Small Business Talk

No doubt you’ve heard someone — even a highly educated someone, expound about the failure rates for small business. Some say that 90% of small businesses will fail in the first 5 years. Others use the 60% failure in the first three years.

In fact, you can pretty much find any old numbers to support any dire predictions. But mostly it’s all wrong. It’s pretty much unreliable.

Which is really good news if you are looking at opening a small business. The failure (as in horrible, disastrous failures) isn’t as high as you have been told. And, we don’t exactly know what the failure rate is, and it’s likely to fluctuate considerably depending on economic conditions.

Here’s the simple reason. It’s definitional. While there are studies all over the place about business failure, how business failure is defined varies from place to place, and often it includes businesses that have been sold (even for large profits), or closed due to death, or family issues, or a number of other reasons.

So, it may be true that x percent of small businesses close within x years of starting, but we do not know WHY they closed, or whether they “failed” or not.

Running a successful small business is difficult, but if you feel you have the vocation and have the skills and desire, don’t let the numbers discourage you. Since the numbers, at leat in this case, simply don’t mean much without knowing HOW the numbers have been calculated and exatly what the numbers mean.

Many small business miss out on the opportunities to use low cost promotional items (e.g. imprinted itemts) to promote and market their businesses, and build brand visibility and identity. Many of us know little about how to do this, or we don’t even consider this as an option.

If you would like to learn more about the use of promotional items you can apply to receive a free subscription to Successful Promotions. Here’s the brief summary:

Successful Promotions shows you how effective imprinted promotional items can be for any kind of campaign. Planning an event or meeting…learn about travel destinations and incentives items that motivate. Whether you want to attract or reward talented employees, thank loyal clients, find new prospects or tout your new products and services, Successful Promotions can help with true-life case histories, usable marketing strategies and showcases of proven promotional products nine times per year.

There are various critical decision points in the life of a small business, and each one can push a business to the next level, or cripple it, depending on the decision made.

One of these decisions has to do with whether one decides to expand an existing business, or to maintain an equilibrium.

As a small business owner you will find that there are several “levels” of size that vary a lot from each other, even though the leap from one to the next seems small.

For example, moving from a sole proprietorship without having any employees to the next level, which is having at least one or more employees is a huge jump, because the skills needed to run a business with employees is quite different than those required to make a sole proprietership work if it has no employees.

Then, moving from a business with one or two employees to one employing more employees than you can reasonably manage or supervisor is the next leap. Once again, the skills you need to do this are quite different than the previous two levels.

The decision to grow your business (growing in the sense of adding personnel) is one that needs to take into account:

• your current skills
• your desire to develop your skill
• your tolerance of financial risk (expansion increases risk)
• your lifestyle preferences (owning a growing or larger business results in a rather different lifestyle than running a one person shop).

Small businesses tend to build websites without really following a set of sensible “thought-exercises” that will ensure sucess, which is one reason why most small business websites fail miserably.

One neglected aspect is the Unique Value Proposition that your website will or does offer visitors. This should be established early on, before any website coding is done, and it unique value proposition should reflect a need on the part of your market or potential visitor pool.

For example, this site is based on several different UVP’s, one of which is based on the potential visitor’s problem of finding good reputable, no bull, semi non commercial information about small business that isn’t, in effect spam, and is also available at no charge. Hence we are building two human reviewed directories so visitors don’t have to wade through machine generated junk from search engines.

So, first things first, which is that when planning for your small business website, always start with how you will fulfil some visitor need in your target market. Of course, there’s much more, and we’ll cover more topics soon.

We’ve built a number of websites for our small business, and it may be immodest but a number of our sites (not all) have been extremely successful in a number of ways.

This site (smallbusiness411.org) is, of course, in the process of being built, so I decided to share with readers the thinking, and actions that go into what presumably will be another successful site. We’ll chronicle our thinking, goals, purposes and so on, and explain our decisions as we go.