entrepreneurship

How true is this?  In response to an article on how to promote your business without being pushy, David Morgan threw the statement, “If your product or service is really good, it should sell itself” out there. So is it true?

If your product or service is really good, will it sell itself? And if so, when?

We want passive income, passive work and pay checks that come like clockwork—I know I do. But how passive can we be in the sales process?

Do products or services really sell themselves?

I see it like this: marketing is exposure. But the sales part of the process is closure. It’s the point that we decide to act on this “thing” that we now want, need and can no longer live without. And ultimately, in order for us to make the most of our customer’s experience we do have to be extremely active in both the marketing and the sales—or at least active in the plan behind the sales and marketing.

But David brings up an interesting point:

“If you produce a product or service which exceeds your customers expectations while fulfilling their needs and wants, it will basically sell itself (within reason).”

While I don’t believe that anything ever sells itself, I agree with the idea that a quality product or service can be much easier to sell. But every part of the process needs the best that we have to give.

As Gregory Berns, Psychiatrist and Author of Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently says:

“A person can have the greatest idea in the world…but if that person can’t convince enough other people, it doesn’t matter.’’

It’s also true of products because convincing “enough other people” is the marketing process.  We just need to consider product development as the first part of the marketing process. Better products, better marketing, a better sales process leads to a better business.

So what do you think? I would love to know what you’ve learned from your own business. In the meantime, here is a quick “2-part,-I-almost-don’t-need-to-say-it,-but-I-will” marketing process/summary (and thanks, David, for your comments).

A Simple “2-Part,-I-Almost-Don’t-Need-to-Say-it,-But-I-Will” Marketing Process

Your marketing budget may be slashed, forcing you to use non-traditional but more cost effective mediums. That’s ok, you can still get your name out there. You just have to:

1. understand your options;
2. learn how to effectively use what you have;
3. design a plan and implement it with everything that you got.

Simple Website Strategy

You need a website home that is more than just a brochure online. Have an about page that sounds like there are real people behind the business. Use a blog to have personal engagement with some of your visitors.

You can also use social media to connect and have a conversation. Act like you are talking to real people—because you are. And then give them some place to go when they finish talking to you on social media. That “some place” should be your information filled website that completely relates to your product or service and your audience.

Simple Product Strategy

Create one heck of a product or service that solves a real problem. And make it simple, or as simple as possible. When developing or upgrading the product, think like the client.  Feel their frustration and work to alleviate it.

If you have a hard time role playing, then talk to real clients and find out what they really hate. In this economy money is spent daily, but only when necessary. And oftentimes necessary just means irresistible. So design an irresistible product for your target audience and then market it like it matters.

Sales Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends If Your Product is Really Good, It Should Sell Itself

Join me, Anita Campbell, and an impressive list of the CRM industry’s leading experts and solution providers a  free 1-day information packed seminar on February 3, 2012 , in Atlanta, Georgia!

The day will focus on the need for companies to transition their approach to “social” away from a narrow, reactionary set of disconnected activities … to a full-fledged corporate culture strategically aligned to build long-lasting relationships with today’s empowered customer.

Sessions Include:

• Keynote presentation by Paul Greenberg, author of the best-selling “CRM At the Speed of Light”
• The Consumerization of IT (by Michael Thomas, Customer Success Manager, Microsoft)
• Journey to the Middle of the Funnel – Connecting Inbound Marketing to Sales Conversion (Jeanne Hopkins, HubSpot VP of Marketing)
• The Role of Community in Today’s Business Environment (panel discussion featuring Anita Campbell, Publisher of Small Business Trends and Robin Carey, CEO of Social Media Today – Moderated by Adrienne Graham, Founder of Empower Me)
• The Velocity of Customer Service in the Social Age (Matt Trifiro, Assistly VP of Marketing)
• Connecting the Dots Between PR and Customer Service (Jeff Nolan, Get Satisfaction VP of Product Marketing)
• Next-Level Listening (by Cory Hartlen, Radian6 Product Marketing Manager)
• The Realities of Becoming A Social Business (panel discussion featuring Adam Naide, Executive Director of Social Media Marketing for Cox Communications, Bert DuMars, VP of Interactive Marketing & Ecommerce for Newell Rubbermaid, and Larry Ritter, SVP & GM of Sage CRM Solutions – Moderated by Art Hall, President of the Atlanta Chapter of the CRM Association)
• Closing the Deal – The Impact of Social on Selling, the Sales Organization and the Customer Relationship (panel discussion featuring Graham Clark , Partner of Customer Results and TAG CRM Board Member, and Judy Mod,  founder of the Social Executive Council).

Description: There’s no doubting the impact social and mobile technologies are having on all facets of human interaction.  But what impact is it having on the sales process, and on the expectations customers have on sales professionals as they move through their buying cycle?  And how are sales organizations leveraging new tools to help sales professionals close deals and grow strong relationships with social customers?

These topics and others will be addressed by a panel of experts as they take on the important question of how to leverage social tools and strategies

Date:  Friday February 3, 2012,  8:30-4 pm

Place:  Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center

                250 14th Street NW, Atlanta GA, 30318

Cost: FREE, with online registration

Registration Link: http://gettingdowntosocialbusiness.eventbrite.com/

Contact: Brent Leary, brent@socialbizatlanta.com

A Production of Social Biz Atlanta, organized by Brent Leary, partner of CRM Essentials (who is also our Host of the One on One interview series here at Small Business Trends, sponsored by BlackBerry).

From Small Business Trends Join us in Atlanta for “Getting Down to Social Business”

some great advice thanks.

Time is very valuable and this is especially true when it comes to small business. In a small business, time is worth its weight in gold. Using your time wisely on matters that will make a difference and aligning business goals is crucial to a small businesses success. Here, Brent Leary joins Jeanne Hopkins of HubSpot to discuss the concept of inbound marketing and wise time management.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Why don’t you give us a little bit of your personal background.

Jeanne Hopkins: My background is pretty normal for a marketing person. I started working in the toy business for Milton Bradley company.  Then I went to Lego Systems, and then I moved into the technology space and worked for a couple of big B2B companies. I came to Hub Spot about two and a half years ago.

Small Business Trends: What is inbound marketing?

Jeanne Hopkins: The concept of inbound marketing is based on three principles. The first one is getting found on the Internet using those search terms that people are looking for when they are trying to solve a problem they have.

The middle of the funnel is what we would call conversion, or getting information from people that visit your site. When they fill out a form we consider that a conversion, or if they give you some information, “Here is my email address and I am looking forward to getting an email newsletter from you.” That is a conversion.

The third component is what we call analyze. How many people visited that particular landing page or offer page? How many people converted to a lead, and more importantly, how many people actually became a customer?

Small Business Trends: How successful are small businesses with inbound marketing?

Jeanne Hopkins: I think the biggest challenge for small business is time. But know that companies that blog, even just once a month, have 50% more visitors to their website than companies that don’t.

So that is the fundamental reason why we encourage people to create content that allows you to get found on the Internet.

Small Business Trends: What skill sets are required to be good at the middle of the funnel portion and turn those leads into sales opportunities?

Jeanne Hopkins: First of all you want to think about how you are following up on those leads. All leads are not created equal. For example, at HubSpot a demo lead is probably worth 10 or 20 times as much in terms of value to a sales person than a lead for somebody that downloaded a Facebook eBook.

What ends up happening is those Facebook eBook leads might have a high volume, but the sales person does not want to follow up on those particular leads because there is less of a likelihood of success with them.  And sales people want to be successful, right?

Mac MacIntosh, a fantastic B2B speaker, says only 23% of those people searching for solutions actually buy within six months.  But two thirds of the people looking for solutions will still buy.  That is what the whole concept of the middle of the funnel is – to keep those people warmed up. You want your brand, your company, your service to be available to them when they are ready to buy.

Small Business Trends: How do you go about implementing a good foundation for that middle part?

Jeanne Hopkins: I would put together a mind map or a spreadsheet which would have a series of offers to warm people up. For example, when you ask somebody for a demo, it is like asking somebody to get married before you ask them out for a cup of coffee. The cup of coffee is get my email newsletters, the cup of coffee is to get my Facebook eBook.  Getting married is the demo because every person who says, “I want a demo” - they know they will be called by a sales person.

Small Business Trends: What mix do you have to have in place in order to make sure you are successful with your funnel operations?

Jeanne Hopkins: I think the very first step is to talk to the sales organization to be able to get them aligned. You are not in it on your own, and they are not in it on their own. You are hooked together.

The second step is to figure out what works. How did you get to that particular demo phase? How do you get them to that point? Once you have actually mapped it out, you can realize that for every 100 visitors to the website – five actually fill out a form. Of those five that fill out a form, these three people fill out this form, and these two people fill out this form, but the two people that fill out the second form - one of them actually becomes a demo.  And of every other five demos, we get two customers.

That is the kind of data that you want.  You really want to be able to see the flow because you want to make sure that those three people that fill out the form, you see, they never become customers.  So you want to be sure that you are not doing more of that - because you are essentially wasting the sales persons time in terms of closing the deal.

Small Business Trends: Where can people find out more?

Jeanne Hopkins: You can go to HubSpot.com. We have a lot of free marketing resources. The next place I would say to visit is TheMarketingGrader.com.  It is a free tool that HubSpot offers.  We have 65 different metrics there to see how you work against other companies, how you stack up, it is pretty awesome.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

From Small Business Trends Jeanne Hopkins of HubSpot: All Leads Are Not Created Equal

It might be hard to read those little baskets on the desk, but they’re labeled “Frying Pan” and “Fire.”

I’d love to take more credit for this, but it’s based on an old co-worker’s desk. She had the traditional “In” and “Out” paper bins, but she also had one labeled “OMG!” where I’m assuming she kept items that needed to be dealt with more quickly.

I never asked her about it, but it always amused me when I’d walk by, so I decided to come up with my own take on it, and this cartoon is the result.

From Small Business Trends Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

Could 2012 be the year of the entrepreneur? Some believe it is. Check out these important links for more tips on your entrepreneurial journey.

Entrepreneurship

Is 2012 the year of the entrepreneur? Scott Gerber of founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council and co-founder of Gen Y Capital Partners thinks so. Among other things, Gerber says the current economy and job market will push more people the idea of providing an income for themselves through starting businesses. Bloomberg Businessweek

Always be a market leader. Whether you enter an existing market or create one yourself, always remember to be the leader. Entering popular markets just because they’re booming can lead to a game of catchup your company will probably loose. Instead, take a step back and rethink company. Feld Thoughts

Management

Building your management team. As your business starts to grow, a management team will be critical. Realizing you cannot do it all by yourself is an important first step. But how can you be sure that the team you assemble will  be able to grow with your business? Some basic tips will help create a stable team that scales. A VC

Improving your business productivity. If you haven’t put much thought into your business’s productivity, you may be missing important teaks that could increase efficiency and reduce cost. These are changes that could make your business more competitive more adaptive in the future.  You’re the Boss

Marketing & Sales

Creating a better business Website. Your Website says a lot about you and your business. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you use it to educate others about your product, service or company. Be ware of a Website that gives a bad impression of your business and brand. What do you want your Website to say about you? Firefly Coaching

Sales tips for any business. Sales are, of course, a critical thing for any business, so you need a sales apparatus in place that can go after prospects and meet revenue projections. Here are some tips that may help Expert Business Advice

Leadership

Losing your best talent. People define your company and when they leave they take the creativity and experience with them that you’ve relied upon in your own business. Is there a way you can stop this “brain drain” from impacting your business? How to you retain the talent you want instead. Ability Success Growth

What is small business leadership? Too often we use the term without fully defining it. In fact, this leadership isn’t simply about forging ahead andobligating those who work with to follow. Leadership is about something else instead. BizCompare.com

Success Stories & Tips

Small business still draws support. One reason entrepreneurship remains strong is a strong grassroots support for such businesses everywhere. Here’s one story about how a small town came together to support their local hardware store. Yahoo! Finance

Five entrepreneurial tips. Starting or running your own business is a challenge. Here are some serious issues to consider. Think about implementing these tips this year, not just for you but for your business. Give yopu and your business the chance to take things to the next level. Small Business Trends

From Small Business Trends 2012 the Year of the Entrepreneur

90% of good video is lighting.

Small business owners often shoot from the hip, do what others will not do and sometimes attempt to accomplish monumental tasks in small amounts of time with limited resources.  I respect the ambition. We have things like the telephone, the car, the ipod because of this frontiersman like ambition. But there is a process to everything.

As John Mariotti says in, “You Can’t Rush The Harvest:”

“After the right steps are taken the crop grows and matures.”

While he was talking about government programs, spending and job creation, it holds true for business development. So, instead of diving in head first, take a few strategy steps first.

Here are two areas to consider: Niches and Productivity.

Niche It And Make It Stick

In “How To Find A Market Niche That Makes Money” Ivana Taylor says:

“It’s counterintuitive to think that by focusing on a smaller market you will actually make more money, but it’s true.”

Niches give you a chance to focus on a target market. That focus means you can truly know your entire market and create solutions that resonate with them. Instead of having an “every man” product, you can effectively create the “go to” solution for your niche.

Focus is powerful. The problem is small businesses are often slow to accept the power of niches and choose to serve everybody. Well, Walmart type companies have everybody covered, you can afford to niche and take care of specific markets.

Lean, Mean Productivity

We are not factories, but productivity matters to us just like any other company. Are you getting the best bang for your buck? Are you making the most of the time that you pay for? How much are you getting done?

Even if it’s a one man or one woman business, you still want to know that your tools, your independent contractors, your late night efforts are saving you time and making you money. You want to know that it’s worth it. And there’s only one way to know.

In “Pride And Productivity: A Win Win Combination,” John Mariotti says, “If you want productivity to be good—and get better—then measure it and manage it.” You have to track your efforts. And you have to manage the work.

But how?

For businesses with employees, managers are important. That’s their role. They need to understand the business, the team and the company goals. Then they are responsible for inspiring, informing and managing the outcome.

For solopreneurs you have to manage yourself. And that means tracking your efforts. I suggest a time sheet that documents how many hours you spend on each task and the end results. This way you can see if you truly save money by designing your own website, being your own bookkeeper, and developing your own marketing strategy without the support of an experienced team.

I use an app to measure my activity (so that I can track it in my phone—iTimesheet). And it has been an eye opener. This data helps me understand which activities cost the most and make the most.

Remember, the cost of time always counts.

Niche Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends Steps and Strategy: It’s About a Niche and Productivity

Your genetic tolerance for risk, coupled with new productivity gains through smart technology, can help your company revolutionize its industry.

Mankind's most innovative, large-scale achievements: building the Pyramids of Egypt and the Panama Canal—even putting a man on the moon—were each accomplished with roughly the same number of people: 100,000. Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie Mellon professor who researched these epic projects, makes the observation that 100,000 may well be the practical limit on the number people it was possible to organize, using pre-Internet technology. Von Ahn is fascinated by the question: If we can put a man on the moon with 100,000 people, what can we do with 100 million?

I'm interested in the opposite question: If it took 100,000 people to put a man on the moon 40 years ago, how many would it take today?

The answer is certainly a fraction of that number: Elon Musk's SpaceX company is successfully sending unmanned vehicles into space with fewer than 2,000 employees. And many more of the best-known new companies in the United States today also employ very small staffs. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, notes that the size of the average American company is down from 25 employees to 10 in just 25 years.

Most of the national discussion around the current U.S. recession has focused on the negative impact of this radical increase in productivity: our "jobless recovery." I think this is a pressing issue that industry and government need to address. But there is one simultaneous, positive impact on our society and economy from smaller company sizes that we should also include in that debate:

Product evolution and innovation happens faster now than ever before.

Scientists study fruit flies to gain rapid learning about genetic traits specifically because they are prolific, inexpensive to maintain, and adapt quickly to change. You could say the same about small companies today. For example: Years ago, two behemoths owned the photography industry, Kodak and Fuji. But innovation in photo sharing has been driven by the dozens of start-ups like Flickr, Ofoto, Photobucket, Picasa, Shutterfly, and now Instagram, that have launched over the past 10 years. Similarly, photo taking has been revolutionized by software and device companies such as Apple, RIM, Nokia, and Sony. It's my contention that rapid product development and market testing of their products and services—something not possible inside most big companies—is what's created the most value for the photo-sharing public over the past decade. And Kodak declared bankruptcy last week.

There are numerous other industry examples, and I'd welcome hearing from readers about their personal experiences. It's my contention that competition among a large number of small teams to solve important problems gives us, collectively, the best shot at getting to a right answer, the best product and the biggest breakthroughs.

It's my contention that competition among a large number of small teams to solve important problems gives us, collectively, the best shot at getting to a right answer, the best product and the biggest breakthroughs.

Astro Teller, who leads New Projects for Google, told a great story to the Mindflash.com staff recently that made this point brilliantly. A university testing incentives to innovation ran an experiment in which students in one pottery class were told their entire semester grade would be based on the quality of their final piece. Students in another class were told that 90 percent of their grade would be total weight of the clay they fired during the semester, and just 10 percent on the quality of their final piece.

The final pieces created by the second group were incomparably better, because those students learned more, went faster and explored more. The takeaway has to be that in an environment where we reward experimentation and reduce or eliminate the risk of failure, we get better outcomes—sooner.

Now, I readily admit that it's one thing to burn through a lot of clay, and another thing entirely to burn through people. The human and economic cost of assembling and dissolving businesses can't be ignored. But for those with the willingness and ability to try, fail and try again, these technology-driven productivity gains are driving each of us the opportunity to create something truly innovative for the benefit of all.

This was recently confirmed for me by a quick tag-cloud analysis I did of the biographies of about 100 of the country's leading technical, political and thought-leaders.The word appearing most frequently in their biographies? Former.

Success, if not handled properly, can lead to the demise of a business. Sustain long-term growth by following these steps.

A funny little thing happens on the road to success. Often the prosperity of the business can outpace the ability of the business to maintain that success. At this point most of you are probably wondering what am I talking about. Rapid success can lead to failure? Get real. But it can. And I have seen it repeatedly in all scales of businesses over the past few years.

How does it happen? Let’s say you bring a product to market. It is received well by the public. They begin to buy. You begin to make money. All is good. You begin to advertise the product more and to different segments. Maybe you even diversify and offer variants of the original goods or services to capture a greater market share. You make more money. You are happier than ever. You spend more on advertising. More money flows in. The cycle continues.

One day you get a disturbing memo from accounting. It seems the business is losing money. Not drastically. Not in leaps and bounds but slowly over time. Even though you are bringing in more money than you ever imagined possible there is a slow bleed causing your expenses to exceed, if ever so slightly, your revenues each month.

Your first reaction is typically one of disbelief and anger. Obviously, accounting has made an error. You explain to them your grand vision, how next month you are rolling out more products and services. How revenue has tripled in one year and will double again next year. The accountant looks at you with that blank stare and says the immutable truth of business and accounting: "Numbers don’t lie."

Often as entrepreneurs we become so focused on bringing the product to market, advertising the product, and selling the same that we fail to grow all aspects of the business in unison. As a result, while the business attains its ever-increasing benchmarks in sales it is growing upon an infrastructure that is not keeping pace with the growth of the business. Flaws in management systems slowly begin to be revealed. Quality control is not in sync with the growth. Eventually a tipping point is reached in which these flaws, caused by the failure of the business to grow its infrastructure at the same rate as sales and advertising, cause the system to collapse.

Don’t think this can really happen? It does, and to some of the biggest companies in the world. Over the past few years we have had dealings with one of the largest hand-held device manufacturers in the world. Since 2000 they rocketed to success riding a wave of innovative technology and cutting edge marketing. They went from being a scrappy start-up to one of the world’s leading hand-held device manufacturers with annual sales tipping the charts in the billions.

However, over the past two years this modern titan has experienced a dramatic fall. Sales have plummeted. Once the industry’s leading innovator, today they are, in large part, viewed as a one-trick pony whose time has come and gone. Their latest products come to market with little fanfare and even less consumer interest. Last year their devices, in large part, stopped working due to some technical glitch which took days, and in some cases, weeks to remedy. They have fallen so far from their lofty perch it is now rumored among the major financial papers that the company may be forced to sell off assets to avoid bankruptcy or face the inevitable later this year. Oh, how they mighty have fallen.

How could this happen to such a juggernaut of technology? Notably, within the course of our dealings with them we noticed a few flaws in their structure that inhibited our ability to effectively communicate with the company. In hindsight, these were symptoms of fatal flaws in an organizational structure that had simply failed to keep pace with the growth of the company.

For instance, for months we attempted to reach their online marketing department through various channels only to have our efforts constantly thwarted. Discussions at certain levels had to go through a bureaucracy which was maddening. Ultimately a deal fell apart that, in our opinion, would have been extremely lucrative for all parties. Why?

The answer did not reveal itself until months later when I was having lunch with the company’s general counsel. In short, he revealed that because their company had grown so large so quickly he did not even know who to call within his own organization to get us to the right people to close our deal. In short, he had no idea who to get on the phone to complete our negotiations. Every time he tried to find out he got passed around from department to department within his own company ultimately with no one offering to take responsibility to speak with us. In short, their structure had failed to keep pace with the growth of their company to the extent that even people within the company could not determine who was in charge of various aspects of the company.

Accordingly, despite a meteoric rise to the top of one of the world’s most competitive industries, the afore referenced company is now in a financial free-fall approaching its eventual demise. What can you learn from all of this? You must grow your organizational structure in proportion to your business. Here’s how:

1. Create a Scalable Management Model

As your business grows you must develop scalable management and quality control systems. In the beginning management and quality control is easy. Perhaps your business begins only as a solo entrepreneurial endeavor or one among just a few people. Everyone has a defined role and everyone knows what everyone else’s role in the company is. Nonetheless, as your business grows and duties become more segmented among new employees, a management structure must be put in place to ensure accountability against established benchmarks as well as to make sure quality control of your goods and services remains constant.

In this regard, each position’s duties and responsibilities should be defined in writing. An organizational chart should be constructed and maintained which clearly defines who is responsible for what, who reports to whom, on what subjects, and how often. If properly segmented over time you will see your organizational structure begin to resemble a pyramid with the CEO on top and increasingly widening rows of persons with specific defined roles thereunder.

2. Define a Quality Control System

As your company grows you must make sure that the quality of your goods or services is maintained despite its increasing size. As such, you must determine what elements should exist in a quality control system and then assign the responsibility of maintaining that quality to someone within your management model.

For instance, let’s say that you run a call center that, in the early days, existed with only a handful of people. At the beginning it was easy to make sure that everyone used the same scripts and delivered the same quality of customer service for your inbound clients. Yet as you grew it became less clear who was in charge of maintaining that level of customer service on the phones and, as a result, a systemic problem has now developed within your organization. Not all of your sales team are using the same scripts. There is inconsistency in call backs of inbound customers. As a result, your sales and margins begin to slip.

To combat this you must create a quality control system to make sure your systems are being performed on a daily basis and assign a manager in your organization to oversee the same. For every business quality control will differ. If you operate a call center those benchmarks may be overall sales as measured against knowledge of the product, responsiveness, etc. For example, a factory may need to make sure that the work being performed by assembly workers is consistent so that each product leaving their station is assembled perfectly, or within measured perfection, every time. But without a quality control system unique to your business the quality of your product will flounder over time.

Once established, a manager or management team must be specifically assigned to oversee the execution of the system. You need to be able to point to one person, or a team if you are large enough, and say that they are responsible and/or accountable for the quality of your company’s goods or services. This structure, like your sales force, advertising, and other segments of your business, should grow at the same rate as the rest of your business.

For instance, let’s say your business originally consists of an assembly factory with 20 workers assembling various parts of your products. Your initial quality control systems can be managed by one full-time manager. If you grow to 40 workers assembling more and more of your products it is reasonable to assume you will now need two quality control supervisors. If you grow to 60 workers you will need three.

Now the actual number will vary for every company. It suffices to say you must know that it has to grow as well alongside your workforce. And within that growth even those added quality control team must have its own division of responsibility with well-defined roles for quality control of the company. 3. Execute the Systems 100 Percent of the Time

Now that you have created a scalable management model with a defined quality control system it’s time to make sure it is executed to perfection.

Each person within the management and quality control team by now should know their respective duties and responsibilities. Even so, you must ensure that those systems and assignments are executed without deviation 100 percent of the time. To this end, especially for small and mid-sized businesses, we have found that it is very effective to use daily and weekly checklists to make sure individuals are performing their assigned tasks in a consistent manner.

For instance, a front-line quality control manager may have a daily checklist of five quality control matters to be reviewed on Monday, seven on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, etc. They are responsible on each of those days for performing those tasks and then recording that they have been completed. The manager above them has his or her own checklist of matters to do which includes checking with the subordinate manager on a daily basis to make sure that they performed all of their assigned tasks. It is a simple system but vital to making sure the systems that are created are executed and executed 100 percent of the time.

The person responsible for executing the front-line systems reports to their manager that they have been completed. That manager then reports to their supervisor that all tasks have, or have not been done as required. If all works properly, we are only speaking about a few minutes out of the top level manager’s day to deal with the reporting of the underlying systems. But it makes sure that all of those systems are running and running to perfection.

4. Listen to the Numbers. Numbers Do Not Lie.

Lastly, even when you set up the systems and grow management and quality control systems in pace with your organization’s growth you must still always be mindful of the numbers. Numbers don’t lie. If used properly, they will tell you where additional oversight or changes are needed within your organization to increase efficiency, sales, and quality.

Returning to our opening discussion, let’s say sales are great. They are growing at an unbelievable pace. Yet your accounting department tells you something is amiss. Something is wrong. Your expenses are outpacing your revenue growth. The numbers don’t lie and they will tell you more about the health of your business than anything else.

So what do you do when the numbers tell a story you don’t like? Use them. Use them to determine what the problem is. Create a system to fix the problem and then assign it to someone to manage and create the internal systems to ensure those systems are run to perfection 100 percent of the time.

Failing to keep good financial records is like driving a sports car at top speed with your eyes closed.  It may be ok for a little while, but eventually you will crash and burn.  Perhaps one of your new year’s resolutions is to keep better financial records for your business. You may have pledged to finally tame the paper beast lurking in your office, or at least find your desk under all those receipts.  But there’s one small problem.

You think the only way to achieve these goals is a painful one.

In fact, you believe that walking on broken glass would hurt less than “doing the books” on a regular basis.  Fear not!  Here are 5 easy ways for you to stay on top of your bookkeeping in 2012:

1.       Make Friends with Technology

There are cost effective ways to make collecting and recording your business expenses easy.  This is not a myth.  I will not be suggesting you consult the Loch Ness Monster in the next bullet.

Despite being a finance geek I absolutely hate tracking expenses.  Then one day I discovered Shoeboxed and the world became a brighter place.  Shoeboxed will convert expenses into an organized data file.  No more typing in paper receipts!

The best part is that you can submit expenses just about any way you want short of carrier pigeon.  Electronic receipts can be emailed, scanned copies of receipts can be uploaded for processing, and hard copy receipts can be submitted in the postage paid envelopes supplied.

Other easy and cost conscious options you may wish to consider are; Concur, Expensable, Keebo (UK Based), and Neat.

2.       Call In Reinforcements

Would you pay someone $100 to keep from being in a head on collision at 70 mph?  How about $200?  $1,000?  In fact it is hard to give an upper limit because you know the effects of a head-on collision would be devastating, potentially fatal.

Wouldn’t you pay to save your business from a similar fate?

Technology alone may not be enough to conquer your accounting needs this year.  A great solution that is easy on the budget is a bookkeeper.  Shop around for a reputable one who will strive to stay within your budget and provide regular reporting on key metrics.

3.       Visual Reminders to Open Your Eyes

Select a picture or graphic that reminds you of the consequences if you fail to follow through.  Then select a graphic that depicts the benefits of success.  My first picture would be a Pinto driving off a bridge, and the second would be a Porsche 911 Turbo convertible cruising down the Autobahn.

Put these on a page, print it, out and hang it on your wall.

4.       Make Falling Off the Wagon Hurt

Keeping resolutions is hard.  Creating new habits is hard.  Only 19% of people who make resolutions actually keep them.  Clearly positive reinforcement alone will not work.

Every month you fail to keep your commitment do the following.  Get a one dollar bill from your wallet and say out loud, “I’m simply throwing money away.”  Then tear up that bill and throw away the pieces.  Need a bit more drama?  Burn it instead.

If the $1 bill doesn’t make you wince, try a $5, $10, or even $100 bill.  By not tracking your financials you are actually throwing away far more money than you destroy in this exercise.  In fact, you may be about to drive your business right off a cliff and not even know it.

5.       Be Publicly Accountable

While peer pressure was the bane of your existence in high school, now it can be a very effective tool.  Declare your bookkeeping intentions.  Not just to your Mom, your golf buddy or your dog.  Declare it on your blog, this blog, or some other painstakingly public forum.

In your public declaration include a commitment to provide monthly or quarterly updates on your progress.  Failure to post an update will cause people to assume that you didn’t follow through.  Who wants that verdict in the court of public opinion?

Final Thoughts

Which of these ideas will work for you?  Do you have another tip or trick that can help people tame the bookkeeping beast?  I really will come back and check for updates in the comment section.

Porsch Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends 5 Easy Ways to Stay on Top of Your Accounting

“Make thousands stuffing envelopes!  Unique work at home business opportunity!”

It’s statements like these which often lead to bogus business opportunities that have spurred the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into taking action to protect people who think they’re buying a legitimate business. Called the Business Opportunity Rule, this new requirement states that any individual who sells a business opportunity to another is required to disclose more information than in the past.

A business opportunity is simply a comprehensive business investment that lets the buyer start a business immediately. It’s “out of the box,” so to speak. It’s different from a franchise.  A franchise is a business opportunity, but not all business opportunities are franchises, says Joel Libava, author of Become a Franchise Owner.

“Sometimes, people confuse a franchise business opportunity with a business opportunity, or bizopp. The major differences include upfront costs, (which are almost always significantly lower with a bizopp) support, and  the rules. In a business opportunity, there aren’t that many rules to follow as an owner. Business opportunities are generally looser in nature; you buy the opportunity, learn how to run the business, and then you’re pretty much free to market it and run it as you wish.”

What’s Required if You SELL Business Opportunities to Others

Anyone selling a business opportunity or bizopp must now provide information on a one-page disclosure document (PDF file) at least seven days before the buyer pays money or signs a document. The seller must state the following:

• Whether legal action has ever been taken against the seller
• Whether there is a cancellation or refund policy for the business transaction
• Any earnings claims that the buyer will earn a specific amount of money through the bizopp
• References for the seller

Because of the rising number of business opportunity scams over the past few years, the FTC wanted to step up the measures taken to ensure the safety of buyers.

If you’re selling a business opportunity, understand that this new rule is meant to help you and the buyer perform a smooth transaction. Here are some tips to minimize the stress on your end:

• Never make unsubstantiated claims. Be prepared to back up any income potential your business opportunity can provide.
• Offer a refund or cancellation policy. It’s good business. Outline what the stipulations are for the buyer to be able to cancel.
• Stay in contact with your buyers so you can use them for references down the road. Even if you don’t promise support in your contract, it’s good customer service to be available should your buyer have questions.

What You Need to Know if You Are BUYING a Business Opportunity

If you are buying or considering buying a business opportunity, then know that the Business Opportunity Rule is to designed to help protect you from potentially bogus deals. Armed with the information the seller is required to give you, you should be able to get a better sense of whether a deal is legitimate. If it’s not, you now have ammunition for legal proceedings.

Pay attention to the earnings claims. In the past, companies have claimed that you could retire off of what you make stuffing envelopes, or make thousands of dollars off a work from home opp. These claims must now be substantiated in writing, and the buyer must list how much other buyers have made, and where they were located (since results may vary depending on many factors).

“The revised Business Opportunity Rule is long overdue,” says Libava, “The most positive change has to do with research. Business opportunity buyers will now have access to a list provided by the business opportunity seller of at least 10 people who have bought their business opportunity. And, if fewer than 10 people have bought the business opportunity, every person that’s bought it must be listed.”

Libava says that buyers should know that they will have to sign a document stating that the buyer can share their personal contact information with future buyers.

Here are more tips to ensure you find a trustworthy business opportunity from the Business Opportunity blog:

• Ensure that the seller has filled out the disclosure document thoroughly, and has provided supporting documents.
• Contact the references the seller lists and ask questions about their experiences with the business opportunity.
• Look for bizopps that illustrate how you’ll make the money, rather than drawing you in with promises of  big financial rewards.

You can read the complete Business Opportunity Rule document on the FTC website. The Rule will go into effect March 1, 2012.

Envelopes Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends The FTC’s New Business Opportunity Rule: What It Means for You

The author of a new book offers a solution to those who can't stop stressing about their to-do lists: swap big verbs such as "implement" and "plan" for more manageable ones.

In many ways all-pervasive tech helps us be more productive. Who hasn't shot off that essential e-mail while standing in line or managed to locate that key figure buried in your files with a quick computer-aided search? But being forever plugged in isn't without its dark side.

From the restless impulse to continuously check your phone lest you miss that crucial after-hours message to the modern ritual of reaching for your laptop before your first cup of coffee in the morning, the ability to work at all hours makes it more difficult for many of us to ever stop stressing and feel content with what we've accomplished. You could always be doing more–and you feel it. So how can you break out of the grasp of your forever-expanding to-do list and start to feel content with your level of productivity?

Jason Womack is the author of a forthcoming book titled Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More, which has 10 chapters worth of suggestions. Among them is a simple mental trick to help those who find themselves forever ruminating about the things they need to accomplish. Rather than lie in bed at night tossing and turning while you ponder how much you need to do to accomplish big, abstract objectives like implementing a strategy or planning your product launch, calm your mind by breaking these tasks down into more manageable, concrete verbs. Womack says:

If your to-do list has "big" verbs–by which I mean verbs that are mentally demanding or longer term in nature such as plan, discuss, create, or implement–replace them with action steps to just get started. That is, pick "smaller" verbs, by which I mean verbs describing tasks that are easier to start and faster to finish. This will save you time and reduce the sense of overload you're feeling.

We all want to enjoy what we do every day. We want to get better and better, both on the job and off, and yet, many people are too overwhelmed to make the key changes that will help them do so. There is no reason to remain mired in frustration.

People lose sleep over creating and planning but rarely over calling or drafting. So next time you’re tossing and turning maybe the solution is cracking your worries into simple actions using smaller verbs as a guide. Who knew better verbs might be a cure for insomnia and stress?

If you’re in small business, be prepared to communicate. It’s an important part of what small businesses do. The same thing goes for those who lead them. Here are some tips and tools to help you better master communication for your small business.

Opening Up

Why you must spend time face to face. Technology is great. It connects us in ways never possible before. But there are limitations to what technology can do when building important business relationships. Here’s why. Jennifer Warawa

It’s lonely at the top. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are 10 ways many business leaders avoid loneliness and isolation. As a small business owner you may sometimes feel isolated too. How do you work to avoid those feelings. Startup Professionals Musings

The State of Business

Big companies want to handle your IT. There was a time when IT services for small businesses and startups were handled by smaller firms as well. No longer. Here is why big business wants a piece in serving your IT needs. WSJ

What Washington is telling small business. Small businesses and entrepreneurs did feature in the President’s State of the Union Address. But what is big government really telling small businesses about where they fit in? Entrepreneur

Blogging & Engagement

Why blogging is your business. No better paradigm of business communications exists today than the small business blog. Personal and focused, it is at the same time representative of your brand. But it may turn out your blog is even a bigger part of your business than you thought. Noobpreneur

The importance of engagement. Is your small business engaging with customers, clients and the public in the way that it should? What tools and approaches can you use to reach the necessary engagement with your customers? Famous Bloggers

Marketing & Sales

The problems with converting leads. Your marketing is a form of communication, but what is really important to consider, when deciding whether that communication is effective, is to look at whether your audience is turning into customers. Dawn Westerberg Consulting

Tech Basics

Best gear for podcasting. Podcaster Ileane Smith shows you her personal choice for equipment to use in your own efforts and explains a bit more about why podcasting is so critical to communication in small business today. Basic Blog Tips

Making Connections

It’s still about the people. No matter how small business communications is done, it’s still a very human interaction. Technology and techniques aside, what will really make you better at marketing and selling is to better understand your customer. B2B Marketing Smarts

Do you know your audience? No, it’s not a silly question! Do you? Because all of the above won’t help you much if you don’t. Here’s why you’ll need to consider the people you’re addressing first before finding success. Respectfully Disobedient

From Small Business Trends Small Business Success Still Relies On Communication

How a scrappy little camera company turned its customers into a stoked sales force and became a $250 million industry.

Nick Woodman and I are strapped into the cockpit of a vintage racecar on a winding, narrow road in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, taking cliff-side turns at 60 miles per hour and rocketing up to 100 on the straightaways. Strapped to each of our chests are tiny high-definition video cameras. There are two more cameras on the doors, pointing in at us; one over our shoulders, pointing at the instrument panel; one mounted to the dashboard, pointing at my face; one under the nose of the car, to capture the road whizzing by; one attached to the front of the roof; and another looking up over the roof via a pole mounted to the rear end. The car is a Ford GT40, a replica of the legendary vehicle that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans rally race four times in the 1960s. It's the property of GoPro, the company that makes the cameras we're using. Woodman is the CEO and an accomplished amateur racecar driver (and surfer, mountain biker, motorcyclist, and all-around thrill junkie).

We approach a blind turn, and the engine emits a loud brap as Woodman guns it around the corner and down the hill, and the back end of the car fishtails out behind us in a slightly sickening way.

"This car wasn't road-legal until a couple weeks ago—I've never taken it up here with a passenger!" he yells over the engine noise. "I think we need to stiffen up the suspension." Then he hammers the gas again.

I've been trying to stay cool, but my mind is a blur of headlines in the tech press about a wild-man CEO and a journalist plummeting into a ravine to their deaths. I give in after about 15 minutes. "OK, you're starting to scare me," I tell him.

I've given him the sound bite he is looking for—the cameras are rolling, after all—so he slows down a bit, and we cruise the rest of the way through the mountains, through the biker town of Pescadero, and out to Highway 1, where we turn off at Pigeon Point, a clearing near a lighthouse on the cliffs over the Pacific Ocean. A film crew is waiting for us there with two electric motocross bikes from a company called Zero (the bikes are also strapped with tiny video cameras) and an elaborate remote-control helicopter (for overhead shots).

Woodman wanted to bring me here for three reasons. One, GoPro is a company that's deeply invested in storytelling (primarily in the form of extreme-sports videos), so he suggested we do part of our interview here, with a dramatic backdrop and some adrenaline-pumping action between questions. We had been at the company's office all day, just up the road in Half Moon Bay, but as the sun dipped enough to provide the magical golden light of late afternoon, it was time to switch venues and turn on the cameras.

Two, Woodman, who's 36 and looks a lot like Ed Helms playing a surfer, wanted to show me he's a risk taker and authentic action-sports fanatic, as are most of the people who work for him. The word dude is thrown around a lot at GoPro headquarters, and executives like to head out for a morning surf session or trail ride before hitting their desks. (It's no accident that some of the country's best surf breaks are minutes from the office.) This cultural authenticity is key, he says, because it means the company's employees are well attuned to what's going to excite their customers.

And three, taking me to ride electric dirt bikes at Pigeon Point is important because it demonstrates a vital part of the company's product development history. To shoot a truly satisfying action video, the audio feedback is almost as important as the visuals. You need to hear, for example, skis crunching through snow to get the full effect of a gnarly descent. But capturing that noise is not as simple as turning on a microphone. In sports such as skiing, skateboarding, and cycling, the wind noise rushing into a camera's mike tends to overpower the sounds of the action. When the company was developing an early version of its signature HD Hero camera, Woodman set out to solve the wind-noise problem with the help of Zero bikes, which are nearly silent except for a low electric whirring. On a Zero, he was able to ride fast and record almost pure wind noise in a real-world environment (here at Pigeon Point), which in turn allowed the company to isolate the sound of wind and then design firmware that could all but eliminate it from recordings.

The point comes back to storytelling. Videos created with GoPro cameras (check out a selection of extreme GoPro videos here) can have a level of production value that rivals that of professionally created content. That's great from a technical standpoint, of course, but even more important are the viral possibilities that kind of content unleashes. The more authentic and immersive the video, the more viewers get sucked in and feel as if they're experiencing the moment themselves. "It's like a teleportation device," Woodman likes to say. GoPro thinks not just about its customers, in other words, but also about its audience.

Let's back up. If you're not familiar with it, GoPro sells a line of wearable, mountable, and affordable HD video cameras that make all kinds of previously impossible shots much easier to capture. About 2 inches wide, the cameras don't look like much more than tiny gray boxes, but they pack a surprising amount of power and versatility—especially for their $300 price tag. An ever-increasing array of flexible harnesses, mounts, and other accessories allows users to attach the cameras to just about anything and shoot high-definition point-of-view action footage.

At this point, you've almost certainly seen video that came from a GoPro camera, even if you didn't know it. A Facebook friend might have shared the clip of a mountain biker in Africa being flattened by a sprinting gazelle; it has drawn 12.4 million views on YouTube since going viral in October. Or maybe you saw the bird's-eye-view video of a seagull picking up a camera and making off with it (2.8 million views) or a skier touching off an avalanche in the Alps and flying away from it with a parachute (2.1 million views). Every two or three minutes, a new piece of GoPro–created content is uploaded to YouTube, and Woodman credits those videos—whether produced by its army of customers or by the company's 20-person in-house media team—with much of the company's runaway success.

In the past two years, GoPro's growth has exploded, and the cameras' uses have spread far beyond the action-sports world. GoPros are being used on dozens of reality-based TV shows. Scientists are sending GoPros into near space and deep underwater. A GoPro was mounted on the rescue pod when the Chilean miners were rescued in 2010. The list goes on—surgeons, oil companies, the U.S. military—and one of the company's challenges is tracking it all in order to support it.

Two years ago, there were 14 employees at headquarters in Half Moon Bay; today, there are 150. The cameras are available in about 10,000 stores—lots of local sports-enthusiast shops but also REI, Best Buy, and Amazon. GoPro's closest competitor in the wearable-camera space, Contour, reported $15 million in revenue for 2010, and Woodman claims GoPro now holds 90 percent of the wearable-cam market, after growing well over 300 percent in 2011. Digital-imaging industry analyst Chris Chute of market research firm IDC estimates GoPro's 2011 revenue at $250 million, on sales of 800,000 cameras worldwide. He calls GoPro "the fastest-growing camera company in the world."

Perhaps even more impressive than the revenue growth is the passion GoPro's users have for its products, as expressed by the flood of GoPro videos spreading across YouTube and Facebook. GoPro's Facebook fan base grew from 50,000 to more than 1.3 million in 2011 alone. To put that in perspective, Contour had 56,000 fans at the end of 2011. Canon USA had 135,000, and Panasonic USA had 134,000. But it's not the size of its Facebook fan base that sets GoPro apart; it's the level of engagement of those fans.

"I think we have the most socially engaged online audience of any consumer brand in the world," Woodman says. The company uses a metric it refers to as a BARE (for brand audience rate of engagement) score to track the activity of its Facebook audience. The score is simply the number of fans Liking, Posting, Commenting, or otherwise interacting on the GoPro Facebook Wall divided by the total number of fans. (Facebook makes this calculation easy by posting a metric called Talking About This; see "The BARE Truth.") In mid-December, GoPro's BARE score was 5 percent. By comparison, Lady Gaga's was 0.9 percent and Fox News's was 1.9 percent. Among brands with a million or more followers, you would be hard-pressed to find one with a higher rate of engagement.

All right, you say, but what does that engagement mean for the business? Can the company directly track the revenue impact or leverage those users for more camera sales? Here the answers get a bit fuzzier, and Woodman is comfortable with that. "That's a big difference between GoPro and other companies," he says. "The first thing we get excited about isn't, What will this do for our business from a revenue standpoint—or, really, from any traditional business standpoint? It's, How stoked are our customers and fans?"

To understand GoPro's success as a social brand, you have to start back before the company's founding in 2002. After graduating with a degree in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego, Woodman started his first company in the dot-com go-go days of the late '90s. funBug was a venture-backed Web marketing company, and it went bust with the rest of the market in 2001.

"I feel like I went through the Great Depression," says Woodman. "All these companies are being successful around you, you're on that track, and then the market collapses, and you're out of a job. You're trying to save your investors' investment, and it doesn't work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal."

He knew he still wanted to be an entrepreneur, but he vowed to bootstrap his next operation: "I didn't want to take anybody else's money. I wanted to do something small that could be profitable from the beginning, and grow that way—and never need someone to write me a check to keep the business going."

He left California to live out of a backpack and surf in Australia and Indonesia for five months, first with his friend Ruben Ducheyne (who now heads up GoPro's customer support operation) and then with his girlfriend, Jill Scully (now his wife, Jill Woodman). It was in Australia that the idea for GoPro began to take shape. Woodman was frustrated that pro surfers tended to be the only ones who could get good images of themselves surfing—because you needed a professional photographer or videographer willing to bob around in the water documenting you. Surfers addressed that problem as best they could by using the buddy system and carrying cheap, disposable film cameras that came with a waterproof housing and glorified rubber-band wrist strap—but that usually ended with the cameras banging them on the head or getting lost in the water.

Woodman's solution was simple: Create a wrist strap that held a disposable camera firmly in place against your arm. When you were ready to shoot a picture of your surfing buddy, you'd just pivot the camera up into place, get the shot, then snap it back down. What surfer wouldn't want that?

"We all kind of laughed at the idea," says Ducheyne. "He's going to make a wrist strap?" It hadn't even occurred to Woodman that he would eventually also make cameras. He fashioned a crude prototype for the strap and took it with him everywhere on his surf safari for testing.

Woodman had saved up about $20,000 from funBug, but by the time he made it to Indonesia, he knew he would need more money if he wanted to get serious about starting the business when he got back to the States. One day, Jill came back from a shopping excursion in Ubud, Bali, and showed Nick a bead-and-shell belt she had bought for $2.50. She was an aspiring jewelry designer and told him about her ideas for making the belt even cooler.

"Nick's always had a 'Go big or go home' kind of philosophy," Jill says, "so he asked me to take him to the market to see about buying more belts and incorporating my designs. We get there, and he's like, 'We'll take 600 of those, 600 of those, and 600 of those.'" He also bargained the price down to about $1.90 per belt. When the couple got back to California, after waiting two months for all the belts to be made, they spent another three months driving up and down the coast and living in Woodman's 1974 VW bus, stopping at street fairs and concerts to sell the belts. "We'd get as much as $60 for a belt," Jill says.

The belt profits gave Woodman enough cash to start GoPro. He borrowed another $35,000 and a sewing machine from his mom, and got to work making his first product—a process that took two years, while he lived with his dad in Sausalito and Jill moved to Santa Monica.

By 2004, Woodman had a product to market—not just a wrist strap but a still film camera to attach to it. (He had discovered that the legal and logistical issues around working with a bunch of camera companies were more complicated than just buying and modifying a simple camera.) Nick and Jill moved into a cottage in the redwood forest near Pescadero, where Nick set about working 16-hour days at the computer and the sewing machine, testing new fabrics for the next-generation product, designing marketing materials, writing patent applications, and starting to build up a network of retailers.

"There was fabric everywhere in the house," remembers Jill. "We had to sleep with the camera on, because if there was ever a sore point, that wouldn't be acceptable. He needed to find the perfect tightness and perfect fabric, so it didn't make you sweat, didn't make you sore. It was all-consuming." By this point, Jill was working full time in sales, and Nick's friend Neil Dana was doing sales from his home up the coast. Their first breakthrough moment was at their first trade show, the 2004 Action Sports Retailer show, where they got an order for 100 units from a Japanese distributor.

A bigger breakthrough came two years later, after the company started making a rudimentary digital video camera. Woodman had always harbored a dream of being a racecar driver, and once sales of the digital camera were going well enough, he indulged himself by going to racing school at Infineon Raceway, in Sonoma. The school tried to rent him a mounted camera for $100. Woodman said no, thanks, strapped his GoPro wrist cam to the car's roll bar, and had his eureka moment: The company would make mounts for its cameras so people could point them back at themselves.

The company bought a Lotus Exige sports car, and Woodman started testing all kinds of mounts for vibration and noise and other details. "He absolutely loves that Lotus," says Dana, who is now a director for GoPro's international sales operation. "He'd spend all day going 130 miles per hour around the Infineon track. He was basically the product test engineer, and he would get whatever tools he needed to test in real-world environments. If we had taken VC money early on, it would have been hard to justify a lot of those things. He wanted the freedom to be, like, I'm going to do it this way."

It was an extravagant investment of money and the CEO's time, but it started to pay off in sales to core enthusiasts in markets well beyond surfers. When the company launched its first high-definition video camera, in November 2009, sales hockey-sticked—and the flood of user-generated videos online wasn't far behind. "We sat back as a company and said, 'Oh, my God, people are really freaking out,' " remembers Woodman. "Soon we realized it was accelerating beyond anything we were doing on the marketing or merchandising side, so it was pretty clear that people sharing their own content was driving the awareness of GoPro."

The company had also started attending trade shows in all the action-sports, motor-sports, and consumer-electronics markets, and began to give cameras away to attendees. "You'd have people walking all around the show wearing our cameras," says Dana. As word of the giveaways spread, Woodman decided to make a bigger deal of them by gathering friends of the company in front of his booth at 3 p.m. each day of a show.

"Are you fired up?" he would yell to the assembled, borrowing a routine from his high school football coach.

"Yeah!"

"Are you fired up?"

"Yeah!"

It was infectious, and the crowd of corporate buyers milling around soon began to join in the chorus. Woodman would announce that whoever yelled the loudest would get free cameras, and then he would lead everyone in a chant of the company's name: "GoPro! GoPro! GoPro!" The commotion would bring the rest of the show to a halt as everyone wandered over to see what was going on. GoPro landed its accounts with Dick's Sporting Goods and REI that way.

It wasn't long before the company's growing profile led Best Buy to come knocking, in early 2010. GoPro had reached out to the retail giant several times but had never gotten a response. Now, though, people who had learned about GoPro online were going into the stores and asking for the cameras. Best Buy has a specialty-product division that responds to such requests and tests new accounts in anywhere from 10 to 100 stores, so the company offered GoPro a shot that way. Sales outperformed expectations, and by May 2011, just weeks after Cisco decided to shutter its Flip camera business, GoPro had shiny white point-of-purchase displays topped with flat screens in all Best Buy stores. In September, Best Buy gave GoPro its Bravo award for being a top new supplier.

Woodman is standing at a whiteboard in a conference room at GoPro's headquarters, where a slick highlight video of footage shot with the company's latest camera, the HD Hero2, plays on a five-minute loop on a big-screen TV. He draws a circle on the board and labels it with four words connected by counterclockwise arrows: Capture, Creation, Broadcast, and Recognition. Woodman likes to talk about the "democratization of professional content," and these are the elements that make that possible, he says.

Capture is what the cameras enable—shooting pictures and videos. Creation is the editing and production process that turns raw footage into a compelling piece of content. Broadcast is the distribution of that content to an audience. And Recognition is the payoff for content creators—spiritual recognition in the form of views on YouTube or Vimeo, Likes and Shares on Facebook, high-fives from friends, or financial recognition in the form of revenue sharing from YouTube or ad dollars from their personal blogs.

"If I'm a content creator, and I get recognition for my work, that's going to motivate me to spend even more time on my next production and make it even better," Woodman says. He points to the circle on the whiteboard. "If you take this circle and flip it on its side, it's going to go like this," he says, and starts drawing a spiral that coils upward. "This is our DNA. This is how we grow, and it's all driven by the content." The company's content strategy is a simple positive-feedback loop, in other words, and the theory is that each revolution lifts the overall quality of the content the audience is producing, the size of the audience, and the number of cameras and accessories sold.

To date, GoPro has focused its business mostly on democratizing the first step in the content cycle: capture. Now the company is training its focus on the rest of the cycle—creation, broadcast, and recognition. "We spent a lot of time recently thinking about, What are we really doing here?" Woodman says. "We know that our cameras are arguably the most socially networked consumer devices of our time, so it's clear that we're not just building hardware. You think about the implications of that and where it can go.…We're thinking of new ways to enable our customers to communicate through video and new businesses that spawn from that."

On the creation side, GoPro's media group manager, Bradford Schmidt, persuaded Woodman to acquire a leading digital-video software company, CineForm, in early 2011, right around the time GoPro released a rig that allows users to shoot in 3-D by calibrating two cameras to shoot simultaneously and create layered 3-D files. At the time, there was no such thing as a simple iMovie-like interface for regular consumers to edit 3-D video (primarily because shooting in 3-D was prohibitively expensive until GoPro's device hit the market). CineForm promptly designed a dead-simple user interface, and GoPro's users were a step closer to being amateur James Camerons.

On the broadcast side, GoPro is working out the details of a partnership with YouTube to create a GoPro network. "Within YouTube, there's no standardized metadata system for video files, like there are for JPEGs," explains GoPro's CTO, Stephen Baumer, "so there's no easy way for us to know that a user-generated video was shot with a GoPro, other than if it's been proactively tagged as GoPro by that user. To our delight, customers have been doing that to a huge degree, and it's been a big part of our success"—but no amount of tagging by users allows GoPro to get involved in the business of user-generated videos on YouTube. That will change in the first quarter of this year, when GoPro releases a Wi-Fi plug-in for its cameras that will allow customers to upload video directly from their cameras or via a mobile app. GoPro itself will then be able to tag the videos as they are uploaded, place them on the GoPro YouTube network (which it aims to launch at the same time as the Wi-Fi plug-in), and begin to monetize all that user-generated content.

Which brings us to the recognition piece of the content cycle. Once user-generated videos become part of a structured network, the company can create more elaborate incentive systems for its customers to do ever more and better work. GoPro already dabbles in these kinds of incentives by, for instance, selecting the coolest user videos to be included in television ads. But the GoPro network will create opportunities for users to get paid for the number of views or shares their videos get on YouTube. Users could agree to run pre-roll video or overlay ads that link to GoPro, for instance. And in the process, GoPro would essentially turn its users into a massive worldwide sales force.

Suddenly the question of how GoPro tracks and maximizes the revenue impact of the content produced on its cameras becomes less fuzzy. In 2011, the company saw its revenue per user from YouTube-generated traffic double. Once more of the user videos actually link to GoPro and users have an incentive to send the company traffic, it's not hard to see that number growing quite a bit faster still.

There's one other piece of evidence that GoPro's content operation directly boosts sales: those point-of-purchase displays, each of which is topped with a flat-screen TV showing GoPro highlights. Walk into your local REI, and you're likely to see someone standing there just staring at the screen. "They've increased sell-through at the store level five times over," says Dana. "We call them our GoPro ATM machines."

Last May, Woodman broke his pledge not to take on venture capital. On the same day GoPro announced it was entering all Best Buy stores, it announced a "substantial" strategic investment from five firms, including Steamboat Ventures, the VC arm of Disney. Woodman says GoPro hasn't touched the money; it's there as a war chest. As the company widens its market, it's increasingly possible that the larger digital imaging companies will move into the space and risk turning awesome little point-of-view cameras into a commodity.

The best way to protect against that, Woodman says, is to build a moat around the company in the form of its content ecosystem. "At a certain point, the services that you build around the hardware become more important than the hardware itself," he says. The company's new investors have deep connections in the technology and entertainment landscape, and they are helping GoPro advance its relationships with media companies. The impending YouTube partnership is part of this initiative, as are other relationships in Hollywood and beyond.

Among filmmakers, GoPro cameras are already a standard piece of most production kits. Lucasfilm used GoPro cameras for the upcoming film Red Tails, about World War II pilots, and countless Discovery Channel productions and news shows use the cameras to film wildlife, rescues, and storms. "It's been a game changer for us," says Ernie Montagna, equipment manager for Original Productions, the company that produces reality-TV hits such as Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Ax Men. His crews attach GoPro cameras to crab pots underwater or to the sides of ships in rough seas.

One of the most innovative media partnerships so far was spurred by a skunkworks project that Schmidt, the media group manager, created for ESPN's X Games. Using the same technology that allows two cameras to be strung together to shoot in 3-D, Schmidt designed a 48-camera array that captures "time slice" images. Picture a video of a skateboarder on a halfpipe ramp, but when he does a midair trick, the motion stops, and the shot pans around to show the athlete from all angles. The effect previously cost at least $100,000 to pull off and required a crane and hours of setup; Schmidt's camera array can pull it off for a few thousand dollars (the price of that many cameras), with one person operating it.

Once again, it comes back to GoPro thinking about its audience. Rather than relying solely on user-generated content, it's betting that slickly produced videos of pros using its cameras to do amazing things will inspire regular people to get out there even more. The company recently started a sponsorship program for extreme-sports athletes and hired a former top Red Bull marketing executive, Paul Crandell, to head the effort. There are about 70 athletes signed up so far, and the idea is that GoPro not only will enable them to pull off jaw-dropping stunts (by helping fund them) but also provide the platform for people around the world to gawk at them. Schmidt is thinking about other ways to string multiple cameras together to create unique effects for partners (imagine hundreds of synced cameras positioned throughout a stadium during a concert, for instance). Woodman is looking forward to GoPro's new Wi-Fi plug-in enabling live streaming of events. Crandell is already looking beyond athletes and thinking about signing up surgeons, scientists, and security companies. And the content wheel spins ever faster.

As small business owners in a recession, we eagerly await any news that consumer confidence is rebounding to normal levels. But looking at consumers as one undifferentiated mass is a big mistake. As the latest BIG Research Consumer Intentions & Actions survey uncovered, consumer optimism may be on the rebound among some groups, while it’s falling among others. Knowing what your customers think is key to successfully marketing to them.

BIG surveyed consumers in four age brackets:

1. Silent (born 1945 or earlier)
2. Baby Boomers (born 1946 – 1964)
3. Gen X (born 1965 – 1982)
4. Gen Y (born 1983 – 1993

Gen Y (there are various “definitions” of the age of this generation) was the most likely to be feeling confident that the U.S. economy is going to return to its pre-recession days. More than one in three (36.7 percent) of Gen Y felt this way. At the same time, Gen Y was also the most likely to feel uncertain about the future of the economy (37.5 percent).

Generation X was close behind its younger cohorts, with 35.8 percent feeling that the economy will bounce back, and 33.9 percent feeling uncertain.

More pessimistic were the Baby Boomers and Silents. Only 29.5 percent of Boomers and 26.8 percent of Silents felt that the economy will bounce back to its former days. In contrast, 39.3 percent of Silents and 37.9 percent of Boomers believe the economy will never recover. (33.9 percent of Silents and 32.5 percent of Boomers were uncertain.)

Least pessimistic? Generation Y—just 25.8 percent felt the economy will never recover, and only 30.3 percent of Gen Xers felt the same.

What’s the reason for the different attitudes? And more importantly, how can your understanding of them help you market to the different age groups?

Silents: Silents lived through or were closely affected by periods of hardship. Some lived through the Great Depression, and all grew up in the shadow of World War II, so they are used to saving and sacrificing. So their pessimistic attitudes may reflect the attitudes they were raised with. To market to this generation, focus on value—not just cost savings, but products and services that are worth the price.

Baby Boomers: Born and raised in unprecedented economic good times, Boomers have taken hard knocks in this economy. They’ve seen their retirement plans decimated and since many of them are caring for aging (Silent generation) parents, they’re shouldering their parents’ financial burdens as well. Add to it the return of adult children to the nest, and Boomers are feeling pretty squeezed. But Boomers still want to treat themselves, so marketing to them should focus on how your product or service can save them time or money, how it can enable them to enjoy life (the way they feel they deserve) or how it can give them a well-earned break.

Generation X: Generation X is in the throes of marriage and parenting and are at the prime of their work careers. This is the stage when consumers, no matter the economy, have to make lots of big purchasing decisions—buying homes, planning weddings or gearing up for babies. Gen X has high expectations for success but a lower budget to achieve it. Target these stressed-out consumers with products and services that help them feel good about themselves without breaking the bank. And be aware that they’re fully tapping the power of the Internet to find and share the best businesses and the best deals.

Generation Y: While they may be the most optimistic, Gen Y has less money to spend than the other groups, simply due to their life stage. However, because they have fewer commitments, they may have more disposable income. Target them with products and services that help them connect to their peers while still being affordable for their limited budgets. One option that can work well for Gen Y is offering different price packages for your product or service. Pricing at a basic level, mid-level and premium levels can appeal to their budgets as well as to their beliefs that eventually, the premium level will be within their reach.

Learn to target the different generations in your marketing, and you’ll see sales that will have you feeling a lot more optimistic about the economy.

Stormy Economy Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends Consumer Confidence: It’s a Bit Murky Out There

As the New Year begins, a lot of us are hoping to do better in our business than last year. And if last year did not meet our expectations, we are looking to improve things. Here are a few thoughts that have emerged as I battle to grow my business:

Get a Higher Goal

We all know how hard it was to start our company, get the product out and get those first 10-20 customers. Now, you are sitting at 65 customers and there is a little bit of money coming in. There is hope for more. You would be at a super comfortable income at 200 customers. Make sure you aim for a 1000 this year. If you don’t plan for a large enough target, you will find it a tough hike to 200 as well.

Get in Deeper

What can you do different for this higher goal? Let’s say you have certain marketing channels to promote your site/product. You are spending on online advertising, have a part-time sales person, are sitting on Twitter and have your web designer helping you with SEO. It’s time to become proficient at some of these things yourself. If you know that getting your site showing on Google will make a much more accelerated impact than making cold calls – learn some basics on SEO (search engine optimization). Take a course, ask people, see what your competition is doing. Sites like blekko give you detailed insights into what makes your competition rank higher on Google.

Get Some Uncle Scrooge in You

Are you still spending $500 per month on those banner ads? Have you calculated conversions on these particular ads to your site? Or is it just a black hole? Those customers you got last month could have come from word of mouth, not those ads. Make sure you measure every dollar that you spend on marketing. Early on, you might not have the cash to splurge on “brand building.” Spend the money if you know you are getting something out if it. I know, it’s hard at times, but you have to be a hawk – don’t give in to sharp sales pitches and good looking sites.

Get a Physical

When was the last time you checked in with your old customers? I know they are still paying you and hence happy, but make sure you know if something is hurting them, or if they are missing something that you could add easily. Also, keep an eye on Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn on what people might be saying about your product or the competition. You can also post questions on this forum to learn more about what you could do better. For the customers that left, send a gentle, personal email asking them what was missing.

Get Some Rest

Thinking of quitting? This might be because you are burnt out with all the effort and hours you are putting in the business. The only reason a business fails after getting to 100 paying customers is because the primary driver (you) did not continue long enough. Make sure you switch off for a few hours in the evening, go to the gym, take a trip or a vacation – you need a reset button. Come back and kill it!

Setting daily goals will convert some of the above ideas into habits that will ensure you hit your targets for this year.

Rest Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends 5 Habits Small Businesses Should Adopt in 2012

The first place your customers meet you is online. So it's time for a spot check: Are you looking your best?

Customer relationships are job No. 1 for any business, but building them with customers who experience your product primarily online and over the phone requires a unique blend of intentions, knowledge, and process (all aligned with clear expectation-setting). The goal is to quickly forge trust in the ability, reliability, and strength of your service and its team. These overall truths of your product and team are vital to delivering a customer experience that bonds the customer to your brand and your service ultimately resulting in a lasting relationship connection.

These days relationship building, especially online, is not for the faint of heart. Much of the Web's transactions and interactions are set up as self-serve and therefore, by design, happen quickly. In lieu of a first-person interaction, first impressions on the Web stem directly from the initial customer experience on your website, social channels, or online conversations reviewing your service in communities or forums.

Every time a customer experiences your product or service, he or she should get clear brand and relationship context to support their purchase experience. Without it, a less-than-positive first impression becomes a potential disaster. Conclusions are drawn quickly, leaving you with limited opportunities to clarify, confirm, and resolve problems before your customers express dissatisfaction to their social networks. Both delight and disappointment can spread like wildfire at a moment's notice.

So what can you do to ensure your customers get a clear sense of your brand, and the relationship you want to create with them, when they make an initial commitment to your service? Here are several ideas:

Be Explicit With Your Customer Philosophy.

Make it visible on your website. Communicate it in your newsletter. Create specific marketing campaigns around it. Write it on your wall in the office. Reinforce the philosophy with employees, vendors, and partners—anyone who has a role in the direct or indirect relationship with your customers. At Get Satisfaction, we express our philosophy through a document called the Customer/Company Pact. We encourage our customers to sign it and incorporate the principals in their own business. It's a foundation to the way we do business and core to our culture.

Keep the Feedback Light "Always On."

The days of monthly webcasts, quarterly surveys, annual conferences, and expensive one-off focus groups are becoming antiquated as relationship development moves further. Online customers want to be able to share ideas and insights wherever they are and whenever they decide to. In fact, they expect it. Encourage always on feedback by creating a visible way to gather it directly from your website and in your social channels as well.

Showcase Your Customers' Success.

Shoot fun videos demonstrating your customer's success. Surprise them with thank you notes, fun schwag and other material that supports your philosophy. Offer opportunities for them to share their insights with other customers, and employees too. Publicly recognize them for their expertise.

Surprise Customers With a Different Form of Communication.

In our crazy online, e-mail-centric worlds, you can shift a relationship by simply reaching out voice-to-voice. Yes, even a simple voicemail can have a big impact. The power of the human voice signals a different intention than can be typically be expressed through an e-mail. Even though we often shy away from making a call, sometimes it's just what you need to build a memorable connection with a customer who typically only gets email communication often filled with corporate speak (jargon).

Build a Highly Discoverable Customer Community.

Make it easy for your customers to find and engage with like-minded peers. Make sure your customer communities are integrated with your social channels and your web site, as well as plugged in to your customer portal or CRM applications. True engagement happens when customers are actively helping each other, solving problems, expressing ideas for ways to improve your service, as well as giving praise for exceptional service and features. Peer-to-peer relationships are central to engagement because they build a natural tone of trust, which can be echoed, supported, and amplified by company employees too.

Making sure that the customer's experience has the right brand and relationship context is core to building amazing long-term relationships with your customers.

Think about your business: How are your brand and your overall customer experience building trust with your customers? How engaged are your customers?

So what can small businesses expect for 2012? My general advise continues to be cautious!  While we are seeing some of the small business surveys showing optimism increasing and more importantly employment improving slightly, I worry that we have been lulled into a mode of thinking that the worst is over. I believe that we are simply in the eye of the storm.  I hope that the storm is dissipating, but I fear that the back wall of the eye will hit us sometime later this year.  It may come as a result of the European debt crisis or it may come as a result of the looming Chinese credit crisis, but I fear it may hit us and his us hard. That being said, we do need to get on with life.  Things may actually improve, but even if they don't the vast majority of small businesses will survive even if things get nasty. Steve Strauss offers his take on trends for small businesses to watch at Business on Main.  He sees mobile mania continuing to surge this year, a continued increase in the solopreneur (a.k.a., free-lancers, independent contractors), and an improvement in how Groupon works with small businesses. He also is keeping on eye on the economy and has some concerns about the impact of the fall election. It is a thoughtful article that is worth a careful read as you make your plans for this year. Whither Groupon? Election-year entanglement