A few years ago, one of my first business coaching sessions was with an entrepreneur who had spent a year and a half in development. He’d given up a well-paid job and spent about $25,000 on developing an App. He had no real business plan. When I pointed out that he had notionally invested about a quarter of million dollars on the App, he drew a deep breath of entrepreneurial fatigue, and said disheartenly, “Well, I suppose so.”
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!
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 🙂
Optimize Business understands pharmacy As your business pushes through the scripts, orders the retail and behind the counter stock, balances the cash, pays the bills, drops off the banking and tries to spend time with talking with every customer…. should you be embarking on a new marketing strategy to embrace social media in your pharmacy?
Social media for pharmacies Social media can be overwhelming at times: content (photographs, images and text), online communities, tone of voice, moderation, legal considerations, time management, public verses personal posts, timely responses to customers… Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter… a blog? Where should you start? Do you even need to start using social media?
We understand social media Pharmacy is a unique business and every pharmacy is unique. Don’t jump into social media with out carefully selecting what best suits your needs. Nothing is worse than a business that started Facebook or Tweeting but has not done an update in the last year or two. It is part of a pharmacy’s public face, just like a shop window, it is either neat and tidy, or run-down and tired. Even worse perhaps, there is no shop window for your Pharmacy! We have great experience with social media, let us help you!
Let us guide you through the process Pharmacists are called on to do a lot of things. Let Optimize Business help you assess your business needs for social media. We’ll sit down with you to understand your customers, your opportunities for social and then we either train up you and/or your staff or you can hand it all over to Optimize Business for a complete outsourced solution.
Our approach We are flexible and will work to meet your individual needs. We will also tell you straight out if we think social media is not right for you. We will also talk to you about social media advertising, it is constantly changing but provides direct access to local customers you choose to communicate with.
Needs analysis
Strategy development
Initial account configuration
Content creation
Outsource 100% or in-house training
Build & engage your community
Social advertising
Grow your business!
To take advantage of current promotional offers, enter your details below and we will contact you:
On Tuesday Telstra hosted the 2013 Australian Digital Summit in Melbourne, social media and the #DigitalSummit hashtag went into overdrive.
Tools, strategies, innovations and techniques are constantly evolving in the digital space.
If you have not seen Storify before, please take a look at what it does here and also check out our story as a resource to catch up on what you may have missed at the Digital Summit!Today we spent about an hour using “Storify” to create a record of the #socialmedia chatter that surrounded the hashtag #DigitalSummit this week.
It is not often you get things for free, but Company Pages from LinkedIn give small business owners, managers, NFP and NGOs a chance to showcase their organisation for no cost (at the time of this blog!). Linked in Company Pages currently have four sections:
Home page
Products and services
Careers
Insights (including views)
Will creating a company page on LinkedIn really make any difference? Well, have you noticed how when you are searching for a local business or person on Google, LinkedIn profiles typically rank very high in the ‘natural search’ results.
Natural search is what Google finds based on its proprietary search algorithms and ranks the results for you to review.
Paid search are results that appear (usually at the top or side of your search engine results page) that are only there based on advertisers paying for you to seem them based on your key words and phrases used in your search.
Adding a company page to LinkedIn strengthens the natural search result rankings of your business. You can create a Home page and Product / Service descriptions with links to your other websites and social media accounts. While not only providing a free way to showcase your business, it also provides a structured way to think through your products and service offerings.
You can link individual LinkedIn profiles of your management team and key staff to each product or service. You also have the option to ‘pay’ for your job listings in the “Careers” section of your Company Pages. This paid service targets your job vacancies to those meeting your requirements and will cost about $200 AUD for a 30 day local posting in Melbourne (Australia).
Check out the attached guide for more information on LinkedIn Company Pages above. You can create a Company Page from the links here at LinkedIn FAQ.
It is not often you get things for free, but Company Pages from LinkedIn give small business owners, managers, NFP and NGOs a chance to showcase their organisation for no cost (at the time of this blog!). Linked in Company Pages currently have four sections:
Home page
Products and services
Careers
Insights (including views)
Will creating a company page on LinkedIn really make any difference? Well, have you noticed how when you are searching for a local business or person on Google, LinkedIn profiles typically rank very high in the ‘natural search’ results.
Natural search is what Google finds based on its proprietary search algorithms and ranks the results for you to review.
Paid search are results that appear (usually at the top or side of your search engine results page) that are only there based on advertisers paying for you to seem them based on your key words and phrases used in your search.
Adding a company page to LinkedIn strengthens the natural search result rankings of your business. You can create a Home page and Product / Service descriptions with links to your other websites and social media accounts. While not only providing a free way to showcase your business, it also provides a structured way to think through your products and service offerings.
You can link individual LinkedIn profiles of your management team and key staff to each product or service. You also have the option to ‘pay’ for your job listings in the “Careers” section of your Company Pages. This paid service targets your job vacancies to those meeting your requirements and will cost about $200 AUD for a 30 day local posting in Melbourne (Australia).
Check out the attached guide for more information on LinkedIn Company Pages above. You can create a Company Page from the links here at LinkedIn FAQ.
Having worked with many accounting and invoicing systems over the last 20 years, Optimize Business knows a good billing solution when we see one. That is why Optimize Business uses and recommends Freshbooks. It offers the convenience of cloud accounting and an easy of use and efficiency you have to see to believe.
Forget about backing up your invoices: it is done in the cloud
Stop fussing with an email or envelope: it is delivered in the click of a button
Convert that estimate to an invoice and email: done in seconds
Visit our Optimize Business Bookshop for the latest books, DVD’s and resources to optimize your business performance
It is great for small business start-ups who can use it free for three or less clients and even better for bigger businesses who can streamline their invoicing process with the click of a button. And the best part? Clients pay quicker because of the paper-less email delivery and the easy of payment!
This is why Optimize Business is pleased make Freshbooks available to Australian and New Zealand business through our relationship with Freshbooks. In fact, Freshbooks can be used by any business, anywhere! From Deli to Denver, over 5 million businesses are using Freshbooks.
So why not test drive this great product? We did, and we were so impressed with the customer service, support and user experience, that we can’t help but recommend it! Try it for free:
Is your small business on Twitter? Do you understand how Twitter works and why so many small businesses have jumped onto Twitter?
The above two minute video from Twitter gives a basic understanding of how you might use this social media for your organisation or business. Optimize Business uses Twitter as the main form of social media to engage, communicate ideas, develop business relationships and keep abreast of the latest news or trends in business.
Social media is an investment in our brand. Five years ago, people would use a search engine like Google to find your website, learn about your business and assess if they want to do business with you. Today, consumers and businesses also look at your social media presence to gauge “who you are”: YouTube is now one of the most popular search platforms and Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are also being used to find businesses.
Unlike Google and Yahoo!, if you are not ‘present’ in Twitter (for example), you will not appear in the results of a search that is done within Twitter. Your business will be Missing in Action in the Twitterspere, this is unless your customers are talking about you (good or bad!), or worse, your competitors are filling your void.
The absence of “your voice” from social media platforms, like Twitter, says something to the world about your business. For those who have used social media to find you, or to talk to you, your absence from their preferred channel will be noted and probably not in a good way.
It is important not to just jump into social media. You should speak to other businesses that use social media, and make sure it is done in a planned way, as part of a social media strategy that suits your brand, your business and your customers. A failed social media presence is perhaps even worse that no social media at all.
Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn and other forms of social media, each “Tweet” is limited to only a 140 characters. Other forms of social media have larger word limits. Tweets therefore need to be short, engaging and easy to understand. The 140 character limit is quite helpful in helping you take the ‘padding’ out of your business communications.
So back to Twitter. It is a great tool for start-ups, small and large businesses alike. You can easily share (tweet) links to videos, blogs, webpages and photos to provide richer content with your short Twitter ‘broadcasts.’ If you content is engaging, you will probably find each tweet brings in additional new followers and people may share your communications by retweeting (RT) your message.
Twitter is a free social media tool that provides an incredible networking and communication channel into the hands of even the tiniest business, NGO or NFP. You can do a lot of targeted ‘campaigns’ yourself for free:
Twitter can provide almost perfect customer targeting, for free! Just search for a topic relevant to your organisation on Twitter.com and look at the people that are engaging in discussions or following others on that topic. Then search through the “followers” of relevant people and you will find people, businesses and organisations that are interested in the topic. These people will therefore be likely to follow you back if you follow them. Be a little selective in who you follow (avoid those who you would not really want following you) and you can easily build up your own followers by simply following those with common interests to your own.
Businesses, large and small, can also pay to have their products or services promoted on Twitter, via promoted “accounts” and promoted “tweets”. This video gives you a good sense of how you can pay to promote your organisation, but most new Twitter users would initially try the free approach outlined in the paragraph above.
For more information, Twitter publishes a great guide to get your organisation started on this exciting social media platform: Twitter for Small Business.
2012 Andrew McIntosh CPA Optimize Business @Optimize_Biz
For the sake of business, don’t for get to “Allow Subscribers”!
If you are running a business page on Facebook, don’t forget to go into your Facebook Settings (found on the top right of your page) and tick the “Allow Subscribers”check box.
A few years ago, one of my first business coaching sessions was with an entrepreneur who had spent a year and a half in development. He’d given up a well-paid job and spent about $25,000 on developing an App. He had no real business plan. When I pointed out that he had notionally invested about a quarter of million dollars on the App, he drew a deep breath of entrepreneurial fatigue, and said disheartenly, “Well, I suppose so.”
Home page
Optimize Business 