Sabtu, 12 Maret 2016

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How to Profit from Market Research

Knowing what your customers want and how they want it is essential to any business. Here's how to gather
information through market research.




Let's face it: No business can sell goods and services that customers don't want and still make money. That's why market research comes in handy. Discovering what consumers want, when they want it, and how they want it packaged or delivered is essential to launching and/or running a business these days. Big businesses hire experts to analyze the market. Small businesses are often closer to their customer base and can get a sense of buying habits, future needs, or other trends. But just how useful is this informal data and when should small firms conduct broader market research?
If the "market" is viewed as the totality of all environmental factors that bear down on a business, market research may be defined as a disciplined investigation aimed at discovering what is going on and, most importantly, on what is changing in the environment. The object is to discover opportunities and threats—and to assess how some intended action might play itself out. The research may be designed broadly or narrowly, but even limited studies must have sufficient scope to give the investigation context.
The pages that follow will discuss why to conduct market research and how to profit from doing it successfully.
Deciding to Conduct Market Research
Without calling it market research, most businesses already conduct some form when they look at competitor's prices or service offerings, talk to customers about their needs, and try to figure out why products were returned or services discontinued. The question is when and if a business should formalize this research. The benefits of market research include the following:
  • identifying potential sales,
  • lessening business risks,
  • identifying problems in the market,
  • and focusing on a plan of attack.
You may have a variety of motives for undertaking formal market research. The context may be negative (declining profitability or sales) or positive (new technology, rapid growth). You may be motivated by forces outside the company's control such as new laws, the state of the economy, changing technology, or a new competitor in the market. Most start-ups that need front-end funding begin their careers by doing a comprehensive market study in order to put the results into a business plan.
Useful market research has a time element. It will present a history of developments and include a projection of future events. A manager wants to make decisions about what to do next and therefore needs a look at the future. Projecting data forward requires special but somewhat opposing skills: statistical expertise on the one hand and an inspired, open, and yet sober sort of gaze. Market research that merely confirms management's prejudices, hopes, or fears is worth little -- but the findings, of course, may do just that. Managements often do see the future accurately.
Elements of Successful Market Research
In order to devise an effective marketing strategy, the U.S. Small Business Administration recommends you do down the following checklist and first answer these questions about your business:
  • Who are my customers and potential customers?
  • What kind of people are they?
  • Where do they live?
  • Can and will they buy?
  • Am I offering the kinds of goods or services they want at the best place, at the best time, and in the right amounts?
  • Are my prices consistent with what buyers view as the product's value?
  • Are my promotional programs working?
  • What do customers think of my business?
  • How does my business compare with my competitors?
Now that you have the basics down, it's time to consider the various elements that go into market research.
Market Size and Structure
Market size is an important aspect of orientation in business: it tells the owner how he or she is doing. Measuring market size at the national level is easy, at the local level difficult and costly. The government collects data at the county level in a series called the County Business Patterns (CPB), but the CPB only reports establishments, employment, and payroll. Product detail is not available. Nonetheless, CBP data are the most objective look at what is happening locally. Data from the CBP, combined with averages on shipments or revenues at the national level, can produce an estimate of the market size for broad industry categories locally. Where an activity is visible (e.g., picture framing shops), market size can be approximated by looking at telephone directories and using an average sales volume. Federal data for framing shops will not be available because the activity is "too detailed." Therefore alternative approaches are necessary. Where only factories are visible, local sales are very difficult to estimate, but the "production market" may be estimated similarly.
At the local level the structure of the market -- its divisions into products, its channels of distribution, its concentration -- are also subject more to guesswork than study. Telephone surveying is the method most likely to yield reasonable results, but such work is very expensive.
Not surprisingly, most small businesses develop a sense of their market in the course of day-to-day operations -- rather than by spending thousands of dollars on studies. They talk with vendors, customers, and competitors. They listen to the gossip and translate bits and pieces of information into rough numbers. This process is rarely -- but can be -- formalized. A small business owner and his and her key managers can sit down with notepads and work out the market size and structure. Sometimes this is useful for planning or for justifying loan applications. At the local level, disciplined recording and analysis of such information yields results comparable to very expensive studies at the larger scale -- and looking at CBP data can produce rough confirmation.
Market Share and Competition
An important aspect of every market is its concentration, measured by creating a list of participants, sorting them by sales, and then adding up the market shares of the top layer -- the top five, the top three. If the top three have most of the market, the industry is highly concentrated; if the top five have around 15 to 20 percent, concentration is low. Most market share listings have an "All Other" category. Small businesses are invariably hidden in that line. The sales volumes of small operations are rarely available publicly, but "work arounds" are available to infer their size. Important measures are employment and square footage. A "typical" small business can calculate its own sales per square foot in retail, for instance -- or its sales per employee -- and can then proceed to develop approximate company size estimates for its competitors by applying the same unit measures to them after counting their people and eyeballing their floor space. There are all kinds of other "proxy" measures available. A ready-mix concrete supplier knows his/her revenues per truck -- and can count competitors' trucks. Economic forces tend always to produce the same averages across an industry.
Competitive strategies are also accessible to the small business. The method of detecting such strategies will depend, of course, on the relative visibility of the competitor. Retail stores advertise; the frequency of their sales and the items they use as loss leaders indicate strategy. They can be visited. Vendors are a useful source of information on less visible competitors' strategies -- as are observations of such companies at trade shows. The alert small business owner will constantly watch his or her competitors and note when they enlarge their leases, build, or pave their parking lots -- or when their inventories overflow to the parking lots. Problems that they encounter also leave tell-tale signs. When such observation becomes routine -- and when the owner collects ads, news stories, and records observation in notes -- doing a market share and competitive analysis for a plan will be relatively easy.
Products Research and Consumer Surveys
A small business intending to test products before launching them to the market will expose them to employees, friends, customers, relatives, vendors, suppliers -- anyone at all with a likely opinion -- and will thus gradually discover what seems to be the best design, positioning, packaging, name, and even marketing slogan. The more systematic this type of exposure is -- and the more effectively informants' opinions are recorded and analyzed -- the more it will resemble the practices of large businesses that deploy sophisticated methodologies like focus groups and consumer surveys.
In general "sophistication" translates into disciplined planning of tests and the application of specialized expertise in that planning. Focus groups and customer surveys frequently employ psychologists before a trial (preparing settings, choosing respondents, framing questionnaires, etc.), during a trial (observing reactions), and after the trial (analyzing results). But, in effect, a high level of sophistication is simply an attempt to formalize and then to apply mechanically what is nothing other than good entrepreneurial "feel" and "instinct." Many a very successful product was launched because the entrepreneur simply liked it -- and so did the people around him or her.
Small businesses generally lack the resources for massive, costly trials and surveys and, instead, rely on innovative ways to obtain consumer feedback. A store, for instance, may mount two very different product displays and then instruct the clerks to note which one the customers spend more time examining. Surveys can be conducted at very modest costs by simply asking every customer a question at checkout time -- and then recording the answer. Such approaches may lack the "scientific" halo of big studies but will produce actionable and reliable results if properly done.
Keeping record of informal events is another low-cost method to accomplish in a small business what large companies spend huge amounts achieving. Customers complain. Customers make complimentary comments. Customers criticize products or comment on them. To jot down such comments with appropriate annotations, to collect them in one place, periodically to review them can be a source of intelligence on customer satisfaction.
Other Market Influences
An important component of all market research is identification and assessment of forces external to the market itself -- but likely to influence it. A classical example of government action for a small business might be the routing of a freeway; it could isolate the business from major parts of its clientele or massively increase its traffic. External influences include government, as already mentioned, which can by its enactments increase pay (up minimum wage) or returns (accelerate depreciation), impose costs by regulation, modify interest rates, stimulate or inhibit exports, and do hundreds of other things. Changes in demographic patterns were underway in the mid-2000s as the baby boom generation marched toward retirement, eroding some markets, swelling others. International events may have great influence by disturbing raw material or energy availability or stimulating competition (outsourcing). Technological change of a massive character impacted communications and distribution by means of the Internet -- but less visible changes, like improvements in materials or equipment have sometimes dramatic impacts of a particular business too.
In most industries, insiders watch certain indicators vital to the industry: interest rates in residential construction are an example; housing starts, in turn, send signals to a large number of suppliers, e.g., producers of appliances. Publishers of references watch budgetary trends in libraries. Hotels and resorts watch gas prices and air travel costs. And so on. The small business doing market research may find it more difficult to find precise indicators that serve as signal for its operations. One way to identify them is to spend some time with trade publications which like to track and publicize changes in relevant second- and third-order influences on the market.
Cost of Market Research
A general rule of market research is that costs vary inversely with level of detail and currency. A business can get a broad view of a market by finding free materials at the library. Expert studies on a national or global market cost between $150 to $700 (depending on the subject). But a business wishing to have detailed information at the county level on some cluster of products is looking at minimally $3,000 for a commissioned study—and more likely four times that. Baseline economic data are collected by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. These are better at the aggregate than at the detailed level. Good data on specific products are simply not there, but data on physical products are better than on services. The Bureau collects fewer data on service sectors and these at a rougher granularity. The future auto dealer, in other words, has an easier job plotting the future than the future independent midwife. Government data are invariable three-or-more years old when they become available. Collecting current, real-time data is very costly. Grocery chains collect such data digital at the check-out counter, but access to it runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Taking Advantage of Online Resources
The advent of the Internet has presented small businesses with a wealth of additional resources to use in conducting free or low-cost market research. The following techniques can be used to gather market information with the help of a few mouse clicks and keystrokes:
  • Keyword Search.You know how to do a simple Web search using search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Take that a step farther by searching for "keywords" that people would use to find your type of products or services on the Internet. See how much interest there is in these keywords -- and how many competitors you have in this market. Keyword searches can also help remind you of product niches that you might not have considered. There are other reasons to conduct keyword searches. 'First, you're going to be reminded of product niches that you might not of thought of.' says Jennifer Laycock, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Guide, an online guide to search engines, portals and directories. 'Second, these services will also give you a guesstimate of how many existing sites already use that phrase,' Laycock continues. 'How many existing sites already offer that product.' WordTracker and Trellian's Keyword Discovery are popular keyword search engines.
  • Competitor Links. A traditional search engine can also help you check out your competitors, their prices, and their offerings. Try typing 'link:www.[competitor's name].com' into Google to find out how many other sites link to your competitor's website. 'It is a great way to see a competitor's link development and PR campaigns,' says Shari Thurow, Web expert and author of the upcoming book Search Engine Visibility. 'Is the competitor promoting a product or service similar to your own? Maybe you can get publicity because you have a new or better product.'
  • Read Blogs. Blogs are updated much more regularly than traditional websites and, therefore, they can be another gauge of public opinion. Search blogs by using blog-specific search engines, such as Technorati or Nielsen BuzzMetrics' Blogpulse. 'Blogs tend to move at a faster pace and be more informal in tone, so you're more likely to pick up conversation about a new product type or need on a blog than on a standard web site,' Laycock says.
  • Conduct Online Surveys. Another way to gauge public opinion is through online surveys. While not as scientific as in-person or phone surveys that use a random sampling of the population, online surveys are a low-cost way to do market research about whether an idea or a product will be appealing to consumers. Now many companies offer to conduct online research for you or give your company the tools to carry out your own surveying. Some online survey companies include EZquestionnaire, KeySurvey, and WebSurveyor.
Offline Research Tools and Techniques
There are also offline market research tools that are used by many large businesses and can be available to small and mid-sized businesses. When these techniques involve people, researchers use questionnaires administered in written form or person-to-person, either by personal or telephone interview. Questionnaires may be closed-end or open-ended. The first type provides users choices to a question ("excellent," "good," "fair") whereas open-ended surveys solicit spontaneous reactions and capture these as given. Focus groups are a kind of opinion-solicitation but without a questionnaire; people interact with products, messages, or images and discuss them. Observers evaluate what they hear.
Major categories are as follows:
  1. Audience Research. Audience research is aimed at discovering who is listening, watching, or reading radio, TV, and print media respectively. Such studies in part profile the audience and in part determine the popularity of the medium or portions of it.
  2. Product Research. Product tests, of course, directly relate to use of the product. Good examples are tasting tests used to pick the most popular flavors -- and consumer tests of vehicle or device prototypes to uncover problematical features or designs.
  3. Brand Analysis. Brand research has similar profiling features ("Who uses this brand?") and also aims at identifying the reasons for brand loyalty or fickleness.
  4. Psychological Profiling. Psychological profiling aims at construction profiles of customers by temperament, lifestyle, income, and other factors and tying such types to consumption patterns and media patronage.
  5. Scanner Research. Scanner research uses checkout counter scans of transactions to develop patterns for all manner of end uses, including stocking, of course. From a marketing point of view, scans can also help users track the success of coupons and to establish linkages between products.
  6. Database Research. Also known as database "mining," this form of research attempts to exploit all kinds of data on hand on customers -- which frequently have other revealing aspects. Purchase records, for example, can reveal the buying habits of different income groups -- the income classification of accounts taking place by census tract matching. Data on average income by census tract can be obtained from the Bureau of the Census.
  7. Post-sale or Consumer Satisfaction Research. Post-consumer surveys are familiar to many consumers from telephone calls that follow having a car serviced or calling help-lines for computer- or Internet-related problems. In part such surveys are intended to determine if the customer was satisfied. In part this additional attention is intended also to build good will and word-of-mouth advertising for the service provider.
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Devise a REAL Business Strategy



Development Strategies, General, Recent Posts
Most so-called “business strategies” are in reality just audacious goals and ambitious growth targets, bundled with a ‘vision of the future’, then packaged as a ‘business strategy’.
Sadly, this is true for many design, media and technology companies.
A REAL business strategy is different.
A real business strategy is a clever solution to a particular challenge or problem. A creative maneouvre. The problem must be understood in order to overcome it. Then an intelligent or creative response is identified. Then specific actions are implemented, which deliver the response and support one another.
Real business strategies embrace thorny issues that false strategies (non-strategies) choose to avoid. For example:
– A real business strategy often means a reallocation of resources from one area to another, doing more in one arena and consequently deciding what NOT to do in another, in order to release resources. The difficult choice to stop doing a current activity, that leads to real strategic focus, is often dodged in non-strategies.
– Very often, the problem identified is about competition. Too often, non-strategies fail to take competition into account, as if the business has the market all to itself. Moreover, competition in a wider sense also includes new entrants, substitute products, powerful suppliers, and powerful customers – the five forces of competition.
– Strategy generally involves deploying a relative strength – a competitive advantage – in an area of greatest impact. This means it’s crucial to identify your competitive advantage and choose customers strategically, two key elements of a successful ‘Business Formula‘.
A useful framework or ‘business strategy tool’ to help formulate a real business strategy is as follows:
Business Strategy Framework
This simple framework helps to devise a real business strategy by dealing with the most important elements at the heart of a business strategy:
1. Analysis. What’s the specific challenge?
2. Strategic Solution. What’s the new policy and direction?
3. Coherent Actions. What specifically will we do?
4. Monitoring and Revision. Is it working? What new challenges have arisen?
1. Analysis. What’s the specific challenge?
* Supply/Demand ratio in our industry
* Competitor analysis. Chart the competition.
* Relative strength of competitors. Who is stronger than us? In what way? Why?
* Forces of Competition (New entrants, substitute products, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of customers, as well as rivals.)
* Limitations of our business
* What’s changing in our industry?
2. Strategic Solution. What’s the new policy and direction?
* Identify relative weaknesses of rivals
* Find market niches we can dominate
* Spot new opportunities due to industry changes
* Deploy our characteristics so that they become strengths in relation to the competition
* Reallocate resources to support the strategic solution (ie away from
non-strategic areas)
3. Coherent Actions. What specifically will we do?
* Identify and plan actions (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timetabled)
* Design combinations of actions to achieve overlaps, efficiencies and synergies
* Note actions/initiatives that could be tempting but are not part of a coherent, synergistic plan of action and so should NOT be done.
4. Monitoring and Revision. Is it working?
* How do we know the strategy is working? How will we measure progress? When?
* Be prepared to review and amend the business strategy in response to external developments. It’s a dynamic process. Strategic planning is not an annual event; it needs to be done in response to challenges as and when they arise.
Advice for your company
Contact David Parrish for professional business strategy advice for your media, design or technology company.
Read this book
One of the best books I’ve ever read on the subject of business strategy is ‘Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters’ by Richard Rumelt. An excellent read for any enterprise that wants to succeed by using a real business strategy. I recommend that creative entrepreneurs read it, especially those in media, design and technology businesses in the creative industries worldwide.
“Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it.”
– Richard Rumelt. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
“At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.”
– Richard Rumelt. Good Strategy Bad Strategy
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Five Steps to Create a Marketing Plan

How business owners can put together a detailed marketing guide for business growth





While your business plan generally outlines your entire business, a standalone marketing plan focuses specifically, and in more detail, on just that one function. When business owners want to dive deeper into their marketing strategy they will likely put together a detailed plan that outlines their marketing goals -- as well as the steps needed to accomplish them.
The standard components of an effective marketing plan can vary depending on who you ask. Here is my recommended five-step process for developing a marketing plan that will help you achieve your goals for business growth.
Step One: Look inward.
Think of your company as if it were a person with its own unique personality and identity. With that in mind, create separate lists that identify your business's strengths, weaknesses and goals. Put everything down and create big lists. Don't edit or reject anything.
Then, find priorities among the bullet points. If you've done this right, you'll have more than you can use, and some more important than others. Kick some of the less important bullets off the list and move the ones that are important to the top.
This sometimes requires input from your managers as well. For example, your management team thinks being conservative on spending is a weakness but you don't. That might be something to drop off the list.

Related: Guy Kawasaki on Writing an Effective Mission Statement
Step Two: Look outward.
The next list you'll need to make outlines your business's opportunities and threats. Think of both as external to your business -- factors that you can't control but can try to predict. Opportunities can include new markets, new products and trends that favor your business. Threats include competition and advances in technology that put you at a disadvantage.
Also make a list of invented people or organizations who serve as ideal buyers or your ideal target market. You can consider each one a persona, such as a grandmother discovering email or a college student getting his or her first credit card. These people are iconic and ideal, and stand for the best possible buyer.
Put yourself in the place of each of these ideal buyers and then think about what media he or she uses and what message would communicate your offering most effectively. Keep your identity in the back of your mind as you flesh out your target markets.
Steps to Create a Marketing PlanStep Three: Focus on strategy.
Now it's time to pull your lists together. Look for the intersection of your unique identity and your target market. In terms of your business offerings, what could you drop off the list because it's not strategic? Then think about dropping those who aren't in your target market.
For example, a restaurant business focused on healthy, organic and fine dining would probably cater to people more in tune with green trends and with higher-than-average disposable income. So, it might rule out people who prefer eating fast-food like hamburgers and pizza, and who look for bargains.
The result of step three is strategy: Narrow your focus to what's most in alignment with your identity and most attractive to your target market. In other words, focus on the area that is shared by all three lines in the diagram here.

Related: Creating a Unique Selling Proposition
Step Four: Set measurable steps.
Get down to the details that are concrete and measurable. Your marketing strategy should become a plan that includes monthly review, tracking and measurement, sales forecasts, expense budgets and non-monetary metrics for tracking progress. These can include leads, presentations, phone calls, links, blog posts, page views, conversion rates, proposals and trips, among others.
Match important tasks to people on your team and hold them accountable for their successes and failures.
Step Five: Review often and revise.
Just as with your business plan, your marketing plan should continue to evolve along with your business. Your assumptions will change, so adapt to the changing business landscape. Some parts of the plan also will work better than others, so review and revise to accommodate what you learn as you go.
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Design the Right compensation plan for Your Business



Susan Carpenter, Founder, MFP Employee Benefits and HR Services, LLC

For every dollar of revenue an employer raises, an average of fifty cents is spent on compensation and benefits, particularly at the executive level. But what does an organization get for its investment in its top team? What can it expect? Solid, well-devised executive compensation packages are great tools for driving organizational goals and objectives.
As an employee benefits and human resources consultant, I work with companies both large and small in designing competitive executive pay plans and compensation packages. My business is often engaged, it is to review current plans to assess if an organization is compensating adequately to ensure it can stay competitive when recruiting and retaining executive-level talent.

Market Data is Key to Ensuring Competitiveness

The process of executive compensation review often begins with data-data acquired through market data studies that illustrate if an organization measures up compensation-wise to similar organizations. Using market data to evaluate your executive pay plan requires a careful look at base pay, annual short-term bonuses, and long-term incentives.
Compiling a market study for assessing executive compensation is a detailed process, which involves these steps:

  • Determine the labor market: How easy will recruitment be? Most CEO searches reach out to a national or international market to recruit, so when looking for competitive market data, an organization must match the industry market rate.
  • Determine the CEO responsibilities: Will the CEO come into a stable organization, or will they be required to double sales in the next two years? Knowing what skills the organization needs in its CEO is critical to finding the right candidate and developing the appropriate compensation based on organizational goals.
  • Develop the market study by gathering data on several different types of executive compensation: Gather market on all three kinds of competitive compensation for executives, including base pay, short-term incentives, and long-term incentives. Keep in mind that long-term incentives can take the form of cash, stock, phantom stock, stock options and other vehicles to reward growth.

For further information, see the Sample Market Data Pay Tool for CEOs, which can be found in the Related Media section of this article.

Compensation Plans Can Drive Your Organizational Goals

Establishing an executive compensation plan involves a strategic planning process to ensure the plan aligns with short-and long-term goals. It is much like a funnel. High-level overarching goals are set and broken down for consumption by the various levels of the organization. As they cascade down, there is smooth alignment.
For example, goals established at the executive level might address financial benchmarks, growing market share, retaining business, or meeting quality or productivity outcomes. Sometimes, as executives work to accomplish established goals, misalignment occurs. Examples include:

  • Large base pay packages with small incentive opportunities tend to promote the status quo. There needs to be enough of a compensation "carrot" available to executives to make them interested in growing the organization. Typical pay packages for the CEO include a base pay with 50 to 100 percent of base pay available in a short-term bonus and over 100 percent of base pay available in a long-term incentive.
  • Executive compensation packages need to be checked to ensure conflicts do not exist between short- and long-term goals. Sometimes executives are tempted to make decisions that generate short-term cash and provide them a generous bonus, but their decisions are detrimental to the organization over the long term. For instance, in a manufacturing environment, preventive maintenance is important. An executive may put off such maintenance so the plant exceeds a productivity goal. As a result, short-term goals for productivity may be met, but the putting off maintenance jeopardizes the long-term life of the machinery.
  • Sales goals and sales compensation must be designed carefully to compensate properly for the sale of all product lines. Checks must be put in place to ensure the organization doesn't emphasize for sales of a low-margin product line and under-incent for sales of a high-margin product line. The design must focus on incentives at the expense of the sale of more high-margin products.

Think Beyond Financial Measurements When Developing Short- and Long-Term Goals

Companies often develop financial goals for executives, but other goals can be measured and rewarded as well, and long-term goals are just as important as short-term goals.
Short-term goals at the executive level, which often span of twelve months, might focus on staff retention, getting everyone through a specific training program, or implementing a new payroll or accounting system. Bonuses on short-term goals are generally paid out three to six months after the close of a fiscal year.
Long-term goals on the other hand, which are generally multi-year initiatives, might be based on opening up new markets or territories or overseas expansion and might be paid out over a multi-year period. For instance, if the long-term goal at the executive level is to expand into ten states, a short-term goal within the long-term goal might be to expand into two states. Here, an executive would be rewarded in the short term for expanding into two states and then receive a bonus again when the larger ten-state objective is met.

Developing Compensation for CEOs Requires Board Involvement

In many cases, a board will charge a compensation committee with negotiating a pay package for the CEO. To begin the process, boards often hire consultants to provide them market competitive pay package information.
To begin the process of determining CEO compensation, the board needs to consider the overall objectives of the company and compensation philosophy. Stock price is almost always a big component of the CEO's pay package.
Many boards take the approach of creating an overall CEO pay opportunity including short-term bonuses and long-term incentives above the market median. Boards should be mindful of this tendency and keep it in check. Additionally, boards need to be flexible and change the CEO's pay components yearly to adjust to the businesses goals and objectives.

Rollout of Your Incentive Plan: Aim for Fourth Quarter Prior to the New Fiscal Year

Companies often wait until the beginning of a new fiscal year to do their executive compensation planning when it should really occur in the third and fourth quarters of the previous year. A good goal for organizations is to develop their plans for rollout in the fourth quarter, so executives understand the goals and objectives and how they will be rewarded.
The compensation redesign process can take three to six months. It is normally a collaborative process within the organization and involves feedback from executives. It also involves determining if systems are in place to measure the outcomes upon which executives will be rewarded in the coming year. If such systems aren't in place, that process alone can take an additional three to six months, and even then, an organization may not be able to use the data generated from the systems right away since they often need refining and readjustment.
There is much work involved in developing an executive compensation plan that keeps you competitive, integrates short- and long-term goals, and contains performance measurement systems that tie back to compensation. But in the final analysis, your compensation structure drives the performance of your top talent—your executives. To maximize organizational performance, executives must be properly incentivized and goals must be aligned.
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‘Surviving the Entrepreneurial Life’ Can Help New Business Owners Meet Needs of Both Business and Family

Kauffman Founders School releases a series offering insights from author Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, a contributing editor to Inc. magazine and spouse of an
entrepreneur



(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) Feb. 20, 2014 – Many an entrepreneur has struggled to balance the needs of the business and the needs of family. Concerns over time away from home, the allocation of financial resources and which spouse is responsible for what can put families under tremendous pressure as entrepreneurs grapple with the uncertainties, challenges, and ups and downs of entrepreneurial ventures.
The online "Surviving the Entrepreneurial Life" series, released today by Kauffman Founders School, features insights from Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, an Inc.com columnist and author of the award-winning book For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families, which draws on her experiences when she was helping her husband build his company and on her hundreds of interviews with entrepreneurs and their families.
Presented through a series of videos and supporting materials, Hirshberg delves into the delicate interplay between work and personal life and the numerous stress points that can undermine relationships.
The Surviving the Entrepreneurial Life curriculum offers practical advice on how entrepreneurs can run their businesses without alienating their families, including:
  • The entrepreneur and spouse should talk about the risks and opportunities of a startup before the company launches.
  • Once the business is underway, the entrepreneur and spouse need to decide together how much and what kinds of information the spouse wants to be told about the business.
  • Entrepreneurs must devise strategies to balance the competing demands of work and family. Besides attending the recitals and soccer games, the entrepreneur should  reserve unstructured "hangout" time with his or her children.
  • Couples in which one spouse is an entrepreneur and the other spouse is working a job to support the family and/or the business face distinct pressures. A working spouse's financial contribution to the entrepreneur's business should be viewed as an investment.
  • Empathy is especially crucial for an entrepreneurial family. The spouse needs to understand that the entrepreneur has to be "all in," and the entrepreneur needs to understand that the race toward business success may seem like a "lonely marathon" to the spouse.
  • Even though entrepreneurship demands intense dedication, entrepreneurs shouldn't get so wrapped up in the business that they forego vacations or indefinitely postpone important life goals such as marriage and starting a family.       
Teaching entrepreneurs best practices in areas not typically covered in other training programs, the Kauffman Founders School enables entrepreneurs to learn anywhere, anytime, and to immediately apply the lessons to their businesses. Other Founders School topics include:
  • Lessons on Start-Ups, including "The Lean Approach" to starting a business, presented by Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and academician. 
  • Entrepreneurial Selling, presented by Craig Wortmann, CEO and founder, Sales Engine, and clinical professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
  • Intellectual Property, presented by Peter McDermott, partner, Banner and Witcoff.
  • Powerful Presentations, presented by Nathan Gold, founder, The Demo Coach.
  • Founder's Dilemmas, presented by Noam Wasserman, who teaches an award-winning course on entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School.
The Founders School online education program is housed on the Kauffman Foundation's Entrepreneurship.org web platform, which offers resources, educational information and tools for entrepreneurs. It can be accessed at www.KauffmanFoundersSchool.org or via www.Entrepreneurship.org.

Related Content

  • Kauffman Founders School
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Entrepreneurial Skills Training

Entrepreneurial Skills Training is a fully-funded series of skills workshops aimed at SMEs to help take your business from good to great by InnovateUK.
Are you a small business owner looking to learn new skills and grow your business?
Delivered by experienced Enterprise Europe Network Innovation Advisers and developed and accredited by School for Startups, Entrepreneurial Skills Training is a series of fully funded workshops to help you innovate and grow your business to its potential.

How it works

Entrepreneurial Skills Training consists of 12 practically focused business skills workshops, ranging from Value Propositions and Marketing, to Pricing Strategies and Managing Risk.
The first three sessions are the ‘Core’ workshops and start with a focus on business modelling, defining your proposition and providing you with an opportunity to conduct a detailed analysis of your current model and how it could be developed and improved.
Whilst attendance at the Core workshops is not a pre-requisite for attending the Specialist workshops (except for Workshop 9) we recommend that you do attend them sequentially to get the most out of the programme:

Core Workshops

Workshop 1 - Defining the Value Proposition

This workshop will help you articulate, test and evaluate your value proposition and wider business model using the business model canvas and related tools.

Workshop 2 - Business Model Generation

This workshop allows you to develop and refine your business model to include competition, customer segments and relationships, routes to market and sales channels, operational resources and partnerships.

Workshop 3 - Testing the Business Model

This workshop illustrates how to test, evaluate and further refine your business model through financial modelling (pricing, costing and revenue streams).

Specialist Workshops

Workshop 4 - Pricing Strategies

This workshop helps you to identify the most appropriate pricing and revenue model for your project and business; devise and implement an effective pricing strategy.

Workshop 5 - Strategic Marketing

This workshop looks at devising and implementing a strategic marketing plan that includes brand development and communication, routes to market, PR (traditional and digital).

Workshop 6 - Web Fuelled Business

This workshop is focused on evaluating the most appropriate online tools for your business and implementing a web focused operational, sales and marketing plan.

Workshop 7 - Selling & Negotiation

This workshop helps you to acquire selling skills and experience applicable to commercial buying, investment and partnership development.

Workshop 8 - Building & Leading Teams

This workshop focuses on developing and implementing a people management plan and acquiring relevant skills to maximise productivity.

Workshop 9 - Organisational Strategy

This workshop will help you evaluate the re-engineering needs of your business and devise and implement an effective organisational development plan.

Workshop 10 - Finance for Growth

This workshop offers the opportunity to interpret and understand financial and economic data to support the key management tasks of planning, decision-making and creating value within the business.

Workshop 11 - Access to Finance

This workshop gives business owners the skills and information they need to acquire funding and finance throughout their growth journey.

Workshop 12 - Managing Risk

This workshop offers the opportunity to identify and mitigate against the key risks facing your business.

Who should attend?

These workshops are aimed at businesses with the potential, ambition and capacity for high growth and attendees must meet the following criteria:
  • Your business must be UK registered
  • Your business must have been trading for at least 12 months
  • You must employ at least one other person up to a maximum of 250 employees
  • Your business turnover must not exceed €50m

    Book your place on an Entrepreneurial Skills Training Workshop

    About Us

    Innovate UK

    Innovate UK is the UK's innovation agency. We work with people, companies and partner organisations to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy.
    Find out more at www.gov.uk/government/organisations/innovate-uk

    UCL Advances

    UCL Advances
    UCL Advances, UCL's centre for entrepreneurship and business interaction, helps anyone who wants to learn about, start or grow a business.
    Find out more at www.ucl.ac.uk/advances
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How the international business climate in the medical device industry is changing




As I was facing up to two of my pet peeves: tightly packed crowds and rain, I had to remind myself of why I had traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany.
The Innosurg division of Kenmold, one our most trusted injection molding vendors in China, had invited us to exhibit in their booth at what was in effect two combined trade fairs. Medica, billed as the world’s largest medical meeting, was being held alongside Compamed, one of the largest medical supplier conventions. We were pleased to have the opportunity to share our medical device design capabilities, talk about 3-D printing, and spread the word on simulation-driven product development with new audiences.
Eric Miller
Enlarge Eric Miller
It was also a great learning experience in terms of the business climate around the medical and health care industry. Here’s a brief summary of my most important takeaways:

Differentiation of your product is critical

There is a lot of competition out there. No really. More than you think. Counting on price or brand is not enough anymore. Globalization, the Internet, and new technology have lowered the barrier to entry for competitors. And those competitors can easily find and reach out to your customers. You have to have something of significant value to offer – not just better but a lot better. And by the way, outstanding customer service is no longer a differentiator you can count on. To survive you have to adapt and offer more. Things like quality, performance, robustness, interoperability, system integration, and features are needed to stand out.

China is here

Chinese companies are everywhere. They are confident and they know things have changed. It’s no longer about low cost and low quality. The domestic market for medical devices in China is booming, and they are not ceding it to imports. Some predictions put China ahead of Japan by 2018, second only to the U.S. market.
The Chinese companies that will succeed will take what they have learned through the years as manufacturers and emerge as device developers and component suppliers that offer a lot. Engineers and managers who spent the formative years of their careers working for large Western original equipment manufacturers are leaving and starting their own companies or joining the staff of local firms, the same way new companies are started all the time in the U.S. Established companies need to learn to work with Chinese firms as partners, just as we have learned to work with European and Japanese firms. Large companies are mostly doing this already.

Consumers in developing countries looking for options

One reason for the growth of Chinese suppliers is they have adapted to the growth of the medical business in emerging markets. They also understand these countries will not or cannot pay what developed countries pay for health care. The bottom line is developing countries are looking beyond the West for higher value options. Not just cheaper, but within their budget and greater value for their investment. Markets that traditionally would have gone to an established global supplier are now up for grabs.

There are many technologies you may not even know about

Mechanical product and device design consists largely of applying a variety of technologies to solve some sort of problem. That technology can be a unique chemical reaction, a material with just the right properties, a chip with the proper feature set, or a finely crafted assembly of injection-molded plastic.
As evidenced at these shows, the amount of technology available to medical product developers is staggering. The problem these days is when we run into a need, we search for a solution on the Web, but we usually only search for things we are aware of. After walking mile after mile of this show, I walked away with the knowledge of a much wider and broader range of solutions than I came with.

Business is still about trust

While standing in front of our booth, waiting to pounce on innocent prospects, I passed the time watching the component suppliers around me do business. Each of them did business differently. Some bargained like old market traders, some were all about relationships, and others were about the sales process. Over four days I saw deals happen, and I saw them fall apart. Across all those transactions it was obvious that successful deals only happened when both the buyer and seller developed trust.
As I jumped into yet another packed trolley on the way home, I was standing next to an Arab female doctor in a Hajib talking to a colleague from Norway in German while four Israeli plastic tube salesmen sat in chairs discussing something in Hebrew. Behind me, a British salesman was helping two Chinese saleswomen figure out which stop they needed to use to best reach their hotel. With the exception of those illusive Antarticans, there were attendees from every continent in the world. It reinforced that this was a true “international” conference and the medical device market is now incredibly dynamic and overwhelmingly global.
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Medical Device Distributor Search in Asia

We can help you build a strong, reliable distributor network to maximize your sales in Asia.




Finding the right medical distributors in Asia can be a difficult process. Knowing the right questions to ask and performing extensive due diligence are crucial to finding the most qualified and trustworthy Asian distributors.
With our deep industry knowledge and strong on-the-ground presence through our four Asia offices and affiliates located throughout the continent, Pacific Bridge Medical can assist you in your distributor search by identifying and qualifying the best distributors for your medical company’s products.
You should not sign contracts with medical device distributors in Asia until you have conducted a thorough analysis of the success rate of their past medical sales. In order to find the most suitable distributors in each specific Asian market, targeted questions are necessary, such as the following:
  • Does the potential distributor sell synergistic products?
  • Does the distributor have strong sales and marketing personnel?
  • Do they have a qualified in-house regulatory team to help with product registration?
  • Can you speak the distributor’s local Asian language or is their English sufficient to communicate?
  • Does the potential Asian medical distributor understand the notion of “conflict of interest”?

Medical Device Distributor Search Services

Pacific Bridge Medical’s experts can assist you during the distributor search process in the following ways:
  • Determine the most appropriate distribution strategy for the client based on a thorough study of the client’s products and needs and a comprehensive analysis of the market situation and opportunities in each targeted Asian market;
  • Contact and correspond with potential distributors, and provide them with the necessary information and materials from the client as needed;
  • Conduct rigorous evaluations of potential distributors to assess whether they will be able to meet the client’s needs;
  • Create a shortlist of the most qualified distributors;
  • Set up meetings for the client to visit the shortlisted distributors;
  • Help the client negotiate a distribution agreement;
  • Manage the distributors locally and assist the client with relevant issues as needed after the distribution agreement is signed, to ensure that the distributors continue to perform at a high standard.

Asia Sales Program Option for Small Medical Device Companies

Pacific Bridge Medical understands that small medical device companies oftentimes do not have the resources or time to develop their own sales team in each Asian country. Our Asia Sales Program is specifically tailored to help these smaller companies increase their sales in Asia on a sales commission basis. Only some small medical device companies with at least $10 million in global sales may be eligible for this program depending on their products. Contact us today to find out if you qualify.
Asia Sales Program Advantages
  • Medical Device Distributor Search in AsiaWe do not collect additional fees for assisting you with the registration of your medical device products in each Asian country.
  • We help train the Asian distributors to effectively sell your products.
  • We manage and motivate your Asian distributors from our four Asia offices in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore via quarterly visits, phone calls, and emails, as well as visits to their exhibit booths at appropriate trade shows and meetings with key doctors.
  • We provide the above services to small medical device companies on a sales commission basis. We are paid only when your company receives purchase orders from our Asian distributors. There will be no upfront expenses to our clients for this Asia Sales Program.
Pacific Bridge Medical has been finding and managing the best Asian medical distributors for almost 30 years. Contact us now to learn more details about how we can help you access the Asian markets and increase your sales in Asia.

Kamis, 10 Maret 2016

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8 Successful Online Entrepreneurs You Should Be Following




There isn’t a single entrepreneur out there that can’t benefit from some extra inspiration and motivation. We can all learn something by following successful individuals. It sparks inspiration and learning from their real-life business experiences can help us all on our own entrepreneurial journeys.
I have put together a list of eight online entrepreneurs that I personally follow and have worked with -- individuals that all entrepreneurs can learn something from, especially those interested in starting or growing an online business.

1. Jeff Taylor

As CEO of DEVISE, Jeff Taylor has extensive experience building profitable online businesses. What began as a web design and marketing firm eventually transformed into an entity that creates, markets, monetizes and then eventually sells websites. Taylor and his partner Evan Lisabeth have the ability to grow online businesses at an incredible rate.
I have first hand knowledge of his success, as my company brokered the sale of a seven-figure website Taylor's team created.
Taylor stresses the importance of taking action immediately, stating, “I’ve had thousands of ideas, but unless you put action behind them, nothing will come of the idea. There’s no reason to wait for the perfect time to start a project. Start working on it today.”
Related: 7 Entrepreneurs You Should Start Following Now

2. Tim Seidler

Tim Seidler is a husband and father of two children that used online entrepreneurship to completely turn his life around. He was once in a place that many individuals find themselves -- utilities turned off and bills he couldn’t pay. He did something that many don’t have the courage to do -- Seidler quit his job and put 100 percent of his time and effort into creating an online income, recently selling a portfolio of websites for six figures!
Through his website, Get Niche Quick, Seidler blogs about the highs and lows of his entrepreneurial journey. His transparent approach is beneficial, as entrepreneurs will see that there are good days and bad days in any business. Seidler shares his current and future projects and also openly discusses his income -- sharing both his best monthly earnings as well as daily earnings. There definitely isn’t a lack of inspiration and I highly recommend following Seidler’s online business journey.

3. Dom Wells

Affiliate marketing is a huge business, but the truth is that many entrepreneurs quit because they get discouraged when they don’t see instant results. It takes time and a well thought out strategy to make sizeable earnings through affiliate marketing. Dom Wells, a highly successful online marketer, offers guidance to entrepreneurs that want to learn how to make money online.
His website, Human Proof Designs, offers training through its blog to those who want to learn how to start a niche website the correct way -- everything from niche research to monetization is covered. Wells doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks the walk, constantly creating new niche sites to add to his portfolio and turning his experiences into case studies for his readers.

4. Steve Rendell

Steve Rendell is the man behind Texfly, an online resource for entrepreneurs who are interested in creating profitable niche websites and ranking them high in search results using the power of private blog networks. Rendell's website stands out because he isn’t afraid to talk about what really works.
Several SEO professionals will dance around the topic of private blog networks, instead just saying that quality content should be the main focus. Well, private blog networks rank websites and many of the elite SEOs use the same methods -- they just don’t openly discuss it. The blog and private blog network blueprint that Rendell makes accessible on Texfly are well worth the read and something anyone with an online presence will benefit from greatly.

5. Stuart Walker

An entrepreneur that specializes in online niche marketing, Stuart Walker shares his insight and knowledge on his website, Niche Hacks. Walker is an under-30 entrepreneur that travels the world and makes money from a wide variety of online assets. He is living the dream many aspire to reach through online businesses.
Since so many people fizzle out and give up before reaching their potential, Walker decided to start a blog that focuses on niche research and the shortcuts he personally uses to create a sizeable full-time income while living location-independent. His best information is free and something that all online entrepreneurs can find value in -- and his blog posts about growing traffic and promoting content is something that every business owner will learn from.
Related: What Type of Entrepreneur Are You? (Infographic)

6. Tung Tran

To be successful online you have to have a strong understanding of how to rank organically in the search results. This is beneficial to entrepreneurs that want to start their own online-based businesses as well as those that want to rank their brick-and-mortar business websites. Tung Tran is an online entrepreneur that documents his success and strategy on Cloud Living.
Tran discusses how to start an online business and how to drive traffic using several strategies. I hear so many people talk about how they would love to earn a living through an online business but they aren’t sure where to start. It’s entrepreneurs like Tran that provide the inspiration and hand-holding that helps numerous people become successful online business owners.

7. Alistair Gill

With an online presence being such a crucial part of every business’s marketing and promotional strategy you can never learn enough about content management systems, search engine optimization and web analytics and metrics. I follow Alistair Gill to stay current with SEO trends and because I enjoy his in-depth analytical posts on his personal blog.
Gill’s blog posts are packed of useful information and he likes to put together pieces of content that feature several months of data and research. I really like reading case studies and guides with data -- these are the types of blog posts that you can read and take the findings and apply them to your own business.

8. Melanie Duncan

Melanie Duncan is a true inspiration to entrepreneurs around the world. She cites the following as a problem many of us have: "If you don’t learn how to effectively work 'on' your business, instead of 'in' your business, you will never be able to strategically grow and you’ll sacrifice the quality of life you deserve."
For those of you still grinding out 80 hours a week, that quote will resonate deeply with you.
Follow Duncan closely and you'll learn all about growing your online business. With a weekly newsletter and regular blog posts, there is just the right amount of content to properly digest and apply before moving onto the next!
While these are my suggested online entrepreneurs to follow, there are certainly a lot more. Do you have any to add to this list? I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments section below.
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Some Kids Sell Lemonade. He Starts a Chain.


Jack Bonneau, 10, of Broomfield, Colo., waits for customers at his cider and hot chocolate stand at a shopping mall in Littleton, Colo. Nick Cote for The New York Times

Two summers ago, Jack Bonneau started a lemonade stand to earn some cash. Instead of setting it up on a street corner in his Broomfield, Colo., neighborhood, he and his father, Steve, came up with a more ambitious plan. Jack, then 8, would peddle cups of lemonade at the local farmers’ market throughout the summer.
The strategy was a success.
“I had sales of around $2,000, and my total profit was $900,” Jack said, adding that the experience increased his confidence in school. He also enjoyed learning “financial literacy,” by which he meant “adding and subtracting, and profit and loss, and subtracting expenses from revenue, and just learning about margins, and all of that stuff.”
By the next spring, the Bonneaus had named the operation Jack’s Stands and devised an expansion plan. They built a website and additional stands and began selling lemonade at three more farmers’ markets.
They used funds from a $5,000 loan that Jack’s Stands secured from Young Americans Bank, a Denver bank that specializes in loans to children. The loan was guaranteed by the bank’s companion organization, the nonprofit Young Americans Center for Financial Education.
Jack, with his father, Steve Bonneau, says he enjoys learning about margins, profit and loss “and all of that stuff.”
 Nick Cote for The New York Times
The Bonneaus also recruited a sales team. Other children eager to earn a buck, and whose parents saw this as a good learning opportunity, volunteered for shifts at Jack’s Stands.
Jack was excited to teach other children what he had learned. He taught them how to operate the stand, and at the end of each shift, he showed them how to count money and calculate profits and losses. The children, ranging in age from 7 to 11, walked away with tips and a cut of the profits, usually $30 to $50.
Jack, now 10, is among thousands of children in the Denver area who have enrolled in courses at the Young Americans Center for Financial Education or have taken out loans from Young Americans Bank. The center teaches financial literacy and personal finance to people ages 6 to 21. It also runs entrepreneurship programs at 420 schools in Colorado and runs a summer camp for children in second through sixth grade.
When he was 6, Jack got his first account at the bank, which offers checking and savings accounts, certificates of deposit, lines of credit, credit cards and business loans to people 21 and under. It charges low service fees.
Earning money was Jack’s initial motivation for the stand because he longed for a $400 Lego Star Wars Death Star set that his father insisted he pay for himself. But there was an important nonfinancial perk to the project, too: “It was really fun,” Jack said.
From the start, Steve Bonneau wanted the lemonade stand to be a learning experience for Jack. Mr. Bonneau is a former nuclear engineer who has been an entrepreneur for more than 20 years. His current company, Buybak, buys and resells used consumer goods.
“We wanted to make sure that Jack wasn’t getting out the Country Time Lemonade, using cups we already had in our kitchen and ice from the refrigerator,” Mr. Bonneau said. “And then at the end of the day, whatever was sold was his profits, without taking out any expenses or learning the other side of it.”

Early on, Mr. Bonneau taught his son business basics. Now that Jack is in fifth grade and studies seventh-grade math, the lessons are more advanced. Mr. Bonneau said he guided Jack through wholesale pricing, applying for a sales tax license and establishing business relationships.
“It’s a collaborative effort,” Mr. Bonneau said of Jack’s Stands, acknowledging that his son’s age and the complexity of the business means there are things Jack is not yet capable of doing. These range from carrying and assembling the 40-pound wooden lemonade stands to solving business challenges like finding organic, locally made lemonade or meeting the requirements of new farmers’ markets they work with.
Jack counted the proceeds with an 8-year-old colleague after a shift at Bonneau’s cider and hot chocolate stand. Nick Cote for The New York Times
In 2015, sales for the business were $25,000. This year, it plans to add several new stands in the Denver metro area, and one in Detroit; this expansion will be financed by a crowdfunding campaign.
Another successful business affiliated with the Young Americans Center for Financial Education and Young Americans Bank is Sweet Bee Sisters, a lip balm and lotion company founded in 2009 by Lily, Chloe and Sophie Warren, now ages 15, 13 and 11. Their products are sold online and in 15 stores in Denver, as well as at farmers’ markets and through representatives who make sales calls at large companies during the holidays.
A priority for the Warrens is to encourage and mentor other children. “Whether it’s business or sports, or whatever kids want to pursue, they can totally do it,” Lily Warren said.
So when Jack approached them a year ago to ask if he could carry their products at his lemonade stands, they agreed. They felt that his business ethos was similar to theirs, Ms. Warren said. When he showed or sold their products to other children, his message was: “‘Hey, I’m not the only kid out here doing this. You definitely can join this bandwagon,’ ” she said.
The bandwagon gained more momentum last winter when Jack set up two new stands in a crafts marketplace at a Littleton, Colo., shopping mall. One is a stand that sells apple cider and hot chocolate instead of lemonade, and the other, called Jack’s Marketplace, features products made by other children.
Sweet Bee Sisters and about eight other child-run businesses sold their wares at the marketplace stand during the holiday season. Two girls who started out selling apple cider and hot chocolate quickly caught the entrepreneurial bug and began making their own products — scarves, headbands and decorated picture frames and magnets — and selling them at Jack’s Marketplace.
Very young business owners have the advantage of abundant curiosity and resilience, traits coveted by older entrepreneurs. They’re also “young, ambitious, adorable,” said Maura McInerney, program coordinator for the Young Americans Center for Financial Education. But their youth can be a liability. “They’re not always taken seriously at first,” she said.
That hasn’t been a problem for the entrepreneurs at the Jack’s Marketplace stand in the shopping mall. According to Lisa Roina, who owns the company that runs the mall’s crafts marketplace, the children not only appear to have fun selling their products, they are good at it.
On weekdays and other times when the children aren’t able to work at the stand, she sends in a rotating cast of adults. But when the children return to operate the stand themselves, sales quadruple, Ms. Roina said.
“They can sell the heck out of their stuff,” she said.
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Market strategies




Developing a clear and profitable strategy relies on balancing your company's competencies and abilities against the market opportunities into the future.
We offer a strategic development process that starts with strategic analysis and takes you through to implementation. Our marketing effectiveness studies look at how your marketing expenditure can be optimised to maximise your marketing ROI.

Strategic analysis

Many marketing plans happen by hunch, but there is a better way. Strategic analysis forms the groundwork for the development of market strategies and involves looking at your customers and markets, your competitors and your competencies to identify the areas of opportunity and threat, based on what your customers really value and what you can cost effectively deliver.

Marketing effectiveness

Increasingly financial analysts are looking at how to get the best from marketing budgets and marketing is now no longer just the preserve of the marketing department but impacts on operations through TQM and customer satisfaction, on IT through customer databases, on sales through CRM and sales management and on finance through customer profitability analysis. With so many people now involved in marketing and so many ways to market, marketing effectiveness is a major question.

Brand development

Brands are not just products, a brand may be the company itself and so how people think about the company brand affects them as employees as well as customers. Developing and understanding brands is a core part of company management.

Focus areas

If you have specific areas of marketing that you want help developing, we have experience in
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Small-Business Owners Devise Creative Ways to Keep Workers





Samantha Martin, standing, owns Media Maison, a 14-person public relations firm in Manhattan: “I’m forced all the time to think about how to keep key people.” Nancy Borowick for The New York Times


Samantha Martin’s small-business nightmare typically stalks her on Gchat.
“It will be a Wednesday, and an employee messages, ‘Can we talk today?’” said Ms. Martin, who owns Media Maison, a boutique public relations firm in Manhattan. “They’ll tell me they weren’t looking, but someone approached them,” she said. “In this industry, if another company dangles $5,000 and an opportunity to work on a fashion show, your loyal employee can be out the door.”
Since any departure leaves her 14-person team short-handed for weeks, Ms. Martin tries to be proactive. She meets frequently with individual staff members, helps new employees pay first and last month’s rent, is generous with titles and promotions and offers benefits ranging from educational assistance to a free trip anywhere in the world after three years of employment. Last year’s recipient went to Paris.
“We don’t have a 401(k) and can’t always offer a big salary,” she said. “So I’m forced all the time to think about how to keep key people.”
With a tightening labor market, more entrepreneurs are facing similar challenges. A record number of job openings, with worsening skill shortages and a tendency among young adults toward briefer tenures, is forcing small-business owners to find increasingly creative ways to hold onto their best and brightest.
After rising in recent years, quit rates in private businesses held steady at just less than prerecession levels in 2015. But survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which looks at job openings and labor turnover by size of establishment, suggest that the number of employees voluntarily leaving small companies remains on the rise.
At businesses with fewer than 10 employees, for example, 1.8 million people quit in the five months through May, a 34 percent increase from the same period in 2014, the bureau’s data shows. In companies with 10 to 49 employees, resignations rose by 12 percent year over year, and, in those with 50 to 249 employees, the increase was 9 percent.
In a June 2015 survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, 80 percent of employers reported they had difficulty finding, or could not find, the talent they needed. Even when they do find it, said Holly Wade, director of research for the organization, “issues come into play when small businesses can’t afford some of the bells and whistles bigger employers can.”
Colin Darretta, a former investment banker, knew when he founded WellPath Solutions in New York last year that he could not compete with a Google or Uber on pay. So in seeking engineering talent for his company, which makes customized nutritional products, he bypassed the Ivy League and hired a local developer from App Academy, in New York.
The fact that the candidate had taken a less traditional path, he added, may have made him better suited to a start-up. “Here was a guy who had developed an interest at a later stage and was willing to take a personal risk to pursue it,” Mr. Darretta said. “The key is looking where those big companies aren’t.”
He has also made a point of spending one-on-one time with all 10 staff members and likes to capitalize on their interests. After a recent busy period, he took a star performer and a newly hired engineer, both big video game players, to a “League of Legends” event at Spring Studios.
Another company can still try to steal employees by offering more money, Mr. Darretta said. But the employee “wouldn’t be getting the flexibility and the other stuff,” he added. “A lot of the time, the other stuff is what matters to people, and it doesn’t cost that much.”
Most people who leave a company do not do so for more money. In a 2015 survey of 11,000 employees by the staffing company Randstad USA, the main reason cited for quitting was a lack of a career path or growth opportunities. Nearly half of respondents said work-life balance was the biggest factor motivating them to stay.
For any incentives to work over the long term, employees must be invested in a company and its mission.
Dr. Amy Baxter, an Atlanta physician who founded MMJ Labs in 2006, has six employees with advanced degrees on a shoestring budget. Her company developed Buzzy, a hand-held device that uses cold and vibration to relieve pain from causes as varied as hypodermic needles, carpal tunnel syndrome and plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the band of tissue that connects the heel bone to the toes.
“We didn’t even get F.D.A. clearance until last year, which makes it all the more amazing that people have stuck with me with no promise of equity,” Dr. Baxter said.
She said flexibility and transparency helped. MMJ Labs’ manufacturing manager spent early years fitting her work hours around an infant daughter’s heart treatment. If Buzzy loses a customer, everyone is involved in figuring out what happened and helping to fix it. Outings like the company’s regular staff dinners and the all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise that employees and their families took to celebrate selling the first 25,000 units do not hurt either.
But Dr. Baxter says she believes the main reason her original hires are still with her is their belief in the product and the ethics of the company, including the fact that the device is reusable and in keeping with the company’s concern for the environment. “If I made Buzzy disposable, some employees wouldn’t stay with me,” she said.
Knowing what really matters to employees, personally and professionally, can be critical to retention, human resources specialists say, and easy to learn in a small business.
When Brandon Baker and his wife, Carmela, founded Loveletter Cakeshop on Fifth Avenue two years ago, they knew they would be making wedding cakes for a affluent clientele where there is little room for error. So as soon as they realize they have an exceptional employee, Mr. Baker sits down with him or her to discuss career aspirations and creative interests so he can assign responsibilities accordingly.
“Sometimes just the act of asking is enough,” Mr. Baker said. “When you find talent you have to nurture it.”
This can be challenging as an organization grows. Proxibid, which bills itself as the largest online marketplace for high-value items (like tractor-trailers and classic cars), has expanded to 167 employees since its start in 2001. Ryan Downs, the chief executive, also faces the dual challenge of finding young talent and luring it to Omaha, where the company is based. To do that, he says he has worked hard to maintain an open culture that offers opportunities for advancement.
He credits this with helping him retain the company’s top engineers when software developers have never been more in demand, or recruiters more aggressive. “You’re not going to stop recruiters coming around,” he said. “But if you give a technical person cutting-edge stuff to work on, we’ve found you can overcome other companies’ irrational prices.”
Michael Mulligan, a senior software engineer, who has been at Proxibid four and a half years, agrees. He says that although he hears from one or two recruiters every week, it would be difficult to match the opportunities of his current position, or the voice he has in the direction of the company. Proxibid, he added, also gets the culture right, with outings, support and companywide recognition of individual success.
“For me, that’s the biggest thing,” he said. “At other places, it was like I was just a number. I know it sounds cheesy, but this is the first company I’ve come to that truly seems to care if their employees are happy.”
Unfortunately, in the rush to serve customers and clients, communication can quickly fall by the wayside even when small-business owners know better.
David Niu, a serial entrepreneur, learned this the hard way when he was running BuddyTV. In 2012, a top employee quit, seemingly out of the blue. Frustrated and burned out, Mr. Niu took a break from the company. “It caught me off guard,” he said. “I kept thinking, if I had better tools maybe I could have prevented it.”
That led Mr. Niu to create Tinypulse to help other employers get a grip on retention issues. Tinypulse, which is based in Seattle, and similar companies like Culture Amp and BlackbookHR allow managers to solicit anonymous feedback from employees. This often provides an early warning that workers are unhappy. Today more than 500 companies use Tinypulse alone, the company said.
Other small-business owners still rely on the old-fashioned way of keeping tabs. At her public relations firm, Ms. Martin says she talks to her employees constantly and has them keep her cellphone number on speed dial. Most recently, she gave the people who have been with her the longest a share in her business.
“How many under-30-year-olds get to say they own something?” Ms. Martin asked. “But when you do find someone who is amazing and treats your business like their own you want to reward that.”
Her approach seems to be working. Ross Garner, the senior account executive she sent on a 10-day vacation to Paris last year, said he still could not get over the gesture. “Stuff like that,” he said, “makes you want to work at 110 percent for somebody.”
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