• My dad called me and said: “Do you know that you are ALL OVER GOOGLE?”
• I said, “Yes, of course I know.”
• He said, “No, you don’t understand, it’s pages and pages and pages of nice things about you, awards and honors and everything – I looked up to page 10 of search results.”
• I laughed and said, “I know. About 3 years ago there was an Amy Larrimore, Venus Swimsuit Model and Amy Larrimore, Super Conservative Georgia Schoolteacher that were appearing and I didn’t want my network to be confused so I supercharged my google resume.”
• He said, “Well I don’t understand what that means, but I told everyone in my office that my daughter is on the first 10 pages of google. [Beaming]“
• I said, “That’s really nice, thanks for telling me.”

Obviously, you want to make your parents proud at your stellar Google resume but you probably also want to have the same effect on potential employers.

Here are some quick and dirty tips on fixing your Google resume licketly split:

1. Put yourself actively on as many social media accounts as you can with your full name and identifying details (try using www.knowem.com) and a standard profile blurb and professional headshot with the file saved as yourname.jpg
2. Put up resume boosting content on those websites – talk about your field – use something like www.hootsuite.com to post often and automatically share good content others are curating.
3. Set up a google alert on your name – it takes about a week or so to “cook the SEO”
4. Begin contacting the websites that have content about you on them that you don’t want there any more and ask them to take it down – they don’t have to but many will.
5. Get really radical and sign up for google adwords and put $30 a month towards buying the keywords of your name and phrases associated with you, redirect clicks to your linkedin profile
6. Buy your own name as a url.
7. Set it up to forward to your linkedin
8. Hire yourprofessionalwriter.com to supercharge your linkedin profile so they are wowed when they get there.

That is the blindingly short lesson on personal SEO but that should help many more dads and potential bosses beam when they see your Google results.

Want to play the big game? Start with this homework.

1. Make a list of 250 people you already know – then write down what each of them can do for you.

2. Make a list of 50 people you need to know – now figure how you can meet them.

3. Wear a suit jacket to EVERY MEETING YOU GO TO. Buy one. Right now.

4. Identify who will benefit or MAKE money by championing your offering within their organization. MAKE, not SAVE.

5. Name three strategic partners who sell what you sell, something similar to what you sell or who talk to the same people. They are probably your competition. Now go have lunch with them and figure out how you can work together. Crazy talk? Yep. Does it work? Yep.

6. Have a flawless elevator pitch with no “stories”. Use this format:

We are The Empire Builders Group. We provide professional services in the areas of human resources, information systems and technology, legal, accounting, sales and marketing. We support closely held companies in financial and technical areas – including technology and healthcare industries. Our services are provided on a situational or ongoing retainer basis.

7. Run your pitch to a person who doesn’t know anything about your industry. See if they can tell you who you are, what you do, who you sell to and how you make money. If they can’t – fix it until they can.

8. PLEASE host your pitch deck somewhere – slideshare.net and invest in a domain name (godaddy.com) to get to it. Go to vistaprint.com and print the link on a card. Stop emailing things.

9. Explain in two sentences HOW and WHEN you, your partners, or me, the investor is going to get my money back if I support your business (the exit strategy).

10. Take notes on the quantity, readiness, leadership, economics and cohesiveness of the people, product, process and prospects in your pitch. Is it balanced?

If you diligently complete these 10 steps, you’re well on your way to building your empire!

Most new entrepreneurs experience anxiety around the idea of failing. I’ve never met one that’s nervous about succeeding. This is ironic because having more work than they can handle well is a large contributor to the failure of many businesses.

This is why business planning is so important – it’s an iterative plan to scale and when you’re riding the roller coaster up, you need it so you don’t get derailed.

Actual email I submitted to a customer support site:

Amy Larrimore, Sep 26 12:19 pm (PDT):

This is the second time this has occurred for me – I [redacted - I detail my issue]

Obviously this is creating problems.

Please help.

Actual reply:

[Company] Support, Oct 02 12:06 am (PDT):

Hi,

Thank you for your support request. Recently, we have been receiving a high volume of support requests and haven’t been able to get back to you within a reasonable amount of time.

The volume of inquiries we receive on a daily basis prevents us from responding to all requests. Although requests from Pro and Teams users will be given priority assistance, we will do our best to get back to other inquiries when possible. If you are not a Pro or Teams user and you’re looking to resolve your issue before we can respond, you may want to check out: [link to their horribly inadequate online help]

If you are still experiencing problems, please reply to this message. We will try our best to get back to you, however we cannot guarantee a response. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,
The [Company] Support Team

Don’t be this company. PLAN how to scale your business. I give some tips and tricks in my post on How Not To Create a Business Plan

How do you get paid?

I ask this of every business during initial review of their operational technology. It does not matter if they hired me because they think they need social media tools, a CRM or new manufacturing software, I always start at the beginning: How do you get paid?

And then I clarify: not what product or service do you trade for payment, but upon successful delivery of that product or service, what are all the steps in the process for you to ask for payment and actually get the cash?

The conversation usually goes like this:

• ClientA: I have quickbooks – my accountant suggested it.
• Amy: Great! So you’re using the automated invoicing features and can run P/L and project ROI reports?
• ClientA: The automatic invoices never come out correctly so I collect my billing information from Quickbooks and my emails about the project and then make the invoices in Microsoft Word.
• Me: How do you track your accounts aging (how long it takes you to get paid and how much cash you’re waiting on) and do cash forecasting?
• ClientA: I enter it back into quickbooks when I get the time. Or, I keep track of that in excel – or a stack of paper invoicing on my desk.
• Me: How do you know “when it’s time to invoice?”
• ClientA: I try to get to that at least once a month.

RISK! RISK! RISK! There are too many variables and too much room for human error.  If this fails, you don’t get paid. I don’t have to tell you that cash is the lifeblood of growth.

It becomes even more complicated when part of your offering is a raw material or a subcontracted service that you mark up or integrate into your final product. In these cases, you need to ensure the delivery of another product or service is suitable enough for you to invoice AND you need to make sure you have the cash on hand to cover the costs of that raw material – even if you can’t get paid by your client ahead of time. This is why most construction industry contractors go belly up.

Luckily there is a better way to do it.

The key to efficiency is twofold:

1. Improve the Process

• Reduce the number of steps in the process and automate as many as possible
• Reduce the number of transfers from person to person within the process
• Clearly define responsibility, roles and timelines

2. Manage Your Information Well

• Reduce the number of data points needed to complete the process
• Create a system whereby they are entered the least amount of times possible
• Reduce the number of copies of data – maintain integrity by keeping the information in one place in one source that is accessed in multiple ways.

Let’s take a look at the process and data surrounding my conversation with client A.

The process usually looks like this:

Pretty ugly huh? Clearly there are some steps we can eliminate, especially those that require many records and many entries of information.

The data points in this process are:

• Contract terms with the client and subcontractor (what, where, when, how much)
• Contact information for the client and the subcontractors
• Records of what was sent and when

We need all these to get paid so we can’t reduce any of them. We can, however, enter the information only once and not duplicate the data.

This is where technology can help us!

Here are three financial (revenue and billing) systems that help automate the process, reduce the amount of steps required and maintain one set of data throughout the time it takes to be paid.

Quickbooks is an extremely powerful, fully featured financial platform that is a good solution for complicated or high volume businesses – like an e-commerce business OR a service based business with multiple projects that have separate expense accounting needed for each. You’ll need a decent level of accounting knowledge and software support to get it set up to work well. I suggest a budget of $2000 after the licensing for configuration. If you don’t need that kind of power or have that kind of budget, it can be simpler and less expensive.

Freshbooks is my personal favorite for almost any small business, especially those that handle time or material billing of any kind. You set it up to account in great detail but significant configuration is not needed for it to work well. Many of my less tech savvy clients love this for its simplicity. It automates most of the process and keeps everyone up to date with emails. You can use this to store client contact information, create estimates that directly convert to one time or recurring invoices. You, your employees and your subcontractors can record billable and unbillable time and expenses into it. It has native credit card processing integration so you can be paid instantly. I have a high ticket client that has an average aging of 12 minutes to pay. Yep, 12 minutes. The system costs about $30 a month.

Harvest is a competitor to Freshbooks that has almost exactly the same functionality and price point, just different integrations and a user interface that has more of a mac look and feel. I have found this is preferred by graphic designers and similar creative types. Both offer some free trial features so try them out and see which you like better.

By using one of these pieces of technology, you can reduce the number of process steps and use one copy of the data. The risk for error is reduced and the variable time to get paid is compressed because automation helps things go faster. You will quickly see a boost in your bank account and a reduction in stress when you wake up in the morning and find your invoicing went out and your payments got collected while you were sleeping.

But most people couldn’t even tell you if they have a cloud – or where it lives or what it really means for their business.

Basically, moving into the cloud means you are freeing yourself of hardware that you have to manage. The business model changes too – instead of buying servers and IT guys, you are paying (usually as a subscription based service) to rent space on someone else’s server that you can access without the trapping of wires, cables, fibers. You access it pretty much through the air – virtually.

It’s not much different from when we freed ourselves from corded landline phones. You no longer needed wires in your house to connect to your phone hardware so you can make a phone call.

It’s not so bizarre when you think about it that way.

Many things change for your business when you begin using cloud based solutions. For one, you access it differently – you can use almost any device, anywhere, and still get to your cloud. Two, you pay for it differently – you budget a monthly expenditure for subscription instead of a big capital expenditure to buy a license and equipment. Third, your risks are different. I outlined this in apresentation to the Pennsylvania Bar Association. Lastly, the quality and quantity of software on your cloud access machine (your computer) reduces and becomes cheaper. Need something advanced? Go lease it in the cloud. Hate it? Cancel it.

To introduce the cloud into your business, consider these critical cloud uses and the technology that can help you:

Backup | Collaboration | Tools

Backup in the Cloud

When is the last time you backed up your computer? Better yet, when is the last time you backed up your 2400 irreplaceable pictures on that 32GB iphone?

For less than $10 a month, you can automatically, easily and painlessly back up all of your devices into the cloud. The anxiety relief that comes with one of these services is well worth the price. I could launch my laptop off the empire state building, go walk into an internet café, login and continue business as usual. Yes, you should do this today.

ZipCloud, like most of their competitors, requires both a download onto the machine that needs to be backed up as well as a credit card for the subscription. They offer standard encryption as well as syncing in the background while you are working on the computer or while it is idle. This can slow down your internet connection so I recommend you get into the habit of leaving your computer on when not in use so that the backup happens while you are doing something else. Similar: JustCloud, Carbonite  and mozy

Interested in backing up your social media sites? This is critical if you are in any compliance based industry and desirable to most others. I have found Social Safe  to be a nifty little tool for that purpose.

Collaboration in the Cloud

No one sends CDs/DVDs around anymore. No one really uses USB drives either. So please stop assuring me the iPad would be so much better with a USB port. Today, people do their filesharing in the cloud.

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment and had a “shared drive” it works exactly the same way.

Dropbox is hard not to love. It is one of the simplest pieces of software to use. Download and install it on your computer and then drag the files you want to share into the new dropbox folder. Download the app on your mobile devices.
Access it on the web anytime at the dropbox link. They give out free account with 2GB storage so it’s easy for others to get the files from you. For example, I videoed our company meeting on my phone, upload it via the app and it lives on my collaboration cloud where my marketing team can go in, look at it, change it or download it – while I’m still at the meeting! The only caution I would give you in a dropbox sharing frenzy is that the security level of this folder is not appropriate for you to use it to store sensitive information.

Similar: Box.com or You Send It

Tools to Make Your Cloud Journey More Enjoyable

Two of the main hurdles to sharing and archiving is software versioning (what if it’s obsolete?) and eliminating the need for paper altogether (I have to print it out to sign it?). Adobe solves these problems for you and they are good to have in your cloud toolkit.

Echosign is a web-based, fully digital electronic signature solution. There’s nothing to learn or install. Simply click “Send” for an online signature that complies with all legal standards, accepts documents in a variety of formats and attaches a digital signature to secure electronic documents.

Adobe Acrobat Professional makes my top five secret weapons of all time list. It makes PDFs (Portable Document Format) for you, but it also allows you to edit them, compress them, merge them together, add layers of security, create fillable forms, and aggregate information automatically. The site has tons of case studies to give you some inspiration. Yes, it’s worth the investment.

Want to make your life easier in your business? Free yourself from hardware and reduce some of your risk of information loss by moving your files into the cloud. Like any business change, it will feel strange at first, but the benefits of being truly mobile will be most appreciated in a time of crisis. Plus, then you can tell people YOU are doing business in the cloud. Sexy, huh?

I had a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System).

It’s amazing how people open their wallets to buy your product or service when they feel like you are LISTENING to them and that you KNOW them.

I suffer through so many business plan pitches that list excellent, personalized, customer service as what makes them different. Every time, I ask “Great – how are you going to collect the information you need, what system are you going to use to record it and how will you report back on it at the instant you need it?” No one can answer that question – and I bet you can’t either.

You’re in luck – technology can make it easier!

Gone are the days of hauling around a laptop and sneaking into a bathroom stall to look up the name of someone’s kid. (Or better yet, whispering it to your sales rep who is calling you because you have the only copy of the data). There are hundreds of web based systems out there accessible by your entire team instantaneously on the device in their pocket.

Most organizations that generate revenue understand they need to constantly improve the sales process:

Improving the process is the first lever in efficient business. Yep, you get that.

The second lever is managing your information well. This is the struggle for most businesses. We have client information everywhere – or nowhere. It’s in the heads of our sales team, scribbled in margins of contracts, in our phone, in our email or hopefully findable on Google or LinkedIn when we need it.

The third lever of success is choosing the appropriate technology. This is where everyone says “Salesforce is what I need, right?”

Salesforce is the monolith and market leader that has become a household name. I applaud them for their successful brand awareness – it’s the knee jerk answer whenever someone says CRM.  It’s what business publications laud as the best in the market and most managers suggest because no one ever gets fired for recommending the market leader. I’ve found it’s an excellent solution if you have an unlimited budget, a highly skilled technology team and a good integrative technology strategy. Oh, and you need all of your data well organized and specified so you can provide it to the customization group. Recently, I attended a cocktail party and the sales exec from a well known company bragged to me he “only” pays $3,000 per user, per year for 100 employees to use Salesforce. I choked on my cracker.

Luckily for you, there are plenty of other options to get you started managing people information well:

BatchBlue manages people, companies, events, to-do’s and deals (including potential deals). It’s the kind of system you can setup and just start using. Three big wins are 1) It has an excellent LinkedIn integration (all social media really) 2) merging duplicates is a snap 3) “Supertags” allow an unlimited number of custom fields. If I had a criticism, it would be that they don’t support Outlook integration and the reporting is very medieval –like DOS based queries. Regardless, it’s a nice solution for a startup or an established small business. Some other options like this are Address Two, Capsule and Nimble.

Highrise has made quite a name for themselves as a simple solution. It’s a freeform system – data lives in blocks of text instead of fields. This is a good for people who become overwhelmed with filling out forms of data – they just want to be able to keep loosey goosey notes. It also integrates well with Basecamp Project Management Software for companies seeking a platform. The biggest challenge I found with this system is that it’s extremely difficult to merge duplicates and it requires wayyyyyyy too many clicks to add simple information – like phone numbers. Lastly, it’s expensive and painful to migrate off of it when your business grows out of it so only consider if you’re small (10 employees or less) and plan to stay small.

Zoho and Sugar CRM are cost efficient competitors to the Salesforce monolith. These can support small to large businesses with dealflow, customer support tickets, vendor markups and other complex customer sales and prospecting processes. They do everything the little guys do with plenty more bells and whistles. The failure in both of these systems is the client expects them to be out of the box. They aren’t. They require an expert to help you with configuration and there will be add-on costs for integrations. All of this is necessary.  If your budget and company aren’t ready for this, go smaller.  If you are ready, they are very powerful and customizable to your business at a fraction of the Salesforce cost. Of the two, I find Sugar a more stable and well supported product so I find the small cost bump over Zoho is justified.

Don’t get caught in the paralysis of choice. It’s better for you to start putting your data in any CRM than holding off on the perfect solution. Implementing this technology provides the largest and quickest return because our human brains cannot process many three dimensional relational data points. By using a database to manage these connections, we can begin to see patterns and close deals we didn’t know were there. What are you waiting for? Good people data makes you money!

Want more? The Empire Builders Group is building a personal assessment tool at crmchooser.com. Today you can find lists of CRMs there. Join the VIP list and you’ll be the first to hear when the free personalized assessment tool is live.

This is a repost of my article on SCORE, The Counselors to America’s Small Business National Blog.

However, this post is not going to navigate the nuances of the Facebook timeline format or teach you how to compose the perfect tweet to attract millions of followers. That stuff actually doesn’t matter one bit. Success comes from having a sound marketing process, being able to manage the information well and using appropriate technology.  I cover this in great detail in the presentation I did for the e-Business Now conference, Using Technology to Jumpstart your Business.

A sound marketing process is simple:

You need to determine who is interested in your product (culling), tease them to get them interested (piquing), analyze that interest and be consistent in delivering the content the person seeks (engagement).  ENGAGED people BUY. This is called CONVERSION – whereby a prospect becomes a customer. Conversion is how you measure the return on a marketing investment – both time and money.

The reason social media is a magical way to market is that it generates SO MUCH data. However, most businesses don’t use the data because they don’t know how to manage the information well. It’s like having the recipe for the secret sauce but leaving out the special ingredients.

This is where technology can help you!

Here are three tools that assist with collecting, managing and understanding marketing information.

HootSuite – This tool is such an excellent solution to listening, posting and analyzing your message across all the social media channels, it’s almost a household name. Plus, the fully featured version is a cool $6 a month. Even nicer, the free version is remarkably useful. If you are new to social media, use it to listen first. If you’re a veteran, love their fully customizable analytics and RSS/ATOM auto post capabilities. The interface is simple, friendly and highly functional.

Website Grader – One of the best tips for web writing is to follow the “smarter than a fifth grader rule” – and that is, most readers aren’t. Check how appropriate your website is using HubSpot’s free website grader. This tool gives you an excellent assessment of how well you’ve done on your website by one of the best web marketing companies around. Once you’re suitably impressed with that, try their complete suite of software free for 30 days.

Constant Contact Email Marketing Analytics – Many business owners  do some email marketing and most are disappointed by the results. This is because so few people use the integrated analytics tools to segment out the people who showed interest and market to them some more. I like Constant Contact for email marketing and for their related analytics tools. When I ran a product business, I would upload or capture my email list with phone numbers, send out my email marketing campaign and then download the list of people who clicked (phone numbers would come too). I would call those “clickers” and offer them a special sale similar to what they clicked on. I enjoyed a 96% close rate from these calls. As shown in the left graphic, the “buy” doesn’t happen when you send the message, it happens after you segment out the people who are interested and close them.

For the advanced user or twitter lover, my two favorite twitter tools are tweepi.com for generating data about your followers and who you follow and socialbro.com for all things twitter data.

Now when you are inspired with your next great marketing idea, you can take it to your audience with the confidence that you can then check to see how it was received generally and who specifically found it of interest. By USING this information to generate a more effective next marketing campaign and to follow up with those who are interested, you will see your revenues grow.

Is all of your filing up to date?

If you’re like most business owners, there is a pile of it somewhere and you are laden with guilt and shame that you “can’t keep up with it.” You probably fantasize about hiring an intern some summer to do it but never find the time to get that started. I’m here to free you and to assure you that most of this work is a total waste of your time.

Actually, the “failure” that most businesses have here is over managing the process. Expenses cost the business money and the process to manage expenses is arduous, time consuming and inefficient.

Let me begin this explanation with some boring terminology from Wikipedia.

“Records management is the practice of maintaining the records from the time they are created up to their eventual disposal. This may include classifying, storing, securing, and destruction (or in some cases, archival preservation) of records. A record can be either a tangible object or digital information…. Records management is primarily concerned with the evidence of an organization’s activities.”

The key phrase here is “evidence.” We keep files (and expenses) for EVIDENCE that we performed an activity. They are, for all intents and purposes, dead documents. They don’t make you any money and they represent a cost (expense) to the organization to manage.

This is different from an action or trigger document/data. For example, I am keeping an email about payment from a client so I can remember to do something for that client. This is a trigger document – it reminds me to do a related thing, the document itself doesn’t necessary help. I am keeping a copy of the gas bill in my inbox because I have been charged incorrectly for the third month running and I have to call the utility company. This is an action document. I’ll need the information on the document to complete the action. When these actions are complete, the document becomes a record (if we need to keep it) or trash.

The key phrase here is “action.” We keep action or trigger documents to MOVE activities forward. They make us money, help grow the business and help save us money. There is a cost (expense) to manage these documents but it tends to be nominal compared to the benefit.

80% of your effort should be spent on action documents and 20% or less on recordkeeping. Remember the keys to efficiency we covered last time?

• Improve the Process
• Manage your Information Well
• Use Appropriate Technology

This is where technology (and process) can help us!

Here are three systems that help automate the process, reduce the amount of steps required and the aggravation it takes to manage records and expenses.

Pendaflex File is an extremely un-technological yet powerful solution. In fact it is so unsexy that it’s rarely considered as an option. Go get a Pendaflex file and label the sorters with the schedule C categories – they start at #8 on the IRS form.  Add additional segments – one for deposit slips and petty cash. Then, when you get a receipt for one of these expenses, shove it into the slot. At the end of the year, rubberband it shut and hand it to your accountant. That’s it. Yep, no data entry every month, no filing by month, no scanning, no nothing. After taxes, write the year on the front, duct tape it shut and throw it in the basement. In seven years, throw it out. This is a great example of not overcomplicating a process with technology when it isn’t necessary.

Shoeboxed is the technology version of the above system. This company manages all of the scans associated with records and expenses in a snazzy little web based dashboard. You can scan, forward emails, take pictures of receipts with your mobile phone or send documents to them directly. They process other paper too, including your business cards. They have the necessary security encryption, backup and reporting tools to make it extremely useful. This is a great solution for those of you who want to be tech-sexy and don’t have time to find the intern.

Mint is a FREE, web based expense management tool. Link all of your accounts and it automatically downloads and categorizes all of your expenses. You can create and track budgets with some nifty reporting tools. For example, set a budget limit on business meals and it will turn yellow and send you an email when you are approaching the monthly limit. So it helps keep your expenses in check as well as manage the records associated with them. This truly is a paperless solution in that it downloads the data from your bank directly. It’s geared towards a personal user but it can work well for a small business. It’s powered by Intuit and has some of the most robust security available. If you feel comfortable putting your information into Quickbooks, this is the same company so you should feel just as comfortable here.  I do recommend that if you use this solution, you do it in tandem with the Pendaflex solution above so you can stay compliant to recordkeeping requirements.

By using one of these systems, you can be clear on what records you need to keep with regards to expenses. With a little pre-planning and configuration, you can automate most of the system, which not only makes your accountant happy when it’s time for taxes, but it allows you to check in with your expense “burn rate.” Too many times when businesses focus on records (the dead documents), they find out too late they’ve overspent what they wanted. Most of these systems allow you to focus on what’s happening now, not spend time on what has already happened. This, of course, is the best way to become successful – manage the future.