Sales Are Quite Bleak

For a while there, I was getting really awful reception on my cell phone. In the kitchen, I got a great signal. Move to my office, though, and I may have well have been on the moon.

I soon became obsessed with checking my bars and trying to figure out exactly where and under what conditions my calls got dropped.What if I stood this way? What if I opened the window?

The blue sweater! It must be the blue sweater!!

And then one day it hit me that those little bars looked a lot like a sales graph(goodness knows I love a good sales graph!)and the above cartoon was born.

So I guess something good came out of it - but I’d still like to be able to call my friends from my office.

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Fresh List of Entrepreneurial Contests for Your Small Business

This list of contests, competitions and awards for small businesses is brought to you every other week as a community service bySmall Business TrendsandSmallbiztechnology.com.

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Start-Up, Boot-Up
Enter by April 25, 2011

Here’s a chance to get your start-up out of the garage with over $75,000 in servers and development tools! Some of the greatest start-up ideas were born in a greasy garage or cramped basement. But Start-Up, Boot-Up™ will take one winner out of that environment and put them in a modern office with access to the servers and development tools to take their idea to the next level: reality. See website for full list of prizes and entry details.

AMD Visionary of the Year Awards
Enter by April 30, 2011

AMD has announced its first ever VISIONary of the Year Awards, honoring innovation in the three passion categories of Foodie, Photography and Entrepreneurship.

Eligible voters can vote and enter to win one-of-a-kind category prizes, including the ultimate culinary trip to New York City (Foodie category), a $4,000 technology shopping spree (Entrepreneurship category), a $4,000 camera (Photographer category), as well as AMD’s $10,000 grand prize.

Recognize an Administrative Professional
Nominate by April 26, 2011

Chances are you rely on one or more administrative professionals to conduct business.  A great virtual assistant, administrative assistant or other administrative professional can be a big part of your success.  Show your appreciation.  Nominate someone deserving, in honor of Administrative Professionals’ Day (which is April 27).  The person with the most nominations gets a $2,500 American Express Gift Card.  Another 100 nominees will be randomly selected to win $25 Gift Cards.

2011 Small Business Awards
Enter by May 20, 2011

In its 6th year, The New York Enterprise Report Small Business Awards honors the achievements and accomplishments of the 500,000+ small businesses throughout the tri-state New York area. In addition to the Best of the Year Categories, the New York Enterprise Report Small Business Awards will honor nine small businesses for their accomplishments and best practices.

National Association for Moms in Business Grant Competition
Enter starting March 1st, Competition runs May 1– June 15, 2011

Business grant competition via crowdfunding to give mom entrepreneurs a better chance at launching a new or current business project. All participants win a half-page feature in Moms In Business Magazine, publicity on peerbackers.com and momsinbusinessgrant.com, and a $2,000 publicity toolkit from PRNewswire. When the crowdfunding competition ends, all grant applicants who raised 80% or more of their funding goal will become semi-finalists. A team of mom executives and entrepreneurs will judge each application to determine the $10,000 Grand Prize Grant Package winner. Competitors must be a member of NAFMIB.

Ernst& Young’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women Competition
Enter by June 30, 2011

Ten winners will be paired with advisers and resources for growing their businesses and they’ll get to participate in a customized executive-leadership program. In addition, winners will receive an all-expenses paid trip to the Ernst& Young Strategic Growth Forum 2011 in Palm Springs, Calif., in November.

The contest is being run in collaboration with the Women Presidents’ Organization, Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, the Committee of 200, National Association of Women Business Owners and Babson College.

The Conway Center for Family Business Awards
Enter by August 4, 2011

The Conway Center for Family Business Awards Program was established in 1998 to recognize excellence in family business and has honored more than 115 Central Ohio family businesses during its first 11 years.

The program honors recipients in categories consistent with the success and longevity of a family business: leadership, planning, communication, support and community service. For more details, see the website.

To find more small business events, contests and awards, visit ourSmall Business Events Calendar. In addition, we also have a giveaways page; click to learn more about oursmall business giveawayssection.

If you are putting on a small business contest, award or competition, and want to get the word out to the community, please submit it through ourSmall Business Event and Contests Form. (We do not charge a fee to be included in this listing. )

Please note: The descriptions provided here are for convenience only and are NOT the official rules. ALWAYS read official rules carefully at the site holding the competition, contest or award.

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State of Small Business Lending: Better or Worse Than Last Year?

Has the state of small business lending gotten better or worse since last year? The answer depends on who you talk to.

Confused?

The answer to the question“Are banks finally starting to lend again?” also varies based on what’s being written and where. Even Small Business Trends’ ownScott Shane weighed in.

For example, according to a recent survey given to members of the International Franchise Association, 39 percent of franchisors report that more than half of their franchisees and franchise prospects are unable to obtain needed financing– up from 33 percent in a similar survey last November. Only 5 percent report their franchisees and prospects have hadnodifficulty with credit access, compared to 8 percent in the November survey.

Compare that negative news with a story I just read in theDayton Daily Newsabout Chase Bank:

“Chase said Thursday it loaned $505 million to small businesses in Ohio last year, marking a 30 percent increase over 2009.”

The article also stated that according to bank executives, Chase made loans to 9,800 small businesses with annual revenues of less than $20 million.

Even more positive was the fact that Chase (according to the article) added more than 500 business bankers and created what it calls a“second-look” program to look for ways to extend credit to companies whose initial loan requests were rejected.” (ReadThe Dayton Daily News article.)

An increase in small business lending in Ohio, which is a state absolutely ravaged by the economy, is certainly great news. But let’s go back to the IFA survey again:

“60 percent of franchisors say they have seen no improvement in credit access in recent months, compared to 65 percent who reported the same conditions in the November survey.  Only 3 percent report they have seen a significant improvement in credit access compared to 1 percent in the November survey.”

You canread the IFA surveyfor more information.

Do you see what I mean?

Now, it’s not like The White House and the Small Business Administration aren’t trying to help improve small business access to capital.

There’s Startup America, which is the White House initiative to“celebrate, inspire and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation.”As was explained in a recent private conference call with the Small Business Administration (several Small Business Trends writers were invited), theSBA’s Reducing Barriers websitewas created so that anyone can submit their answer to this really important question, posted right on the website: “What concrete ideas could reduce federal barriers for entrepreneurs trying to start and scale companies?”

One look at the ideas submitted to the site so far shows that most of the ideas have to do with improving access to capital.

Recently, the Business.gov website was merged with the SBA.gov website and totally revamped. The focus of the new site is easy access. The Small Business Administration is really trying to make the process of getting capital a lot more streamlined. The new site is a lot friendlier to people who are looking for information about getting small business loans (or any kind of small business information). All they have to do to get started is go to the section of the site named SBA Direct and type in their ZIP code.Go ahead and try it.

Not only is the SBA trying to make things easier for current and future small business owners, they’re trying to make things a lot simpler and more streamlined for banks, too. They recently rolled out a section of their website devoted solely to lenders– The SBA Lender Toolkit. Look at what it includes:

• Find a Loan Package, which allows users to select a loan type and download all the associated forms so they can prepare more accurate loan applications

• Find a Service Center, which enables the lender to search for service centers based on loan processing parameters, loan type and stage

• Lender FAQs, which helps lenders get answers about the SBA’s approach to financing and underwriting loans

• Weekly Lending Report, which provides updates on interest rates and important lending news

The SBA is certainly going out of its way to cut out some of the bureaucracy that has existed for years and get things moving in the right direction.

The credit crunch has been going on for a solid two years now. It feels like the entire small business community has been mobilized to get the lenders lending again. Let’s hope that they start doing what they’re paid to do— lend.

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Ensuring America’s Small Businesses Get a Fair Deal on Tax Day

Business owners often have to make tough decisions when it comes to their bottom lines. Unfortunately, for many self-employed and micro-businesses, health insurance has become a luxury item– purchased when times are good and given up during times of belt-tightening. A contributing factor to this “unhealthy” reality is the fact that theself-employed do not receive a tax benefit for purchasing coverage, unlike every other type of business entity, which can write off the cost of health insurance as a business expense.

Congress passed a temporary reprieve of this minor quirk in the tax code that has a major effect on our nation’s smallest businesses when it passed theSmall Business JobsAct last fall.For the 2010 tax year, self-employed business owners are able to deduct the cost of their health care coverage, which will put about 15 percent of their premium back in their pocket.The average self-employed business owner, who pays about $3,000 a year in health insurance premiums or $6,300 for family coverage, will save $456 to $962 in taxes on this year’s deduction.

A large business might not notice such a relatively modest amount of extra cash on its books, but this is not an insignificant amount to a self-employed business owner. The temporary health care tax deduction could help pay for an extra phone line or fund some online advertising. It could be used to purchase new office equipment or pay for an energy efficient lighting upgrade.These are tangible benefits to small businesses that can help them stay competitive— and in business— in an economy that continues to shun robust recovery.

With the ups and downs of our current economy, this extra savings could be the extra help a struggling business owner needs. Approximately 23 million self-employed business owners across America are eligible to claim the temporary self-employed health care tax deduction this year.

But here’s the rub.Congress only gave self-employed business owners the 2010 tax year to claim this deduction. An overwhelming number of the potential beneficiaries of the deduction won’t be able to take advantage of the deduction because health coverage is a luxury they can’t currently afford. Self-employed business owners need Congress to make the deduction permanent and make the tax benefit of purchasing coverage fair to all business entities.

According to the latest available data,23 million small business ownerscontribute nearly $1 trillion to our nation’s economy. What these businesses need is more than just lip service from President Obama and Congress, who both are proclaiming that it’s the small business community that will put our economy back on track. These businesses don’t need another major piece of legislation:Thoughtful tweaks to existing law will help small businesses stay afloat and expand.

The temporary self-employed health care tax deduction is a step in the right direction,but making it permanent is just one of the little fixes our policymakers can address to support the small business community.

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Two Burning Questions About Shipping

This series is underwritten by UPS.Discover the new logistics. It levels playing fields and lets you act locally or globally. It’s for the individual entrepreneur, the small business, or the large company. Put the new logistics to work for you.

Here atSmall Business Trendswe like to discover what’s on the minds of small biz owners and entrepreneurs. So at the recent GrowCo conference April 6-8, 2011 in Las Vegas, I knew what I wanted to ask Luke Mauricio, Small Business Marketing Manager for UPS (pictured below), when I had the chance to sit down with him.

My question was simple: what do small business owners attending the conference want to know about? In other words, what’s on their minds when they talk to a company like UPS?

According to Luke, not many people had questions about basic shipping services. Most people seem to have a good handle on that. Instead, the questions were about:

(1) How do you ship internationally?

(2) How do you save money on shipping?

Well, seeing as how I had Luke’s ear, I sat down with him for a chat to get some information about these questions.

On shipping internationally…

The reason this question comes up so much is that ”You’re dealing with unknowns when shipping to another country,”  according to Luke. You’re probably not familiar with local customs regulations.  Business practices may be different.  Currencies are different.  Even the language may be unknown to you.  It’s natural to feel out of your element.

When it comes to international shipping, Luke says“UPS wants to inspire confidence”— confidence that items will be delivered and that someone will help them slice through the red tape. For instance, Luke pointed out that UPS haspartnered with the U.S. Commercial Service(part of the U.S. Department of Commerce) to help give businesses information about exporting.

UPS also makes available an online resource library with information about shipping internationally. There you will find a downloadableinternational shipping guide(PDF).  The guide explains things such as the documentation used in international shipping— example, the Certificate of Origin document.  Another useful feature on the UPS international resource library is the country snapshots.  These snapshots are concise documents giving you facts and figures for doing business in specific countries.  Countries include Canada, China, Brazil, Vietnam, Poland and India.

On saving money…

According to Luke, a goal should be to create an efficient and effective supply chain. That can have a direct impact on your customers’ experience.

“An effective supply chain is not so much about cutting expenses, but about your customer’s experience.  There are a lot of paybacks from an effective supply chain.  It becomes a comparative advantage for your company.”

And sometimes the bigger issue businesses face is a cash flow issue, i.e., having to wait too long to get payment in hand. “Not a lot of people know that UPS has a finance subsidiary called UPS Capital.  We actually give out small business loans,”  says Luke Mauricio.  Loans are designed to bridge a short-term situation a business may face, such as the gap between delivering products and getting paid for them.

UPS is itself an entrepreneurial story.  It was founded 104 years ago in Seattle by two teenagers who took out a $100 loan.  According to Luke,“Their first business model was very very simple.  They were bicycle messengers who delivered customer purchases from Nordstroms, the department store.“  The two young entrepreneurs saw a need and expanded to meet that need for package delivery services.

For additional coverage of Growco, seeWhy You Should Never Define Your Financial Goals as Revenue.

Photos above: (1) View of Las Vegas from my hotel balcony at the beautiful Cosmopolitan Hotel, at night. (2) Luke Mauricio during a few quiet moments at the UPS Lounge at #GrowCo.  Note:  UPS subsidized my attendance at the conference.

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Why You Should Never Define Your Financial Goals as Revenue

This series is underwritten by UPS.Discover the new logistics. It levels playing fields and lets you act locally or globally. It’s for the individual entrepreneur, the small business, or the large company. Put the new logistics to work for you.

If you are used to setting financial goals for your business you undoubtedly have a revenue goal.  In other words, you’ve set a figure for how many dollars your business is going to bring in this year.

But according to Carissa Reiniger, CEO ofSilver Lining LTD, that’s not good enough.  If you want to achieve a financial goal in your business, you must break your goal down  into“units of sale” rather than an annual, quarterly or monthly revenue number.

Last week (April 6-8, 2011) I attended theGrowCo Conferenceput on by Inc Magazine.  I was inspired and as always when I attend events, I learned a few things.  (Many thanks to UPS, which subsidized my attendance.)  In a series of posts this week, I’d like to share with you some of what I learned at GrowCo.

In this, my first in the series, I cover one of the key tenets outlined by Carissa Reiniger in her workshop,“Build a Growth Plan for Your Business.”

Using her company’s proprietary methodology, Carissa walked us through the steps to build your financial goals from the bottom up.  I will focus just on the portion of her session that deal with how to set financial goals for your business in such a way that you can align your strategies and tactics to achieve them.

Figure out Your Breakeven Amount

The first step for setting financial goals is to understand your monthly breakeven amount.  Carissa says,“This is the  revenue dollars that you have to generate if you don’t want to lose money.“  To determine your breakeven number, you’ll need to list all your expenses. And you’ll start with your personal expenses.

Now if it seems odd to start setting business financial goals by looking at your personal expenses, it’s not.  The reason you start with personal expenses is that you need them to determine your salary.  You’ve heard the advice to“pay yourself first” in your business?  Carissa Reiniger is a believer.  One of your business expenses will be your salary as the business owner.  Your salary needs to be at least enough to cover your personal expenses, or more, so that you have enough to live on.  That’s why you start by adding up your personal expenses.

Next determine your hard costs.  Hard costs are what you have to spend in your business regardless of your revenue.  These are the things you spend each month that would not be easy to get rid of— office rent, staff salaries, and so on. “Most people don’t want to know this number because it sucks,” she says.  She’s probably right— but knowing your expenses is crucial— unpleasant or not.

Set a Minimum Revenue Goal

Now that you know what your costs are, you are ready to determine yourminimumrevenue goal.Naturally, you want to strive to make a profit, not just break even.  But at the very least your revenue number should equal your expenses so that you don’t LOSE money.  Your minimum revenue goal shouldat leastbe the monthly, quarterly or annual amount needed to cover your salary as the business owner and your business expenses.

Of course, you may have a desired revenue target that is higher.  But at least if you start with your expenses, you know what the minimum needs to be.

Break Down the Revenue Number

Now comes the crucial part— you have to break down your revenue goal into manageable chunks.  While it might sound impressive to announce that your goal is to generate $1.5 Million in revenue this year, you need to be more specific, or you and your team will lack focus on how to achieve that revenue goal.

And that’s where“unit sales” come in.  Unit sales are the real targets you should be establishing, monitoring and working to achieve in your business.

Unit sales are calculated based on your revenue streams.  Determine your revenue streams by asking yourself, “What are the things you sell?”  Revenue streams are simply the things you invoice for.   But how many are the right number?  She notes:

“If you have 27 revenue streams you have too many, and if you have one revenue stream you have too few. The right number, a good number, is 2 to 5.  If you have more than 5 you’re trying to sell too many things to too many different people and you’re all over the place.  If you only have one, then you’re in trouble because if that doesn’t go well it doesn’t look good for your business.“

After you have outlined your revenue streams for the year, you do an equation:   X  x  Y =  Z  The purpose of the equation is to get to the number of units under each revenue stream that you have to sell in order to reach your overall revenue number.  Essentially you work backwards from your desired revenue number.

Your financial goal should be how many units  of a given product or service you need to sell and deliver if you want to achieve your desired revenue.  Let’s take an example of a company that sells consulting services and also software licenses.  If you are forecasting that you will make $1,000,000 from selling consulting services, and each project averages $2500, then you’d break it down into something like this:

Example:  $1,000,000 divided by $2500 = 400.

The number 400 is how many of those $2500 consulting projects you need to sell in order to bring in $1,000,000.  And to get to your total $1.5 Million figure, you’d need to find an additional $500,000 from software sales, your other revenue stream.

Start doing these calculations for each revenue stream.  Whenever you think of your financial goals for your business, always think in terms of how many unit sales you need to make for each revenue stream— not an overall revenue figure.  That’s how you get to financial goals for your business that are specific enough to be achievable.

Now, if you felt the above exercise is like opening a set ofRussian nesting boxes, each time encountering yet another smaller box inside, you’re not alone.  However, if ever want to establish an action plan for what to do each day, week or month in order to achieve your revenue targets, you have to know where the money will come from adds up to your annual revenue.  This level of detail is important to understand that.

Detail = clarity and purpose.

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Read Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible

Whenever I hear people say they couldn’t predict the recent financial fiasco that we lived through, the little voice inside my head saysreally?I’m finding it hard to believe that all these intelligent people just couldn’t see it coming.  Maybe they should have read Daniel Burrus’ latest book, Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible.

InFlash ForesightBurrus covers what he calls the“seven radical principles that will transform your business.”I don’t know about the transforming my business part.  But I can tell you that it has certainly transformed the way I look at the world of business and make decisions.  And that just might be good enough.

Who Is Daniel Burrus and How Does He Know So Much?

“Daniel Burrus is one of the world’s leading forecasters, corporate strategies and visionaries.”(That’s from the book jacket.) Burrus (@DanielBurruson Twitter) is a“trendwatcher” who previously wrote a book calledTechnotrends.  His client list is a virtual Who’s Who of consumer and technical products that includes the likes of Proctor& Gamble, GE and Kaiser Permanente.  And if there’s one thing all these companies have in common, it’s the need to predict what we unpredictable humans are going to do next.

This is where Burrus’ insights about how to look at the data around us and make sense of it in a way that helps us make the right decisions comes in.  I was looking through his bio and his profiles to see what he studied. Was it economics, mathematics or something completely different?  I wanted to know just what it was that prepared him for parsing and looking at data in such a powerful and insightful way.

As it turns out, he started his career teaching science!  I can only assume that Burrus’ passion for science has translated into a passion and a gift for looking at data and recognizing patterns— a gift he is sharing with the rest of us inFlash Foresight.

7 Principles That Will Change How You Look At Data

Burrus has distilled his technical know-how and intuition into seven principles we can use to look at the data that surrounds us:

1. Start with certainty.Focus on distinguishing“soft trends” from “hard trends.” This was the most useful principle for me.  Soft trends are things thatmighthappen; hard trends are things thatwillhappen.  An example of a hard trend is the Baby Boomer demographic.  Millions of people were born, they went to school and they will retire.  There is no question about that.  A soft trend is something such as a surplus or a deficit.  It looks like it’s heading in that direction, but it can change.
2. Anticipate.Base your strategies on what you know about the future.  Instead of being proactive, Burrus encourages us to be preactive.   In other words, anticipate what tomorrow’s problems will be and think about how you’re going to solve those future problems instead of today’s problems.
3. Transform.Use technology-driven change to your advantage.  Looking at how popular Apple and Steve Jobs are today, it’s hard to imagine a time when Apple was actually thought to be dying – out of the game.  Instead, Steve Jobs and his team transformed the company by looking at hard trends and solving tomorrow’s problems (being preactive) when theycreated the iPod.
4. Take the biggest problem and skip it (it’s not the real problem anyway).What you think is your current biggest problem is nothing more than a distraction that will keep you from your solution.  Skip it.  Leap over it.
5. Go opposite.Look where no one else is looking, see what no one else is seeing and do what no one else is doing.  Easier said than done.  This principle will take some practice. Flash Foresightoffers lots of examples such as Amazon, Crocs, Dell, Jet Blue, Kiva and more.
6. Redefine and reinvent.Identify and leverage your uniqueness in new and powerful ways.Flash Foresightgives examples of Lee Iacocca redefining and reinventing the family station wagon and other examples of reinventing the old by using it in different ways.
7. Direct your future (or someone else will direct it for you).This is the conscious exercise of your creative capacity to envision and rewrite your future life and career that wraps all the other flash foresight principles into one.

Each principle has a chapter devoted to it. And each chapter nicely reflects back on previous chapters so you get a sense of layered learning.

What I Love About This Book

Flash Foresightis well written.  It’s fun to read and it sort of tickles your brain into seeing everything around you in a new way (although I’m still catching myself reflecting and being in hindsight instead of foresight).

Action steps at the end of each chapter guide you through the process.  We aren’t naturally wired to look at the world the way Burrus is encouraging us to do, so these action steps really help.

Burrus’ enthusiasm and passion for sharing his talent and skill pop off the page.  In a case study on the Miracle Earbud (in the Anticipate Chapter) Burrus talks about being in a meeting with the management team and discussing the hard trend of baby boomers aging and not wanting to wear a hearing aid –that’s just too “old.”  In a flowing conversation and stream of ideas, he transforms a hearing aid into a“hearing enhancement experience” that allows you to drown out the screaming baby on a plane and listen to Jimi Hendrix instead.  Brilliant!

Flash Foresightwill teach you how to think and re-think.  I love this.  The biggest challenge I see for myself (and maybe you, too) is taking the time to stop and think along these new pathways.  Perhaps this is what makes Burrus so good at what he does.  His brain is wired to think this way— and the rest of us will just have to learn how.

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