The Small Business Book Awards recognize business books that were published in 2011. Small business owners often seek advice and information through books. While there are many thousands of books published each year, it’s those of interest to small businesses and entrepreneurs that the Small Business Book Awards seek to honor.

“With so many books being published each year, we wanted to recognize those that made a difference to small business owners and managers and startup entrepreneurs,” said Ivana Taylor, Book Editor at Small Business Trends, which produces the Awards. “Our annual Small Business Book Awards are a way to highlight the books that entrepreneurs are reading and learning from.”

The Awards are an honor to the authors who write books for the small business and entrepreneurial community. Says Anita Campbell, CEO of Small Business Trends, “For many of the authors, writing a book is a labor of love. Often they get up early in the morning before the rest of the family awakes, and they devote their evenings, weekends, holidays and vacations to writing. They deserve recognition.”

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For the next 4 weeks anyone ordering a copy of my book from the web site here will receive a signed copy with unique bookmarks.

About the Small Business Book Awards

The Small Business Book Awards, now in its fourth year, enable the small business community to nominate, show their support for, and vote on their favorite business books. The top 10 winners will be selected by readers based on number of votes as the Best Small Business Books of 2012, while the top five vote-getters in each category become Category Winners. Voting commences February 1, 2012. In last year’s Awards, over 41,000 votes were cast by the community.

The Small Business Book Awards initiative is produced by Small Business Trends, an award-winning online publication, which along with its sister sites, serves over 4,000,000 small business owners, stakeholders and entrepreneurs annually.

CONTACT:

Small Business Trends
admin@smallbiztrends.com
Twitter hashtag: #BizBookAwardsTweet

Here is what I know:

WordPress Blogging Platform (this is the platform for this blog)

1. Start with an area of business or hobby or whatever you feel strongly about and focus on that. Everything I write about revolves around “Execution Tips” for busy executives.
2. So originally I drafted 10 big playbook areas e.g. Positioning, Marketing, Sales, Metrics, etc that I wanted to cover and 10 sub ideas within each that I thought I could cover. Well that gave me 100 ideas. Now the frightening blank sheet of paper had vanished.
3. WordPress allows you to literally start typing just like a word doc. You want to link a word to a web site, highlight the word, then use the link icon in the tool bar, copy the url into the link and done.
4. Again using the tool bar, you can insert images in jpeg format, videos etc. You can preview it, and edit it until you are ready to publish. Make sure you use Tags on the sidebar to record key phrases the search engines can pick up.
5. Shutterstock is a great place to find high quality images like the one above.
6. Give yourself a publishing deadline. In my case I publish every Friday. That means I need to have written the copy by Thursday to be safe. Of course you can write several posts at once and schedule them to be published over the following weeks.
7. Try to stick to 600 words (I know this post is 800) if possible.
8. To insert a spreadsheet table is relatively straightforward.-Highlight the table in excel and print to Adobe pdf-Once the pdf image appears use Tools tab, Advanced Editing, Crop Tool – to highlight just the table.-Click on the table and in the pop up window look for the small box “remove white margin” tick box- Now save this image as jpeg file-Use the WordPress tool bar to insert your saved image eg 

Twitter

1. Again you need to be clear on your objectives. I do not (or rarely) answer the question “what are you doing?” Instead I answer the question: What have I found interesting today on my reading travels? So every day I take 10 min to share really compelling articles, links to the WSJ, FT, and great blogs.
2. Use the Twitter platform to let people know you’ve just posted a blog.
3. Use it to tell people you are attending an event.
4. Use the Direct Message functionality (DM) to contact followers who follow you.
5. Use RT to retweet tweets you want to share
6. Curate the fire hose of noise by using TweetDeck -
7. This allows you to create columns for everyone- all your friends you follow, to new people who follow you, to Direct Messages etc. This allows you to see specific Tweets from specific people quickly.
8. As a rule I’m wary of people with a higher number of following than followers.
9. Find someone interesting – explore their followers to look for common interest.
10. Create your own lists and keep a portfolio of people you want to keep in touch with.
11. TweetDeck also automatically shrinks links to keep you under the 140 character limit.

LinkedIn

1. You might already have some form of presence on LinkedIn but there is a significant amount of functionality hidden away. So my advice would be to kick the tires. Press a few tabs and explore the functionality of the site.
2. Specifically I would take some time to build out your profile. It’s an opportunity to get across your passion about current projects/ companies/issues.
3. Join a few groups – you can see the details behind groups by clicking on Groups, members tabs.
4. Announce your blog posts – by framing them as a question e.g. “Do we need to simplify to be successful?” was a recent blog post that garnered a lot of interest.
5. Form a page for your company
6. Become a Premium member to access a bunch of services e.g. you can send direct messages to all your contacts, see who is looking at your profile, organize your contacts
7. Join the conversation with some great Groups. Elevate your company’s brand.
8. Create a unique url -see here.
9. Review all your profile details for SEO key words that you want to drive search results.

So I hope that helps with the basics. It’s really about giving up a little bit of time each week and diving in.

Final chance to vote for my new book – the Orange Paperback – 60 chapters packed with stuff just like this post! – VOTE

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3 days to go. You can vote every 24 hours, so if you feel like clicking that button it’s under HERE.

Testimonials so far:

Derek Sivers, founder, CD Baby, sivers.org - Great advice in a great format. 60 little stand-alone chapters, each compiling helpful wisdom from his and others’ experience. A great read, especially for those so busy they only find a few minutes at a time.

Tom Deans Ph.D. - Award Winning Speaker and Author of the Best Selling Book Every Family’s Business - This is one on those rare books CEOs will keep in the top right – hand drawer of their desk.  Over time its worn edges and dog-eared cover will evidence its reliable straight shooting advice that kept its owner coming back for more elixir to the challenges of creating and monetizing value.

Joseph F. Trustey, Managing Director, Summit Partners, a leading US PE firm. - With the wit only a Scotsman can muster, Ian takes complicated business principles and brings them into the realm of the ordinary.

Amy Scott Boudnitskii - Award winning film producer – Not only have I read the book but was fortunate enough to see Ian Smith speak in person. This is a valuable tool to anyone owning their own business, regardless of whether or not you are expanding, selling or just starting out as the valuable tools and insights can be applied to a business at any stage. I recommend this book highly and also urge you to attend a seminar if Ian is speaking.

Paul FP Cronin – Partner at Successful Transition Planning Institute - Fulfilling The Potential of Your Business”, book provides real, actionable advice every business owner can and should act upon. Doing so will increase profits and company value. I have seen too many companies going through the motions during good times, then wondering “what happened?” when tough times arrive (economy, new competition new regulation, etc). The straight forward advice on systems, sales, and operations will guide any business to become a better, or as Ian says, “remarkable” business.

Really appreciate the support.

Best

Ian

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Downtimes are a great opportunity to go back to basics to remind yourself why you are in business. It’s an opportunity to simplify, to block out the noise, and return to making money and creating an innovative, remarkable business that’s fun!

The key is where to start? – Answer -Positioning: Give yourself a Perspective session. Involve an outsider. Take the baggage, the padding out of your strategy. You need to figure out what you can be great at and then execute your strategy with passion and skilful delivery. Thermo Fisher Scientific refocused on scientific instruments and sold off non core activities that were not central to their new vision. EBay, News Corps and Sara Lee have all executed repositionings during this recession.

By understanding your unique market your super powers,  you can simplify your message. Pruning your strategy allows you to execute everything else much faster.

You can now lay out clear policies on the type of innovation that makes sense, the acquisition targets that would fit well, the metrics you need to measure, the marketing strategies that deliver the maximum ROIs, the clear business results that you deliver for clients and therefore the sales narrative that articulates how you solve real problems. Even recruitment becomes slicker as you are able to articulate one compelling story to candidates. People love joining a cause with a future.

Simplicity works, and back to basics is key, allowing your team to rally around one cause. Specific operational examples to inspire:

37 Signals one of the most successful private software companies in the last decade have this to say: Be a curator. Stick to what is strictly essential. Pare things down so you are left with only the most important stuff. Then do it again. You can always add stuff later if you need to. They are even rebuilding their core product as you read this from the ground up rather than add new features to old features.  That takes guts.

Intuit’s new R&D strategy delivers remarkable results, it’s a new approach using small (2 or more) nimble teams , bottom up rather than top down. This changed 27 years of thinking at the company.

Hubspot simplify social media with really smart dashboards that allow meaningful actions to happen.

i-Robot is at the leading edge of technology but even they demand a defined simple Value Proposition from all 3 levels of their R&D, Short Term Level 1, Medium term 12 months to 18 months Level 2 and Blue Sky Level 3.

Dashboards, once you know who you are, you can decide what to measure. Well known one page simple dashboard users include – Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft & Larry Ellison of Oracle. (Jack Welch was a big fan)

Checklists, – From aviation, construction to surgery, the power of relevant simple checklists can transform projects. Simple checklists deployed methodically can transform the operational performance of a business, from reports to R&D to Board Meetings.

Projects: Define the problem, allocate an owner, build a team, state success criteria, sign off deadlines, release money.

Hope you enjoyed this post – there is a whole book of them published late last year on Amazon double click on my orange book cover for details.

Support the cause for small business and vote for my book here – nominated in Management – Small Biz Book Awards – One click vote here 

Comments always welcome.

Best

IanTweet

11 days to go. You can vote every 24 hours, so if you feel like clicking that button it’s under HERE.

Testimonials so far:

Derek Sivers, founder, CD Baby, sivers.org - Great advice in a great format. 60 little stand-alone chapters, each compiling helpful wisdom from his and others’ experience. A great read, especially for those so busy they only find a few minutes at a time.

Tom Deans Ph.D. - Award Winning Speaker and Author of the Best Selling Book Every Family’s Business - This is one on those rare books CEOs will keep in the top right – hand drawer of their desk.  Over time its worn edges and dog-eared cover will evidence its reliable straight shooting advice that kept its owner coming back for more elixir to the challenges of creating and monetizing value.

Joseph F. Trustey, Managing Director, Summit Partners, a leading US PE firm. - With the wit only a Scotsman can muster, Ian takes complicated business principles and brings them into the realm of the ordinary.

Amy Scott Boudnitskii - award winning film producer – Not only have I read the book but was fortunate enough to see Ian Smith speak in person. This is a valuable tool to anyone owning their own business, regardless of whether or not you are expanding, selling or just starting out as the valuable tools and insights can be applied to a business at any stage. I recommend this book highly and also urge you to attend a seminar if Ian is speaking.

Really appreciate the support.

Best

Ian

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Brilliant. However on the basis that your operational team needs more guidance than that, I’ve listed a few ideas to get your juices flowing. A few ideas worth considering to leverage your existing footprint.

Scaling an Operational Cell

Are you building a marketing and sales cell that can be replicated anywhere in the globe? A lead generation machine and sales closing team that is so slick and effective, working to a set of protocols that it could operate anywhere. An operational blueprint capable of delivering repeatable success. Details are everything. The operational blueprint will need to be tweaked from territory to territory. Clearly exporting a protocol from Boston to Tokyo is more challenging than exporting it to say London, or is it? You still need to set out a lead generation plan, a recruitment strategy, an onboarding strategy, teach your sales process, delivery translated collateral (even phrases that work in the States may need tweaking for the European market eg an RFP in the US would often be called an ITT in Europe, Request for Proposal v Invitation to Tender). Once you have a working cell, there is usually an attractive opportunity to replicate that somewhere else. Different selling territories exhibit surprisingly similar behavior if you are brave enough to try.

 Zero Based Budgeting Approach

Costs creep on over time and before you know it your business is totally misaligned. Costs and sales are out of step. This is a moment in time where you have to stand back and say I’m changing our approach. I’m making this a 5% or a 10% or a 15% net profit to sales business. I know I can sell say $10m this year. I know I can make 60% gross margin of $6m on that sales figure and therefore to make 10% net of $1m, I can only AFFORD $5m of overheads. That moment of conviction changes everything. It drives you to find cost savings everywhere. It acts like a catalyst to drive a root and branch review of all costs. It demands you ask the question, if I was starting this business tomorrow from scratch what could I do without? This does not necessarily mean cutting heads but it will definitely mean cutting costs that do very little to facilitate sales.

Volume & Yield Tactics

By understanding the volume and yield drivers behind your sales figures and those of your competitors you may spot a better way to come to market. Think of the battle between Nokia and Apple. Nokia dominated the volume argument but only made $10 on every phone. Apple made more money selling a small percentage of Nokia’s volume but made $180 profit on every phone! Now when was the last time you looked at your pricing model compared with your volume model. Could you make changes to your model to make more money?

Acquisition Costs of Sales Leads and Customers

Measuring the ROI on all lead generation activity is essential. Was that trade show really worth the investment? Did that workshop generate any real business? Did the production of that white paper bring us real business? These are all key questions. However just as important is the tracking of lead acquisition costs month in month out. An upward trend is not a scaleable business. Rather critically the WSJ commented in a recent article, referring to Groupon, the daily offers company that recently listed, “ Critics pointed out that Groupon was unprofitable and was spending heavily to acquire new subscribers amid a flood of competition from daily-deal clones.” If you are a growing private company with rising lead generation costs per lead you are building trouble for tomorrow and indeed many early stage VC businesses run out of runway to turn that trend around.

Restructuring Sales Commission

I’ve reviewed, created and lived with a plethora of sales incentive schemes over the years. Biggest problem: disconnect between the psychology of the formula and the commercial objectives of the scheme. Symptoms range from, base salary % of  Total On Target Earnings (OTE) being > 70%, math way too complicated, lack of clarity on how it scales, the commission payout is paid too long after the sale. By tweaking the OTE package you can increase profitability and achieve a more highly motivated sales team. If  a salesperson comes to you complaining their base is too low, then they are looking at the wrong end of the problem but only assuming you’ve cracked the appropriate incentive scheme. The following worked example illustrates this final point. Imagine your current sales team are on a base salary of $90k plus 3% commission. A more appropriate reward structure might be $60k base and 5% commission. Scenario A is the present scheme. Scenario B is the new proposed scheme. At $1m sales achievement both schemes pay out $120k OTE. However if you can incentivize the sales team to deliver higher levels of performance by doubling the commission % from 3% to 6% to say achieving on average $1.5m sales not $1m then everyone wins. The OTE increases 25% and the profit of the company quantum leaps 53%.

 These are just a few examples to inspire you to build a more profitable business that ultimately is more robust and predictable.

Now don’t forget to vote for my little orange book, one click vote, 10 days to go – Vote button under here

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Fulfilling The Potential Of Your Business has been nominated for a 2012 Small Business Book Award in the category of Management.

The Small Business Book Awards recognize business books that were published in 2011. Small business owners often seek advice and information through books. While there are many thousands of books published each year, it’s those of interest to small businesses and entrepreneurs that the Small Business Book Awards seek to honor.

VOTE FOR MY BOOK

To get my manifesto out there I’d love your vote. To VOTE, simply go here and press the “VOTE” button. Come back daily and vote. One vote per IP address, per book, per day.

WHAT DO THE WINNERS GET?

The top 10 vote getters at the conclusion of voting, will each be named to the 2012 winners’ list, along with the recognition that comes with being named a 2012 Small Business Book Awards winner. Recognition includes publicity as a winner, as well as the right to display Winners insignias on books, websites, brochures and elsewhere.

There will also be awards for the top 5 books in each category.

Really appreciate the support.

Best

IanTweet

In 2011, The Portfolio Partnership worked closely with 5 clients who grew sales on average at 40% by embedding a relevant Operational Blueprint.

The Patriots have an Operational Blueprint.
IBM have an Operational Blueprint.
All of the businesses I managed over the last 25 years had an Operational Blueprint.
All 20 businesses that I sold for attractive exit proceeds had an Operational Blueprint.

If you are achieving a net profit of $1m or more you will never scale your business without an Operational Blueprint.

Here’s How

1. Create a COO role (inside, outside, part time – related blog post)
2. Define your  positioning statement so clear your 10 year old can understand it.
3. Build a Business Plan that shows how you will execute your positioning.
4. Align all your marketing narrative and sales scripts with your positioning. Test: if you listened in to a sales call or read any page of your web site you would recognize your company.
5. Define all operational metrics that demonstrate the progress of all departments achieving the Business Plan.
6. List essential projects that need to be completed this year to progress your objective of moving to the #1 slot in your niche.
7. Divide these projects into 3 buckets: strategically essential, cross departmental priorities, and departmental must haves. Allocate leaders of every project, ask them to define success criteria and deadlines and sign off a budget if required.
8. Redefine your Product Road Map by reconciling everything back to your positioning. Apple spent $1.8Bn in 2010, that ranks it #70 of 1000 large R&D spenders, Microsoft spent nearly 5 times that at $8.8Bn which ranks it at #4, but who do you think of as more innovative? Alignment of R&D with your core strategic aims is the number one factor in effective R&D according to Booz & Co. Kill feature creep. Kill wild punts. Focus and curate ideas that drive you to #1 in your niche.
9. Build a talent nurturing system ( see related blog post) and talent acquisition process (see related blog post) that reinforces your positioning and defines the importance of each role to the company’s mission.
10. Update staff regularly on achievements against the Business Plan and key projects and therefore the fulfillment of the positioning statement

Only by embedding an Operational Blueprint that aligns all departments around a common cause will your strategy really be executed with passion including increasing sales!

For a review of the key playbooks that form the basis of an Operational Blueprint see here.

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I’ve noted below a simple solution with examples that I hope will help. Execution seems theoretically simple but that’s where the problems start. Stuff only gets done when you really understand the type of problem you are solving, the key issues the solution needs to solve and who is going to own the solution.

Type of Problem – Categorize

There are only three types of problems:

1. Strategic
2. Inter-departmental tactical
3. Departmental tactical

Scope & Allocate

Often by taking a step back before diving in we get to a better solution.  It’s so important to list the issues that the solution should solve e.g. at one client we identified the need for a protocol for training customers.
Here are some of the issues we needed to solve?

• What is the definition of on site training?
• What is the definition of on-line training?
• Do we offer training at a separate price, include it in the total package of the system, offer it free?
• How do training videos form part of the solution?
• At what point in the sales process do we discuss the onboarding of the customer?
• Who is going to do the training?
• What level of documentation are we giving to the customer?

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You see the problem with this environment is that we start to look at the wrong stuff, too much stuff, any stuff!

We’ve stopped asking the really smart questions. Look at the technology at our fingertips to analyze our businesses: Intuit accounting software, Eloqua lead tracking software, SalesForce reports, Google analytics, Excel Pivot Tables, 37 Signals Project Management Software. Literally 1000′s of great software programs waiting to be deployed often free or under $1000.

So stand back and ask the questions first, then set your team up to find answers.

Here are my top 30 questions to ask yourself, to really get your arms around the operations of your business:

Questions

1. Who are the top ten public and private competitors in my unique market by sales and what are their sales per employee and profit per employee?
2. What sales growth have they produced over the last 5 years?
3. What marketing campaigns produced the highest ROI in 2011?
4. What market share of my customers spend did my products achieve in 2011? eg Customer A spends $2m on IT and you sold them $200k of IT services therefore you achieved a 10% market share.
5. What is my market share by vertical sectors?  eg automotive sector, aerospace etc
6. What does my Pie Chart of  sales for 2011 by industry sector look like and has it changed over the last 5 years?
7. How does lead generation compare over the last 5 years?
8. Can I compare all sales professionals performance against their performance for last year by product?
9. How did the weighted pipeline of sales for 2011 by quarter compare with Targets and 2010?
10. How do I know our sales scripts are synchronized with our positioning statement of who we are?
11. How does the annual earnings of my top 10 sales professionals compare between 2011 v 2010?
12. What are my 5 worst performing products by total sales and what does that analysis look like by salesperson and by region?
13. What are my 5 highest growth products by sales and how much R&D expenditure is allocated to their Product Road Map?
14. What are the launch dates in 2012 of my new products or features and what impact will they have on the top line?
15. How do I know that all our product road maps are consistent with our market positioning and strategy?
16. How do we test the sales and marketing teams  knowledge of our products?
17. How do we onboard new staff and how do we know it is working?
18. How do we onboard new customers and how we know it is effective?
19. What is the protocol for finding , interviewing and acquiring new talent?
20. What is the protocol for developing staff throughout their career with us?
21. What are the main volume and yield drivers that explain our 2011 P&L performance against 2010 and budget?
22. What are the trend lines for trailing 12 graphs (every data point in the graph represents 12 months) covering the last 3 years for all sales lines and major cost categories?
23. How do the major cost lines compare as a % of sales over the last 3 years?
24. What is the trend line for Accounts Receivable over the last 12 months?
25. How does profit/cash generation as a % compare by quarter for last year?
26. What was the profitability by product for 2011?
27. What internal control weaknesses were identified during the 2010 audit and what progress has been made in 2011?
28. What were the 5 main projects we committed to achieve in 2011 and how did we do and why?
29. What are the top 10 exposures in successfully completing the 2012 budget and what’s Plan B?
30. How will I spot major changes in trends and business models in my marketplace in 2012?

The Portfolio Partnership is working inside some very successful companies to execute operational blueprints that answers these and many more questions. Reach out for a chat.Tweet