• Clean Up Your Workspace
• Clean Up Your Tech
• Reconfigure Your Schedule

The last three days have been pretty active. Today, let’s sit and dream a while.

Imagine your perfect business year. What happens? What are you doing? What is your company like? What does your company feel like?

Let’s wallow in that for a bit, shall we?

From that vision, can you draw three big-picture goals? A goal has three requirements that makes it different from a mere wish.

1. A goal is measurable. You know if you have completed it or not.
2. A goal is time specific. There are deadlines.
3. A goal is achievable through incremental steps.

Stating good goals is harder than it seems but once you get there, you will have a prioritization plan for the year. Those goals can drive your decision-making. You’ll just keep asking, “Does this take me one step closer or one step farther away from my reaching my goal?” If the work is put in ahead of time, it’s amazing how easily the day-to-day, nitpicky details tend to fall into place.

Now picture yourself at the end of 2012 and feel the glow of your accomplishments. It can definitely be.

Happy year’s end, everyone! And all the best for the next one!

• Clean Up Your Workspace
• Clean Up Your Tech

I bet you are not ending 2011 the same way you began it. We live in a world of quick changes, and that is affecting both our business lives and our personal lives. We update our budgets. We update our goals. But our daily and weekly schedules are often overlooked.

As Julie Morgenstern says, time is like your closet. Thinking of time in a physical sense makes it easier to handle. When you add a garment to your closet, a certain amount of space is taken up. Nothing else can go there. And once the closet is filled up, everything else is overflow and creates a mess.

True, right? So start looking at your days, weeks, and year as a series of time blocks. What are you going to fit in those? Do you want to devote more energies into improving customer response times? Adding additional services? Getting a new logo? Or perhaps you want to simplify your processes. Maybe even take more time off.

All of that can be visualized with a working schedule. It does not have to be your hard-and-fast rule, but it can certainly keep you on track and avoid wasted hours.

When do you wake up? By what time are you at work? On what day do you send out invoices? Report sales tax? The act of plotting it all out really helps decision making and the process of realizing what is possible and what is not.

Give it a try and plot out a single day in your life. Then you’ll see what a difference a schedule can make in your productivity and sense of purpose.

Tomorrow, brainstorm and prioritize.

How does your computer’s desktop look? You’ll feel just as wonderful looking at an uncluttered screen as you do sitting at an uncluttered desk.

• Go through your contacts in your phone(s), email(s), and database(s). Update and delete.
• Create subfolders named 2011 and drag all your completed projects into them. Now that blank space is ready to receive your 2012 work.
• Tackle that email! Delete, file, archive, and back up.

Tomorrow, reconfigure your schedule.

But if you have to be at work, or at least want to feel like you are at work, how about being productive without really doing what you do?

For example, how often have you felt frustrated at losing something important at a critical time this past year? How many times have you wished that thing out of your way?

It’s no surprise that clutter makes us feel anxious and disorganization causes stress. So right now, while the phones are not ringing and your inbox isn’t refreshing constantly, why not take the the time to physically rearrange your space?

• If you haven’t used it in two years, then you don’t need it. This is true of everything from a color scanner to the pens in your cup. Put them in the donate pile.
• Fix your ergonomics by raising your monitor, getting a mouse that fits your hand, and upgrading or modifying your chair. A pillow behind your back or a box under your feet works wonders.
• File your paperwork. Yes, it must be done, and you can make a big dent in it all by doing a big chunk all at once. Take rests as you need and put on some fun music.

If you feel like you can do with a second pair of eyes, please give me a call. You can even send me a picture. I would be happy to send along some suggestions.

You will feel so much better with cleaned surface areas. A comfortable space allows for greater energy and optimism. Hey, 2012 is going to be a great year! Let’s prepare to meet it.

Tomorrow, clean up your tech.

3. Avoid breaking up with your fans.
The marketing experts out there will tell you how benficial it is to have fans. They’ll give you all sorts of ways to turn your customers into advocates for your business.

I completely believe in his endeavor and it is one of the most effective things a small business can do to keep running. The experts, however, will rarely mention the flip side of the company-fan relationship: the messy break up.

Netflix managed to build a very loyal membership of fans. These fans touted the service to their friends and family. They stuck by little indie Netflix through the big challenges of Wal-Mart, Amazon, Blockbuster, and more.

When a long-term fan relationship goes south, it is going to act more like a break-up than just a lost business customer.

The anger and passionate outrage expressed by Neflix users seemed to be heightened by a sense of personal betrayal. The response went over and beyond what a regular price increase or policy change should usually incite.

Postage stamps are about to go up again, and just how many of those slips of tiny print do we get from our credit card companies? Yes, people get mad, but we just don’t see the same levels of reaction in those cases.

Loyalty and personal investment make the difference. Customers who are fans can maintain and propel you. An angry ex can affect your operations and reputation for years to come.

2. Easy Business is good business.
A few weeks ago, Netflix announced the end of Qwikster. Qwikster was going to be the original mail-to-home arm of a split interface.

Yep, in an age when the trend is to get everyone to do everything with one thing, Netflix wanted to make its members keep two want lists, one for streaming videos and one for getting the DVD discs mailed to their homes. These two lists would be managed through two log ins, processed with two credit card transactions, serviced by two member review sections, and all the rest.

Understandably, the people were exasperated. Instead of becoming more convenient, Netflix wanted to become more cumbersome. Users would have to spend more effort to get the exact same result from the company.

The lesson here is that when people wanted to do business with you, make it easy for them to do so. There are times when innovation is great and desirable. For small businesses though, a reinvention of the wheel is not always the best option. We can use existing expectations to overcome a lack of resources.

For example, websites are expected to have a certain layout. Your About is in one of two places. Your Contact in one of three places. When these elements are not where they are “supposed” to be, your customer has to work harder to do business with you.

From our standpoint, payment is one of the most important aspects on which to have clarity. Have your payment options be obvious on every invoice. Make Pay and Buy noticeable on your websites. Allow for flexibility and promote usability on every transaction.

You’ve worked hard to get people to your operations. Now make dealing with you as painless and effortless as possible. The less thought the customers have to put into the process, the less time they have to consider the alternatives out there. Everyone likes easy.

Next: Lesson 3. Avoid breaking up with your fans.

1. Price hikes are tricky.
Back in July, Netflix announced an across-the-board price increase for all members. The negative talk began immediately. Instead of addressing people’s concerns directly, Netflix, as far as I know, stayed silent and just waited for the September price increase date to roll around.

In that time, would-be subscribers decided not to join and long-time members canceled their service. Enough people acted that Netflix had to issue a notice saying the company would not be meeting its projected financial figures.

It doesn’t matter that the reasons for the rate increase are easily understandable and pretty obvious. The raising of prices automatically comes with negative feelings. (Think about the postage stamp increases of a couple cents at a time.) The best thing for a business to do is to avoid them as much as possible.

This may mean setting a price right at the beginning that will account for these future rates. One can always use discounts, sales, and promotions to be more in line with current market demands.

If a price increase is necessary, and may you be in business long enough for this to become your dilemma, it helps to think of the move as a campaign and not as a solitary action. Changing a price is as easy as hitting a few buttons these days, but the company should think about how it wants to communicate this change.

Should it be positioned as “Gee, we hate to do this to you, but our costs are up and in order to continuing doing what we do, we really really really have to do this”? Or can the price increase be delivered along with increased value? Has the product been upgraded and is therefore better? Are there more services bundled in with the originals?

Even if the price increase’s true reason is the first one, see if you are not able to achieve the second. Brainstorm how you can justify the additional cost to your customers by making them know that they are also getting a better deal.

In my opinion, this is where Netflix really failed on their subscription increase announcement. They want to push everyone over to streaming, where there are lower overhead and potentially higher profit margins, but they didn’t simultaneously announce better streaming services. They didn’t announce that a lot more and newer titles will soon be available. They didn’t announce better speeds and more reliable connections. In fact, with a few of their contracts falling through, the perceived amount of in-demand titles available on the streaming side is actually going down.

So their customers heard: We’re raising prices. You’re getting less.

Yep, the people were not happy.

Stay tuned for Lessons 2 (Easy Business is good business.) and 3 (Avoid breaking up with your fans.)…

When I come on board, it is rare that the scope of my work remains only on the initial project. Usually, I become a sounding board and a discussion partner.

Running a small business can be an isolating endeavor. Oh, sure, the resources are out there, but the time to access them may not be. Trustworthy peers can also be hard to find.

In these instances, someone like me, a fellow small business owner and someone with experience in a wide variety of fields and tasks, can be so valuable. Why not give me a call to see what I can offer?

Make sure your staff is not afraid to point out mistakes and offer solutions. Every boss will do better with back-up and another working mind.

Capable assistance is an asset and the cultivation of this relationship is absolutely worth it. It may appear to be a waste of time and money to not simply do things your way, but over the long run, a team on your side will catch those huge problems before they occur.