Keep up won’t you? There’s no room for weenies in the global micro enterprise community. My hapless and hopeless UK agent, Tony Robinson OBE, sent me a press clipping of what Serena Williams said after winning the Madrid Open last week.

He’s obsessed by how Serena and Venus have raised the game, opportunity and fashion in women’s tennis so he’s always sending me stuff about what they do, say and wear.

Unfortunately, as he’s by no means the sharpest knife in the drawer, he doesn’t realise that what the Williams family achieve provides some great learning for micro business owners the world over. It also captures a lot of what that fab Enterprise Rockers movement, for micro enterprise owners, is about.

Apparently there was a lot of controversy at the Madrid Open about the new blue coloured clay courts. They use blue playing surfaces indoors in tennis and in other sports, like this coming Olympics hockey, as it make the game better for spectators and television.

However, the men, particularly the world’s number 1 and 3, Djokovic (cool) and Nadal (hot), didn’t like these blue, normally red, clay courts. They said it was too slippery and threatened to boycott any future tournaments that used it.

Diplomacy

This is what Serena Williams had to say, in her winner’s interview, about the playing surface:

“Women are way tougher than men,” she said. “That’s why we have the babies, you guys could never handle kids.”

“We ladies don’t complain we just do our best. On the WTA we are real performers, we are not about going out there and being weenies.”

Just do it

Go Serena go. Now neither Serena nor I have had babies but I think you can see what she’s getting at. By the way, I wonder if she hasn’t had babies for the same reasons I haven’t? I’m just not convinced that the maternity or new Mum look is for me – why I’ve even seen some of these women go outside without their mascara on!

The point is there’s really no point in whingeing as it gets in the way of winning. (I’m sure they’ll put that in the next volume of fave Soculitherzisms – see ‘Stripping for Freedom’).

I believe women are better at just getting on with it. However, all the successful micro business owners, women and men, I’ve interviewed work longer and harder than their corporate and public sector equivalents but because they love what they do they remain incredibly positive.

It’s unfair so get over it

My agent, Robinson, is stupid but he’s said for years that a level playing field for micro enterprise owners will never be a priority for government, certainly for you Brits. Governments traditionally view micro business owners, the 95%, as the great unwashed whereas they can clearly see what executives in larger organisations, the 5%, can do for them.

So, they give them more skills and support funding, greater public procurement opportunity, ability to cope with regulations, more favourable taxation, better financial services provision and bale outs when things go wrong. It’s called ‘creating the right conditions for enterprise and entrepreneurs’.

In turn, larger organisations make the playing surface very slippery for micro business particularly by the practices and processes they impose on their micro business suppliers and then by the late paying of their bills – average 80 days.

Money talks. The big company lobbying machines, which get from government the playing conditions they want, out muscle the small business membership organisation’s lobbying efforts by £billions.

So just get over it and get on with it. Complaining about unfairness is a waste of business building time. Concentrate on winning like Serena. The great thing is that it’s unlikely that you’ll ever need to overcome the same level of adversity and prejudice in order to get to the top with your microbiz.

Rocking all over the world

I think Tina Boden, who co-founded the Enterprise Rockers, a global movement for micro enterprise, has the right idea. Tina’s psyche is the same as Serena’s, along the lines of;

‘Let’s get on with it and just do it ourselves to make life better and fairer for all of us. Then, one day when we have the Power of Plenty in the Rockers’ band, say over half a million, as voters and customers, those that are making us play uphill may just have to listen to us.

In the mean time we’ll have a lot of fun helping each other to thrive and make everyone understand self employment and running your own micro biz is a great career and life option’.

Mind you, I think that now the Enterprise Rockers have got that big German guy, Stefan Topfer, CEO and owner of WinWeb, involved, government may be listening – and a tad scared – already.

There is a better way of winning new customers than pushing you and your B2B offer at them. Customers love it because they’re buying rather than being sold to. You’ll like it because it feels better than selling and you’ll get more long term business from it. Using social media well has made it even easier to do. It’s also a great way of testing new products, services and even a new business. I call it, and please if you call it this too mention me and my company, ‘BRIDGING‘.

For over 25 years my company, the Business Advisory Bureau Limited, has been helping executives go it alone as independent consultants, trainers, coaches, advisers and freelance B2B professionals. We don’t let these new micro business owners out of our grasp until they’ve learned and practised the skill set which will allow them to bridge.

No-one buys from a desperate business owner

You may have heard the story of why we came up with a process to help B2B professionals win more business and keep their customers/clients satisfied and providing referrals. It bears repeating:

As a trainer and coach I was using video cameras on a key account management (sales) programme I was running. I was demonstrating something in a role play and to my horror when I saw the playback I realised I was pushing my offer down the throat of an intimidated, and fortunately mythical, client. What had gone wrong was that my own win-win influencing skills had deserted me.

The reason they’d deserted me was that, in real life, we’d just started a new business and I was desperate, really desperate for clients. Frankly, we were only months away from not surviving. My over zealous need to get the sale in real life had spilled over to a role play in a training room.

I realised that not only hadn’t I fully understood what the client wanted and needed but I hadn’t established any credibility to allow the client to feel it was the right thing to buy from me. Seeing how bad I’d become at ‘selling’ on that TV monitor saved our business.

Alligator soup

Think of two people, you and your prospective client, at opposite sides of a rope bridge. Both you and your prospective client are safely on dry land. The bridge is wobbly and underneath is a river with alligators waiting to gobble up those that fall. What can you do to draw your prospective client to meet you in the middle of the bridge so that you exchange something they want (e.g. your service) for something you want (e.g. your fees).

Why social media and all forms of cloud communications can help you is that by the time you arrive at your side of the bridge your client should already have decided that you are credible and have the solution or can provide the opportunity that they are looking for. In other words, they’re interested in you and want to meet you. Hint: check your networking skills and your LinkedIn profile to see if you can do this.

Then when they’ve got to the bridge you’ve got to pull them to you by asking questions, listening, summarising and influencing or negotiating so that they really want to meet you in the middle. You both fall in the river if you feel or they feel that you are selling to them.

A bridge too far? Never

The art of B2B marketing, including using social media (no excuse with WinWeb in the cloud services), is to get more days in every month when you have a prospective client at the end of the bridge that you can solve a problem or provide an opportunity for. Then you need the ‘pulling’, (just don’t tell your spouse or partner that’s what you’ve been doing!), skills to win the business.

Find out more at TonyRobinsonOBE.com and join the greatest Micro Business Owner community in the world, free, at EnterpriseRockers.co.uk

Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.

1. Make sure that your email Inbox is totally clear of anything urgent and that you have replied to everything important. You can set your email to provide an ‘out of office’ message and let people know when you will be back.

2. Turn off alerts on your phone if you want to really disconnect. Nowadays with smartphones you may feel like you are never really away from your business even when you get some precious time off, so make sure you won’t get email notifications or incoming business calls.

3. Let people you work with know where you are going to be and tell them how you can be contacted in an emergency, but make it clear that you shouldn’t be bothered for trivial matters.

4. Keep your social media presence active even if you aren’t there. Schedule a few good updates to go out whilst you are away.

5. Work hard before you go away to ensure that you won’t have a lot of things outstanding when you return. Plus, it will feel more like you are deserving of the break!

Just like your business’ brand, the sales ledger is an intangible asset that generates value and contributes to growth. It is not the most obvious choice of an asset because it’s a record of sales you’ve already made.

Using your sales ledger

The sales ledger records a business’ regular sales – income receipts from the sale of goods and services. However, this income also includes money owed to your business. The assumption is that it will be in your interest to chase your debtors, especially slow-paying customers for payment.

It’s important for you to regularly record the total amount of sales invoices. By doing this, you will be able to identify and calculate the amount of debt owed to your company. Also, you need to save copies of the sale invoices as it could help you when tracking invoices for payment.

The modern SME will tend to trade on credit terms of up to 90 days. Imagine the financial impact this could have on the owed company?

Financing via Invoice Finance

Your business could have a comfortable turnover, with a high proportion of cash locked up in your debtor books. You would still have to pay out expenses and meet other financial requirements whilst waiting 60-90 days to get paid by your customers. This ‘wait’ could have a devastating effect on your cashflow.

How about a facility where you could release cash against your sales ledger? That is what invoice finance is all about. Your sales ledger is used as the principal security against which up to 90% of the cash could be released.

Invoice finance is a cashflow solution for any type of business – start-ups to established companies, regional to multi-national, lower turnover businesses to financial giants. As long as your sales ledger has invoices outstanding to other businesses, you could qualify for invoice finance.

Invoice finance is administered in two forms: factoring and invoice discounting. Both facilities release a pre-arranged cash advance on your invoices as soon as they are raised. The invoice balance, less any charges, is paid to your business once your customer settles their invoice.

The main difference between both forms of finance is that factoring provides an additional service of sales ledger management and debt collection. This makes factoring suitable for SMEs (including start-ups) that trade on credit with other businesses.

On the other hand, invoice discounting allows the business to mange its own sales ledger and chase customers for payment. Invoice discounting is geared towards the ‘larger’ businesses, with a projected annual turnover of at least £350k, as they have in-house debt collection systems.

Benefits of sales invoice financing

Your business benefits from accelerating its cashflow by up to 90% of the cash tied up in your sales ledger. You immediately gain access to working capital that can fuel growth into your business.
Unlike other traditional forms of finance such as bank loan and overdrafts, the credit rating of the applicant is not a major issue. Finance providers set their invoice prepayment percentage based on the quality of the outstanding invoice.

Whilst waiting on your customers to make payments, your business could potentially miss out on supplier discounts and offers. The funds released via invoice finance boosts your bargaining power with suppliers and enable you take advantage of early discounts.

Invoice finance is a flexible form of finance that grows in line with your business. This means the more invoices you raise, the more cash you could get. Should you require, bad debt protection could be offered.

GUEST BLOG: This business advice article is written by Factoring.uk.net, the invoice finance experts.

Dad died in March, aged 91, and a huge number of people came to share in the appreciation of his life and to share their memories. Kirby’s ten year rule came up, from others who had received this pearl of wisdom from him whether they wanted it or not.  One man put it succinctly. The full message was to build steadily, and to be clear on the degree of commitment and stamina required to get through the maze of learning; to tell yourself at the outset that knowledge and experience take time; to galvanise yourself for the mistakes from which you can learn and to accumulate the value of all of this.

I think the worth of what Dad said is higher than ever now, and this is why.

My Dad’s age tells you that he worked before the technological revolution, in the lean years after war service, long before the hyper fast dissemination of information on the web. Building a name took a long time.

Today marketing is everything (or is it?), with everyone able to get their name or their business name in front of the world if they are wired in to all the possibilities. A great idea well pitched and professionally tuned in to all that the web can offer can grow wings overnight. How good is that? How ready are you for that?

What Dad taught me and others was to work within reason; to measure strides and to build pace in tandem with trust and reputation – to keep your balance, both at the bottom of your bank statement and when you face the new challenges that can take you higher up the ladder.

Mother’s Garden may, in some people’s opinion, have grown too sedately in this hothouse age, but my partner Maggie and I are comfortable with that. There have been the huge “abroad” aspects to address too – language, bureaucracy, tax system, vagaries of the exchange rate etc – that must be tackled, but we have come a long way.

After those vital years of learning and cementing in the cornerstones of our business we feel we are ready to build to the next level, using cloud for a host of good reasons. It will be interesting to explore how we can make that work given our Spanish base and UK market.

Top 5 Tips posts from the SME Blog are always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.

1. Using a credit card is actually a sensible thing for a business to do, provided they are going to be paying it off in full each month. Doing this helps to build a solid credit history.

2. The card should be used for small purchases at first to allow you to improve your credit rating. As your credit rating improves you will be allowed to borrow more money.

3. Don’t pay for too much all at once on credit. Plan your purchases carefully and stagger them across multiple months if possible.

4. If you must buy things on long-term credit, shop around for a good interest rate and don’t be afraid to chop and change lenders to get the best deal.

5. Make sure that any employees who will be able to buy things on the company credit card understand what should be paid for on credit or upfront.

Following that we met up for coffee earlier today to talk about blogging, which I do quite a bit of, and a general catch up.

During our conversation we got round to the article that he had shared with me and we got to talking about networking, in general, and our views on it.

This got me started on a bit of a rant about open networking. You see, I think Nigel has a point, but I would go further.

Personally, I don’t like open networking as most people I meet seem to be intent on talking ‘at’ people and are out to get something for themselves. A not so subtle way of trying to sell themselves or their products in many cases.

Barclay concurred and agreed that it’s best to listen to people so that we can get to know each other better and so better understand how we can help them. I agree with Barclay but in our conversation we agreed that we need to think more broadly about the idea ‘how we can help them’.

Our help should not be limited to what we, personally and in our businesses, can do for someone but should include who we know that we trust and can help that person.

I believe that we need to gauge our networking not just by how much business we gain from it but also from how many people we have connected and helped with introductions.

Networking comes from the word ‘network’, the strength of which is based on its connections. If you are only concerned with what you can get from your network then, I believe, you are only building weak, one-way and transactional relationships. However, if you adopt the principle ‘give before receive’ then I believe you will get more out of your networking, become a more trusted node in your network, get known as more of a ‘go-to’ guy or girl in your community and, in the end will benefit more in the long run.

That’s exactly what the people at Landjacker are allowing businesses to do. They have a giant virtual map on their homepage gridded into 6×6 squares and the more squares that your business purchases, the easier it will be to see.

But the great thing is that Landjacker is not like other forms of advertising, because there is the potential to earn your money back and make a profit on top! If someone wants to buy your land, you will get your money back and earn a profit of at least 10%. So it is a win-win situation each way, because you will either make a profit on your land or have your advert displayed there forever.

If you get in early your land is not available for “landjacking” in the first two months and your business logo will be displayed in the Original Owners page for the life of the site. Why not go and grab some land today?

Mother’s Garden is more than a brand; it is a way of life.

All we that do – the books, the olive oil, the farm cottage holidays, the farm – have grown organically from the principles that fuelled our life change and independence all those years ago, and which we work very hard to sustain today. We wanted a foundation on which to focus on the importance of family, to find time and never wish it away, and to find a place where we could challenge ourselves to make a new life that would fulfil us.

And here is a key point, one factor that had the greatest bearing on whether, particularly in the early years, we would succeed or fail: To everyone among the many who asks how he or she can do likewise, we always stress the need to build on rock.

The analogy of our beautiful, ancient farmhouse is a good one for anyone thinking of starting out on their own in business, whether in a foreign country or where they are. It is built on rock. The house needed attention in 2000 (it still does), but the roof was sound and it had electrical and phone connections. It is on fertile Priorat land with a well and spring, close to a village, school, medical centre and a railway station, 40 minutes from the sea, Reus Airport and Tarragona, 1 hour and 30 minutes to Barcelona.

The core of our business – whatever it turned out to be – would rise from this foundation.

The fact that we had no set plans regarding income, other than the gross gamble of finding a publisher and a readership for my books, was “very brave”, some people have said. No. It was mad. We had no savings and in the first two years attempted to be as self-sufficient as possible, watering vegetables until nightfall while we brainstormed how best to water the seedlings of this adventure and somehow find a way for Mother’s Garden to bear a different sort of fruit.

We believed totally in the Mother’s Garden concept of living and we quickly appreciated how the wide interest in it was important. So the ideas of how to support ourselves came. We shared our experiences through two No Going Back television documentaries on Channel Four, created and registered a perfect brand logo of a fruitful tree from a drawing by our niece and our daughter, turned our burgeoning Latin farming and cuisine knowledge into an olive oil export business and we restored a derelict house on the farm into a holiday retreat for people from around the world.

In the coming weeks I will talk about our steep and ongoing learning curve regarding marketing, language, planning, brand building and growing, covering the obvious challenge of basing ourselves in a different country and all that means. I will be honest about our failings and will chronicle our advances.

Despite the years we remain an almost kitchen-table business, one that now needs to evolve, because the jigsaw has now become too large for that significant table. I am happy to share that journey with you. And if you would also like a less-business, more earthy account of this family life, see my blog at mothersgarden.org.

Most entrepreneurs I’ve met are looking for opportunities to make money all the time. If they followed the advice on these start up websites they wouldn’t just copy stuff and they’d be too late in getting the product or service to market and the opportunity would have gone.

Look at Loubi (Christian Louboutin to you), if he hadn’t read an article about a slashed out shoe with a red line, then thousands of rich women around the world wouldn’t have fallen off his killer heels to, legs in the air, show off his signature red soles.

Dear reader and fan, I want you to take a look at the mind of an entrepreneur. Let’s take one successful one, Stefan Topfer, Editor of this Small Business Blog and one unsuccessful one, the aforementioned aberration, Tony Robinson OBE. They have two things in common; they’re both badly dressed (fleeces – urgh) and they look for business opportunities all the time.

The Recycling Opportunity

So, yesterday, Robinson rang Topfer and the conversation went like this:

Robinson: I’ve just seen on the BBC News site that a scientist has proven that giant dinosaurs could have warmed the earth with their flatulence.
Topfer: Ja – I mean, so?
Robinson: Well, where is the equivalent place today where hundreds of dinosaurs, produce masses of hot air?
Topfer: In your House of Commons and House of Lords?
Robinson: Precisely and why will this supply of huge volumes of hot air continue ad infinitum?
Topfer: Would that be because it is mainly a boys club eating vast quantities of posh nosh provided by the City and the top 100 CEOs and one or two media moguls.
Robinson: Yeah that and their humongous expense accounts that they can spend on Big Macs and pasties. It makes you feel good to know that we can now recycle all that dinosaur fuel for the benefit of the people.
Topfer: Ja, I mean nein, I mean how?
Robinson: You’re fab at technology, do the math and turn Parliament into a massive great hot air heater channelling warmth into the council housing, parks, stations and shop doorways where those with no dosh to pay for heating live.

I won’t carry on – as Topfer told Robinson never to speak to him again. The point is that here are two dinosaurs discussing a business opportunity that utilises a source of natural energy that has been available for thousands of years. There’s nothing original here apart from the possible opportunity.

Stuff to ignore

So ignore the stuff on websites that is ‘conventional business guidance’. ‘How to come up with a great business idea?’, ‘How to pitch your idea to investors?’, ‘Getting finance’ ‘There’s a business in you’, ‘What needs to be in your business plan?’, ‘Get a mentor from a Bank or Corporate’ and ‘How to sell’. the enterprise essentials are much less complicated and far more common sense and natural than this guidance.

Most successful entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed haven’t done any of the things that are regarded as ‘good business practice’. Most don’t like borrowing money, especially from banks. Their business planning is always in their head. Most of them are action rather than words people. They often copy and improve other people’s ideas and activities like crazy. The point is that time is money and opportunities come and go and they can’t be wasting time on this theoretical business stuff.

Instead, my advice to a start up, from my award winning series of entrepreneur interviews (see my book ‘Stripping for Freedom’) is:

Look for what customers want and are buying that you’d relish providing too.
Then, preferably by bootstrapping, check that you can afford to produce it as a product or service.
Then test market your product or service with its ‘twist’, like Louboutin’s red sole or, more likely, with an additional service that the competition aren’t providing.
Then from what you have learned launch your new business always remembering that you may need more products and services or even businesses to make the earnings you need to make.

Let’s Twist Again

This ‘copying and improving with a twist’ is important to the success of many entrepreneurs.

For example, the unique ‘twist’ that Stefan Topfer achieves with WinWeb is that he is absolutely passionate about beating the global competition not just by great cloud software and infrastructure but with exceptional customer service too. His customer service people are mentors. He’ll sack people that ‘sell’ his products and services as he believes in the customer buying what they choose that is absolutely right for them.

The great news is that everyone starting a business on their own can provide their own ‘twist’, a unique level of service, to support a product or service that customers already understand, want and need. Just get your offer out there as quickly as you can after testing it.

-Finis-