How to Get the Best Employees for a Small Business

Attracting the Right Talent to Meet Your Business Needs

When job seekers are looking for their next career opportunity, it is safe to say that some of them do not dream of working for a small business. Many talented business professionals seek jobs where they feel their skills are most desired and most useful and, more often than not, this lends itself to larger corporations and businesses. But when small businesses advertise a working environment that appeals to the talent they are looking for, it is much easier for an owner to find and hire the right people for the job. Here are some ways that small businesses can attract the best employees for their organization.

Develop the Right Culture within Your Business

In a recent study, almost 50 percent of job seekers expressed that they would like to work for an organization that has a clan culture. Clan culture is defined as a business that harbors a team-orientated, collaborative working environment with leaders who facilitate, mentor, and help build a well-working team. If your business already operates in this manner, congratulations – you are one step closer to finding and retaining the right people for your organization. If a business does not operate in this way, it may be worthwhile to take a hard look at the organization’s culture and see what changes can be made to help not only attract talent but also help keep current employees engaged, productive and happy.

Another popular culture that job seekers look for is a market culture. Market culture is defined by its orientation to competition with leaders who are competitive and value profitability, goal achievements, and market share results. Almost 21 percent of job seekers expressed that they prefer this type of business culture, which is still a large percent of the potential employment group. If your business does not necessarily fit into the clan culture mindset, market culture may be worth looking into. While market culture may seem cut throat in many ways, it is important to note that this culture is more geared to being aggressive in the industry and working together to keep the business’s competitive edge.

Introduce a Job Seekers Potential Manager Early in the Hiring Process

Not every job seeker likes the same type of management style, just as every manager has their own way of directing employees. It is always important to introduce a potential new hire to his or her direct supervisor and other leaders early in the interview process. A quick “hello,” however, may not be enough for a potential new employee to get a good feel of their management style. Consider having your leadership staff be a part of the interview process or put together an information packet about the managers with their photos, biography, and some insight into their management techniques. This will give job seekers a better idea of whether their working style will mesh well with leader’s management style.

For many job seekers, the actual job itself is not a huge draw for them to work for a specific company. As shown in the study discussed here, individuals looking for employment opportunities are more interested in the working environment, culture, and management style of a business than what the physical job entails. By making sure to develop the right business culture and bringing managers and leadership into the fold early in the interview process, small business owners have a much higher chance of not only attracting the right talent but retaining the best employees for years to come.

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Dealing with Negative Reviews about Your Business

How to Handle Bad Feedback from Online Reviewers

The internet has given consumers an opportunity to express their feelings about a business’s service, whether it is good or bad. Webpages such as Yelp, Google Reviews and Angie’s List are open forums for customers to tell the world about their experiences with any given organization. While positive reviews are great for attracting new business, negative reviews can be equally damaging to a business’s reputation and profits. While there is no way to prevent bad reviews from making it online, there are some ways that small business owners can offset and even learn from negative customer reviews.

Review Your Customers Reviews Regularly

Business owners need to know how their customers feel about the business. While a customer may seem happy when they speak with you in person, they could be masking a negative experience. Statistics show that the majority of people will not voice their complaints directly to a business, but will go home and write about their experience in an online forum. Because of this, make sure to check what customers are saying online on a regular basis. While this should not become an obsessive behavior, it is important to remember that a customer’s experience is important to the business overall.

Keep an Eye Out for Negative Reviews from Competitors

Many online review sites do not allow businesses to post reviews about their competition – Yelp, for example, prohibits these types of posts on their website. Because of this, it is important to take notice and look out for competing business owners who may be adding negative reviews to bring down the business’s overall rating. If you spot suspicious activity, make sure to contact the review website and request that they investigate or take down the post. More often than not, if it can be proven that a competitor posted the negative review, the website will quickly remove it from public view.

Respond to both Negative and Positive Customer Reviews

For a consumer, it is important for them to know that a business owner is actively engaged with their business and customers. An easy way to build a rapport with consumers is by joining into the conversation on business review sites. When you come across a negative review complaining about customer service or a particular product, respond to the comments by apologizing for the customer’s inconvenience and offering to reach out to the customer to find a solution form them. While it is important to respond to negative reviews, it is also key to respond to the positive reviews. When a consumer writes something great about your business, make sure to thank them for the great feedback.

Learn and Grow

One of the most important things a business owner can do about negative reviews is learning from them. By truly taking customer’s input into consideration, an owner can help to grow their business in a positive direction and help to correct problems they may not even have known existed. If a consumer is upset with the level of customer service being offered, consider offering employees a training course on the subject. If there are issues with shipping and delivery times, look into other vendors to provide that service and help to elevate the consumers overall experience with your business.

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Are you Ready to Become an Entrepreneur?

Tips to Help You Transition from Employee to Business Owner

Becoming successful owning your own business takes more than a great concept and the right business connections. While these two points are important, making the jump from working for someone to working for yourself takes a complete mindset change that may also include changing some habits along the way – some of the habits that we work tirelessly to master as good employees often do not help but hinder when it comes to being your own boss. Making this important mental transition is the key to becoming successful in your business and helping it to thrive for years to come.

Prepare Yourself to Play Multiple Roles

When working as a fulltime employee, individuals are generally tasked with handling one area of the business. When something goes wrong with a program, server or piece of equipment, unless that is your given position, you would usually call someone else to fix it. When becoming an entrepreneur, you become the person that everyone calls when things go wrong – small business owners are the accountants, IT department, marketing managers and sales representatives for their business. When transitioning to these new roles, make sure you are ready to be everything to everyone in your business.

Working Long Hours is OK

When people imagine working as their own boss, the usually imagine more leisure time and signing into check on their business while lying on the beach in a faraway country. The hard reality is that owning a business is nothing at all like this – being an entrepreneur usually means working longer hours than when you were a fulltime employee for someone else. Starting and maintaining a business is a lot of work, which is why it is crucially important to break into a business or industry that you love. Like grandpa always told us, “if you’re doing what you love, you will never work a day in your life.”

Practice the Art of Saying ‘No’

One of the skills that we work to improve while being an employee is the idea of saying ‘yes’ to everything and working hard to get recognition. Saying ‘yes’ generally equates to being reliable, responsible, hardworking and a team player, all the things employees should strive to be. But, when you become an entrepreneur, it becomes more and more important to teach yourself the art of saying ‘no’ when something is simply not feasible. Focusing on your and the business’s main priorities is most important and when there is no time to work on something else, you need to be able to say ‘no.’

Make Sure to Manage Money Properly

While many of the points that have been discussed focus on an individual’s mindset, it is also important to complete some practical tasks as well to help the business, and yourself, be successful. One of the hardest areas for new entrepreneurs to handle is going from being a salaried worker to wondering where the money will come from to pay the mortgage. In order to help relieve some of the financial stresses, start putting money into an account before you leave your fulltime job and make sure there is enough money to cover at least 6 months of expenses before striking out on your own.

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Improving Your Customer Service

Three Keys to Amazing Customer Service to Grow Your Business

Great customer service is the most important aspect of growing a loyal and happy customer base. When a customer is treated in a friendly, respectful manner and given the things they believe they deserve, it will have them coming back to your business over and over again. But, in many cases, great customer service is a lost art – not many businesses nowadays have made this crucial aspect of customer relations a priority or have forgotten how important it is to the growth and prosperity of their business and with advances in social media, unhappy consumers have more places to let other know about their bad experience. If your business is struggling with customer service, here are some tips to get back on track.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

Part of providing great customer service is handling issues and problem when they go wrong and making it right for the customer as quickly as possible. The best way to accomplish this is to have a process in place to handle problems before they even come up. Think of the most common customer complaints and how to solve them, this way when a customer does report an issue, it can be solved quickly and efficiently. Additionally, make sure to express the most sincerest apology for their issues, even if it is not the business’s fault – when customers feel your sincerity and your willingness to make the problem right for them, they are more likely to calm down, making the restoration process that much easier.

Have Quality Products and Services

Another important aspect of great customer service is providing customers with high quality products and services, another way the business can be proactive instead of reactive. When a product or service is worth the money it is being sold for not only are consumers more likely to buy but employees are much happier and more eager to sell the product or service as well. Additionally, high quality items will usually satisfy a customer’s needs and wants exactly how they are, making customer service complaints less likely and less frequent. When a business starts off on the right foot with what products and/or services it offers the public, it is much more likely to succeed in the area of great customer service.

Speed is Key

With advances in technology and social media and the continuing competition that continues to grow in many industries, consumers have lost a lot of their patience and are quick to wag their fingers at businesses with poor customer service in these public forums. Customers will not take the time to wait for a business to correct a problem before moving on to the next closest competitor and hurting the original business’s reputation and possible profits along the way. A great way to counteract this is, again, to have processes in place to handle customer complaints quickly. Also, when a business provides great customer service, consumers who have experienced it are more willing to wait for a resolution.

Customer service is one of the key pillars of a profitable and successful business. It is important to remember that the consumers who purchase your products or services is what makes having a business possible – their purchases help to pay your employees, your overhead and other aspects of running your business. Providing great customer service and making customers feel important to you and the business is key in building a large, loyal customer base. When a business masters these customer service tips, it will help to make their customers happier and send profit margins through the roof.

Learning how to properly communicate with customers and satisfy their needs is a basic survival skill for small business owners. If your legitimate home business is struggling, you may want to contact Stacy O'Quinn to see how he can help you become more profitable. For more information, click here.

Should You Move Your Small Business Data to the Cloud?

What to Think About before Going Digital

It is no secret that many small businesses struggle with how and where to store data. With limited hard drive, email and other storage space available, moving to a cloud service may seem like a great option to free up in-office storage capacities and help improve computing capabilities. But, before jumping into “the cloud” there are some important points that small business owners should consider and risks that should be closely evaluated – moving important and sometimes sensitive business information to a cloud vendor is a huge move that should not be taken without some serious thought.

Make Yourself Aware of Legal Liabilities

Many businesses have internal auditing rules that govern how important or sensitive information is handled. One of the first things to consider before moving to a cloud service is whether or not using this type of service violates any of the internal standards that are set for the organization. It is also important to identify whether or not your business operates within a regulated industry or handles transactions with a government agency – these types of business transactions are often subject to different restrictions as far as data handling and management goes. Make sure to gather and understand any and all pertinent information before signing on to work with a cloud services vendor.

Find the Right Cloud Services Vendor

It is relatively easy for different vendors to offer cloud services. This gives businesses a choice between larger, more established vendors and smaller, start-up vendors. When choosing a cloud service to work with, consider what the business’s comfort level is – although smaller vendors may be perfectly able to provide services, are you comfortable being one of their first clients? It is important to consider aspects such as customer reviews, references and performance before choosing a vendor. Reliable and fast service is critical to cloud storage since this vendor will quickly become your business’s information technology department. Above all else, make sure you are comfortable with the vendor you choose.

Consider Back Up forms of Storage

It is very likely that the business’s data will be safe and secure on a cloud service – many professionals and business have been using cloud services for years and have reported few problems. But it is also important to consider the worst case scenario and consider putting a backup plan in place for important information. One way to put this safeguard in place is to periodically backup data that is being stored in the cloud. This can be done through exporting the information from the cloud to an external storage device or some vendors offer cloud backup services – these vendors allow businesses to keep copies of their cloud on local servers. This simply adds another layer of security for important business data.

Using local computer hard drives or server software is the most traditional way for businesses to store their data. Although this is effective, large amounts of data can often slow down computer and network performance, frustrating both the business owner and their employees. Luckily, technology has made it more possible for businesses to store data in places other than local hard drives – while clouds have made business life easier it is not without much consideration that many organizations choose to use this service. If you are considering cloud services for your small business, make sure to look at the big picture and seriously contemplate whether this technology is right for your company.

Moving to the cloud is just one decision a small business owner must make. If you are struggling to turn a profit with your legitimate home business, you may need some help or just a better opportunity. To find out how Stacy O'Quinn can help you like he has helped dozens of other business owners, click here.

*Photo Courtesy of Elvert Barnes via Creative Commons License