I enjoyed it and thanked Heavens for the opportunity. I wondered how beautiful entrepreneurship is. It’s important for us to relive those good moments and help us get past the current difficult times.

Makes Us Better Human Beings

This is the best part. Entrepreneurs are essentially problem solvers. You solve a problem, you get the order. By itself, that makes you a good person. To get repeat orders, you have to earn trust from the client. To make a business successful, you have to earn trust from every other stake holder in your business.

Generating trust is not automatic. You have to keep your promises, exceed expectations, and speak truth – which are traits of a good human being, not just a good entrepreneur. “Business is a force for good,” Sumantra Ghoshal, a management guru said. How true!

Experiment and Have Fun

Business is uncertain. We don’t know what works and what doesn’t. We don’t know if a prospect will buy our offering; and if a prospective employee will take the offer. We have to experiment and find out. Just like we learned science in school – we have to figure out for ourselves what works. If it doesn’t, we learn that it doesn’t – but learn we will. In some cases, we fail miserably. In some others, we get much more than we expect. That’s fun. We learn, failing is okay. We fail many times until we succeed. We cherish success.

The Market Makes the Butterfly in You

Entrepreneurship brings out the butterfly in us. We have to pass the test of the market and it means that someone has to pull hard earned dollars out their purse and pay us. It’s not sufficient if one person does that! Lot of people have to do that before our business can survive and make profit. And that teaches us a lot. It teaches us perseverance, the value of relationships, and a lot of other qualities. Many observe the transformation in themselves after they start a business.

It’s Time to Relive the Good Moments

In these tough times, it makes sense for us to remember those good moments to keep us going. Relive those moments and share what made you feel good about being in business. Share it. This is an opportunity to cherish those moments!

* * * * *

Chaitanya Sagar is the Co-Founder and CEO of p2w2, which helps small businesses outsource services like writing, software, graphic design, virtual assistance, business consulting and research. Chaitanya blogs at p2w2 blog. He is fascinated by entrepreneurship and the difference technology can make in people’s lives.

Picture credit: Matt McGee

The post Relive the Good Moments of Your Business! appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I googled “What small businesses want” and it fetched all of approximately 800 results – nothing close to what I am looking for. That’s certainly not as interesting as “What women want” which generated about 1.1 million results. 

But I think it’s fascinating. Small businesses exemplify entrepreneurial spirit that I so admire. Entrepreneurs pay for value – not for bureaucratic processes. We have distinct needs; and we aspire to be large. Very few companies have been able to come up with products and services that small businesses love!

Your Friendly Neighborhood Computer Guy recently wrote a wonderful post on what to look for in a small business bank. Anita wrote a follow-up post on How to Get Startups to Say “I’m in Love with Your Bank.” It set me thinking.

So this is going to be a post where all you small businesses can write in the comments your experience in buying a product or a service. You can write what you wanted in a product, what you found exciting or how it did not match your needs or resources. This is a post to voice your needs so that businesses out there can hear you. Feel free to mention (briefly) about your company.

I promise to talk to every one who puts in an insightful comment (for the first 5 days only) and write an article with all the insights that will be published again on Small Business Trends so it can be useful to all the readers that deal with small businesses. If your comment has insights, you could get quoted in that post and I’ll even point people back to your website!

So go ahead. Write an insightful comment about how you choose products or services!

* * * * *

Chaitanya Sagar is the Co-Founder and CEO of p2w2, an online marketplace for services like writing, software, graphic design, virtual assistance, business consulting and research. Chaitanya blogs at p2w2 blog. He is fascinated by entrepreneurship and the difference technology can make in people’s lives.

The post What Do Small Businesses Want? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

“Sir, keep your hair long in the front so that you don’t look bald.”

I never went back to that stylist!

If you are in a services business, your customer’s delight depends on your critical capability – the ability to ask the right questions. After a customer awards a project to you and before you ‘do it’ what do you ask her?

If you don’t ask anything, you may use a one-size-fits-all solution. Your clients don’t get what they want. They get what you have. If you ask the right questions, you can understand what the client wants; she feels listened to and you connect with the client.

There’s another important reason. Most solutions you give your clients tend to be within a range — a range of cost, a range of time, a range of quality, and a range of scale. And results and what it costs your customer vary wildly if you assume, instead of asking the client what exactly she needs.

The right thing to do is to ask. Take your own business scenario, and you could ask the following questions to start with:

• What are you trying to accomplish? (maybe you can suggest an alternative)
• What are your key priorities (quality, time lines, budget?)
• What is your budget?
• When do you want the deliverables and are time lines negotiable? You could tell the client if it saves money or improve quality with delayed deliverables.
• Can you point to samples that you think are good?

Asking questions gives you an opportunity to listen.  I had earlier written about how to lock in your clients by listening to them. Stan Christensen, an expert in negotiation, says that in negotiation (which is what you do every day with your clients) listening can be very persuasive. Below is the video about listening in negotiation. Hope you enjoy it!

(You can also listen to the full length podcast of his presentation.)

In a service business, asking the right questions is not a one-time activity. You have to do that EVERY time you have a new client or a new project. So you may as well build that into your process. That helps repeat success.

I enjoy asking questions and knowing others’ perspective. In addition, it helps me deliver higher quality of service.

What do you ask clients? How does that help you in your business?

* * * * *

Chaitanya Sagar is the Co-Founder and CEO of p2w2, an online marketplace for services like writing, software, graphic design, virtual assistance, business consulting and research. Chaitanya blogs at p2w2 blog. He is fascinated by entrepreneurship and the difference technology can make in people’s lives.

The post Service Businesses: Do You Ask Your Clients the Right Questions? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

In the initial days of my company, I did everything myself. I spoke to customers; I interacted with investors; and wrote business plans. At the same time, I cleaned my office and went long distances just to deliver legal documents somewhere. I spent a lot of time on those tasks which were not strategic or something that contributed to my customers. I did everything because I had nothing better to do. If I hired someone else, I would pay them and I’d have to sit idle!

As a small business grows, and as the scale at which a task is done increases, you have to find ways to get the time to focus on the bigger picture. If you don’t, you will get caught up in myriad routine activities, and can’t progress on strategic areas of your business. You have to make time to steer your business in the right direction. And you can do that by delegating work to others, by outsourcing, and at times, it’s as simple as asking other party to visit your office instead of you visiting them!

My startup has been growing gradually. And some of the rules I had learnt in the initial days are obsolete already. Though I saved precious dollars in the initial days doing all the routine work, time and again, I found myself asking myself, “Why am I doing this? How does my customer benefit from it? Should I not be working on something that enhances value to my customer?”

So now I do what is strategic and outsource many activities like coding for my website, marketing material work, accounting, graphic design, etc. In areas I do outsource, I am glad I do because it led to a lot of progress. On hindsight, the decision to outsource my work to others has greatly paid off in the following ways:

1. Where it was not my core competency, I rode on other’s competency and made wonderful progress.

2. When the project (such as product development) was over, I had the ability to scale down the activity reducing the “burn rate” without having to fire employees (had I hired them).

3. I was able to save time and could focus on the strategic aspects of the business.

But I must say that there still are areas where I think I could have outsourced to a person who was more competent.

Outsourcing has its limitations. What you should outsource depends on whether the other party can do it better (and whether “doing that thing better” is necessary); whether your time has alternate and better use to it; whether delegating to a full time employee (but not outsourcing) is a better idea for that task.

Here are a few resources about delegation and outsourcing that you might find interesting:

•  The 4 Hour Work Week
•  Tips For Outsourcing Small Business Needs
•  The Benefits Of Outsourcing For Small Businesses

Coming back to the bigger picture: If you want your business to grow, you should not become the bottleneck. You must learn to delegate and outsource.

* * * * *

Chaitanya Sagar is the Co-Founder and CEO of P2W2, an online marketplace for services like writing, software, graphic design, virtual assistance, business consulting and research. Chaitanya blogs at p2w2 Blog. He is fascinated by entrepreneurship and the difference technology can make in people’s lives.

The post Delegate or Outsource – If You Want Your Business To Grow appeared first on Small Business Trends.