Business Owners Toolbox Blog Discussions and articles to help the small business owner solve the challenges they face as they grow their business.

June 30, 2009

Has Your Company Stopped Being Creative?

Filed under: Growth Management,Not yet categorized — Tags: , , , — Mike Van Horn @ 3:08 pm

This post was catalyzed by “At what size do companies stop being creative?” on www.joyofhumancapital.com

I see small companies launch in a burst of creativity, then slowly lose their creative edge over time. How about you? Tell me about you and your company’s creativity.

My clients are small business owners – from a handful to a hundred employees. Run by the owner, who is often the founder as well. As I look around at the people I’ve worked with (including myself) here’s what I see.

First, two observations:

1. Creativity comes in many flavors. Not just the “creative industry” like ad agencies. Also creative business concepts, product dev, designs; creative marketing campaigns, merchandizing, or product selection; creative distribution or service packaging or customer service; creative team building or organization structure; creative pricing or financing.

2. Creativity comes in all sizes, and so does failure of creativity.

CREATIVITY KILLERS FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS

• Lack of support. Nobody is pushing her/him to take the creative leap, or problem solving how to overcome the hurdles . . . No-one following behind, handling the details, executing the vision.

• They get dragged out of creativity by the demands of running the business day to day. This has a lot to do with their own management style. “ I can’t find good people that I can trust.” “I got into this business to do what I love; now I spend all my time as a damn manager.”

• Lack of help. Owner continually pulled back down into lower-level tasks, can’t focus on creativity, vision, strategy.

• Lack of systems, relying on seat-of-pants management. Thus their franticness quotient increases exponentially with growth.

• Ill-fitting systems. E.g., accounting systems that don’t give needed performance information to the owner.

• Constraining systems. Too much “by the book” or “bean counter mentality.” Of course the owner has put these into place, but then starts believing in them.

• Failure of vision. Creative owner gets beaten down, burned out . . .  Has one good idea, and sticks with it long after the window of opportunity has slammed shut . . .  Fear of taking the needed next step. “Tried that, got beaten down, it didn’t work, now I’m gun shy.”

• Gets out of touch. Drifts into an eddy out of the current of new ideas and technologies. This can be related to age, but there are many creative codgers out there.

• Gets too comfortable. The balance between work and life tips toward Maui.

• Physical/mental impairment. Alas, this eventually catches up with us. If you’re smart, you’ll go out at the top, handing the creative reins over to the young whippersnapper you’ve groomed.

Can you add to this list? And how did you overcome this hurdle?

June 29, 2009

Most bang for your marketing buck — right now!

Filed under: Marketing,Thrive in tough times — Tags: , , , , , , — Mike Van Horn @ 3:53 pm

“As a small business in the current economy, how have you modified the advertising portion of your marketing budget this year? How has it been working for your company so far this year?” (Question on LinkedIn)

Melissa,

Hopefully, nobody says, “Business is down, money is tight, so let’s cut advertising.” But you SHOULD ask, “Where do we get the most bang for our scarce marketing buck?” Then examine advertising along with your other options.

Ads or promo? Direct mail or email? Internet outreach?  Networking or public speaking? Asking for referrals? Cross-selling current customers?

And not just about advertising in general, but for each type of ad placement.

To figure this out, I would create a grid: Down the left column, write every every type of advertising, and every other marketing activity that attracts business for you. Then across the top, head columns by the most important criteria for you, such as:
– How much you’ve spent on this, in both dollars and time (Put a dollar value on an hour of your time.)
– Size of customers or sales this brings you
– Number of customers per time period
– Desirability of the customers
– Lead time till you get the customers
– Its potential to bring you more in the long run
– (add your own)

Then rate each marketing activity by each criterion. Add up the totals and see what gets high and low scores. This is an eye-opening exercise.

This approach is over-simplified. It ignores interactions among types of marketing, and ignores strategic marketing with a long lead time. But it gives enlightening answers to the question, “What marketing gives me the shortest route to cash flow now?”

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