How can a small accounting firm succeed in getting or increasing its business?

The top 5 strategies are:

1. Be An Early Adopter: Keep up to date with the latest trends in software and hardware technology. This will help in acquiring new clients as well as retaining the existing ones.

2. Focus on Reputation: Focus on developing and maintaining a great reputation

3. Focus on Quality control: Ensure that all the checks and balances are in place, so that the client is not concerned about working with a small firm on that regard

4. Be Competitive: Be competitive for contracts, and complete the job within budget.

5. Be A Niche Player: Specialization allows small businesses to become market leaders. Some of the latest niche markets are forensic accounting and business valuations.

What’s your secret to getting clients?

Coaching and mentoring is an aspect that many people as well as the majority of the corporate world realizes the need for. Several organizations have informal and formal programs in place for their employees to get the benefit of mentoring.

However when companies consider implementing mentoring programs which are exclusively focused on women, they are faced with the following 5 challenges:

1. There are not enough Women Role Models: Even in 2010, a majority of women still have not shattered the proverbial “glass ceiling”. According to the April 2010 USAToday article (Author: Ilene H. Lang), women occupy 15% of board seats and are 3% of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. What this means is that there are not enough women ‘C’ level or even Director level executives as well as other female role models for upcoming middle-management women employees.

2. There are not enough Women Mentees:  Women in many countries have social and family pressures to not take up promotions at work. They are expected to go for a day’s work and return back at regular times to look after their immediate and extended families. Promotions would entail travel and longer working hours which are not usually accepted in these social conditions. Given this scenario, many women actually do not seek mentoring since that would propel them on a path to management roles.

3. Mentoring is not supported by Sponsorship: Mentorship may be prevalent but if not supported by sponsorship fails to be effective. According to the Sept 2010 Harvard Business Review article (Authors: Herminia Ibarra, Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva) sponsorship goes beyond mentoring—in which the mentor uses his or her influence with senior executives to advocate for the mentee. According to the research conducted by the authors, high-potential women are undersponsored relative to their male peers—and in spite of being mentored, are not advancing in their organizations.

4. Mentees do not know how to ask for help: One of the aspects that Kathleen Barton wrote in her book Connecting with Success: How to Build a Mentoring Network to Fast-Forward Your Career was that the mere acquisition of a mentor will not help unless you’re ready to be mentored. Until mentees become active participants in the mentor-mentee relationship and understand how to to be proactive about development of their career goals , the relationship will not succeed. Mentees are also faced with not knowing which mentor to ask help from – especially if there are too few mentors available to choose from, and they are all extremely busy.

5. Mentors do not know how to provide help: This also leads back to the earlier point about sponsorship. Mentoring is a combined act of active listening, providing advice based upon experience, consistent and active follow-up as well as championing the mentee. People sometimes fail to be effective mentors due to reasons stemming from one or more of the following reasons:

i) lack of time OR

ii) feeling that the mentee does not have the inclination or ability to follow the advice OR

iii) lack of own ability to listen effectively OR

iv) lack of empathy OR

v) competitive pressures.

In conclusion, a mentoring program focused specifically on providing mentorship to women are faced with more problems than a corporate-wide generic mentoring program. However, in the next article, I will touch upon a few companies which have successfully overcome these obstacles and implemented effective women’s mentoring programs.

A fully-developed business plan needs to contain a marketing strategy. As part of the marketing strategy, the business’s advertising and promotions plan is covered. Traditionally advertising and promotions have been done through newspaper and direct marketing ads, and includes leveraging opportunities like affiliated event sponsorships. These strategies are still important and relevant.

However, with the advent of social media, it is hard to ignore the need of using it as an advertising tool, regardless of the kind of business. There are so many online ways of advertising your business. You have to analyze each of these and see what makes sense from a holistic strategy.

The most popular social media venues include, but are not limited to:

Facebook Page For Businesses, Twitter, LinkedIn For Businesses, Blogs, YouTube.

The beauty of online strategies is that it is not very expensive. So the business plan will be much more realistic and current for having included it, and you don’t have to increase your marketing budget by much.

eg.

Facebook Page for businesses: Free

Twitter Account: Free

LinkedIn For Businesses: US$24.95/month or get two months free and pay US$249.50/year (Basic Plan)

Blog: Should already be included in your website development budget

Your main cost is having a social media consultant (if you plan to have one) work with you in creating a consistent brand.

Read this great article to get more details on various social marketing tips: 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips

What attracts potential investors to GoDaddy is the successful combination of its two business models:1) Subscription based business model based upon the razor-blade strategy 2)Service based model, offering customized premium services.

GoDaddy gets regular monthly cash flow from monthly fee-based subscriptions. The razor-blade strategy comes into play by selling websites at as low as $1.99 for the first year, but once you are bought into it, goes up as high as $20/year/domain name for a private registration. Read more on the razor-blade strategy.

In addition GoDaddy charges premium fees on services like email management, website management, marketing and SEO techniques. Customers who are already using GoDaddy are more likely to buy these premium services – an example of Sticky Services.

So what can your business learn from GoDaddy’s success? Analyze how you can obtain a steady cash flow from moderately priced solutions. Then see where you can attach customized solutions and charge a premium for these services. A lesson for all types of businesses – small or large.

Markets can be segmented using factors such as (read more in Market Segmentation For The Small Business):

1. Demographic bases (age, family size, life cycle, occupation)

2. Geographical bases (states, regions, countries)

3. Behavior bases (product knowledge, usage, attitudes, responses)

4. Psycho-graphic bases (lifestyle, values, personality)

How does segmentation really help? The short term and simple answer to that is a stronger relationship with your customer and lower advertising costs. The long-term answer is that this will ensure your business longevity and also allow you to grow into other segments, if the currently served segment has been tapped out.

Take the case of Rite-Aid. Rite-Aid is the 3rd largest drug store chain in the US and has traditionally focused on providing prescription drugs. In fiscal 2009, prescription drugs represented 67.2% of revenue (up from 63.7% in 2007). They have traditionally targeted the aging baby boomer population, estimated at 76 million people in the US. However the profit margins are threatened by competitors like Walmart and CVS that produce their own cheaper generic drugs.

Instead of reducing product prices, Rite-Aid has started exploring other segments to boost its revenue:

1. Tweens within the Demographic base : There are approximately 35 million teens in the US controlling an estimated $208 billion in largely disposable income, according to the research report publisher Packaged Facts. Rite-Aid decided to target the teen girl segment, by focusing a campaign on  girls ages 13 to 19 with its Glam Camp programs, comprised of sampling, gift with purchase and in-store events. Read more in the article Segmenting tweens/teens.

2. Geographical base: This is the latest strategy from Rite-Aid. They are identifying unique opportunities in each of their geographical areas and capitalizing on it. For instance they have just announced a licensing agreement with Sav-A-Lot and will offer fresh foods in 10 stores in Greenville, S.C., and reduce their health and beauty product display. According to Rite-Aid, its stores there are all medium-sized and because their pharmacy businesses are solid, but sales of items such as beauty products are not as strong. Read more in the article Rite-Aid To Add Save-A-Lot.

Now how do you segment your market? Is the strategy working? What lessons can you implement from Rite-Aid?

These sites generate the online rush to buy goods similar to the rush seen in stores on Black Fridays. People see that a deal, generally 50-70% of retail price, is on for only 24 hours, and are motivated to purchase the goods, in case they lose out. The deal will only get activated if enough people buy the daily deal.

If you are trying to sell your products on Groupon or LivingSocial, you can be in control of the minimum number of offers that you want to sell the deal for. The site gets a percentage of the sales that you make.  Its a win-win since you are trying to get new customers, and this is a dramatic way to do it, without spending thousands of dollars.

Here is an example of a success story from the Groupon website:  “In January, a $25 Groupon for $50 worth of services at Andre Chreky salon in Washington, D.C., met its minimum 100 sales at 7:33 a.m., and topped out at 2,222 by midnight.” And Living Social reports about the success story of a dance academy which has a waiting list of students after it created a daily deal.

The demographics of the subscribers to these websites is 60% female, 44% college graduates, 46% between the ages of 35-49 and a pretty even distribution across income levels.

Nowadays businesses have to market to their customers in so many different ways. These sites can be used to give an extra edge.

You may find that you have to have more than one mentor to get advice for different areas – for instance one for business growth ideas and another on how to manage employees effectively. If you can find multiple helpful mentors, that is great! While looking for mentors, consider friends, relatives or prior business associates. Also, there are multiple associations which are helpful in providing mentors, including the non-profit organization Score and National Association of Women Business Owners NAWBO , to name a couple.

You may find that you do not agree with all the advice that a mentor gives you. And that is fine. Use this opportunity to learn and choose solutions that make sense for you and your business. However, be very gracious with your mentor – s/he is spending valuable time to improve your business. Ensure that you are not wasting his or her time by coming unprepared to meetings.

Finally set goals based on the advice that you do agree on. And very importantly follow-up with your mentor to let him/her know which advice you did find useful. This helps keep the process honest and meaningful.

1. If you have a restaurant, offer a day where the non-profit can host a dinner. A percentage of the profits can be donated to the non-profit organization.

2. If you have a retail store (brick-and-mortar and even online), provide a flier to the non-profit organization that they can send to their volunteers. Assign a specific day that people can then come in(or log-in) with the flier and get discounts on the products. A percentage of the profits can be donated to the non-profit organization.

3. Offer to provide items/services for the non-profit gala. Usually non-profits are looking for local businesses to donate items for their auctions. This is a great marketing tool also for your business.

4. With the non-profit organization’s permission, post a link to their site on your website. If the organization is small, they may be able to reciprocate also.

According to the American Payroll Association, employees ‘steal’ an average of 4.5 hours every week. The causes include tardy arrivals, “buddy punching” (clocking in an absent coworker), “lolly-gagging” (wasting time getting to the work area), extended breaks, and early departures. This time theft causes businesses 1.5% to 5% of gross payroll.

The National Retail Security Survey measured losses from inventory shrink at $34.8 billion. Employee theft represented 44% of these losses, much higher than shoplifting which was 34%.

Biometric devices are being increasingly used to combat both of these issues.
The devices can be used in POS for signing in, entering transactions, allowing manager approvals and for removing an employee from the system.

The most popular biometric devices used by restaurants are fingerprint and hand geometry readers. These devices collect and store physical attributes such as the length, width, and thickness of a person’s hand, as well as the lines of a person’s fingerprint. The devices store a mathematical representation of the hand or fingerprint and each time an employee clocks in or performs functions on the point-of-sale system, the biometric reader detects and compares it with the stored data—making it impossible for employees to share access.

Biometrics also offer perks for employees, especially employees that work for tips.

Here are a few more ideas that you may have overlooked or are currently hot ones to pursue in CA.

Sam’s Club Online Loans

Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club has teamed up with a SBA lender, Superior Financial Group LLC to offer online loans of up to $25,000 to its members. But this is not for all members. You have to have one of the following business to qualify: minority-, woman- or veteran-owned business, or very small enterprise(with 10 or less employees) . Sam’s Club itself is not managing the loan, just offering it to its members and then making $50/loan. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100706-710011.html

Bank Debit Cards

L.A. Times reported that big banks are competing  each other to get retail and small business customers in California. They are offering 5% rebates on debit card purchases. The market share occupied by incumbents Wells Fargo and Bank of America is now being hotly sought after by new entrants Chase and US Bancorp. U.S. Bank is also trying to come to the forefront. All this competition is great for the small business owner. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bank-war-20100706,0,4774899,full.story

Merchant Cash Advance

The loan is offered to the business as a lump sum in exchange for a share of future sales.

No regular fixed payments are required by the company. The lender collects a set percentage of the company’s daily credit card sales. Merchant cash advances don’t have a fixed interest rate, but they can be quite expensive. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2009/sb2009018_234392.htm

Purchase Order Loan

This type of loan has always been present, but is coming mor into prominence after banks have been turning down loan applications. This is a fee-based, short-term loan made based upon the credit history of the customer, not the small business seeking the loan. The unusual aspect of this loan is that the P.O. lender now ensures that the customer’s goods are manufactured and delivered, and collects the payment from the customer. The small business gets a part of the payment from the P.O. lender. http://www.entrepreneur.com/money/financing/article207058.html

Peer to Peer Lending

This refers to the online sites that allow you to post your loan requirement and your interest rate. Potential lenders then bid on your loan as long as you have good credit. This was pretty popular a couple of years back until the SEC shut down a few companies. So make sure you are using a site that has passed the SEC scrutiny before you use it. http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/apr2009/pi2009043_811816.htm