Ideas for Assessing Your Business Acumen

Before you jump on the Trans-Atlantic voyage of entrepreneurship, keep in mind that the United States Small Business Administration estimates 1 in 2 small businesses will sink during the first five years of existence. The question for you, the deckhand ready to pack for months at sea, is this: “Do you have what it takes to run a small business with all that entails?”

How will you avoid drowning at sea in the unknown world of owning a small business? How will you manage your time and focus your skills on the activities that will help your business grow and thrive in a competitive market? What will set you apart from other entrepreneurs during a slow economy?

For the brave deckhand in you, this tutorial features details about developing a critical self-assessment useful for gauging whether entrepreneurship is your best choice. Use the steps below as a guide for writing your primary assessment before investing too much time or money in business courses with questionable relevance to your business ambition. However, it is recommended that you take advantage of all resources offered by the small business development center near you. Use this tutorial as a starting point, not a substitute for professional advice.

After devising your self-test, you can take the assessment and grade yourself on your responses. The final step will be to use the information to make plans for your entrepreneurial future. In this stage, you will reflect on what you have learned and turn your focus to writing a professional development plan that suits your personal attributes and aspirations.

Writing for “Entrepreneur,” Martin E. Davis observes in his book, “Managing a Small Business Made Easy:”

“Being honest with yourself is as vital to your success as being honest with your customer! The failure to honestly assess your skills can result in the demise of your small business!”

There are a thousand ways to begin developing your personalized assessment. You can start with a list of skills or desired characteristics. You can write a list of questions that can be answered on a numerical scale. You can create essay questions and rate yourself on the quality of your answers. No matter what approach you take, the key to self-assessment is tailoring the test to your needs.

Here are some ways to analyze your small business and the skills that are essential to managing your individual organization. When you finish developing a list of skills essential to managing your company, you can also utilize the Internet as a helpful search tool. Take some time to identify other articles about successfully managing a small business similar to your own.

A small business includes certain core functions or processes that must be accomplished for the business to run smoothly. You can work forward or backward from your product to identify all of the processes involved in delivering the product to the customer. In addition, consider underlying processes that impact the financial wellbeing of the business and are not tied directly to creating or delivering a product. When you have found the core processes, make a short list of activities for each one.

Here is an example. If you run a dry-cleaning service, you need counter help, a dry-cleaner operator, a person to package the clothes, a person to balance the accounts, and someone to service the equipment. You also have to keep the building lease paid and the electricity turned on. Who will do all of these things? If you are a sole proprietor, it is easy to see that each job requires different skills. Your self-assessment might include skills like bookkeeping, customer service, technical knowledge of dry-cleaning equipment, and property management.

For Web Site Owners - Highlighting Savings for Budget-Minded Consumers

When you redesign the copy on your business web site to provide variation for regular site visitors, you can select a new focus for your written messages. This article discusses some tips for how to target your copy to budget-minded consumers. Before redoing your copy, consider this thoughtful approach to redesigning copy. For people with less cash to spend or a desire to save money, targeted copy is just what they need to influence their spending decisions.

Writing for Your Audience

How well do you know the consumers who visit your web site? Have you ever done a survey or used another method for gauging their needs? For example, database-driven web sites can store the purchase history of each customer, allowing for the site owner to target emails, pop-ups, and other messages to customers who have indicated interest in specific products.

Amazon.com uses a technique to recommend products based on previous purchases, such as suggesting book titles on pregnancy when a customer previously purchased a pregnancy self-help guide.

When you revise your web site copy, keep in mind that the slower economy changes the spending habits of consumers. People spend differently when they have less cash than when cash is aplenty. For example, cash-strapped customers might buy store-brand cereal instead of their favorite brand cereal when saving money is important.

Write copy that appeals to customer preferences and a desire to save money. Your web site should provide language that is easy to read. You can balance readability with written content that provides helpful information to customers.

Drawing Attention to Special Offers

When you write copy for selling products, you have to make decisions on word count for copy like product descriptions and special offers. For the budget-minded consumer, the way you describe a product’s special price or an offer designed to save the customer money may make the difference. You can write persuasive copy that is not overly pushy. Readers should get the point that you have found a new way for them to save money. Don’t provide copy that emphasizes how customers have less cash to spend in a tight economy unless that is your intended message.

Explaining Changes in Pricing

Much like retailers advertise their deep discounts on Black Friday, you can design copy that highlights special pricing. For example, if you have discounted the prices of all kitchen products by 5%, you can make this point in your copy. When you choose how to deliver copy, you can also think about visual formats such as cartoons, pop-ups, banners, slogans and captions, and copy included in artwork.

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Leonardo da Vinci - Learn more about the Renaissance Man

A great article on Leonardo da Vinci, Cesare Borgia, and Niccolo Macchiavelli

History Today
March 2009
"Machiavelli, Leonardo & Borgia - A Fateful Collusion"
By Paul Strathern

You might learn some little known facts about Leonardo da Vinci, including how he was inspired for painting the backdrop of the Mona Lisa. Did you ever wonder how much more Leonardo might have influenced history if his scientific and inventor drawings had survived intact after his death? This article will give you a good idea of why.

The Small Business Communicator

As the proprietor of a small business, you have probably read your share of resources on marketing. Have you thought about the way you communicate with employees, colleagues, and customers? How you talk to people both verbally and nonverbally results in positive or negative impacts on your business relationships. Start your journey to better communication with these four ideas.

1. Are you a good listener? Listening is an important skill that matters as much as what you say in business communications. If you are not familiar with the patterns of human communication, read how people send messages (encoding) and receive messages (decoding) at HumanResourcesOnline.net. As you improve your understanding of communication, teach yourself to focus clearly on what people say before you respond.

2. Do you make each person who walks into your establishment feel important? Treating every business contact as your equal and the object of your respect builds your reputation. Remember, you never know who will refer friends and family to your business based on a positive interaction with you.

3. Do you maintain good relationships with your staff? Because your employees are the lifeblood of your company, how you interact with them is important. After you evaluate the quality of personal communications with each person, focus on developing the weakest relationships first. If you can win distant employees to your side, enjoy watching them transform into better contributors to the company.

4. Do you use technology to improve your communication with customers? For example, web-based tools like blogs, email, Twitter, and social networking sites offer free options for reaching your customers. If you find your A-game in face-to-face communication, turn your attention to becoming a more effective writer.

Small business owners often overextend themselves in the daily operations of a private enterprise. Remember to bring high quality and attention to your written and verbal communications. If you neglect this area of your business, you will miss out on a free opportunity to grow your business.

Use Your Blog to Show Your Style

A blog is a fun way to show your sense of style regardless of your purpose for blogging. This short blog entry provides three quick tips for using your blog to reveal to the online world what you can do as a professional.
Tip #1: Let People Inside Your Head
Style means something different to each blogger. Some people will focus on arranging the elements of their blog visually and including catchy features like videos, widgets, and links to other sites. Other bloggers focus on written content. When you think about the essence of your blog, the style includes the way all of the parts are assembled together. Let the audience inside your head. Dare to be different!
Tip #2: Try New Blogging Styles on For Size
As an Internet surfer, you have probably discovered other cool blogging sites. Create a variety of experiences for your readers by experimenting with different design options and writing styles. It is okay to take hints from your favorite bloggers or to try something you’ve never seen before. For example, if you have a travel review blog, throw in a few posts about your experiences while traveling to exotic places that are not reviews of where you stayed and what you did while you were there. You might talk about an interesting person or an unusual event that made your trip memorable. Tip #3: Make Readers Want to Come Back for More
People who enjoy finding information, entertainment, or unique ideas on their favorite blogs will develop certain expectations. Make every visit worth the reader’s time by ensuring each blog entry is presented with style. While blog entries are often short and quickly written, you can still remember to include at least one valuable idea in each piece.

The Art of Photography and Surrealist writing

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) gives an interesting perspective on photography:
"Where photography takes itself out of context, where it frees itself from physiognomic, political and scientific interest, then it becomes creative. The lens now looks for interesting juxtapositions, photography turns into a sort of arty journalism..."

When you write or create art, do you realize the value of juxtapositions? Read about the cultural movements of Dadaism and Surrealism (around the years 1916-1936) for more ideas on how to bring ideas from the early twentieth century to bear on your own works. One hundred years later, some of these ideas still relate to us. The Internet allows us to consider timeless questions in a global forum. Perhaps the artists and writers of that period would be shocked by how much their visions of the future came true!