SBI Reviewed Articles

All companies must discover their weaknesses and strengths, so that they can improve their company. In this article I will show the 4 weaknesses and the 4 strengths of owning a family business over a non-family business.

Weaknesses

Decreased Profit Margins - In a family business there is often a much lower profit margin. Especially compared to public companies. Private family businesses have a tendency to make much less money per sale.

Less Concern Over Profits - Often family businesses will be interested in improving things that will not necessarily help the company financially. They often try to hard to make their customer happy, and will give away too much for too little.

Alternative Goals - Many times small business owners will have different goals other than their companies success. Often the owner of a company will donate more money than the company can afford to his or her favorite charity, or to buy something that doesn’t help the company. This comes less often in public companies as the higher people in the company feel pressure from share holders.

Nepotism - Often family business owners will hire other family members out of obligation or guilt, even though they may not be the best choice. This causes many companies to lose great employees that they could have had, and to also get many employees that are really bad, but that they can’t fire, or get rid of.

Strengths

Team Work - In family businesses members usually don’t have to question their fellow employees/family members motives. Usually, they can assume that their objective is to help the company grow, and to help every body else in the family.

Concerned Employees - Family business owners are often concerned about their companies success, over their own success. Unlike employees in other companies, who go to work from 8 to 5, and then go home without giving the company another thought, family business owners have a tendency to treat the company as though it were there own (even if it’s not), and they will work much harder to make it successful.

Greater Sacrifice - The members of family businesses are often willing to work a lot harder, than they would be in another type of business. They will work longer hours, and are willing to get paid less, because they know that they are helping out their future generations.

Loyalty
You will rarely find turnover in small family businesses. It is rare for members of family businesses to leave, especially in management, and it is even rarer for the employees to go to other competitors, or for them to start their own business in direct comparison with yours.

Sense every business needs to realize their weaknesses and strengths, it may be a good idea for family businesses to look at what makes them different from public companies.

When people think about email and the internet they often have a tendency to picture teenagers and younger people sending very unprofessional letters to their friends, which include slang, acronyms, and many misspellings. Unfortunately this connotation often carries on into business also. In today’s digital age, email is essential for every small business to utilize, however it is essential that you use proper formating to avoid looking sloppy, or unprofessional.

Here are 10 tips to make sure that your business emails are professional looking, and don’t look “spammy”.

1) DO NOT USE ALL CAPITALS: You should never use all capitals in your business emails. It’s true that they grab attention, however they also make your emails look very “spammy”. Think about what looks more professional:

a) CHEAP SALE ON WIDGETS
b) Cheap Sale on Widgets

Although the first one grabs attention, the second one looks much more professional.

2) Keep it short: You should try to send short emails if possible. People generally use email to make quick contacts, so it is best not to make your email many pages long, one page can usually do.

If however you do need to send a long email, make sure that you divide the email into multiple short paragraphs. Try to make each paragraph only 1 or 2 sentences long. People don’t like to read a lot, and if they see a long, huge paragraph they immediately get scared of it, and procrastinate from doing it. Long paragraphs make the email harder to read, and make it a lot more boring. If you send short emails, or ones with shorter paragraphs, you may notice that you receive a reply a lot quicker.

3) Never use emoticons: Emoticons are great. Use them for personal emails to your friends, but never for business. They’re just way to informal.

4) Don’t forget to proof read: This sounds fairly obvious, however it is amazing to find out how many people forget to do this step. They will just finish writing an email, and they immediately click send, without any proof reading. Many times the email doesn’t make sense, or it says something that the original sender didn’t really want to say. If possible you may even want someone else to proof read it, so that you have a second opinion.

5) Don’t procrastinate: When you get an email in your inbox, which requires a reply, read it quickly, and then write a reply immediately after. Don’t leave any room for procrastinating. The person who wants to receive the reply will greatly appreciate your prompt reply. This will help to build a strong relationships with your employee’s, and customers/clients.

6) Do it Quickly: When people check their email sometimes they have a tendency to go in, and take their time checking all of their emails and replying to all of them. While it is a good idea to reply quickly to emails, it is necessary to reply to every single email that you receive. Also you should try to read and reply to the emails quickly. Don’t try to avoid and dance around the real subject of your emails. If you have a question: ask it. If you have an answer: answer it. Just go into your inbox, and do what you need to do.

7) Remember your Reader: Write your email in a way that reflects your relationship with the person you are sending the email to. If you know the person well, you can use a more informal email, however, if it is the CEO of a billion dollar company, then you may want to be very formal. Remember when in doubt go for the more formal email.

Express your email quickly: Don’t get fancy using a bunch of words, and different writing techniques. Simply say, or ask, what you need to do in the simplest way possible. Remember Occam’s Razor: The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.

9) Don’t always use email: Try to use other forms of contact also. If you have something that will take a long time to explain, you may want to try face to face contact, or phone conversation instead. Since only a small percentage of conversation is expressed verbally, you can explain something a lot easier if you use your voice, facial expressions, and body poster.

10) Use Your Own Domain - If you are using a domain name that is something at yahoo DOT com, hotmail DOT com, etc., then you may be risking looking unprofessional. Instead make the ending your companies name by buying a domain name.

If you just make sure that you don’t send overly personal business emails, and you follow some basic guidelines for business emailing, you will be able to communicate much better, and look much more professional.

Many small businesses who create a website, often wonder how they can promote there website.

There are 2 main ways that people advertise their website. They are SEO, and PPC.

SEO is where you try to get organic traffic to your website. You do this by looking for keywords related to your small business, and then trying to build backlinks with those keywords placed around your link. This makes it so that the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) will index your pages and rank them highly so that when someone does a search for your keywords you will be the first result or at least a very high result on the page.

PPC is where you pay for advertisments on other peoples websites. You pay other people to put an ad on their site, and then you pay them for every click that they deliver to your website. You will usually purchase a certain amount of clicks, and then those clicks will be sent to you.

Ideally any business should use both of these forms of promotion, however there is a certain way to promote websites using both methods. You must first find out how to promote your website using both methods, and to what degree you should use each method.

Organic Traffic

People are searching for your product:
If people do a Google Search for your product’s keywords, or product name they are probably looking to buy your product. This means that you will probably get more sales per page views than you would with PPC advertising.

More Permanent:

PPC ads will only last untill you get all o the clicks that you purchased. Unless you repurchased again, you will not get any  more traffic. SEO on the other hand will have a more long term effect. It will continue to recieve traffic months or even years after you finish your campaign. You should still continue to promote your website, however.

PPC Traffic

Instant Results:

You will get results nearly instantly, with PPC. With PPC advertising you will begin to see clicks quickly after you purchase the ads, possibly even the same day.

Simpler Research with Statistical Data:

It is much easier with PPC advertising to figure out how much money you make per thousand page views (CPM). You can easily figure out how much money you can spend per click, and then you can find keywords that are cheaper than that. By doing this you should be able to always make a good ROI (Return On Investment). You will also be able to better test your websites success. You can then change it, and experiment with it to make it more profitable.

SEO is better if you want to create longer term results, and you don’t mind risking a bit more. PPC is better if you want a more statistical idea of how your website is doing. Also it is a good idea to use more PPC then SEO if you have a lot of money to spend advertising, and researching your companies website.

Good To Great is a classic business book, selling over 2 million copies, it has been on the best sellers list for years. Taking over 5 years of research by a group of 20 people, this book provides deffinitive answers for how to make a company Great.

The book essentially answers the question, “How Can I Make A Good Company Great?”.

It is written in an unbiased, expository format, which makes it slightly harder to understand how to apply it. There are still some applications however, on how you can use the principles from Good To Great in your small business.

- Hire Great Employees

If you want your business to succed you must hire only Great employees. Don’t settle for anything less. Make sure that all of your employees will be loyal, hard working, and above all honest.

- Make Yourself Great

If you want to make your employees great, you might as well be a good role model. The employees must know that you are a hard working employee, and that you care greatly about the companies success.

To become a Great leader you must develop the personality of being humble, having high will power, and you must learn to care more about the companies success than you do your own success.

- Make A Difference in the World

Make you and your employees love comming to work, because they know they are making a difference in the world. Provide some service to others, which you and your employees find valuable. This will make your employees enjoy work more, so that they work enthusiastically and thus get more accomplished.

- Don’t Settle for Good

Make your company the BEST at something. Find out what your company can do better than any other company, and do it. If you aren’t the best in your industry, people will stop buying from you, and they will go to the person who is the best. Just make sure that you can do something the best, whether it be your products quality, price, service, or any thing else, just become Great at it and do it.

If you want to make your company succesful I highly reccomend that you read the book Good To Great, and try to apply what you learned from it into your own small business.

Are you a small business owner? If you answer yes, you have probably thought, at one point or another of creating a website for your small business.

As you probably already know, I am a firm believer in SBI for small businesses, and I will try to address some of the reasons why in this blog post. Specifically I will address the cost of NOT using SBI.

1) The first thing that you will need to buy is a WYSIWYG. For WYSIWYG’s you really have just two options.

a) SharePoint - A product by Microsoft, formerly known as FrontPage. Costs $300.
b) DreamWeaver - A product made by Adobe. Costs $400.

2) Now that you have the WYSIWYG software, you need to find a web host. There are many options available here, and you will probably go with GoDaddy, or 1and1.

Depending on what host you use, you could spend any where between $2 a month, all the way up to $100 a month. You will probably spend about $5 per month however, for a total of $60 a year.

3) The next step is to buy a domain. Domains usually cost around $10 a year. Not very much, but still it’s ten extra dollars that you have to pay every year in addition to everything else that you plan on buying.

4) You will need to also sell your products online, so you need to buy a shopping cart software. Most hosts come with the ability, and resources for creating a shopping cart/ecommerce store, however they require you to set it up yourself. This is usually very complicated, and in order to do it successfully, you would need to purchase a third party service to run the shopping cart for you. This will cost you about $100 a year.

5) And the final (and most expensive part) of this whole process is site promotion. There are 3 main things that you need to get in order to successfully do site promotion.

a) SEO consulting firm - You must hire an outside company to look at your site, and tell you how to optimize it so that you can get indexed highly in the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.). This will usually be a one time fee of at least $1,000.

b) Link Building - Once you have your website optimized for good keywords, you will need to promote your site, by getting back links. You will have to hire a company or in some cases multiple individuals to do this for you. If you hire a company, you will probably spend around $100, and you will want them to redo the service every 3-4 months.

c) Finally you will need to constantly research the keywords yourself, so that you can find out how to better change your site, and promote it better. In order to do this, you will have to find a keyword research tool. You will end up using WordTracker, which costs $300 per year.

If you add this all up, it totals a minimum of $634 a year, and $1,300 one time fee. The actual amount though will probably be much more, as these were very conservative estimates. You can easily spend more than $1,000 a year, and easily pay a one time fee of over $5,000.

With SBI, you get all of the tools, and resources listed above (Plus Much More) all for one low price of $300 per year. You will save a ton of money, and time by using SBI. This is the main reason why I believe so strongly in the company SBI.