The Biz Insight July

B US IN E SS T ea m w o rk ta l en t M ON E Y TO M OR R OW Q UE ST I O NS A N D A N S W E RS BU S I N E S S t e a mw o rk Ta l e n t MO N E Y T O MO RRO W Q UE S TI O N S AN D AN S W E R S B US I N E S S te am w o r k T M ON E Y T OM O R RO W Q U E STI O N S A ND A N SW E R S BU SI NE S S te a mw o rk ta l e n t mo n ry t o mmo rro w q u e s t i o n s A N D AN SWE RS B US I N E S S te am wo r k Tale n t M O N E Y To m m o r r r o w

B u s in ess Talent

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Biz Insight

Are we simple?

I had lunch with a young man the other day and he shared that he likes about our community.

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Dare to be different Most people come up with an idea, or they have a passion, and they decide to turn it into a business.

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4 Ways regular Training improves your company

Regular training for your employees is integral to productivity and profitability.

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Portage County Business Council

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DARE TO BE DIFFERENT INSIGHT If you have enough profits and enough work, stop reading now.

Otherwise, here are a few ways you can recreate your existing business for greater revenue.

Target Your Ideal Customer and Market to Them

© GraphicStock By: Christina R. Green Most people come up with an idea, or they have a passion, and they decide to turn it into a business.

The savvy among them create a business plan around their idea or passion. Many get so excited about their venture that they create the product or service first and then try and find the market. This approach is like swimming upstream. It can be done but it’s a lot harder. They easier way is to locate a group of people with a problem and solve for it.

Often finding your target audience first produces a greater return on investment. But if you already have a business, what can you do? You can reinvent it. The process is not as hard as it sounds, but you have to let go and leave your comfort zone to provide a more tailored experience to your customers.

This is the hardest jump to make, identifying a target market and forsaking all others. The idea that customization, and drilling down to one or two types of customers, will yield you more customers and not less is a bit unnerving at first.

The secret to this work is to ensure that your ideal audience needs you and knows it. If you have to spend a lot of time convincing them of the need, you not only have a marketing campaign on your hands but an educational one as well.

Find a segment that has a problem you can help with. Then market to them by showing how your service or product solves their problem.

Don’t worry that you’re not solving everyone else’s problem. If you clearly and adequately solve someone’s problem, they’ll be back, and they’ll bring their friends.

Transform Your Social Media Now that you have a target market, find out where they are on social media and show up. Don’t worry about other platforms. If they’re not there, no reason for you to be either.

This also means posting the kinds of posts they are interested in, about

Portage County Business Council | July 2016

subjects that appeal to them. Don’t be vanilla. Adopt a tone that appeals to your ideal demographic as well. If you don’t know how to do that, think about hiring your ideal customer (from a demographic perspective) to do it for you.

Create Content that Answers Their Questions You know their pain point. Talk to it. Write about it directly, then tackle related issues as well. Marcus Sheridan was the co-owner of River Pools, which installed fiberglass pools. He recognized that most people don’t wake up one morning, call a pool company, and ask them to start digging in the afternoon.

There’s a lot of research someone is going to conduct before they hand over $30,000. Because of this he began compiling all the questions he received from potential customers and created content out of them. He built a resource library. Not only was it loved by his customers, but Google took a fancy to it too. Soon he was ranking above all of his competition.

All because he listened to potential customers and gave them what they needed to make an informed decision.

Stand Out Maybe you’re thinking that your customers don’t need any educating.

Maybe you run a boutique. I’d argue there’s still content that could be effective for you like explaining the difference between a “wild” pearl and

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one that was cultivated, but there are other ways to stand out. Gift wrap your products, include a “thank you” message, or place an extra goodie or sample in the bag. These small gifts are a wonderful way to remain fresh in your customer’s mind.

Give Them What They Want This is perhaps one of the boldest things you can do once you decide on a target market. Now, think about giving your audience what they want, even if it changes your business model. It doesn’t have to be painful for you and may actually introduce new economies of scale.

LOCAL FOCAL

POINT

For instance, there’s a pizza place in Berkeley called the Cheeseboard Pizza Collective. They make 1 type of pizza every day, and no, that’s not a typo. One. As in singular, for $20.

People line up around the block to await a slice of the Co-op’s specialty pizza and because the place is small, they take their slice outside and consume it to the tunes of one of the local bands playing that evening.

These “picnickers” are a silent, but powerful, testimonial for the co-op.

The co-op realized their vegetarian clientele didn’t want variety as much as they craved farm-fresh gourmet.

It’s difficult to provide farm-fresh in a variety of options, so the restaurant

looks at the freshest ingredients available at that time and creates a pizza based on that. Doing so, has made them the talk of the town.

Who is your ideal customer and what are you doing for him or her today?

Christina R. Green teaches small businesses, chambers and associations how to connect through content. Her articles have appeared in the Midwest Society of Association Executives’ Magazine, NTEN. org, AssociationTech, and Socialfish. She is a regular blogger at Frankjkenny.com and Memberclicks.

Published by the Stevens Point Journal

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RANK’S HARDWARE PRIDES itself on its service and sense of community.

And it shows with the awards it has won and various aspect of the store, from the friendly customer service to the small and cozy break room that looks more like a home kitchen than part of a retail store.

The family-owned business celebrated 75 years in Stevens Point with an anniversary celebration.

But it’s not just about the success of the business or the family. It’s about the success of the community, the customers and the 15 full-time employees that the Kleins also consider part of the Frank’s Hardware clan. http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/story/news/local/2016/06/24/franks

Published by the Stevens Point Journal

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HE BOYS & Girls Club of Portage County recently received a generous pledge of a brand new shuttle for the new Plover Center Club site.

Mid-State Truck Service sold the new Diamond Coach shuttle that was donated by Jon & Annette Vandehey and Jerry Fahrner to support club members in the Village of Plover. Stratford Signs created and donated the shuttle’s colorful wrap.

This new shuttle will transport up to 14 club members at a time for field trips and other programs and activities. http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/story/life/2016/07/01/boys-girls-club-receives-donate

Portage County Business Council | July 2016

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ARE WE SIMPLE? DIRECTOR’S INSIGHT- TODD KUCKKAHN Plus, they probably had a minimum of forthy-five minutes for their commute home. Go to our website at www.portagecountybiz.com and check out our member directory under restaurants, food and beverage to find some places with no traffic whizzing by, fumes only from the planted flowers, and scary quiet I want to make it clear that he (might even hear the birds). was NOT referring to our mental My millennial lunchmate also capabilities. Far from it! His use of the term “simple” was to compare us had recently purchased a new home. to other communities in the country. His dollar went much farther than the communities we are competing For example, take shopping or with for talent like Milwaukee, Austin, getting to work or even the ability to Madison and Denver. That positive get things off the “to do” list. Those cost-of-living also correlates to daily of us who have lived here for a while purchases like food, entertainment take it for granted that it takes ten and eating out. minutes to get just about anywhere Along the same lines as “simple”, I Or maybe fifteen minutes to a unique business or maybe thirty minutes to had an interesting conversation with another recreational feature. The someone at our monthly Business same goes for the work commute. After Hours event. We talked With some local commutes, travel about that as a business owner time may take thirty minutes, but and entrepreneur, it is easier to get that is only if you choose to ride your noticed in our community. While bike to work, which many do here there is plenty of competition here, when you do a good job and are twelve months out of the year.

Do you think our community is “simple”? I had lunch with a young man the other day and he shared what he likes about our community.

As he went into a deeper dive into what he meant, it was clear he was spot on with his simple word to define our area.

As I was driving back from taking my grandson to the Milwaukee Zoo (I know—should have gone to the Marshfield Zoo), I saw people enjoying some Friday afternoon beverages on the patios of local establishments. Of course, there were three lanes of rush hour traffic both directions, fumes from the exhaust pipes, and enough noise to make you want to run and hide.

Portage County Business Council | July 2016

engaged with other businesses and the community, you get noticed. As we work on enhancing our culture of entrepreneurship, it is also easier to raise yourself up and get noticed for your innovation. That isn’t new to our region; it is a way of life. If you want to get engaged and noticed, there are countless opportunities through the Portage County Business Council.

Maybe what we are lacking is enough “other” people knowing about our community. We are humble, hard-working, polite people who tend not to brag. Let’s get on that. We recently posted an exciting story about Stevens Point (i.e. our county and region) ranking number one in medium-sized communities and we had over 10,000 hits on social media. If you do nothing else, please share and post about our community.

Your mission, should you decide to accept—share widely about our economic vitality and about how “simple” can be an economic driver and a great place to be!

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4 WAYS REGULAR TRAINING IMPROVES YOUR COMPANY By: Laura Stack

Regular training for your employees is integral to productivity and profitability, meaning it’s something you should never take for granted.

Among other things, training:

1. Improves confidence and therefore performance When people know they’ve been equipped to do their jobs properly, it boosts their spirits and reassures them they can achieve levels of competency and productivity they haven’t realized in the past. Further, when employees understand why their work matters and how to do it, they’re more likely to hit the mark or go above and beyond.

2. Saves the company money Well-trained employees make fewer errors and require less direct supervision. Furthermore, they spend less time thinking about problem solving, because they already know what to do. Consistent training also decreases employee turnover — a big drain on corporate costs.

3. Earns the company money While money saved is equivalent to money earned, directly fattening the bottom line makes people sit up and take notice. A few years ago, Nations

Hotel Company invested heavily in coaching and saw a return on investment (ROI) of 221 percent.

4. Increases productivity Motorola long since realized that every dollar invested in training can yield as much as a 30 percent gain in productivity within three years.

That let the company cut costs by $3 billion and increase profits by 47 percent in 2000 alone. According to another report the 2001 Global Training and Certification Study by testing firms CompTIA and Prometric — as little as a 2 percent increase in productivity can result in a 100 percent increase in training ROI. Researchers have consistently observed this effect over the years since. For example, Dillon Consulting, an international consulting firm, quadrupled its profits by 2009 after instituting a project management training program four years previously. Similarly, in 2013, BSkyB,

a pay-TV service in the United Kingdom and Ireland offering broadband and telephone services, reported a significant ROI after delivering 850,000 hours of training to its customer service representatives over a 12-month period.

Big-time payoff Good, consistent training more than pays for itself in terms of employee confidence, performance, productivity, reduced turnover and dollars earned on the bottom line.

Rather than view it as a necessary evil, treat it as a positive expense— just as you would any initiative that promises to increase profits and benefit everyone all the way down the line.

Laura Stack, aka The Productivity Pro®, gives speeches and seminars on sales and leadership productivity. For more than 25 years, she’s worked with Fortune 1000 clients to reduce inefficiencies, execute more quickly, improve output, and increase profitability.

The Biz Insight is a monthly digital publication published by the Portage County Business Council.

For information please contact us at admin@portagecountybiz.com or at 5501 Vern Holmes Drive; Stevens Point, WI 54482 | www.portagecountybiz.com | 715-344-1940

Portage County Business Council | July 2016