February 2006 Edition

Do You Like The New Look?
Job Information Is Not All Bad
Do You Need Coaching Or Just Training?
More On Advertising
TECH Corner
Some Smiles

Volume 2

do you like the new look?

We just changed the look of Small Biz Newz and hope you like it.  We wanted to add some flare and a touch of humor so please tell us if we succeeded.  Just shoot me an email to let me know what you think and we sincerely thank you for your continued support.  We get more subscribers every month so share this newsletter with others you think may get benefit from reading it.  We are now over 900 readers across the nation and even some outside the U.S.  Remember the price, $0.00....

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JOB INFORMATION IS NOT ALL BAD

U.S. Economy Adds 193,000 Jobs in Jan.; Unemployment Rate at 4.7%

I find it amazing that I talk with many people every week and some of them still believe the economy is in bad shape.  When I hear this I wonder how they come up with this perception.

The truth is the U.S. economy has been growing for the past 10 years with the only exception being the fourth quarter of 2001 and we all understand the reason for that very mild dip in performance.

We get blasted so often with all the negative like GM laying off 30,000 workers, but we don't hear the number shown here.  "Some 1.98 million jobs were created over the full year 2005" yet there is a focus on the 30,000 lost at GM.

As business owners we need to pay attention to the facts.  Keep our head held high and take pride in the fact that small business continues to keep our economy strong.  We small business folks are the ones hiring people in the U.S. and this has been the case for the past 15 years.  While larger companies content with pressure from the international market, small business adapts to the changing world - successfully.

Chin up folks - it is not all doom and gloom like some want you to believe...

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DO YOU NEED COACHING OR JUST TRAINING

Many people take all types of business training classes as they search for that one last magic bullet that will propel their business to success, "take it to the next level" as the trite saying goes.  Unfortunately, there is only one magic bullet and it is named WORK.  Training can be worth your time and money if you are willing to take the information back to your office and work with it.  Oh, there is that word again, work.  We work with our customers, we work with our vendors, we work with our staff, we work with our partners, we work to deliver on time, we work the numbers, we work the list.  All around us is work, golly, I wonder what the message is?  Ok, I will move along here since I think I've made my point.

If a person wishes to maximize the effectiveness of a training session they should follow it up with coaching.  The following chart explains this most effectively.  Click on the image to make it full size so you can read it.

This chart shows a class was attended in the lower left corner of the chart.  After eight weeks of no coaching the attendee (you or me) retained 22% of what we learned in the training class, while those people with ongoing, weekly coaching retained 88% of what they learned.

So there is a simple question here.  If you invest the time and money in a class would you rather retain 22% or 88%?

Therefore, when you are considering taking classes on business check them out first and see if they offer any ongoing coaching because if they do not you may only get 22% of what you paid for.

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more on advertising

Last month we talked about how one must track the results of advertising.  Let's delve into the tracking a little more this month.

If you have a business and cannot report what customer purchased which item in a selected time frame you are in trouble.  Simply put you must be able to quickly (in a few minutes) report who purchased what and when they purchased it.  We work with so many companies, selling many different services or products who cannot answer these questions, but they will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in advertising.

When we start asking about why a company cannot track this we get a common response, "we cannot afford the POS (point of sale) system, they are just too expensive".  My first question after that is this, "is the advertising you are doing free"?  Of course it is not so let's explore the numbers more closely.

A company is spending $750 per month in advertising and they do this every month for six months in the hope of getting more business so this cost is $4,500.  Unfortunately they do not have any type of POS system so they have no way of knowing if the ads work or not.  Since we happen to know most advertising does not work directly let's just assume the ads are half-effective, meaning half of the ads bring in business.  That means the other half, or $375 per month is wasted money.  Take the $375 over six months and you have $2,250.  Imagine spending the $2,250 on a POS system (easy to accomplish) and you stop spending the extra $375 per month.  After the first few months you will be able to track exactly what results you are obtaining from your advertising and stop the guessing.  If you do these simple calculations for your business I believe you will see you cannot afford not to have the POS and in fact there is a pay out on the investment in less than a year.  We encourage you to think about this before you sign yet another contract to advertise...

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TECH CORNER

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some smiles

Ever stop to think about UP?

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meaning than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP."

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we waken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing:

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable of the proper uses of UP, look UP the word in the dictionary. In a desk size dictionary, takes UP almost 1/4th the page and definitions add UP to about thirty.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.

When it rains, it wets UP the earth. When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP,

for now my time is UP, so.............

I'll shut UP.....!

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