Posts by Rebecca
Laser Focus, Bigger Profits: The Power of Niche. (The Exercise)
Every small business needs management consulting. But not every small business is a good fit for my management consulting. Much like not every animal with four legs is a cat. Many small businesses worry about being too specific – too niche – in their market, for fear of losing business to competitors. To quote the…
Read MoreDon’t Be Perfect: Be Valuable. (The Exercise)
Every Tuesday, Tuesday On Your Business gives you ways to spend thirty minutes working on your business instead of in it. Step away from the day-to-day tasks of your work and spend time planning for the future, solving problems, and innovating. Starting today, I’m adding a weekly exercise to these posts and emails. For those…
Read MoreWhat you now know about… Everything 😀
Your business does not exist in isolation. You now know some of the most common service providers you’ll work with in your business. Most importantly, you know that working with any service provider always comes down to one thing: That one thing. Know one thing Your business service provider wants to know one thing: what…
Read MoreWhat you don’t know about… Employee Morale 😤
“How do I know what my employees are doing all day?” Step 1: good KPIs. Instead of tracking their desk time, track their results. But productivity isn’t the only consideration here. Employee engagement and happiness can be reflected in how they spend their time at work. I spoke to Tess Gamble, founder of the concierge…
Read MoreWhat you don’t know about… Websites 👨🏻💻
“Everybody who comes to a website has a task.” Wise words from Jason Wade, founder of Sitetrustee, offering website management. A business website isn’t for leisurely browsing. Business websites are designed to help people accomplish something. It is your job to make that accomplishment easy. What is a website about Every website is about that…
Read MoreWhat you don’t know about… Marketing 🧮
Marketing can feel like a guessing game, a mixture of magic and luck. But that feeling is wrong. When done right, marketing is highly planned and equally measurable. Marketing is data To learn more I spoke to Marc Apple, founder of the digital marketing agency Forward Push. Marketing is all about tracking data. But which…
Read MoreWhat you still don’t know about… Contracts 🗂️
A few weeks ago we found that the scope of your work is the most important thing in your contracts. In a conversation following that post, a new question arose: once I’ve written one contract, I can copy and paste my scope into all the standard templates, right? Wrong. “Contracts are not all the same,…
Read MoreWhat you don’t know about… Advertising 📺
Advertising… that sounds big, right? Superbowl ads, Billboards, Times Square… In other words: big budgets and big business. Not really: advertising is for every business, big and small. To understand more about this often-elusive topic, I spoke with Matt Spett of Rebel Fox, an advertising agency present in Atlanta and Pittsburgh. Communication Matt explains that…
Read MoreWhat you don’t know about… Storytelling 📖
Over the last couple of weeks, we learned about how powerful visuals are in conveying information. On the other hand: what information are we conveying? Small businesses want to talk about what they do and how they do it, but is that what people want to hear? Let’s find out from the expert: Anita Henderson,…
Read MoreWhat you don’t know about… Graphic Design 🎨
Visual communication is effective, fast, and valuable. This much we established last week. A fundamental component of any visual communication is design. But what does that even mean? Can I download some free graphics, commission, and off-the-shelf logo, and use Papyrus font for all my materials? Sure… I could… but I shouldn’t. I sat down…
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