Marketing your professional services firm

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

The next graduate arrives, interviewing for a position at a small to medium-sized accounting firm: your accounting firm. This graduate will be one of the top performing employees for the employer of their choice. It takes you a while — nearly fifteen minutes into the interview, to fully realise that they are actually interviewing you.

Methodically, the graduate carefully crafts their answers and questions. When you look up from your notepad, direct eye contact takes a fraction of a second to re-connect: this graduate is absorbing the environment, the workspace and your body language. As you take notes, this graduate is also checking boxes on their own mental checklist: assessing you as a partner and the firm as a whole.

They don’t fit into your standard interview guide or assessment criteria: they are impressive in every aspect that a young aspiring graduate could be. They are energized and prepared to embark on a exciting career — just not with your firm.

I am a 90 year old one man band because I am also underfunded but resolute!

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

After being surprised by the stat that “the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity is in the 55-64-year-old group” in a recent article by Jim Dougherty, I was posting my own blog about single operator businesses and was surprised yet again to get this comment back:

“I am a 90 yr. old one man band because I am also underfunded but resolute! There are services that one can sign up for that begin in a free stage and I definitely use them, have to. But this digital business needs advertising money, lots of it. One SBA volunteer told me since I didn’t have money I’m dead in the water. But I got an order the other day.” David Lambert

Amazing: especially after you read his bio of life experiences, I could not help but try to encourage a few followers, likes, views for him. Because you can do digital business at no or low cost and not all entrepreneurs are young, Jim rightly says. And maybe he’ll get the odd order or two; I know I became his second order from #socialmedia.

All this links social links are from his webpage, so anyone feeling socially generous, please give David’s Delicious Chocolates a like, follow or even an order (via PayPal, here’s on that too)!

I live in Australia and David is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I have never met David until he reached Melbourne via LinkedIn and now I’m ordering chocolate from some guy called David in Pennsylvania!

http://davidsdeliciouschocolates.com

How do you get business inspiration (and keep it)?

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

Go!

Stop. Think. Get inspired.

The gardening crew has arrived outside my office. I hear a clunk and a bump as their truck and trailer bounces into the lot. I watch for a few minutes, and I’m inspired by the efficiency. They quickly rev up the ride-on mower and begin trimming the edges. It’s like a well-oiled pit stop team — every worker knows his place. Someone hands me the bill and everybody leaves as smoothly as they came in. In business, it’s important to be creative. Here are five sources of inspiration. See full article: Here

Optometrists, war, hot cross buns and death

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

Business owners often ask me about how to create content that is interesting and relevant for social media and blogging: “but I don’t have anything to write about” they say.

Firstly, we have all probably have heard a hundred times that it is about creating valuable “content” and “story telling.” Social media (which includes blogs like this one you are reading now), can just talk about what you care about or what you are doing as a business or passion. No-one has your life, it’s unique and your business is also unique.

Here are some tips to draw out some relevant:

Have an annual calendar of events is a great starter – plan in advance

How does your business relate to the local, state or national event?

Link social media to real life. Easter? Maybe have hot cross buns for customers over lunch. (e.g.Photograph the buns in advance and let people know its coming);

Use social media to share the event when it is happening (e.g. photo and text of staff and customer eating piping hot cross buns right now, hurry in);

Send out a thanks for coming post. A picture tells a thousand words so: I am alway big on using images.

Last week was ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand and I have been helping a local optometrist network in content creation and story telling. For those unaware, ANZAC Day is national day of military remembrance held on the 25th of April each year.

So what can an optometrist do for a day like remembrance day, apart from being shut? Well, like any profession, retail or trade, Australian and New Zealand optometrists made a huge contribution during First World War and other conflicts. With a few hours research we had a relevant and respectful ‘social media campaign’ ready to go.

Advertising was minimised during the period;

We shared photos and stories of opticians, optometrists and optical dispenser to high the service of the profession;

While some stories were amazing (a single optometrist at an Army Hospital able to examine, cut and fit lenses in 16 minutes during #WW2), some were heartbreaking & heroic.

I have summarised the story of four #WW1 opticians we found and reposted here. On ANZAC Day, we will, and did, remember them.

Lest we forget:

museumandhistory.com

AWMP08299.007 An outdoor portrait of the 9th Training Battalion at Perham Downs, Wiltshire. Victorian optician Gordon Heathcote from Kew is seated on the far left, sporting his new Corporal stripes he earned in England.

Cpl Gordon Roy Heathcote, 24th Company Australian Machine Gun Corps.

Cpl Gordon Roy Heathcote was an optician of Kew in Victoria. Single, twenty-three years old and living with his parents comfortably in Melbourne’s inner eastern suburbs, he enlisted in August and set sail from Melbourne on 20 October 1916. Seated on the left above, the machine gun is not just a prop for the photo – this optician had landed as a non-commissioned officer in an Australian Army Machine Gun Corps. Single, living with his parents comfortably in Melbourne’s suburbs. he enlisted in August and left Melbourne on 20 October 1916. In was promoted to Corporal while in England and completed his physical and bayonet training courses there before landing…

View original post 933 more words

#socialmedia: the new word of mouth

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

Wow, I can’t believe it is two years since I took the entrepreneurial leap and founded Optimize Business. An exciting time for any small business, it is enjoyable, exhilarating and I love meeting new people everyday: exploring their ideas, developing their ideas into strategy, strategy into a plan and plans into action.

Expanding from business coaching and strategy services, my clients value my financial background and being a CPA gives an added credibility and weight to suggestions about running their organisations. What I enjoy most and now do most is help business with their social media. I diversified my skills with photography, documentary video and writing for the web.

Most of my clients now come from the “new” word of mouth – #socialmedia. I just signed a contract with a North Eastern US company to provide regular social media content… they contacted me from Connecticut, I do not market to the US but social media is global, so be ready! Most people find me through LinkedIn or as a result of my social media engagements.

So give it a go. Try flying solo. Ensure you have enough cash-flow up-front, a good strategy, a good plan, and go for it…. oh, and a good business coach or mentor to guide you along the way 🙂

Social media companies dominate the ‘best places to work’ for 2014

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

Social media companies are the best technology employers to work for. According to employees, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are the best three technology employers for 2014. Google is ranked fifth, with Interactive Intelligence the only ‘traditional’ tech company in the top five best technology employers to work for.

Not only did social media providers dominate the technology sector, they also seized the majority of positions in the overall top five rankings.

Social media is transforming lives in more ways than we could have expected. From record initial public offerings to the birth of the Arab Spring, these companies are now setting the standard as the employers of choice.

When Glassdoor, a free online jobs and career community, revealed its 2014 Employees’ Choice Awards this month, it also provided a snapshot of the ever-growing influence of social media beyond a screen.

In 2010 Southwest Airlines led the rankings, joined by a mixture of manufacturing and business services firms. A year later, things began to change in when social media companies began wowing their employees:

2011: Facebook entered the top five with a bang, as the number one employer in Employees’ Choice Awards. Facebook had bumped the much acclaimed Southwest Airlines to number two, followed by business services and manufacturing leaders Bain & Company, General Mills and Edelman;

2012: Unseated by consulting behemoths Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company, Facebook ranked third and was joined by Google just scraping into the top five. With MITRE taking the fourth place, business services and consulting firms clearly ruled the day in 2012, but Google and Facebook were giving rival employers a taste of things to come;

2013: Facebook, the only social media company in the top five, reclaimed the number one ranking, amongst a diverse range of employers from business services, technology and health sectors;

2014: While Bain & Company has stolen the 2014 crown, social media companies dominate the top five, filling sixty percent of the top five positions: Twitter, LinkedIn, then industrial Eastman Chemical, followed by Facebook in fifth position.

Glassdoor has aggregated millions of salaries and anonymous company reviews, surveys and other “employee generated content”. The US rankings of the 50 best places to work in 2014 is now in its sixth year and provides a unique confirmation of social media pushing the boundaries in more than just the technology industry.

The top five of the last six years is like a storybook of our change in our society: 2009 did not include a single social media company. Traditional industries dominated, with General Mills, one of the world’s leading food companies, with 100 consumer brands, topping the employee rankings.

Business services firm Bain & Company was ranked number two and is noteworthy in that it is the only employer to be consistently listed in the top five for the last six years. Bain & Company went on to claim the leader’s jersey in 2012 and again in 2014.

The lessons for 2014? Watch this space: social media companies are innovators in more than just technology and IPOs, they are disrupting many different aspects of business and society. And their employees love it.

What is Global Entrepreneurship Week? #GEW

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

November 18 – 24 is an exciting time each year for the start-up, innovation, education, entrepreneur and broader communities of the world: it is Global Entrepreneurship Week (#GEW). And it is really “global” in every sense of the word.

The growing popularity of these events is partly due to the global connectivity of social media networks. Never before have so many buddy entrepreneurs had so much opportunity to use ‘free’ global communications tools to inspire, share and make connections, experiences and ideas. Twitter is buzzing with the hashtag #GEW, #GEW2013 and other country specific hashtags and LinkedIn provides opportunities for targeted networking: social media helps develop international relationships, introduced through #GEW, that many innovators will find as they pursue their goals.

So what is #GEN? Perhaps the best way for me, as a social media strategist, is to use social media (YouTube) and let the international organisers explain for themselves:

#GEW is here. Jump on, jump in or take that first step – it may just change your life! If nothing else, you will find following all the tweets and other social media posts and events an inspiring spectacle in its own right! So, enjoy and feel free to contact Optimize Business if you have any questions or queries. Here is the Australian GEW page link:

Minor CBA system upgrade leads to bank meltdown and social media backlash

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

The Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has taken a beating overnight on social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. What started as a ‘minor upgrade’ to NetBank ended in a social media and literal spat for cash. By 3am the issue had not been resolved, with CBA customers at the end of their tether.

Read the posts on Storify.

It all started with a small Facebook post on the CBA page on Sunday 27, 2013. It was not dissimilar to the outage notice of the night before (1am – 7am), about a minor upgrades, except this notice was of an earlier start to a 6 hour upgrade may impact some accounts from 6pm-12midnight on Sunday evening:

“We’re upgrading NetBank tonight, making several minor enhancements to Australia’s #1 online bank. NetBank, mobile, tablet and CommBank Kaching apps will be online, however some accounts and features will be unavailable 6pm-12midnight (AEDT) on Sunday 27 October. You can stay up-to-date commbank.com.au/update“

The post from the Saturday outage from 1am caused no ripples, with 56 people liking that update and about 25 comments. Sunday’s post, however, turned into something of a social media storm with 85 likes and nearly 500 Facebook comments on the post and over 100 comments directly on the Commonwealth Bank’s Facebook Page. The @NetBank Twitter account also did a short innocuous tweet about the same time, then seemed to go to sleep for two hours before it responded to the tweets for updates, cash and help. Initially mild queries and complaints came in of inconvenience came in:

small business owners lamented the timing for their Australian Taxation Office Business Activity Statement due on Monday;
some asked “is netbank not working at the moment?”

Then some more desperation started to appear in the posts, like from Angela on Facebook over a 2 hour period:

What is going on?? I tried to make a purchase from a store and my card was declined…I went to an ATM and i kept getting error messages…I have tried calling …no response…..NOT HAPPY
I’m pissed off…i’ve been a customer since forever..paid THOUSANDS in interest and this is the service I get????
And what is wrong with the call centre…why cant I get through to anybody ..it even hangs up on me!! Very frustrsting. Feel sorry for the person at my local branch in the morning

After several hours, the impact of the “minor up-grade” became more apparent, with CBA customers almost crying out for help:

unable to pay for dinner or takeaway
spending hours shopping then being unable to pay
“humiliation” and “embarrassment” at having their cards declined
people trapped at petrol stations with a full tank but unable to pay
others frantic to transfer money, pay rent or withdraw cash
customers unable to pay for flights and facing the possibility of losing flights
employers unable to pay their staff

And so the list of individual dramas, tension and frustration continued. Several CBA employees jumped in to defend the corporate giant and leading to with a tongue in cheek poke at impatient customers, led to them being identified as employees and images of their full name, work role and other details being taken as screen shots and posted online. CommBank posted a warning directed at several individuals, deleted several customer posts that identified an employee and reminded the customers of the Facebook Community Guidelines.

At 2:15 am CBA updated their web page with “We’ve had an unexpected issue that we’re working hard to resolve. We still have more investigation and testing to do before we bring our systems back up.”

At 2:30am the CBA posted on Facebook “Hi everyone, we apologies that NetBank still isn’t available right now. We’ve had an unexpected issue that we’re working hard to resolve. We still have more investigation and testing to do before we bring our systems back up. This is all the information we have at present, our next update will be later this morning. Again, we apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.”

And that brings us to 3am when this writer will cease monitoring the situation. I became involved while trying to phone the CBA tonight to advise of overseas transactions on my account, only to eventually get the message “we have encountered a technical problem” and the call was terminated by the CBA.

Twitter for Business: link your tweets to appear on Facebook!

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

: Get your Tweets posted on your Facebook page automatically! It is easy to set-up, go to the Twitter Help Center to learn more.

The Facebook Settings page (when you are logged in as a profile Administrator in Facebook) has a “Link to Twitter” button. This is a good way to post onto Twitter if your primary social media tool is Facebook.

But remember the most Twitter users will see of your Facebook post is 140 characters. This means you need to fashion your opening Facebook wording carefully to still make sense once it posts on Twitter. The link to your Facebook post in the Tweet will also decrease your available characters.

Optimize Business suggests doing the reverse: log into your Twitter account and then have your Tweets automatically post onto your Facebook page. This will mean that you have more control over the final text outcome that is communicated on both social media platforms. You can carefully craft your Tweet to 140 characters and this will then look and ‘feel’ better across both mediums.

You will probably find you end up doing more Facebook entries as well, because avid tweeters often end up tweeting more from their mobile devices…. so why not communicate to your Facebook crowd too!

If you want big, attention grabbing photographs or links to interesting articles, simply post direct to Facebook to ensure you do not get a thumbnail of the Twitter photograph.

Need a store on your Facebook page?

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Andrew McIntosh CPA, Optimize Business

Product information from Payvment’s Facebook page.

If you find you are driving interactions with your customers and fans via Facebook, why not add a store to your Facebook page?

Didn’t think it was possible? Well, applications, or “Apps” as they are affectionately know as, are a real revolution in the functionality of software these days. From social medias like Facebook, to accounting software like Xero, you can get an App for just about anything to enhance or quasi-customise your software purchase.

One such App is Payvment. Currently offering a free online store to Facebook users, its a god send to businesses that have developed a heavy Facebook following. Many business face the customer experience problem of moving customers from social media to webpages or external shops or payment providers, but Payvment is an example of a great way to enhance your Facebook experience and secure a secure a sale or lead in the process. Check out Payvment.com on the web, via Facebook or Twitter.

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