March Seminars

Creating an Empowered Workforce workshop of Volunteer State Community College's Tennessee Small Business Development Center, 2-4 p.m. Thursday, March 3, 1480 Nashville Pike, Gallatin, TN in Building 300. Registration is required. Reserve online. www.tsbdc.org. Free.

Starting a Small Business workshop of Volunteer State Community College's Tennessee Small Business Development Center, 4-6 p.m. Tuesday, March 8, 1480 Nashville Pike, Gallatin, TN in Building 300. Registration is required. Reserve online. www.tsbdc.org. Free.

Getting and Creating Loyal Clients for Your Business workshop of Volunteer State Community College's Tennessee Small Business Development Center, 9-11 a.m. Wednesday, March 9, 1480 Nashville Pike, Gallatin, TN in Building 300. Registration is required. Reserve online. www.tsbdc.org. Free.

Social Media Intro for Entrepreneurs and Marketing Professionals workshop of Volunteer State Community College's Tennessee Small Business Development Center, 9-11 a.m. Tuesday, March 22, 1480 Nashville Pike, Gallatin, TN in Building 300. Registration is required. Reserve online. www.tsbdc.org. $10, payable at the workshop.

Achieving Product/Market Fit

For any startup to succeed, achieving a good product/market fit is among the most vital of goals. But verifying that your product meets a strong market need and can stand up to competitors is not an exact science, nor does it typically happen in one grand a-ha moment. Likewise, building momentum in a market requires patience and comes with no guarantees as customers’ needs, regulatory landscapes, and competitive pressures change over time.

“Consider that your business will only succeed if it adds real value for the user. In this case ‘value’ means that businesses or individuals will understand they need or want it enough to pay you a price that will give you profit and success,” advises SCORE mentor and marketing expert Sue Phalen. “Start by understanding your target market's need and then whether you will be a better solution than your competition.”

There are some actions you can take to increase your success in accomplishing product/market fit.

Do your homework to understand your customers’ current needs and anticipate what they’ll need in the future. Research your target demographic by spending time with prospective customers, read industry blogs and print publications, attend industry tradeshows and webinars, and seek out a professional in your industry who might serve as a mentor to you as you develop your products and services. SCORE is a good place to seek a mentor with the background you need.

Focus on one primary and critical value proposition. It’s impossible to be all things to all customers. By homing in on what’s most important to your target customers, analyzing significant trends in your industry, and identifying where competitors are falling short in solving customers’ problems, you can deliver value out of the gate. If you’re solving a pain point for your customers from the start, they will be more patient in waiting for you to add other features and options.

Have a business plan, but be open to change as you listen to feedback and ideas from your early customers. Learning from what they’re telling you can improve your products or services. And be prepared to adapt your systems and processes to make your business more viable and sustainable. 

According to Phalen, “Good planning and research will pay off in costs avoided and a far better marketing strategy and tactics that will resound in your customers’ minds. It is not ‘how’ you bring your product or service but rather what the benefits are in the language the customer understands.”

____________________________________________________________________________ SCORE is a nonprofit association whose volunteers help start and improve small businesses. Send questions or volunteer inquiries to scorehouston@gmail.com.

Where's Your Bottom?

Tapping into our unrealized happiness potential requires several key elements. One of these elements is to address, get control of and change our thinking habits. Thinking habits? Indeed, like so much of our behavior, much of our thinking – use of the brain – is routine and habitual. It’s our brain’s way of conserving energy.

Habits – those well worn groves in our brain – are a regular topic in the ‘behaviours we should change’ category. On many levels, we know that certain behaviours are diminishing our happiness, and yet the power of the habit defies our will power and the logic that says we should change.

One of the most dramatic change processes in our society – and one that has a strong track record of success – is what happens when an alcoholic or drug addict ‘hits bottom’ and makes a choice to change. Recovery from any addiction is a convoluted process but it must always start with a ‘bottom’.

Accessing our unrealized ‘happiness potential’ involves hitting your version of the ‘happiness bottom’ and choosing to do something about it.

There are only two motives driving personal change: hope of gain or elimination of pain. Until an individual can see one or the other, sustainable change will not occur.

So…when habits get in the way of increasing our happiness, how do we create an environment for personal change?
A commonly suggested current strategy is mindfulness – a practice which is supported but various forms of meditation. Check out this short TED talk in which mindfulness, meditation, and habit change are elegantly described.

If this makes sense but you need support to move forward, your coach is always an effective resource to turn to.

Fear The Status Quo

No matter how happy you feel, there is always room for more. We all have unrealized potential. The interesting aspect of this is that most of us become complacent and ultimately accept ‘how it is’.

Acceptance of the status quo is false security. Maintaining status quo sets us up for slow erosion of our sense of wellbeing and ability to deal with the unexpected difficulties that arise in anyone’s life.

The place to start is with awareness – awareness of what happiness feels like and, more importantly, what fuels the happiness in our lives. Equally important is awareness of what impacts our happiness negatively.

Awareness is an element of mental activity. Shakespeare once wrote ‘there is no good or bad but thinking makes it so’. We think ourselves into whatever mood we are experiencing. Happiness or contentment or equanimity are all positive states of mind and are all within our grasp.

Armed with intention and the tools to use, anyone can tap into their unrealized potential.

Seem unrealistic? Perhaps your coach can get you started!

Emerging Leaders Initiative

After getting off to a good start and proven your concept with ample unfilled demand for your service, it may be time to prepare your small business to substantially grow. That’s when you need the expert training and mentoring that is required to make that leap forward to compete at a higher level. Fortunately, there’s a successful program in its second year in Houston that can prepare you for the challenges you face.

The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Emerging Leaders Initiative is a federal training initiative conducted in 48 communities since 2008. The program specifically focuses on executives of businesses poised for growth. The initiative provides these executives with the organizational framework, resource network, and motivation required to build sustainable businesses and promote the economic development within urban communities.

Hundreds of graduates have reported revenue growth, $17 million in new financing, created new jobs or retained all existing jobs, and over $700 million secured in federal, state, local, tribal and corporate contract awards.

Over the course of seven months, participants are given the opportunity to work with experienced mentors, attend specialized workshops and develop connections with their peers, city leaders, and the financial community. The Initiative incorporates a research-based curriculum specifically designed to stimulate and support the development and expansion of your business including options for accessing new capital and securing government contracts. 

The Emerging Leaders Initiative is for established business owners and is not for start-ups. The series is open to small business owners and executives that: have annual revenues of at least $400,000, have been in business for at least 3 years, and have at least one employee, other than self. All types of businesses can participate.

At the conclusion of the training, entrepreneurs produce a three-year strategic growth action plan with benchmarks and performance targets that will help them access the necessary support and resources to move forward.  The end result of the executive education prepares and encourages small businesses to move to the next level on their growth trajectory.  

Participation in the Initiative is free. The only cost is your time and commitment to complete the curriculum over the course of seven months. All other costs are covered by the SBA and SCORE who is sponsoring this event and providing mentoring services. 

Business executives interested in participating should register before March 7 at www.interise.org/sbaemergingleaders. Classes begin in April. For information, contact Stephen Curry at Stephen.Curry@sba.gov or (713) 773-6542. _________________________________________________________________________ SCORE is a nonprofit association whose volunteers help start and improve small businesses. Send questions or volunteer inquiries to scorehouston@gmail.com.

Happiness Is An Inside Job

Many of us look for external ways to impact happiness in our lives. To either bring more happiness or maintain the happiness we have, we look to things, experiences or other people to be the catalyst that creates happiness.

Typically, the happiness derived from external sources is fleeting and fades over time. As feelings of happiness dissolve, we head off in search of ‘more’ or ‘new’ or ‘different,’ to return us to happiness.

This process gets pretty exhausting after a while.

The reality is that feeling we associate with happiness come from inside. The connection between what is going on for us and how we feel about it is a choice. The choice we make is informed by an array of factors including our beliefs, experiences, judgments and expectations.

Managing the reality of our experiences – most of which are beyond our control - is a task fraught with unpredictability. Yet, out of this unpredictability we hope to create and maintain our happiness.

I call this the happiness lottery. You have about as much chance of successfully achieving happiness as you do winning 649!

There is, of course, another way.

By understanding the connection between what comes into your life and how you deal with it, you can directly have a positive influence on you personal happiness. Translating that understanding into effective happiness inducing actions can be within your power.

There are tons of great resources available to support you in making this shift - books, videos, blogs, workshops, retreats, teachers, and more - many of which are low or no cast. The problem with so many choices is that identifying a starting place is almost overwhelming.

Your coach can help you sort through the alternatives and create a plan that fits your personal happiness needs.

Don't Worry...Be Happy

Happiness, in a wide array of forms, is one of the most frequently promoted self improvement subjects today. There are extensive books and newspaper articles to read, blogs to subscribe to, workshops to attend, and television shows to a help you: a) assess your level of ‘happiness’ and, b) address whatever roadblocks stand in the way of being ‘happier’. Gretchen Rubin published ‘The Happiness Project’ in 2009 and western society has been struggling to achieve elusive ‘happiness’ ever since.

There is no doubt that achieving a greater degree of happiness is a worthwhile goal but the constellation of resources now available to address the opportunity is overwhelming. The happiness pool is a kilometer wide and a centimeter deep. The result is, of course, that most people choose not to use anything that is sustainably effective.

Can anything be done? Of course!

Happiness, like many emotions, means something unique to each person….which is why most ‘solutions’ don’t work. The place to start is developing a self awareness of what happiness means for you and whether you need to do anything about it. The unrealized potential in ones own happiness then informs the type(s) of tools that might work best.

Managing happiness – whatever that means for you – needs to a life’s work, so whatever you do, needs to be incorporated into all the things that fill you existence.

One of the areas a coach can be most effective is helping you create a foundation from which to bring more happiness into your life.

The 5 Simple Actions to More Revenue This Year

If you own an accounting, financial planning, HVAC, sign, construction, graphic design, landscaping, consulting, attorney, insurance, catering, massage, photography, insert-almost-any-type-of-business here, this is written for you. 

This process (borrowed from the highly successful businesses I have met) will grow your business in 2016.  Not overnight, but it will build a foundation that, if repeated regularly, will give you more work than you can handle.

     1.    Send a monthly newsletter (yes, I’m partial, but it works) – Just a few effective tips, pretty pictures, and a call to action can make an effective monthly newsletter.  The idea is drive people back to your site and learn more about how you can help them.  And if you are using an email service, you will know who is engaging with your newsletter and you can follow up with them later.

     2.    Use Social Media – The same content in the newsletter can be used in your social media platform of choice.  Additionally, you should take the time to interact with others and use social media to be, well…social.  This helps you continue to build brand recognition and identify people and follow up with them later.

     3.    Networking– Attend at least 2-3 networking events per month.  Make sure to collect at least 3 business cards from people that you can help and follow up with them later.

     4.    Coffee or Lunch – This is the “following up with them later” part.  When you have a coffee or lunch date, make sure to be the one that listens and finds a way to help that person, even if it is not with the service you normally provide.  

     5.    FOLLOW UP the FOLLOW UP! – This is the biggest miss by most entrepreneurs.  They may make great contacts, but then don’t follow up.   At all.  They assume that the other party isn’t interested because they didn’t buy immediately. 

The truth is that people are busy.  Too busy.  They are thinking about themselves and not you.  It is up to you to follow up.  And in most cases it will take 7-12 times before they make a buying decision.  Use hand-written notes, emails, phone calls, gifts, and your newsletter to follow up.

Add these activities to your calendar and treat them like a doctor’s appointment.  You would not let a phone call or an urgent email prevent you from your annual physical or getting your back adjusted when you are in pain.