAL: To be effective in small business marketing online

Hindering Forces	Helping Forces
1. lack of time	1. good brand recognition
2. lack of knowledge	2. motivated
3. don’t know where to start	3. have a good speaking voice
4. not a good writer	4. have friends who are good at small business marketing
5. have no presence on social networks	5. access to good online resources
6. don’t know how to create a WordPress blog	6. prepared to have a go

So now you have to decide which helping forces you will strengthen and which hindering forces you will work to reduce. So some options might be:

In relation to the helping forces, you might employ two or more of these strategies to strengthen the things that are working for you:

develop a podcast blog (to build on your speaking capability)
set clear, achievable milestones to maintain your motivation
use specialists in online branding to strengthen your brand online
talk to your friends about what works for them
study up on your online resources with a particular focus and goal in mind
join a small business online forum or group on one of the social networks.

To reduce the impact of hindering forces you might decide to do two or more of the following:

work on improving your productivity
use your online resources to build your knowledge (in a focused way)
purchase a resource that covers “small business marketing online”
outsource your writing
start with one social network that you are comfortable using, e.g. Squidoo or LinkedIn, and build from there
outsource the design of your WordPress blog to a web design service.

Force Field Analysis has many applications including evaluation of outcomes and processes. MindTools.com explains how to use Force Field Analysis for decision making and offers a free worksheet for using the tool.

Force Field Analysis offers a comprehensive approach to goal planning and has been proven over many years to help small business organisations and individuals achieve their goals.

February 14, 2012February 22, 2012

7 Ways Focus Improves Your Productivity

I’ve been reflecting on how focus has helped me to improve productivity with respect to blogging. Over the last 3 months, I have written 80 blog posts for my Small Business Odyssey blog (from 400 to 1000+ words each), while in the previous three months I wrote only one blog post. This improved productivity is the result of focus.

One of my early posts on this blog was about the benefits of focus for small business marketing. In this current blog post, I want to discuss how focus improves productivity – as it has obviously done for me with regard to blogging.

[Photo credit: Close Focus Lens by SqueakyMarmot]

7 ways to improve productivity through focus

There is no doubt in my mind that focus was one of the key means that helped me to improve productivity. In reflecting on this, I identified 7 key ways focus contributed to my productivity improvement:

1. Focus builds momentum

Early definitions of ‘momentum’ described it as ‘the power residing in a moving object’. You know yourself that once you get a heavy object moving, it gains momentum and is a lot easier to push (e.g. trying to push a broken-down car). For me, momentum is the key benefit of focus. Once I decided that I would focus on writing a blog about small business marketing, I began to overcome the resistances (the heavy objects) that were residing in me – the barriers to productivity. Once I started writing blog posts with my new-found focus, I began to gain momentum – writing blog posts became easier and I looked forward to writing them.

2. Focus is motivational

Once you become focused, you start to achieve things that seemed impossible before. You become more disciplined, avoid distractions and build sound habits that help to improve productivity. The sense of achievement you gain is motivational – it provides the intrinsic reward, a sense of satisfaction, that keeps you going. Extrinsic rewards, in the form of increased traffic and revenue usually follow, but it is the inner sense of achieving a worthwhile goal that provides the initial impetus. Focus enables you to gain this sense of achievement and the resultant motivation that leads to improved productivity.

3. Focus channels energy

Focus brings an alignment of your energies (mental, physical, emotional) so that you are able to pursue a single goal or direction with increasing energy. You know yourself that a lack of focus dissipates energy – you are ‘all over the place’. Focus, on the other hand, results in harnessing energy towards a single goal. I think of the analogy of using a magnifying glass to focus the energy of the sun’s rays to burn a hole in a piece of paper (as we used to do as kids). The sun’s energy is there all the time, but it is unfocused unless you capture it with a magnifying glass (or nowadays with solar panels to produce electricity). It is the focus (or the focusing instrument) that channels and concentrates energy. This channelled energy helps you, in turn, to improve productivity.

4. Focus creates a new significance

Lou Tice, famous organizational psychologist, used to talk about the power of organization vision to ‘create a new significance’ – visioning is about focusing on a desired future state that you want to work towards achieving. He explained that the process of visioning, focusing of some desired future, activates a part of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system) which is responsible for arousal and activating the conscious mind. So, for example, you may be driving to work in a ‘mindless state’, almost on remote control. Then suddenly you see the rear lights of the car in front of you turn read (the brake light). It is the RAS that tells your body to take evasive action (your brain has recognised the significance of the red light – you are going to crash if you don’t stop or swerve away). TheRAS brings you back to a heightened state of consciousness. And so it is with focus in any arena of life, especially in small business marketing. The consequence is that you start to see things you did not notice before, new resources come to your attention, and you recognise new resource people – your brain has created a new significance around your focus and this new consciousness helps you to improve your productivity because you become better resourced and informed.

5. Focus attracts productive people to you

Other people value focus because it demonstrates commitment and achievement – a goal that many people aspire to but cannot achieve. People who have achieved in life are attracted to other productive people and recognise their expertise. Here’s a simple example from my own experience. I decided a few years ago to spend a year acquiring expertise in Squidoo and eventually attained the level of Giant Squid100 (100 excellent Squidoo lenses determined by Squidoo itself). This enabled me to write many blog posts about Squidoo and create an e-book on Squidoo Marketing Strategies which I sold via Paypal. As my expertise developed I came to the attention of Mari Smith, Facebook expert, who asked me to run a webinar for her on Squidoo for her Social Media Certification Course. This gave me increased exposure and access to resources and contributed substantially to my visibility, branding, motivation and productivity. Mari is a great example of how focus attracts others, builds expertise and increases personal productivity.

6. Focus improves efficiency

Efficiency is about achieving more in less time – the hallmark of productive people. With focus you are able to avoid distractions and use your time better. You can overcome information overload because your focus gives you the basis for ignoring, or attending to, the endless bits of information that you are bombarded with. You can sift through information quickly and attend to only those things that further your goal (your primary focus). As you become more time efficient through your focus, you improve your productivity in terms of achieving your goal.

7. Focus taps emotional energy

It is very difficult to sustain a focus unless there is some emotional attachment to the goal underlying your focus. So in my case, the focus on small business marketing contributes to two key goals of mine – the promotion of my own HR consultancy business and the development of a future stream of revenue when I wind down from running workshops. I have a very strong, emotional commitment to both these goals which are interrelated and intertwined. This enables me to tap into the emotional energy involved in my focus and to improve my productivity. The positive emotional energy sustains me when the going gets hard – writer’s block, downtime on my computer, the pressures of my offline business and illness. A key lesson here is to align your focus with a goal you find emotionally energizing and your focus will help you to sustain and improve your productivity.

For further information on ways to enjoy the benefits of focus and learn to improve productivity in your small business marketing, subscribe to my free e-course on how to be productive.