Finding Qualified Applicants

Finding and hiring good employees is one of the most important things you can do as a small business.  Employees help set the tone, do the work, deal with customers and are on the front lines.  Thus, it is important to have the right people in the right positions to ensure your success.

Before hiring anyone, you need to have a very clear idea of the necessity of the position and what the position will entail.  A job analysis (although often underutilized) is one of the best ways to define your hiring needs.  It is essentially the process of gathering, analyzing and synthesizing information about a position in order to identify the position’s task, functions and roles.  A job analysis also requires you to define the competencies required to perform the work of the position.

Following job analysis, you should prepare a job description.  A job description helps you focus on the qualities you want in an employee, including duties, responsibilities, experience, skill sets and so on.  You should also consider personality and compatibility.  After all, you will spend lots of time with your employees.  Finding those who complement the vision of your business will go a long way in establishing an enjoyable workplace.

Once you know what you want from an employee, you need to find a stable of potential candidates to interview for the position.  Some options to consider that are off the beaten path include:

• Craigslist.  This online classified ad marketplace is a good place to find Generation X or Generation Y employees/applicants.

• Temp Agencies.  The best thing about hiring a temp is that you can test drive an employee before making a long-term commitment.

• Seniors.  Older workers usually have an excellent work ethic and are responsible and eager to please.

• State Employment Agencies.  Every state has job placement programs.  If you tap this resource, the State will not only post your job listing on State job boards, but also may prescreen applicants for you.

• Colleges.  Universities are a good place to find smart, inexpensive part-time employees or even interns.

Finding good employees has a large impact on the success or failure of your business.  Take the time to map out your needs through a job analysis and job description before you begin searching for potential candidates.  In doing so, you increase the likelihood of locating a good fit for both you and your organization.

What’s Your Elevator Pitch?

As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you are often asked what you do.  Be it from family, friends or attendees at a conference, people want to know about your business. Knowing this, how many times have you started and ended with something like, “huh?” Well, get ready for your story to change.

Having a quick, interesting, powerful answer — an elevator pitch — is a simple and effective means to not only describe what you do, but may lead to opportunities that you did not even know it existed.  As the saying goes, you only have one chance to make a good first impression.

When you describe your business, you want to prepare a pitch that will spark someone’s interest and have them saying, “Tell me more!”  Here are a few questions you must answer to create a good elevator pitch:

1.  What problem are you trying to solve?
2.  Can you keep it simple?  Use plain English, be intriguing and speak with conviction.
3.  Why would people want to know more?  Instead of “I am a graphic artist,” start with “I help people get more business by illustrating their dreams.”
4.  Does it accelerate your heart rate?

While these questions should get your creative juices flowing, grab a copy of Chris O’Leary’s Elevator Pitch Essentials to get the full run down on how to get your point across and leave a lasting impression in two minutes or less. You can also get some tips over at StartUp Nation.

Developing A Marketing Plan

Marketing, advertising and branding makeup your business image.  If they reinforce one another and communicate a unified message, then your business image will result in a clear identity that people can recall.

Marketing, boiled down, is the combination of all your efforts to get people to remember your business.  It includes everything from how you answer the phone to how you deal with complaints to how you design your signs, logos, letterhead and promotions.  Marketing, more than anything else, is what builds your brand. An identifiable brand is the hook that gets people to remember your business.  And, if they remember you, they will likely buy from you.

When framing your business, you want to create a distinctive personality and a memorable brand, by marketing a consistent theme.  Developing a marketing plan will help you do just that.  To get started, consider the following:

1.  Determine the purpose, size and budget of your marketing campaign.
2.  Decide what medium (or media) works best for your business, brand and budget.
3.  Come up with marketing materials that build on that brand.
4.  Test the materials.
5.  Once you are convinced that you have a marketing method that works, roll it out.

For more details and a step-by-step system to create a simple, effective and affordable marketing campaign, take a look a Marketing Plan Pro designed by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Plan Pro contains a structure to complete a well thought out actionable plan and allows you to monitor the progress you are making. It includes great instructions with the videos embedded of John Jantsch giving helpful tips along the way.

Virtual Assistants – An Alternative to Hiring Employees

If you don’t want the expense and responsibility of hiring employees and finding space for them to work, consider hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants are independent contractors who work from their own home or office, handle duties for you, and communicate with you via telephone, fax, e-mail or messenger service.

Virtual assistants are especially good at handling pesky administrative duties such as collections, marketing, travel planning, research and accounting. They might even help you create your own website, newsletter or schedule appointments. They are typically very affordable — charging only for the time you use. Best of all, by hiring a virtual assistant, you get all the advantages of having an assistant without the associated overhead — no employment cost or taxes, no rate for office space, etc.

Below are some resources for locating a virtual assistant best suited for your needs:

• 247Virtual Assistants
• AssistU
• International Virtual Assistants Association

6 Tips To Use Your Blog To Market Your Business

As you may already know, a blog is an excellent tool to let the world know about your business or your product, to connect with potential customers and promote your expertise. Knowing how to maximize your blog’s impact, however, can be challenging. Here are six tips to help you do just that:

1. Blog Consistently. Many small business owners get excited about blogging, post 3-6 times, and then stop. To get the desired effect (search engine and human traffic), you need to update your blog on a regular basis. Aim for three to five times a week, at least until you build up your readership. You can then scale up or down as needed. The search engines will love your new content and keep coming back to index it. Potential customers will like your new content and return to read your blog.

2. Use Your Blog For Branding. Your blog is an extension of your business, so make your blog represent the essence of what makes your business unique. Your brand, including your business name, logo and purpose, should represent your business identity; your unique position in the market.

3. Use Search Engine Optimization To Optimize Each Blog Post. The purpose of your blog is to get people who are in your target market to read your posts and enter your sphere of influence.  Thus, you should use a keyword research tool to find phrases that are related to the main subject of the post, and weave them into the content of the post.

4. Have A Special Offer On Your Blog. Offer a free special report, free ecourse, or preferential notice of new product releases or discounts on services in exchange for signup on your mailing list. This will transform people from casual surfers who just happened to find your blog to newsletter subscribers.

5. Share Information About Your Events, Products and Seminars. You may think that everyone has already heard about your upcoming teleclass on life and work balance or your e-book about achieving financial success. Not so! The person reading your blog might be hearing about you for the very first time, so they have no idea about your teleseminars or products unless you specifically tell them.

6. Avoid overselling. Overselling will dramatically reduce the number of your blog readers. Do, however, let your blog readers know about your seminars and products. If you don’t tell them, nobody will.

A blog is an excellent tool to generate additional web site traffic, get new newsletter subscribers and sell more products. Use your blog to introduce potential customers to your business. Keep your content fresh and they will return to learn more.

Employee or Independent Contractor?

Deciding to hire an independent contractor can often be advantageous and cost-effective for a small business.  Although an independent contractor often performs similar duties as an employee, your obligations toward an independent contractor are minimal compared to an employee.

Unlike employees:

• An independent contractor is not subject to minimum wage and overtime requirements.
• An independent contractor generally is not eligible for employee benefits such as vacation, health insurance and retirement plans.
• An independent contractor is not covered by employment discrimination statutes.
• You are not required to provide an independent contractor with workers’ compensation insurance.
• You need not pay any portion of an independent contractor’s Social Security or Medicare taxes.

These benefits will save you money and hassle.  But, if a worker is not truly an independent contractor, the results can be severe.  Potential liabilities include payment of back taxes, interest and penalties to the IRS for a period of at least two years, as well as back pay, front pay, cost, attorneys’ fees and compensatory and punitive damages in litigation expenses.  In short, the consequences of misclassifying employees can be devastating.

To ensure proper classification of your workers, the guiding principle to remember is control and who has it. For a worker to be classified as an independent contractor, he or she should be both physically and economically autonomous of your business.  Independent contractors control the process of when and how they do the work.  You have the right only to the ultimate result of the independent contractor’s work, not the means and methods used to accomplish the result.

Although using independent contractors can be an effective way to minimize costs and increase the efficiency of your small business, you must properly classify your workers.  While control is not the sole means of establishing independent contractor status, it is a determining factor which could make the difference between ongoing business success and bankruptcy.

Help An Employee Out

Good training creates better employees.  Whether it’s explaining a new policy or teaching new skills, adequately training your staff is vital to the continued success of your small business.

To be most effective, employee training should begin on the first day of work and cover everything the employee needs to know.  I repeat, training should begin on Day 1.  This includes information from accessing voicemail to evacuation procedures in case of emergency.  By creating a training program that covers all the bases, you set the stage for any efficient and productive employee.

Some areas you might want to cover in a new employee orientation include:

• Philosophy.  Employees should understand your way of doing business, particularly any processes you have in place.

• Brand.  Teach your employees what your business is all about and what you want your company to represent.

• Policies.  Dress code, office hours, vacation, sexual harassment, workplace safety, technology use and other relevant policies need to be explained.

• Operations.  Employees need to know how to use office equipment, handle complaints, and other processes pertinent to business operations.

• Expectations.  To know what to do, employees need to be told what you expect of them, particularly as to their performance.

You can’t expect your business to grow and thrive if only you understand your way of doing business.  Providing proper training, however, gives you with the perfect opportunity to lay the foundation for your business operations and employee expectations.

Avoiding Employment Discrimination Claims

Almost all employees are considered to be employed at will.  An at will employee can be fired at any time, for almost any reason, except under the following circumstances:

1.  You cannot fire someone in retaliation for the exercise of a statutory right, such as filing a workers’ compensation claim.

2.  You cannot fire someone in retaliation for the exercise of a legal duty, such as jury service or military service.

3.  You cannot fire someone on the basis of their color, sex, religion, age, ethnic background or disability.  These are called protected classes.

Employment discrimination lawsuits usually arise when employees are fired or denied employment and they contend that discrimination was the cause. To prevent employment discrimination claims, there are a few things you can do.

• Have an employee handbook that explains what is expected of employees, what at will employment means, and how the disciplinary system works.  Also explain that nondiscrimination is your policy and that discrimination claims will be investigated promptly and thoroughly.

• Document, document, document.  This includes all disciplinary actions, warnings, performance reviews, training, etc. The more documentation you have to support an employee termination based on legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons, the less likely a discrimination claim will stick.

Lawsuits are an expensive, time-consuming, exhausting, frustrating and often ineffective way to resolve disputes.  The information provided here is for educational purposes only.  If you find yourself up against an employee discrimination claim, find a lawyer to advise you regarding your specific circumstances.  We, however, can assist you with establishing and creating some preventative measures such as an employee handbook.

4 Tips to Avoid Customer Complaints

People can make or break your small business.  Offering excellent customer service can distinguish you from the competition, result in increased sales and a more loyal clientele.  Therefore, teaching employees how to treat customers right should become part of your initial and ongoing training.  It should be reinforced daily.

Below are four tips you can incorporate into your training to minimize customer complaints:

1.  Do not put phone calls ahead of on-site customers.

This is one of my particular pet peeves.  One of my preferred take-out joints has a bad habit of taking phone orders over those standing in line with money in hand.  There is nothing worse than waiting in a long line, getting to the front and having the phone ring.  Instead of taking customer orders, the employee decides the phone is more important than those waiting in line. This is a big no-no.

Actual people who visit your business in person are almost always more important than callers.  Make sure your employees know that and are taught to treat actual customers with the respect they deserve.

2. Make exceptions when appropriate.

Sometimes you have to bend policy and make an exception.  The customer will remember it and your business will benefit from it.

3. Say “Thank You.”

These two simple words can go a long way in customer satisfaction.  And, if you really want to have a loyal fan, provide your customers with special discounts or advance notice of new products and services.  Simple ways of showing thanks and appreciation can go far toward leaving your customers with a good impression of your business.

4.  Ask for feedback.

You provide feedback to your staff (if not, you should), why not receive some from your customers.  Feedback from your customers is one of the most valuable things your business can get.  After all, dissatisfied customers will typically stop patronizing your business if their problem is not solved quickly and satisfactorily.  They also spread the word to at least nine people (or even hundreds online) about their bad experience.  Talk about a buzz killer…

When you get a complaint, ask the customer how they would like to have the problem resolved, and make every effort to do so.  If they want a refund, it’s usually best to honor their request.  If an employee is involved in a dispute, trace the problem and provide the employee with training, if necessary.  But, if you are convinced that your business is not at fault, apologize, offer something to placate the customer, and explain how they can avoid similar situations in the future.

Even when following these tips, sometimes you just get an unreasonable customer.  In this scenario, you may just have to part ways and decide not do business with them.  Although it may not feel good at the time, refusing to do business with an unreasonable client may end up with unexpectedly positive results.  You may attract a higher quality customer or signal that you have standards and morals that are worth more than money.

What are some of your customer service policies?

Managing Generation Y

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