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As a small business owner in Australia I am always looking for inspiration, innovation and ways to grow my business. Thanks to well-known innovators such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, and newer stars like Aaron Levie from Box Silicon Valley is a hotbed of innovation and inspiration. There is a lot we can learn from their experiences and successes. Here are the five things I have learned about succeeding as a small business owner.
This sounds counter intuitive, but believe me it’s not. To fail fast means to try something as quickly and cheaply as possible and if it doesn’t work you learn and improve or pivot and change direction. This approach provides the greatest possibility for innovation, the magic ingredient in your value proposition to your customers that will give you an unfair advantage over your competitors. You need to keep going, learning and iterating until you succeed. More often than not success is a function of how many times you can afford to fail before you succeed.
Fail fast and you will fail well. Affordable failure is actually what success looks like. Use cloud based tools like salesforce.com, Dropbox or Xero that let you iterate and evolve quickly.
This is closely related to failing fast. There is a quote I love in the running lean card deck “opinions in here, facts out there”. Ultimately you don’t buy your product or service, your customers do. Find out what their problems are and how you can better solve them. This is your value proposition. Try to connect on an emotional level. This is what they will pay you money for. Get your products and services in front of your customers for feedback as quickly and often as possible. Unless you are working on the next enigma machine, keeping it under wraps or simply not bothering to get feedback is not going to do you or your customers any favours.
Cloud computing has been a massive game changer that enabled us to move very quickly. No hardware. No software. Small and medium business have access to the same level of competitive advantage from technology that only large companies could afford 15 years ago. In fact in some ways small business now has a distinct advantage over big business. Big business often can’t afford to move off 15 year old legacy on-premise systems. Big companies would love to be unshackled from their legacy systems and be agile like small businesses: embracing the latest apps, operating with speed in the cloud, adopting mobile and using social to create disruptive innovation.
These days as a small business you can scale in hours to run your business in the cloud with better CRM, integrated online marketing and productivity platforms at your fingertips quicker than large companies.
I really wish we had known more about marketing a lot earlier. At System Partners we have grown year-on-year via referrals and word-of-mouth. It could have been multiples better if our marketing was stronger.
You don’t need to lots of money for marketing, leveraging social media is a free and easy way to test your market, message and get your name out there. Gone are the days of needing a big marketing budget to make a big splash. Be smart and use your networks. ‘Feed a starving crowd’ by best selling author Robert Coorey is a great resource to get you started. It has more than 200 unique marketing strategies, of which 174 require no budget to get you on your way. Apply the concepts of fast failure to find out which marketing tactics work best. When you are ready consider looking at digital marketing platforms to supercharge you efforts.
This term has been around for years in Silicon Valley. Originally it comes from an old army term “to haul yourself up by your bootstraps”. After failing fast a number of years ago, I’ve been involved in bootstrapping a number of successful startup companies, including System Partners (which we started with $50 each). Our first office was literally in a cafe, our second office was in a large empty office floor that was being used to store furniture. One of our early customers let us use it rent free. And so on. We now have a nice new office in Martin Place and it’s a multi-million dollar business with a consistent 100% growth rate.
The message is that fixed costs rob you of the chance to keep “failing fast” while you get your revenue in line and may well kill your business. Keep your costs as variable as possible for as long as possible. This also lets you survive the inevitable variable revenue and cash flow which is a fact of life for most small businesses. Avoid long term leases on premises, focus all your efforts and resources into iterating quickly and solving your customers problems. Keep it lean and it will make you hungry and it will make your business strong.
About the Author:
Barret Cunningham is a Founder, Director and Principal Consultant at System Partners. As one of the founders of Salesforce CRM implementation experts System Partners, Barret is a Principal Consultant, with over 15 years experience in business improvement and technology.Barret has been implementing salesforce.com since 2004, working on some of the largest and most innovative projects in the APAC region. He has engineered business transformation for a range of small, medium and enterprise clients as well as successfully launching four technology companies.
