These seem to be pretty reasonable and accurate. Still, if you are implementing what is talked about here, you will be ahead of much of the pack.

5 Trends that Will Shape Small Business in 2011

Sep 30, 2010 -

Last year I wrote a piece where I predicted trends for 2010 – you can read them here – and I must say that I was pretty much spot on with most. The thing about predictions and small business – and I think I’ve developed a bit of knack for this odd duck – is that no matter what trends are reported in the media, small business will always adopt it much slower and in ways that are counter to much of the hype.

Small business owners don’t care what’s cool. They care about what seems practical and what seems obvious – and that’s not always what gets the buzz.

Here are my predictions along those lines for 2011. Some of these might seem pretty obvious, but again, not in the way small business will adopt them.

Social simply is

This year we will simply stop talking about social media as though it were some new, sexy, foreign cousin of marketing. It’s just a fact of marketing life and will get integrated into strategy and tactics alike in ways that produce ROI. (I hope all the social media consultants heed this.)

It will become standard operating procedure to include social media activity into a prospect of client’s CRM record and use social networks as the primary way to acquire introductions and make warm sales calls.

Mobile finally lands

Seems like we’ve been talking about mobile marketing for as long as I can remember. So, why hasn’t it become a part of the small business mix yet? I think it finally will this year, but not in the way it was always portrayed.

 Mobile’s promise always seemed to be tied to mobile ads, text messaging and proximity pushes, but consumers don’t want these in their life any more than they want spam, so mobile’s promise has evolved. 

Mobile for the small business will be about mobile payments, search related apps, and location based offers and not about SMS.

Small business doesn’t care about Foursquare or Gowalla, but they do care about the behavior these services are instilling.

O2O becomes strategy

Last year I talked about fusion of online and offline and, as social simply becomes a part of the fabric, so has the logical integration of instant media with traditional media, social networks with chamber mixers. Online and offline, traditional media and new media, will stop competing and start working together.

 For 2011 a new kind of strategy will emerge for the small business and that is one of using the online space to drive people to the offline space. The in person experience is the ultimate competitive advantage of the small business and how they beat the online and big box competition.

Get them in the store, get them to a meeting, get them to an event, get them in a community, get them on using an app.

Online 2 offline will be a strategic marketing approach employed by the most successful local businesses where conversion will be measured in hugs and handshakes. 

Networked referral automation

Once again, returning to last year’s prediction, I suggested that search would become social and it has. Search engines now tell you who in your social network likes those shoes or wrote about that topic you just queried.

The evolution of this behavior will be the total automation of social surfing. Surfers will be able to view who in their network knows also knows the real estate agent they are considering hiring and who on Facebook also went to high school with the attorney that was referred to them.

Using an individual’s social graph match with that of your own will become standard business behavior.

Apps over Web

The good news is that you can find anything on the Web these days. The bad news is you can find anything on the Web these days.

Information seekers will grow tired of the unpoliced nature of the Web and will increasingly turn to trusted sources of content and willing pay to have that content contained, packaged and delivered in application form to the device of their choice.

Marketers need to consider this behavior when they develop their content strategies and take a look at the community of content approach vs. the free information approach.

Trusted networks will become even more important.

John Jantsch is a marketing coach, award winning social media publisher and author of two best selling books, Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.

Mind Mapping for Small Business

 

May 26, 2010 -

I am a mindmapping freak. I use the process of mindmapping for many of my projects, especially in the planning phases, but all the way up to keeping status on many projects at once. Have you tried it? Here are some thoughts:

Mindmapping is Drawing Out Your Ideas

Just to quickly level-set what we're talking about. Mind maps are those drawings (like the one in this article) that let you start at a main idea, branch out into sub-ideas or sub-topics, and then branch out even smaller. The basic idea is that by drawing (on paper or on the computer) your thoughts, you'll uncover things you weren't considering before. The act of mapping out your thoughts gives you a whole different visualization and taps a whole different part of your mind than when you use something like project management software, a spreadsheet, or a word document.

Mind Maps Help You See The Big Picture

In planning by mindmapping, you can see which categories of your process are considered major and which are minor. For instance, in the launch of my upcoming new business, I was having trouble defining what it was my company did in a succinct way. After a few tries drawing (and you can use software or paper, don't forget), I found that my best description was that I'm building a media and education company. This wasn't clear until I tried organizing my thoughts into the various branches of a mind map.

You Shake Out Little Details

In a much more detailed mindmap I drew the other day, I realized that I needed a whole new discipline added to my set of potential vendors, because a new business idea I was launching required some "real world" elements (most of my companies are online). It's moments like that, when in drawing out the little lists in the little branches, that I come to realize there are details missing. If you were mindmapping out a band, and you forgot the drummer, it'd be quite obvious quite fast. It might not be as obvious if you were using a spreadsheet, for instance.

Maps Let You Re-Think Decisions

When I map out my projects, I then realize how many steps and details it will take to accomplish some tasks. Sometimes, this gives me enough of a heads up that I can look for help, scale back the deliverable, or push out the deadline. If I hadn't mapped it out, I might not have really thought through the depth of the project. You can do the same.

You Can Talk Through Maps Faster

I had a meeting with my executive team in my new business, and Diane brought her own mindmap to the meeting. At first, she'd written down all her thoughts in a Word document. That ended up going 17 pages long. She read from the map, with the other document ready, should she find herself unable to articulate a point. Guess how it went? We used the map the whole time. We got through hours of information in under one hour, which let us focus on decisions instead of exposition. Sometimes, having a visual map is a much easier way to "see" all the information you need to make a good decision.

So What Now?

I sure don't want to pick which software you choose to use, but I'll tell you my experience. The high end of mindmapping software that I've used was by MindJet, and I believe it's compatible with both PC and Mac. On my Mac right now, I use MindNode. There's a huge list of mind mapping software on Wikipedia, too. You might even consider an online version, so you can access it from many machines, though I prefer offline, so I can use it while on an airplane.

What should you map out? Try solving a decision with it: should I stand pat, or should I expand? Something like that. You can't really tell how it works without trying it. And, if you find that it works well for you, it'd be great to hear about it in the comments.

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling author of the NEW book, Social Media 101. He is president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at chrisbrogan.com.  

Tags: chris brogan, mind mapping, mind mapping software, mindjet, mindnode, new marketing labs

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I like this a lot. Plans and beliefs are all stories. A model allows flexibility and adjustment. Exactly what a startup or an ongoing endeavor needs. This article comes from Steve Blank.

No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy
Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke

I was catching up with an ex-graduate student at Café Borrone, my favorite coffee place in Menlo Park. This was the second of three “office hours” I was holding that morning for ex students. He and his co-founder were both PhD’s in applied math who believe they can make some serious inroads on next generation search. Over coffee he said, “I need some cheering up.  I think my startup is going to fail even before I get funded.” Now he had my attention. I thought his technology was was potentially a killer app. I put down my coffee and listened.

He said, “After we graduated we took our great idea, holed up in my apartment and spent months researching and writing a business plan. We even entered it in the business plan competition. When were done we followed your advice and got out of the building and started talking to potential users and customers.” Ok, I said, “What’s the problem?” He replied, “Well the customers are not acting like we predicted in our plan!  There must be something really wrong with our business. We thought we’d take our plan and go raise seed money. We can’t raise money knowing our plan is wrong.”

I said, “Congratulations, you’re not failing, you just took a three and a half month detour.”

Here’s why.

No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers
These guys had spent 4 months writing a 60-page plan with 12 pages of spreadsheets. They collected information that justified their assumptions about the problem, opportunity, market size, their solution and competitors and their team, They rolled up a 5-year sales forecast with assumptions about their revenue model, pricing, sales, marketing, customer acquisition cost, etc. Then they had a five-year P&L statement, balance sheet, cash flow and cap table. It was an exquisitely crafted plan. Finally, they took the plan and boiled it down to 15 of the prettiest slides you ever saw.

The problem was that two weeks after they got out of the building talking to potential customers and users, they realized that at least 1/2 of their key assumptions in their wonderfully well crafted plan were wrong.

Why a business plan is different than a business model
As I listened, I thought about the other startup I had met an hour earlier. They also had been hard at work for the last 3½ months. But they spent their time differently. Instead of writing a full-fledged business plan, they had focused on building and testing a business model.

A business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value. It’s best understood as a diagram that shows all the flows between the different parts of your company. This includes how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. And it shows your company’s cost structures, how each department interacts with the others and where your company can work with other companies or partners to implement your business.

This team had spent their first two weeks laying out their hypotheses about sales, marketing, pricing, solution, competitors, etc. and put in their first-pass financial assumptions. It took just five PowerPoint slides to capture their assumptions and top line financials.

 

This team didn’t spend a lot of time justifying their assumptions because they knew facts would change their assumptions. Instead of writing a formal business plan they took their business model and got out of the building to gather feedback on their critical hypotheses (revenue model, pricing, sales, marketing, customer acquisition cost, etc.) They even mocked up their application and tested landing pages, keywords, customer acquisition cost and other critical assumptions. After three months they felt they had enough preliminary customer and user data to go back and write a PowerPoint presentation that summarized their findings.

This team had wanted to have coffee to chat about which of the four seed round offers they had received they should accept.

A plan is static, a model is dynamic
Entrepreneurs treat a business plan, once written as a final collection of facts. Once completed you don’t often hear about people rewriting their plan. Instead it is treated as the culmination of everything they know and believe.  It’s static.

In contrast, a business model is designed to be rapidly changed to reflect what you find outside the building in talking to customers.  It’s dynamic.

 

“So do you mean I should never have written a business plan?” asked the founder who had spent the time crafting the perfect plan. “On the contrary,” I said. “Business plans are quite useful. The writing exercise forces you to think through all parts of your business. Putting together the financial model forces you to think about how to build a profitable business. But you just discovered that as smart as you and your team are, there were no facts inside your apartment. Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.”

Lessons Learned

A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

There are no facts inside your building, so get outside and get some.

Draw and test the Business Model first, the Business Plan then follows.

Few if any investors read your business plan to see if they’re interested in your business

They’re a lot more interested in what you learned

via steveblank.com

Here is a resource in San Antonio for the start up or seasoned business looking for some help in nailing down all of the components of a successful small business.

Chapter 164 San Antonio, referred to as ALAMO SCORE, was chartered in 1974 to serve as a unique resource within the local business community by providing efficient and effective delivery of pro bono, high quality technical and managerial counseling and guidance to prospective and existing small businesses and non-profit organizations in the greater San Antonio, Texas area. The Chapter relies on the services of some 40 business men and women with real-world experience and a strong belief in the importance of small business.

http://sanantonioscore.org/