The Business Formula – Part 5

This week we’re going to talk in a very basic way about structuring your accounting and paperwork.  If you don’t know how to do this, it is VERY important to contact a CPA and have them set your business up and possibly have them refer a book keeper as well.

When considering accounting and paperwork, you need to create a plan that details the various tasks you’ll need to carry out while maintaining your records and paperwork.  If you have a business or accounting background, you may know what to do, but if you are at all unsure, talk to someone who can help you like a CPA (certified public accountant.)

Think about things you’ll need to do like profit and loss reports, taxes, and other record keeping.  Think deeply about your scheduling, for example, will you need to do certain things daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly? 

You need to stay on track with your paperwork and your record keeping, because not only are there some penalties for failing to get things done on time, like for taxes, but information is the fuel of your busniess, and making sure that you have that data available to make decisions on is absolutely very important!

The Business Formula – Part 4

Let’s talk about marketing.  This is something that we’re all intimately familiar with, as it talks to us daily almost everywhere we go.  You’ll need to start your mission by thinking long and hard about your market.  Is it local, national, or international?  Is it Internet only?  You’ll also need to do your best to focus on three essential parts of marketing

1. Branding – How do you want your brand to be seen?  Are you down home or sophisticated and classy?  Be sure that your marketing material stays true to your brand at all times.  This is beyond important.

2. Viral – can you creatively market your idea in a fun, or interesting way?  Can you get people to spread word of mouth for you?  Think of creative ways to get people to think about or ask about your idea, and they’ll do your marketing for you.

3. SEO – for those of you who don’t know, this stands for Search Engine Optimization.  A largely dead art, there are still some ways to make inroads into appearing at the top of search results lists on Google and Yahoo.  The best way to make sure that you are at the top is to be a trusted and valuable source of information.  If you fill your site with great content and information, people will naturally spend more time on your site, link to it more often, and click on it when your results show up in their search results.  This option takes hard work, but will eventually pay off, especially in a niche market.  The other things you should consider are deciding on some keywords that you’d like to be popular on, and including those keywords often in your writing, making sure that you have meta-tags configured, and making sure that your site is handicapped accessible.  These are only some basic ideas, and everyone does them, but it will help to ensure that you’re at least on the same level as everyone else.  The MOST important thing for SEO is great content that is relevant to your market and your desired keywords.  For more information on SEO, check out the help pages on major search engines that will tell you how you can put your best foot forward on their rankings. 

Once you’ve got your marketing plan working for you, you need to make sure that you track everything.  Web stats are easy through packages like Google Analytics, but many firms will offer tracking for any kind of marketing campaign.  If you’re tracking, you obviously should analyze the results and most importantly make adjustments based on those results!

There is a lot to learn about marketing, but if you follow the principles above, you won’t make any early mistakes!

Check us out next time when we talk about structuring your accounting and paperwork workflows!

Yogurt : The Dairy Queen

Yogurt is praised by dietitians and docs as a waistline friendly but wholesome breakfast or snack. It is a great nutritional pick for it’s high calcium content. A calcium-rich diet helps build strong bones early in life and prevent osteoporosis later on.

Need another great reason to top off your cereal with yogurt? The active cultures in yogurt help food move through your system more smoothly, easing gastrointestinal problems like inflammatory bowel disease, constipation and diarrhea. The active cultures also may help prevent yeast infections in women. Consumption of yogurt lowers the vaginal pH (measure of acidity or basicity), helping our bodies wart off these painful infections.
Greek yogurt is your best bet, with more protein and less fat than regular yogurt. It also has up to fifty percent less salt then standard varieties. The best part- Even fat-free varieties of Greek yogurt have a creamy, thick texture bound to please your palette.
Hint: Greek Yogurt is a perfect substitute for sour cream in baking, with 6 times less fat and little difference in taste!

Try this recipe for healthy tuna salad!

2 cans 6 oz. light white tuna in water
2 tablespoons Organic pickle relish
1/2 tablespoon Organic vegenaise
1/2 tablespoon Organic Dijon mustard
½ Cup 2% fat organic Greek yogurt
for some extra veggies add chopped celery and carrots!

The Business Formula – Part 3

In our continuing series on creating a successful business out of any idea or product, we’re going to continue on from our discussion of branding and service, and move into creating a team and training them.

The first thing to remember is that you cannot do everything yourself.  You will definitely need help!  This does not always mean a full time employee, or even a traditional business relationship!  You can outsource common tasks like bookkeeping, tech support, advertising, and more.  Check out my previous post on having time for everything, and especially check out the required reading in that post of Ferriss’s wonderful book “The Four Hour Workweek”  This book will tell you how to outsource all kinds of business AND personal functions, and will allow you to focus on those things that only you can accomplish, like vision and strategy.

Once you’ve got an idea of how you want to assemble your team, follow some rules that I’ve laid out for ensuring that everyone on your team is fully trained.  This is an ongoing process, as every employee should be constantly learning and evolving with both your business changes, and the world! 

The first thing you should be doing is creating a training manual that includes every aspect of your product, service, and image. 

 If you’ve completed the first two articles in this series, you should have the bulk of your ideas ready for this documentation.  You should now formalize all of that information and make sure that not only you understand it, but the people you’re working with do as well!  Make sure that the training manual is the first thing you review with each employee, and be sure that you use this time to evaluate that employee or partner’s compatibility.  If you’ve hired just because they have experience, you should be able to find out now and save both you and your employee a lot of time and heartache by letting them go now if they can’t keep up.  As I said before, this process is an on-going one, so you should be reviewing both your training material AND your employee’s understanding of that material on a very regular basis.

One last tip, before we move on to the next topic : when training, be sure to

Tell, Show, Do Review

If you explain, do it with them, and then make sure they’ve got it, you know for sure that you’re doing training right!

Check out my next article for more information on marketing and how to track it, both off and online!

Just Be.