Minding your own Small Business
I’m discovering here in New Zealand that Small Business owners don’t back themselves enough when it comes to deciding and knowing what’s in their best interests. Why do I say that? And in what context? I say it because many of them allow someone else to tell them those things and I believe they shouldn’t.
Many believe that the internet is the be all and end all of their business. It isn’t of course but it is one of the main ways considered by the business community to go to market more quickly these days. Of course it’s also a sentiment that BIG business shares too and in a small pond you can look more like a tadpole if you haven’t got all the right gear. By ‘gear’ I mean a fancy website, period.
The internet is a platform, pure and simple, a way to do business that up until some twenty-something-odd years ago didn’t exist in any real mutli-user, user-friendly form. It’s a platform, and so small business owners need to get their heads around how they can best use this technology to create a presence among consumers and how they incorporate and effect that understanding to implement their overall business plan.
I find myself becoming mentally unhinged when I hear firsthand and surmise just how much money small business owners are allowing themselves to be bled dry of by website developers, designers and publishers here. It borders on criminal actually. I’m serious!
First and foremost, I have to lay the responsibility for being ‘sucked’ in by the bells and whistles at the feet of small business owners themselves. A bit of research would help. Goodness, there are any number of Government and business sites that’ll tell you what’s what and perhaps that’s the problem. By the time a small business owner has got them read and been blinded by the wizardry of graphics their thinking is so overrun with choice they simply pick the first one they see next so as to ease the headache that’s developed!
The problem with choosing this way is that you just might end up with a $1700 (starter) that’s a bit of a no frills job but you don’t really know the difference because, well, you don’t actually know what YOU want the thing to do for YOU and YOUR business. And you have no-one else but yourselves to blame if you haven’t thought through that part of your marketing strategy, of which, an internet presence may only be ONE component.
Personally, I think dollar for dollar, in this region, radio advertising is a better deal. It has immediacy, it can even have personality and compared with the set-up and ongoing costs (and headaches?) of maintaining a website, radio advertising is relatively painless in all the financial hot spots of your business pocket. It goes back to small business owners having thought through what’s best for their business, that’s the bottom line.
Earlier this year I advised a Small Business owner on some fairly basic IP issues that needed his attention before I would even go near his website. They were recommendations and simple control tweaks I felt would help his business. I declined his suggestion I put in a quote to (re)build his current website in an email the moment I got home, why? Because he wasn’t serious. How could I tell? The ‘speak’ wasn’t reflecting my own, that of active consideration. For the record, I don’t expend energy that has no reasonable expectation (in my mind) of returning a decisive and proactive outcome.
To his peril, he ignored my advice and it’s come back and bitten him majorly in the proverbial financial butt. His business has all the signs of it suffering from the parvovirus care of a dis-eased dog bite. I’m not sure his own next shot won’t simply be to his business head. To put him and his business out of it misery.
It’s cost his business tens of thousands of dollars and I’m not exaggerating. There wasn’t any need for matters to have gone that far. Despite things having got entirely out of hand, I still do think there is a solution for this small business owner. Report the perpetrators (of what I believe are illegal practises) to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs. Small businesses, the bottom line is really simple. Mind your own business!
