Archive for category: Build A Better Business

LinkedIn is a tool that can help your business in many ways, including as a marketing arm and research tool. But how do you maximize the effectiveness of your usage to ensure that you build a following of loyal customers?

Marketing agencies can help with your outreach via other media, and the decision to use such an agency for targeted advertising and definition of your optimal customer base could pay dividends to your business’s growth. However, no one knows your business better than you do. The importance of telling potential customers the story of how your business came to be, and what it exists to do, is undeniable.

So how do we harness the power of connection through LinkedIn to raise awareness about our story and purpose?

Attention Grabbers

Part of telling your story is grabbing the interest of the audience in the first few seconds. In a world of scrolling FOMO drones, give the audience something to make them stop and pay attention. Visuals are typically the most responded to addition to any LinkedIn post, and that includes the visuals of your business and its people.

As a storyteller and representative for the business, make sure your profile photo is professional and sets the tone for what you represent. A head and shoulders photo of you looking directly into the camera is best, and make sure it currently represents your day-to-day appearance.

Additionally, you are going to want to make your profile photo stand out by enhancing it with the cover photo for your profile. A photo of the Grand Canyon is great, but it doesn’t exactly tell the viewer what your business is about unless you are selling donkey rides into the Grand Canyon. Aim for a photo that immediately conveys what your business does or where it does business. You can even forgo a photo and replace it with a graphic that supports your story with text, but minimize the number of words and utilize complementary colors that match the photo and format of your profile.

After your visuals are set, it’s time to use your keyboard as a paintbrush and illustrate the essence of what you do with words. A professional headline is what people will see first, so make sure you include two or three brief descriptions of what you do for the business, as well as two or three personal details that will help you be memorable and provide a talking point when first making contact.  Make sure to use “I” language in your About Me section as well, so that the reader feels that you are more personable and approachable.

Focus The Attention On Your Message

Once you have your audience’s attention, and you have helped them become familiar with yourself and your business, it is time to focus their attention on your message. You want to create an awareness of your story and your goals. You need to convey how you and your business can help serve their own goals and purpose. To do this, you must give the reader something that resonates with them. And nothing resonates with an audience like authenticity.

Sharing your story on LinkedIn allows you to become more than an enterprise fighting for the dollars of the public. There are many unique ways to spread your message, including short and impactful posts. Links to long-form content hosted either on LinkedIn or a business website or blog, allow for even more insight into who you are as a business. Video content, polls, and how-to posts also help in spreading your message through more attractive and interactive outreach. Providing value to a potential customer is the best pursuit strategy for gaining their business, and LinkedIn is a free resource that is invaluable in introducing yourself to those customers at minimal cost.

Quality of Connections

There are many approaches to take when trying to woo an audience into your network. Consistent content is a necessity, but consistency doesn’t connect if the message isn’t personable.

To connect with your audience you need to make them care. Customers who care are customers who spend.

People want to spend their money with people or businesses that they like and know. Using LinkedIn to let the customer know about you is effective, but connection is a two-way street. To build a relationship that grows into a partnership, you need to know about the other party as well. Today’s social media and scheduling apps are great at reminding you about birthdays or events in the life of a contact, but everyone knows that the generic greetings are done as a task and not a genuine act of appreciation or well wishes.

Taking the time to make your messages personal is key in letting the customer know that you recognize them as something more than just a business contact. That builds a stronger connection with the customer which can be impactful for years to come.

Looking to tell your business story? We can help with that. Give us a call.

No matter how small or large a business may be when starting up, it will always face the question of how to get more awareness for its brand. Most companies lack substantial marketing or advertising budgets to begin with. They find their customers in the most organic way possible through one-to-one outreach. What happens when that route has grown stagnant?

That is when the business owner typically considers paying others to market and advertise for them. With that option comes many questions that can lead to paralysis by analysis. After all, there are a lot of aspects to consider when defining the approach your company will take to reach its next level of growth, including what its value may be currently and what its potential value may be with the correct marketing approach.

Word of Mouth or Word of Agency

When you are ready to spend money on additional advertising, you will look for the most impactful method available. You will find yourself questioning what your best options are for achieving customer growth.

You can continue to pursue sales the same way you have been and redirect any marketing stipends toward product improvements or infrastructure enhancement. After all, your business has reached its current level with only your hard work since you are far from being an absentee owner. Word of mouth has been your marketing approach so far, which has worked. Can a marketing agency make that much of a difference? Well, that depends.

The first question you will ask yourself is if your target customers are in a very narrow or niche market. Will they only respond to a very technically savvy or experienced approach? If your answer is yes then you can continue growing your business through a self-directed approach. For example, you can attempt to gain traction through organic advertising on social media sites. However, only two to five percent of your fans on a site like Facebook will see your posts in their feed unless you spend money with the host to advertise. That is where a marketing agency can be very useful for a business with a narrow market. They can keep you from wasting your money on low-impact pursuits and instead leverage your cash for higher-cost but more impactful advertising.

Ready To Hire

After evaluating your market and realizing that you need to gain new customers and not just repeat customers, you decide to move forward with getting some outside marketing help. A common question for small business owners at this point is at what level of revenue they should hire a marketing agency. Again, it depends. The cost of hiring an agency can vary from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. You will need to evaluate what it is exactly you require so that you can get an idea of the cost.

The thing to remember when evaluating the need for hiring an agency is if you are looking for targeted areas of advertising or if you require a more holistic pursuit of marketing your business. As your need for more variety grows, so will the potential benefits of an agency.

Best Avenues

Marketing is a scheduled activity that you plan for that is repeatable. If that planned activity is for paid search or SEO, finding an expert in that specific discipline will be more advantageous. You can spend more money on a singular targeted area with an expert than you would be spending for an umbrella of marketing services that you would find from an agency. The downside of choosing a specialist is that you won’t know how effective your advertising budget could be if spent on other approaches.

Another option is to find someone who is very skilled in multiple disciplines of advertising and hire them as an employee. That allows you to have your marketing handled in-house, with all the benefits of having them as an employee. These types of candidates can be difficult to find, however, as it takes years of experience and a gifted person to excel in multiple marketing skill sets. Even then, they are likely to be proficient in all areas of advertising. You will also have the added concern of them being poached by other companies, leaving all of your marketing pursuits unattended.

A final option for bringing in marketing help is to go with an agency that will typically have top-level talent in each area of advertising method. You will likely pay more for these services, but you can utilize their expertise in multiple campaign directions at a single package price.

Deciding how to proceed in improving your company’s reach is not an easy task. Knowing your growth goals and your available budget for hiring assistance to achieve those goals is critical to making the correct decision.

If you want to know some names of agencies we trust to help with your digital marketing, give us a call.

We may not think about it too often, but there’s a lot of planning that goes into making sure Americans have chicken, beef, and pork waiting for them when they walk into grocery stores to buy. The pandemic threw a curveball at US producers, who didn’t want to miss out on current demand but also needed to forecast into the future. One of those producers who’ve been getting a lot of attention recently is Tyson. We’re going to take a look at the multiple factors affecting their performance and what we as small business owners can learn from a big business like theirs.

Prices Matter

Tyson has been dealing with consumer pushback on higher prices. These higher prices have been caused by two pressures on Tyson:

• Labor shortages have caused wages inside Tyson to rise
• Lower supply of meat from producers have led to higher acquisition costs for Tyson

We’ll talk more about both of these issues in a moment, but in the medium term it seems that consumers do have a limit as to what they are willing to pay for meat and Tyson is finding that out firsthand.

Small Business Lesson:

It’s important to get the pricing right for your products and services. What are your competitors charging and how do those prices relate to yours? What is coming up in the short and medium term future that should lead you to consider a price change? What event(s) could lead consumers to buy less from you?

Employees Matter

The pandemic reset a lot of people’s expectations about work. Broken from the spell of the daily grind, many stopped to ask themselves what they were doing with their lives and they sought better answers than what they had been previously pursuing. This has led to a still-visible impairment in the service industry and the same is true at Tyson, though it had already suffered reputational damage for poor employment practices for years prior to this.

Small Business Lesson:

If Tyson hadn’t been so relentlessly focused on the bottom line and realized that there are actual people, not only robots, working in their plants, they would have put together a long-term strategic plan to raise wages and compete for labor, creating a culture that makes people want to work at Tyson, not have to work at Tyson.

Small Business Lesson:

Have you been creating a culture for your employees that makes them want to work there, not just have to work there? If not, why not?

Vendors Matter

Often Tyson is the single largest buyer of meat in a given geographic region, giving them powers resembling a monopoly, which they have abused, both when they buy and when they sell (as lawsuits have proved). Frustrated by long-term issues with the company and the already-thin margins they deal with, many small producers have headed for the exits, leaving Tyson with fewer options to deal with consumer demand.

Small Business Lesson:

Do you show appreciation for the vendors that help your business exist? Or do you just take them for granted, or worse, like Tyson, take advantage of them?

Accounting Matters

As its stock price has cratered as a result of its net operating income losses (the first seen at the company in many years), Tyson has used a one-time goodwill impairment charge to deal with some of its losses. What that means in English to those of us who don’t do accounting for a living is that Tyson took a slice of their intangible goodwill and charged it off to make a quarter not look as bad on paper as it was.

Small Business Lesson:

Small businesses don’t have to be accountable to stock price fluctuations, so they don’t really ever have to worry about writing off their goodwill. But do you know what the value of the goodwill in your business is? You would if you did a valuation. That’s a key step in getting any business ready to sell.

Predictions Matter

It’s tough to navigate the market as a big business, particularly in the industry that Tyson serves, which has to account for multiple inputs that have proven to be less predictable over time. Tyson’s production ramp-up during the pandemic has turned out to be a mistake and they are paying the price for it now in stock, sales, and reputational damage.

Small Business Lesson:

It’s not possible to get every prediction right as you try to navigate the waters of your industry. But too many business owners get excited about the upside and don’t prepare well enough for the downside. As you make big moves for your small business, always remember to cover that downside.

If you need help examining these lessons for your small business, we’re here for you. Give us a call.

One of the big social media giants, Twitter, recently rebranded as X, and another, Instagram, launched a product called Threads. We’ve talked in the past about rebranding (and how not to do a brand refresh) and launching new products and we thought these two recent high-profile happenings offered some helpful general reminders for all business owners.

X Marks the Spot

To understand “why X” you have to go back in Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial journey, almost back to the beginning.

In 1999, Elon had just sold a city guide website called Zip2 to Compaq, who wanted it for its search engine. He made $22M on the deal and put $18M of it to X.com, which was to be an online hub for every kind of financial transaction in the world. He would eventually merge with another company called PayPal, which soon became the name of the merged company when Musk was ousted. He bought back the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017 “for sentimental reasons” but clearly he always felt there was unfinished business.

So now that you know there’s a history of “X” with Musk, you have to see his purchase of Twitter as simply an acquisition of a very engaged customer base to offer more products to. His vision of the new company is not simply a messaging, “tweeting” application (which has limited monetizable value) but an “everything” app similar to Grab and WeChat in Asia, offering messaging, social media, food delivery, and crucially, payments. 

Musk wants to create a content hub, then pay the creators in an ecosystem they (and users) can then spend the money in. Business professors who have often never built a single business in their lives are roasting Musk for “destroying Twitter’s brand value” but that brand name wasn’t equipped for what Musk planned to do. So he got rid of it.

Key small business lesson:  If your brand is aligned with your future, don’t change it! But if your brand can’t take you where you want to go, you’ll have to change it, perhaps radically, and try to get your customers to come along with you.

Threads Already Unraveling

Long before Musk revealed the new name for the former Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg had a team working on an app called Threads, which was supposed to be a Twitter killer. Zuckerberg had smelled blood in the chaotic takeover of Twitter that Musk was involved in and rushed to create an app to capitalize on that.

Its launch in early July 2023 was promising. Since Threads used the Instagram infrastructure, users could simply import their account info and would get a feed similar to what they were used to on Instagram. Within seven hours of its launch, Zuckerberg claimed 10M people had joined the app and soon raced past 100M users. 

But six weeks later those numbers are a distant memory. The number of average daily users has declined steadily and as of the time of this article is hovering around 10M. For perspective, Twitter’s number of average daily users is north of 110M.

Apart from the first complaint most people had (“why do I need another social media app?”) Threads lacked functions that users associated with Twitter: search, hashtags, even a discovery page. People also were used to using Twitter to follow current events and pop culture, in which a popular TV show could be discussed side-by-side with political happenings. The experience on Threads seemed to be entirely disconnected.

It seems, oddly, that Zuckerberg may have forgotten how Google tried a “me too” social network some years ago to try to take on Facebook (Remember Google+? Yeah, most people don’t.) and it failed miserably because Facebook occupied that position well and Google miscalculated. People didn’t want to maintain two social networks, or if they switched away from the dominant one, they either needed most of their friends to follow too or they needed great features. Google+ delivered neither.

Key small business lesson: You shouldn’t launch a product just because a big player in your industry leads with one. It needs to make sense for your brand, but more importantly it has to answer key questions:

• What does it offer that the competition doesn’t?
• Why would someone switch away from another product to use ours?
• Does this product integrate well with all our other offerings?

Threads isn’t dead yet, but it soon will be. Zuckerberg and his team will put in some more token effort so it won’t look like all their work was for nothing, but because they didn’t answer these questions, even with all the money behind them, their product launch failed. Don’t make their mistakes. 

We aren’t on X or Threads, but you can find Apex Business Advisors on LinkedIn, where we share relevant news stories and successes for our brokers and clients. See you there!

We’ve talked about the Great Resignation in relation to the changing world of work we’ve seen over the last two years, including some companies moving to a hybrid model. One of the news stories we continue to see is not just people deciding to move because of remote work, but businesses deciding to move for better business and tax conditions. Is it worthwhile to move your business before you exit?

Looking at the Statistics

The low hanging fruit when looking at business relocations is California. The Golden State is losing two $200,000+ income households for every one that comes in (that ratio is inverted for Florida). It’s the poster boy for a larger trend: of the 25 lowest-tax states, 20 enjoyed net in-migration in the last year. Just as individuals have used remote work to make major changes in their lives, so too businesses have chosen to go where they are treated best instead of just where they’ve always been.

The big storylines include tech’s migration to Texas, led by Oracle and HP, as well as Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, which purportedly saved hundreds of millions in taxes by coming to the Lone Star State.

Why Move?

If a business owner is looking to sell in the next 6-12 months, a move probably doesn’t make any sense. Key employees may not be willing to come and it will take a while to get your business up and running in its new location.

But if you’re a business owner who still has some gas in the tank and is looking to sell 2-3 years in the future, and beyond, there are several reasons why you might be willing to endure the difficulties of a move:

• A better business and social climate — some retail businesses are having to simply close because local law enforcement is not dealing with crime or drug use, blighting what were formerly thriving downtown areas. Policymakers in some states also offer lots of obstacles for businesses to have to jump through in order to stay in business and after the pandemic, some people have had enough. They want their business to grow and thrive now, and moving can be a solution.
• Better options for a liquidity event — lower taxes and a better business climate certainly help entrepreneurs in the present, but when they take their business to market, it will help them as well, as the taxes they pay on the sale may be greatly reduced, giving them more chances to keep the fruits of their labor, or give it away to causes they support.
• Setting up for retirement early — while some business owners had a “sell and move” strategy already, they might opt to invert the process by moving then selling. If they had a place they always wanted to live, and the business can continue to do well there, the owners can reap the benefits of moving to their dream location while running their business. They may then find that same reinvigoration that many remote workers have experienced when given the option to live someplace they’ve always wanted to (and often, at lower prices) and go on to work in the business a few years longer, increasing the valuation of the company while making profits that are taxed at a lower rate in the short-term.

One more cherry on top? Business moving expenses are almost always entirely deductible!

It’s too early to tell precisely what the long-term effects of businesses and wealth creators leaving certain states will be, but it’s unlikely to be anything good. Hopefully that can serve as a wakeup to policymakers, if they’re listening to what people want instead of telling them what they should want.

Thinking about moving your business to another state? We’ve got people who can help you evaluate whether that’s a good financial decision, and we can help forecast the effect on the valuation of your business. Give us a call today.