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By stella

Revolutionary, irreverent and cool, Richard Branson’s Virgin has developed a brand so strong it speaks for itself. Branson recently shared some secrets to how he developed the brand in an OPEN Forum article.Here are the salient points:

1) Develop simple values- Virgin’s goal to attract customers when just a record store was to provide a cool place to hang out with low prices. Everything they did came back to the core idea of cool and low cost.

2) Stick to them- As Virgin’s empire began to grow and differentiate, sticking to the core values helped them figure out where their strong markets and products would be. They soon realized that the “fun” element referred to an excellent customer experience so markets such as consumer electronics were not as strong for them as experience oriented services.

3) Tell everyone about them- Virgin’s employees all learn and are constantly being reminded of their brand values. Making those values central to the work environment will reinforce their strength in outbound customer interactions.

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By Renata Sternfeld-Allon

Reading the news every day, it seems like the economy is sliding back down a black hole instead of getting better. This month alone we saw two abysmal numbers; small businesses shed 500,000 jobs, and the value of real-estate has slipped down again, 27% in fact, bringing the numbers of pre-owned houses being sold to the levels of 1991.

Business news daily did a poll of 50 small business owners to see what they would like the government to do to help us through these tough times. A few things emerged as most important to small business owners:

Lending – In theory SBA backed loans were supposed to help businesses when they are turned down by the banks, but the requirements and application process leave a lot to be desired. Many business owners said banks have to reduce their demands and allow loans to be backed 100% by the government. They also said that the SBA needs to raise the cap on 7(a) loans, a loan program to help start up and existing small businesses when they are unable to get a loan through normal channels, and raise the cap on American Capital Recovery (ARC) loans as well.

1099 reporting – The new reporting required by the Health Care Bill. This new requirement which will go into effect in 2011 will require businesses to file a form for every company they purchase from and pay over $600 a year(!) for goods and/or services.

Government Contracts – Make it easier on small businesses to get government contracts; simplify the bidding process without having to spend time and money on lawyers to make the bid. “I can sign a $10,000 contract with a customer in a few minutes” says Healy Jones, owner of OfficeDrop. “Spending hours writing proposals and mailing them to government agencies is just too time consuming.”

Communication – Communication with the government has to be clearer, and bills that are passed should be understood. Sometimes, clauses in unrelated bills create more work for small business owners, like the health care Bill and the 1099 forms.

Regulations – Ease on regulations and reporting. Small businesses are being regulated to death they say. “They really need to butt out” says John Kramb owner of Adams County Winery, “And let businesses do what they do best; Make stuff and provide services the meet the needs of the customers.”

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By stella

Does your personality come through when you’re doing business? Or is your website/office filled with what I’ll call “flair,” random generic, expected materials that make your business look like just anyone else’s. I’m talking motivational business posters and copy infused with words like “thought leader and synergy.”

Well it’s time to stop following what’s expected and let your personality shine. Who do you think potential clients will remember more? The companies that look like everyone else, or the ones that focus on being original while delivering the best service or project? A couple of great example of companies with personality are Groupon (albeit annoying) and Copylicious.

1) Groupon- I hate the Groupon cat, and reading their convoluted descriptions of the daily deal. However, it’s a brilliant strategy to make them stand out and shine amongst hundreds of copycats (pardon the pun). Consider this: when the daily deal is usually a manicure, facial, or restaurant discount…who’s going to stand out: the company that describes each pedicure as “indulgent, relaxing, and luxurious” or a company that’s not afraid poke a little fun?

2) Copylicious- If you haven’t read Copylicious, do yourself a favor and check it out. The site is infused with creator Kelly Parkinson’s creative personality. Check out her About page which will have you smiling (but still be impressed) in no time. Even her picture shows a unhindered smile instead of a severe, corporate headshot. Making sure your personality shines through is also a way to filter the right clients: only the ones who want to work you fully knowing your expectations will oblige.

Bottom line: There is no advantage in being like everyone else. Whether your business personality is strict, fun, nerdy, or sarcastic, (Groupon’s case) highlighting your unique culture will help you stand out amongst blah competitors who speak in cliches and buzz words.

Image thanks to http://listicles.thelmagazine.com/2010/01/11-irksome-motivational-posters/

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By Renata Sternfeld-Allon

Will new regulations, which went into effect this Sunday, August 22, 2010 (designed to protect consumers against rate hikes and bank charge) change the way banks conduct business with small businesses?

The new rules do not apply to small businesses… only to personal credit cards, but they might have an effect on the way business owners conduct their business.

“While small business credit cards and consumer credit cards are similar in terms of their function and features, they differ markedly in the manner in which they are used. As the Fed report makes clear, small business cards limits and per card spending tend to be much higher, and small business cards require specialized management and underwriting techniques to help manage the particular risks that small businesses present,” says Kenneth J. Clayton of the American Bankers Association, as an excuse for not extending these regulations to small businesses.

With the new regulations it is tempting to use your personal credit cards as your business cards, and get the new protection. However, doing so has its own set of problems;

Accounting – Blending business and personal cards can create accounting issues. If you keep all your business purchases on one card, you probably can deduct the interest and the fees for this card. Once you start mingling personal purchases, any accountant will tell you it gets pretty hard to distinguish how much of the balance is due to personal purchases and how much is due to business purchases.

Credit Score – The business debt will show up on the personal credit report and the surge in debt might lower your credit score. The usage of available credit on revolving accounts is one of the factors to calculate your credit score. Increasing this ratio will cause your credit score to drop.

Banks – The bank may notice increased usage on your personal credit card and decide it is not a personal card. Then, they can change the terms making it a business card.

Yet, 86% of small businesses say they use their consumer cards for business purposes, according to the 2009 National Small Business Association survey.

Is there a silver lining? With the new law, the credit card issuers are scrambling to make up for lost revenue. What is a better place than the cards that did not go under the new rules? Small business owners might find that the new business credit is greeted by a much friendlier credit card industry. Offers sent out in the second quarter of 2010 totaled 40.5 million, up from 26 million in the previous three month period, according to a new report from the consumer advice website WalletPop, which goes to show the banks are already starting down that road.

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By Renata Sternfeld-Allon

Sometimes, small business owners can hurt their own businesses without being aware of it. They do so by creating complexity and taking the focus away from conducting the business, to reporting about it.

It’s a known fact that a directive issued by the boss which trickles down the levels of employees can create more harm than good. Every level down, the directive gets more and more demanding. If the boss says “I’d like to see the numbers,” the first level will say “The boss needs to see…” then, “The boss demands to see…” and so on and so forth. By the end of the day what was asked as a friendly, non-committal request, ends up sounding like a strict demand.

Ron Ashkenas tells a story that illustrates the process in his article in Harvard Business Review. He asked hundreds of managers a few questions: Does the complexity of the business make it difficult to meet client’s needs? Does the complexity cause dissatisfaction from employees? The answer to both questions was yes.
If so, he asked, who causes that complexity? After a short silence, most managers admitted that occasionally they are the ones responsible.

To illustrate this process Ron Ashkenas tells a story; a president of a large company asked his CFO to produce a weekly, nonfinancial, activity report. The CFO asked each of the directors of this multi-branch company to give him a few highlights of the week’s activity. Most of the directors asked their subordinates to do the reporting, and it trickled down to many levels.
Before long, people in the organization were busy producing those reports, and thinking of creative ways to say that nothing is really new. As the report went up again, each of the directors, wanting to look good, embellished it or reproached his subordinates for not making the report look good enough. Soon many people in the organization were busy producing that report instead of producing income for the company.
The president, of course, was oblivious to what was going on. After all he asked for a simple, nonfinancial, report.

The problem was that none of the levels of employees asked what the president was really after. Each wanted to look good to his boss, to appear productive and none of the heads of departments thought they might do the report themselves without input from their employees. The process took a life of its own.

What to do? The solution is not simple – we all need reports, especially if the business is growing and we do not have daily contact with all the departments. The challenge is to make all those invisible source of complexity more visible.

You can read more about it in Ron Ashkenas’ book “Simply Effective” and learn how to reduce complexity in your business.

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By stella

Over the course of 2010, there is one thing that visitors to ZippyCart.com keep asking us about, and this is which ecommerce software solutions have social commerce tools that they can use to better market their online store. At the beginning of 2010, the social commerce tools available to most merchants via their ecommerce solution provider were very limited, but now the top companies in the space are offering a good mix of social commerce tools. Ecommerce merchants are very concerned about marketing their online store, and they’re constantly on the lookout for the latest and greatest tools to keep them on the cutting edge. The best ecommerce software companies are aware of this desire, and this is why, over the course of this year, they have continued to introduce social commerce tools to meet the needs of their merchants. However there is still 4.5 months left in the year for these ecommerce companies to improve their tools so that they can be atop the pack in 2011 when merchants start to review if their current ecommerce platform is still the best choice to power their online store.

Why Social Commerce?

Social Commerce is a constantly evolving niche as new techniques and methods are being experimented with so merchants can figure out how to best way to expand the reach of their online store. Some of the ecommerce software companies leading the way right now are 3dcart, BigCommerce, Volusion, and CoreCommerce. These companies provide a variety of social commerce features, but two stand out from the crowd. First is the ability to include the addthis button on your site, so that people can quickly share your products on a variety of social bookmarking sites. Additionally they all provide merchants a way to setup some sort of ecommerce storefront on Facebook and other social networks, so that they can generate revenue from other marketing channels. The ability to sell directly on Facebook is different than just using a Facebook shopping cart app. Instead, all of a merchant’s Facebook sales directly integrate with their ecommerce platform, making it very easy to manage sales throughout channels.

Since the niche is so new, there is still a lot of room for innovation and improvement, and ecommerce software companies are all competiting to ensure that they provide the best social commerce tools possible so that their merchants can be successful. Two things that we see becoming key for merchants demanding social commerce tools, are more automation so that merchants can focus on other tasks, and more advanced ways to utilize Twitter. While it is great that ecommerce solution providers offer social commerce tools, merchants have little time to test out new strategies, and want things to be more automated so that they do not have to spend too much time managing multiple stores. Current Twitter tools from ecommerce software companies are a bit basic, and none that we know of have tools like Wishpot offers in their social commerce platform. They allow a merchant to sync up their product feed to Twitter, and define parameters around price drops, sales, and new items. After a merchant sets this up, they then can control the frequency of tweets, and the platform takes care of automatically tweeting products from the feed that match the criteria set by merchants.

The bottom line is that social commerce is now a must for most merchants, as they need to be able to engage with customers via a variety of mediums outside of pay-per-click search and SEO. As the holiday shopping season draws near, merchants should begin to examine how social commerce fits into their social media marketing strategy. If your ecommerce software does not have any social commerce tools, then you should request them now, and in the meantime review other 3rd party companies in the space to see what they have to offer.

About the Author: Nick Grant is the co-founder of ZippyCart.com, the Internet’s leading ecommerce software review website. Merchants in search of a shopping cart to power their online store turn to ZippyCart to read shopping cart reviews and compare the best ecommerce solutions in the industry and determine which option is best for their needs.

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By Renata Sternfeld-Allon

New bank overdraft regulations that went into effect August 15, 2010 may cost banks billions in lost revenue according to guess who: major banks. Research firm Moebs Services estimates overdraft brought banks $37.1 billion last year, as reported in The Washington Post.

The new rules may help small businesses that are dealing with tight cash flow and were slapped with huge fines. Here are how the rules were before the new regulation:
Let’s assume your bank account shows you have a few hundred dollars in your account. You buy a cup of coffee, you buy stamps, you maybe have lunch. You paid for all of those with your debit card.

A few days later you discover you are overdrawn by hundreds of dollars. How could that possibly happen when you had a few hundred dollars in your account? Quite simply, banks decide which withdrawals they post first. Let’s assume a check you gave a month ago was just now posted into your account, or a recurring automatic payment you forgot about went through.

Regardless of the dates, the bank posted your big check first. That brought your balance to zero. All the other withdrawals, small as they may be, now appear after it. Instead of paying overdraft on one big withdrawal, you now pay for all the small ones – with a fine. The cup of latte for which you paid $3, has now a fine of $37. A few of those and now you owe the bank hundreds of dollars.

This was one of the ways the banks made a lot of money with an unfair but legal practice, and that is one of the problems the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act addresses.

According to the new rules, the banks have to give their customer the option to enroll in overdraft protection or opt out. But many economists fear the new rules are not spelled clear enough, so here they are:

The customer can decide if he enrolls in the program and has the bank honor all of his debit card withdrawals regardless of whether there’s money in the account. Overdraft charges will be accompanied with a fine. If the customer opts out, banks will not honor debit card payments when there’s not enough money in the account to cover them.

The FDIC admits the complaints about overdraft abuse doubled from 2008 to 2009, prompting the agency to write guidelines that include small banks as well. They say the banks have to limit the number of times an overdraft accrues by limiting the dollar amount or the number of times the fee can be slapped, a provision that is not included in the bill, and they call to review the order in which bank post the withdrawals.

What worried bank critics is the idea that the bank will now look for other inventive ways to make up for their lost revenues. Legislation takes years and until the public catches up with the bank shenanigans, the customers lose.

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By stella

Usually, hearing “no” is the end of the road when you’re making a pitch. However, being at the end of the road is infinitely better than being in limbo with a “maybe.” Who wants to have their time be wasted by prospective clients or investors who have no intention of working with you? Here are three steps, as recommended by HBR, to get a definitive “no” instead of a willy-nilly “maybe:”

1) Be crystal clear about the ask- Make sure to fully disclose what you’re asking for, people may say no because they’re simply unclear about what is being asked.

2) Set a deadline-This way, they know that their is a define time in the near future at which point a decision must be made. No buts about it.

3) Learn to understand silence- People hate saying no, and will sometimes opt to not say anything at all. Helpfully asking a question when you hear the silence will put the naysayer at ease, enough so that they can more easily express their genuine decision.

Be clear about your request. People often say maybebecause they are confused about what you’re asking of them.
Set a deadline. When meeting a prospective investor, buyer, or customer, explain when you need a decision. A deadline can yield a quicker yes or no.
Know when silence means no. People hate to say noas much as you hate to hear it. When you sense that your audience is going to say no, but hasn’t built up the courage to express it, provide an out. Something as simple as, “I assume it’s a pass for now?” can help the other party be definitive about its decision.

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By Renata Sternfeld-Allon

Most small business owners have a lot of great ideas about running their business and how to make it more profitable. But some of us find that those ideas overwhelm us, crowd and confuse us sometimes. How do you know when your ideas are good and when you should act on them?

Rhonda Adams says that the biggest problem facing small business owners is lack of focus, and she has some suggestions, in a USA Today article, of how to organize your ideas and check if they are worthy.

1) Write your ideas down.

As long as they are circling in your head, they are just bothering and cramming your brain. They might distract you or even freeze you. When you set out to write them down you achieve two goals: While writing down the details, you’ll often find that the idea is not completely formulated. Having it down on paper enables you to look at all aspects, even those you skipped.

The other great thing about writing ideas down is that you move them out of your head. You have a sense of achievement for formulating them on paper, and when you stop obsessing about them, there’s more room to think of other things.

2) Create an idea book.

Dedicate a folder, binder or a computer page to ideas brought up by your employees, coworkers or something you thought about. Make sure everybody knows of the existence of this place for new ideas.

Once a year or more often if you like, sit with your coworkers and go over that file. You might find that some of the ideas that looked brilliant 6 months ago are not that brilliant now. On the other hand, you may find that some seed of an idea can improve your product, service, marketing or a new concept.

When you have a new product out and you get feedback or suggestions for improvement from your customers, write it down in a dedicated book. When the time comes to improve the product, you have all your notes in one place and you won’t forget anything.

Having a dedicated book for events is helpful as well. When you go to a trade show, carry it with you. Attach the business cards of businesses you are interested in and add your immediate remarks. When you are back in your office, you have all the information in one place and your remarks can enlighten you to your potential customer’s reactions.

It takes focus and discipline to succeed in today’s marketplace. Make it easier on yourself by getting organized and leaving room in your head for other important business decisions.

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By stella

The Cinese e-Business Research Centre released a report announcing that internet sales in China have increased 60% in the first half of 2010. Last year, total e-commerce sales equaled 3.6 trillion Yuan ($350 billion), while the first half of 2010 boasts a total of 2.25 trillion Yuan ($331.3 billion). Growth is set to keep rising as more people gain internet access, and thereby become e-commerce shoppers (about 1/3 of Chinese internet users).

Don’t think this has gone unnoticed.

The release of the report comes hand in hand with MasterCard’s announcement of acquiring DataCash for $520 million. MasterCard’s aim in the acquisition is to drive its e-commerce expansion into the Asia-Pacific area, Europe, and Australia. (not to mention rival Visa’s recent acquisition of CyberSource) DataCash serves as an all-encompassing interface for e-commerce merchants, giving them the ability to process payments across the globe. They develop and outsource electronic payments solutions, alternative payment choices, fraud alerts, and back-office reconciliation for merchants.

Moreover, it seems that MasterCard is making a big statement: while Visa’s acquisition of CyberSource was an attempt to take over US e-commerce (for $2 billion, a pretty penny) MasterCard has replied by saying, “Ha! Visa, we plan to take over the world…for a fraction of the cost.”

MasterCard’s acquisition is bolstered by the numbers from the Chinese e-commerce report, indicating the wide expanse of opportunity available to MasterCard now…and challenging Visa to see what they can come up with next.

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Financially Speaking | TransFS

Financially Speaking / Home RSS Feed

Brand Secrets from Richard Branson

How the Government Can Help Small Businesses

Infuse Your Business with Personality

New Credit Card Regulations and Small Businesses

Is Complexity Hurting Your Business?

Are Overdraft Fines Hurting Your Business?

When Hearing “No” Is a Good Thing

Ideas, I’ve Had a Few

Chinese E-Commerce Soars 60%, MasterCard Wants a Piece

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