Peace offering: published pieces

To compensate for a blog silence in June and early this month, I’d like to make a peace offering – my video appearance on Kochie’s Business Builders and a number of articles I’ve recently published on small business development.

Each piece focuses on a different aspect of developing your small business via your relationships with each of your important tribal groups; suppliers, yourself, mentors, customers and stakeholders. I welcome your comments and feedback and trust they’ll provide you with some useful tips for your organisation. 

• Supplier Relationships: Supporting your brand, Tribe K, (2008) Flying Solo
• Solo business growth strategies, Tribe K, (2008) Flying Solo
• What I have learnt from my mentor, Tribe K, (2008) Flying Solo
• Seeking feedback from stakeholders to remain competitive and grow your business, Tribe K, (2007) Kochie’s Business Builders video:

 

 

Celebrating success

Welcome back to regular blogs from me and welcome to the new financial year.

It has been a crazy and eventful first half to 2008 with a turnover 3 times the same period in 2007, new team roles at Tribe Research and new products being developed and enhanced.

Small business owners often forget to celebrate their successes or say they don’t have time to celebrate. It is a big mistake, as the celebrations can carry you through the lows or hectic times and raises the energy of your team (whether they are staff, family or friends). Plus they are fun!

At Tribe Research we celebrate the end of the year at our annual dinner, every 6 months at our Planning Expeditions, weekly in our Explorer Update and Friday 4pm meeting.

We also send small business owners birthday cards for the birthday of their business and remind them to celebrate.

I have spent the weekend preparing our next Planning Expedition for our team. It will be starting with the following celebratiions:

• We just started our 7th year as an incorporated company
• We will be having our 6th Planning Expedition
• The first half of 2008 had turnover 3 times the same period last year
• The last financial year had turnover 1.6 times the previous financial year
• We introduced having a Mapper to the Tribe Research team
• We started TRX, a club for previous staff
• New products are almost ready to be released

So, share, what are you celebrating?

Managing feedback

I am not a regular watcher of Today Tonight but was on Monday because Geraldine Cox, the founder of Sunrise Children’s Foundation, was scheduled to be on. But today I wanted to write about another story they aired. The story was about a restaurant that responded poorly to negative customer feedback that was delivered by email. It is a great example of the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

The feedback was an uninvited email citing a recent poor experience. The response by the restaurant owner used poor English and rejected the feedback. On receipt of the email the customer forwarded the email to a few friends and the forward kept going until it came to the attention of Today Tonight. The restaurant is now closed.

The lesson to be learned is how to deal with feedback whether it is positive or negative. Providing a channel for customers to provide feedback and then dealing with the feedback properly improves customer satisfaction and loyalty whether it is a formal or informal process.

If people who provide negative feedback are thanked for raising an issue, changes implemented, and then those who provided the feedback are made aware of the changes, these initial critics are more likely to feel valued, might try your product/service again, and tell their friends about the positive experience.

I’m not saying that you have to jump on every word of negative feedback and make changes exactly as suggested, sometimes the solution is to educate your customers on why you do things the way you do.Let me give you an example. Your business is based on high quality products. Your prices are high to reflect this. You receive feedback that your prices are too high. But, your prices aren’t the problem, the perception of value for money is the problem. So, your solution is to educate your customers on the value they receive from your products, not to reduce the prices.

Positive feedback creates great testimonials and collateral to guide your marketing.

So have a look at your feedback procedures. Do you ask your customers regularly about their views? If yes, do you then act on the information you receive, whether it is good or bad? If you answered no to one of these actions then you need to change this, so your business doesn’t fall victim to poor word-of-mouth and close like the restaurant in the Today Tonight segment.

Protecting IP by using Wikis

I was talking to my mentorees as part of the Australian Businesswomen’s Network program MentorNet about the benefit of using a wiki for your company’s policies and procedures. It has a few main benefits over the traditional word document.

Firstly, it can easily grow as your business grows. It isn’t up to the business owner to build the procedures, everyone can discover new ways of doing things and add their own content. You can add RSS feeds to your wiki and subscribe yourself so you know when content has been added. This way you can quality control the content.

Secondly, you have the added security that staff can’t easily email the contents to themselves when they leave and this protects your intellectual property of your business.