In her post today on USA Today, Rhonda Abrams discusses the need for small business owners to reinvent themselves, and provides 5 strategies for change.

“What do you do when everything in your industry turns upside down? When your consumers dramatically change? When new technology pushes out traditional business methods? Now is a time of great transformation for most industries. Some changes have been brought about by economic conditions; some by technology; some by new competition.”

Here are her five strategies:

1. Recognize opportunities. One keynote speaker at the Tools of Change conference was Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, a successful online news and opinion site. She chided the audience “Don’t look back to a golden age; the golden age is now.”

2. Reinvent yourself and your business. Recognize you’re doing something very new. As Henry Ford pointed out, he was building a car, not a faster horse. Understand that you’re going to have to develop new products or services. It’s not the same stuff in a different package.

3. Leverage your current assets. Transformation is different than starting anew, so use your assets, such as current products, services, customer relationships, a terrific team. You can start ahead of the competition.

4. Learn to juggle. One major challenge of transformation is you often have to run your current, diminishing business while building a new business. Another speaker, Dominique Raccah of SourceBooks, addressed exactly the question of how do you run, essentially, two businesses. Develop a strategic plan to help you shift your resources.

5. Consider investors. Because you are growing a new business, you are going to be strapped for cash. That may mean you need to find a new source of capital. If you have a compelling business opportunity, it may be appropriate to seek investors.

As a final note, Rhonda suggests that you change your vocabulary along with your attitude. Switch from learning how to “adapt” or to “accommodate” change. Instead it’s time to “embrace” the “renewal” and “reinvention” you’re experiencing.

For more on SMB change, see:

Ready to Re-write The Rules of Your Business?

How to Find a New Direction For Your Business

Are you ready to re-write the rules of your small or midsize business and begin playing by your standards? Doing so can create new opportunities and favor you over your competitors. Here are 9 reasons that you are ready.

1. You focus on creating uncontested market space and making competition irrelevant (a Blue Ocean Strategy) rather than on beating the competition. (a)
2. You understand and are ready to play by the new rules of marketing and PR. (b)
3. You want to hear the voice of the customer and have already deployed free “listening posts” throughout your company. (c)
4. You know the power of technology and how to leverage it, but realize that business is about people first.
5. You have strategic frameworks to create new customer value and to reconstruct market boundaries in your favor. (a)
6. You are prepared to “be there before the sale” to gain trust with prospective customers as a first step to doing business. (a)
7. You use a proven, integrated methodology that ensures your Internet efforts drive visits and convert to leads then customers.
8. You realize that you and your customers both have in common the scarcest resource-attention-and will tailor your selling efforts to this fact. (b)
9. You understand that by executing against these points you gain an immense advantage over your competition.

Would you like to share your ideas, or learn more about how to re-write the rules of your business? I’d like to hear from you.

References:

(a) Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne

(b) New Rules of Marketing and PR, Scott

(c) Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith

(d) Kraft Associates

Don’t continue to do what you’ve been doing.

The new path to improved performance for SMB owners has never been the path of yesterday. This is even more powerfully true today as business owners attempt to navigate in an uncertain economy. Uncertainty, however, can cause temporary confusion, so the following poem The Calf Path by Sam Walter Foss (highlighted by David Scarlett in his blog) can serve as a valuable red flag. Some suggestions how to carve a new path for you business include:

Change The Business Game In Your Favor In Four Moves

Managing Small and Midsize Businesses In Uncertain Times

Your SMB Website is Your Most Valuable Piece of Real Estate

The Calf Path (by Sam Walter Foss)

“One Day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed – do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf,
And though this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed this zigzag calf about
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day.
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A morel lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
Bu how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.

Ah many things this tale might teach -
But I am not ordained to preach.”

For SMB owners, there are four moves you can make now to change the business game in your favor.

1. Resolve to change the game. Create new rules that favor your business style and strengths. (a)
2. Break from the competition by reconstructing market boundaries. (b)
3. Recognize how the rules of marketing and pr have changed, and incorporate them. (c)
4. Simplify your business life and gain time to think by using a fully integrated system to manage your online presence. (d)

These four moves are based on timely and valuable insights from the authors of the following four books. Mine these books for details, or contact me.

Books and Authors

(a) Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith

(b) The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Scott

(c) Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne

(d) Inbound Marketing, Halligan and Shah

Question: What’s the difference between “Green” and “Sustainability”?

Answer: The concept of Green is best defined as a “Health Related” practice although is often misapplied to anything “environmental.” The concept of Sustainability is best defined as “the management of our resources.” Sustainability is not singularly focused on energy reduction and carbon emissions. (Source: Trans World News).

This post makes the compelling case for a sustainability officer for every company. Find out why, and where to get trained, here.

As small and mid-size businesses dig their way out of the recession, they will be faced with this decision: should they rebuild in old ways or new ways? Will it be business as usual, or can the business plan be changed to produce better outcomes? There are compelling reasons to rebuild in new ways to produce better outcomes.

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

The digital revolution through the Web is changing business in powerful ways. The fundamental change, when you focus away from the distraction of technology to what technology is enabling, is how people connect. Some of the key expressions you will hear are that surround this change are:

• Transparency: The Web makes more things visible, like competitive pricing and product descriptions
• Relevance: customers are searching for what is relevant to them, and filtering out the noise of unwanted messages
• Social Capital: the new coin of the realm is social capital and it is the value and trust a business creates

New tools enable new connections. The most significant of these tools involve Social Media. Blogs, podcasts, online video, and sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are all part of the Social Media landscape.

THE NEW REALITIES FOR BUSINESS

• The new reality is that power in shifting into the hands of the customer to gather information (formerly controlled by Sales), screen out unwanted messages, and manage the pace and form business conversation.
• The speed of business has speeded up, and all businesses are, in effect, open 24/7.
• The economics of the Web allow businesses to replace money with brainpower. This bodes well for business and helps offset the power shift into customer hands. A relevant idea facilitated through social media connections can reach large audiences for far less investment than traditional media.

THE BUSINESS MANDATE: CHANGE THE GAME

New realities, new ways to connect, and new tools of conecting offer businesses unprecedented opportunities to change the game in their favor. In other words, now is the ideal time for businesses to rethink the rules and systems they play by, and restructure the game in their favor.

EXAMPLES OF GAME CHANGERS

• Apple changed the game of music sales by introducing the iPod (which simplified downloading, storing, and playing music) and enabling its distribution with iTunes technology.
• Gary Vaynerchuk changed the way wine is sold by changing how people learn and experience the world of wine. His change vehicle is the video blog called Wine Library TV, which has a cult-like following of more than 80,000 viewers a day. It is as far as you can imagine from the stuffy world of “conceited sommeliers, snobby shopkeepers, and mystical conventions. His business grew 10 times in 5 years to over $50,000,000 largely through his only efforts.
• eBay changed the way buyers and sellers collaborate. No longer do you need auction houses like Christie’s. Live auctions are held online and even the smallest items can be exchanged.

Even the smallest businesses can produce superior results when they commit to changing how their game is played.

BUT NOT EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED

In the midst of change, the imperative to manage your business vs. being managed by it has not changed. Yes, there are different issues, such as:

• Direct mail or email
• Direct sales or online sales
• Cocktail networking party or LinkedIn

And there are new expressions such as Tweet and Search Engine Optimization.

But the way to manage business has not changed substantially. These fundamental practices still apply:

• Management By Objective (MBO)
• Managing with values and beliefs
• Using systems like The Four Cornerstones of Business to organize efforts and make decisions
• Building excellence throughout the organization
• Committing to continuous improvement

BALANCE

The successful game changers will balance the new realities of the digital revolution with proven management techniques. Side-by-side we will see:

• The person who manages your social media profiles will also be taught how to close the loop to ensure that ideas produce effective action.
• You will still need interviewing skills, training techniques, and team development skills, whether for an online marketing manager or a warehouse foreman.
• You will listen to the voice of the customer through Google alerts and Twitter search, as well as from the actual words, questions, and expressions of your customers as observed by cashiers, truck drivers, and fulfillment specialists.

Now is the opportune time for owners of small and mid-size businesses to change the way they do business by embracing the new realities of the Web and balancing them with time proven management practices.

Real estate can refer to more than a physical address. For example, I’ve used it to describe storefront real estate- the amount of window display space. I’ve also used it to refer to the space on a restaurant table- tabletop real estate. Both usages mean that however the expression is used, real estate is valuable.

David Scarlett talks about website real estate and claims that “Centimeter For Centimeter, Your Website Is Likely To Be The Most Valuable Piece of Real Estate You’ll Ever Own!” I agree. And to support this statement, he sports a 6 minute and 3 second video describing what to do to maximize this real estate investment. It’s a video worth viewing. Follow his post here, and the video here.