Small Business Minute

Regardless of whether you have two or twenty employees, leadership matters and for what it’s worth, there are few natural born leaders. That’s why leadership skills need to be learned and relearned all the time. So here’s a question I bet most entrepreneurs don’t ever consider. Do you lead from the front or the back? Some entrepreneurs know instinctively when to lead from the front or to lead from...

Unfortunately, not all entrepreneurs have the same motivations. There are those that really care about what they do and how they do it – the good, and there are those that just want your money – the bad. Fortunately, there are more of the former than the latter. We often hear complaints on how consumers have been taken advantage of by a less than professional business, but these issue...

I actually starting this piece 3 or 4 years ago, pre-Covid days. And as often happens when trying to be creative, you can be hit with a case of writer’s block that can leave any number of incomplete topics to collect dust. In my case, I can have upwards of a dozen or so pieces just sitting on the sidelines at any point in time. So was the case with this piece. The reason I mention pre-Covid days i...

Too often innovation gets confused with invention, when in fact they are not the same. Unfortunately, we are bombarded with articles and warnings that in order to survive as entrepreneurs we must innovate or be left behind. Ok, I’m not sure that we would be left behind, but innovating or improving how we do things, is never a bad idea. The goal for any innovation should not be for the sake of inno...

The world economies are in a mess and heading for a recession. But this shouldn’t be much of a surprise if you’ve been paying any attention to the news over the past year. The war in Ukraine, inflation, ongoing supply chain disruptions, interest rate increases, energy supplies and pricing are making it tough for consumers and small businesses alike. So what is a small business owner to do? Well, y...

The following is an edited transcript {Greg} Today I would like to welcome back Dennis Geelen the author of the Zero In Formula. Dennis was a previous guest on SBM #92 titled – The 2 Biggest Mistakes. If you haven’t listened to it, I encourage you to check it out. The reason for having Dennis join us today, is that he’s launching his new book – The Accidental Solopreneur. So, welcome back to...

“There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg. The Countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enou...

So what’s a whale? In this case it’s not a big fish. The whale I’m referring to here is a very large customer. It’s the client that spends more with you than anyone else. Overnight it can take your business to the next level. But if you are not careful, it can also put you out of business. Pursuing large clients is what most of us strive to do. It’s even better if the company is well known. It giv...

The reality of being a small business owner is that you are going to have difficult clients. How you deal with them comes down to how much you are willing to endure. These are the clients that hire you because of your expertise, but then try to tell you how to run the project. They can also be the type that doesn’t respect your time or are late in getting you the information you need but still exp...

One question I get all the time is, “How can I increase my sales?” The answer to this is question is quite simple. The hard part is executing on the answer. Selling is more than just showing up so, here are five ways to increase your sales that apply to any business. #1 Improve your knowledge and become an expert Knowing everything you can about your product, your industry and your competition can...

Inflation is much like rust. Left unchecked it can quietly eat away at your buying power and can turn a profitable business into one that struggles and a struggling business into non-existence. For many of us, you pretty much had to be a Boomer living in an industrialized world to fully appreciate the impact that inflation had during the 80’s. During that period mortgage rates skyrocketed to over...

For Thanksgiving we decided to get the whole family together and rent an Airbnb. Since our family has grown significantly over the last few years with marriages and the explosion of grandchildren, we now require a much larger accommodation.  For the most part, many of the larger places also come with a higher price tag. In keeping with the higher price, such locations typically boast of a hig...

An often published piece of advice to aspiring and to lesser extent existing entrepreneurs is to follow your passion. By doing so, riches or success will surely be yours. But, as with most of these sound bites, this is rarely the case. Let’s be honest. There’s lots of things that people have a passion for that could never support their dream lifestyle. Unless of course their dream is to just grind...

I’m always surprised at how many small business owners don’t prepare for their business’s year-end. Sadly, it’s more of a case that “they don’t know what they don’t know!” But spending some time on this annual event can potentially save you a lot of money. As to why so many entrepreneurs are oblivious to the importance of preparing for year-end has a couple of parents. To begin, most of the respon...

One of the biggest challenges of a service business is managing your inventory. Now you might wonder what inventory, besides a few stationary supplies you may have, that need to be managed? Well, unlike a manufacturing, retail or a distribution business, where you have physical inventory that needs to be stored, sold and then replenished, service businesses on the other hand have a single and very...

With the vaccine rollouts well under way in many countries, the talk has turned to the reopening of the economies. One of the biggest issues facing many entrepreneurs, is the return to the workplace. At the start of the pandemic, millions of office workers were sent home to work remotely. Once the initial technical issues were resolved, everybody seemed to profess that they are never going back to...

There are lots of reasons start-ups fail, but one that I see far too often is the lack of industry experience. Industry experience can be summed up as having substantive knowledge working in the area of the planned start-up. As an advisor, I have met with hundreds of budding start-ups and one of my primary questions to them once they have explained their idea is, “what industry experience do you h...

“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think”. This often repeated quote is regularly but wrongly attributed to Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and philosopher Bertrand Russell, all big thinkers in their own right. The reason for this is that they all had similar thoughts on the on the capacity or desire of h...

For newly minted entrepreneurs, the biggest priority is to generate revenue, any revenue in an effort to transition from struggling to profitable enterprise. To those of us who have made the crossing, we have more often than not sacrificed our own financial needs in order to create a proper fiscal foundation for our business. Because so few of us ever get investor capital, we are left to our own d...

A year ago, had you asked small business owners what 5 things could put them out of business?, I would have bet a pandemic would not have been on their top 10 let alone their top 50 things. But a lot has changed in just over a year. According to the CFIB (Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses), it is estimated that 1 in 6 small businesses won’t survive because of Covid-19. The UK is also p...

For some time now I’ve have taken issue with the advice given small business owners on social media platforms under the guise of motivation and advice. Sadly, much of this advice being spewed forth by many of these so called experts is, in my opinion, nothing more than hype to grow their popularity. But in order to balance my opinion and for research purposes, I have spent over 20 hours of listeni...

Pivot! Just pivot! That’s what your being told if you’re having challenges running your SME. It’s another one of those words that actually had value once upon a time. Now, it’s so abused that’s it’s nothing more than a throwaway statement by individuals who want to sound like they’re offering intelligent advice, but really aren’t. Realistically, most businesses can’t pivot. If we’re to be honest,...

This is a guest post by Dennis Geelen of Zero In. Take a minute and think of a few companies that pop into your head that were once seen as leaders in their industry but, for one reason or another, eventually came crashing back down to Earth.  Maybe they have since been surpassed and are no longer a household name.  Perhaps they filed for bankruptcy.  Or maybe you are thinking of a...

Money, it’s one of those personal topics that many people are uncomfortable discussing. Why that is, varies from person to person. Even inside a business that uncomfortableness exist, but that needs to change. Generally speaking, the only time the subject of money seems to ever comes up is in the heat of the moment in comments such as “Do you know how much that costs?”. Even then the word money is...

I’ve been wanting to golf at a rural course for a number of years now. The reason is that this golf course now sits upon farmland that was once owned by two of my uncles. I had spent a lot of time of these farms as a kid growing up and I had only played the course once many years before and my memory suggested it wasn’t a bad little course. So when a neighbour suggested that we get out for a round...