SMART Goals are out; it’s Time to Get DUMB!
If you’ve ever read any strategic or business planning literature, you’ve no doubt come across the acronym SMART for mapping out goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. Those are all fine and dandy objectives, but I’m out to propose another side of the coin—DUMB goals. Hear me out for a second!
DUMB stands for Dreamy, Unrealistic, Motivating and Bold. If you stop and think about traditional and realistic goals, they aren’t that inspiring or exciting. They encourage status quo and/or staying within confined areas to achieve marginally better results at best. Most employees can see through status quo goals and aren’t going to go that extra mile to achieve things that are already within relative reach—greatness comes from inspiration; not reaching a plateau that the ordinary can achieve with typical or expected efforts. That might be why a majority of employees so willingly sign off on the goals during a formal review process—they know they don’t have to do a whole lot more to get the raise that comes from a satisfactory review next time around. Let’s dig a little deeper to see how “DUMB” we can get.
Dreamy goals repeatedly wake you up at night wondering if something is possible with an effort that is truly remarkable. They imply going for that rarified air no one dares to breathe. It’s finding that special “cause” that will unite people on a mission that makes them feel part of something special versus merely putting in time to collect a check. It’s like your kid at five years old saying he’s going to be President one day and you encouraging her/him to be anything they put their mind to. What happened to encouraging that blank canvas of wide open thinking?
Unrealistic goals are the ones traditionalists warn against and believe aren’t obtainable by anyone. To most, a job is a job until there is a challenge of the unimaginable or someone telling you “it can’t be done.” Unrealistic goals push people to really push hard to move beyond what’s expected to stand out in the crowd and achieve greatness. Isn’t it a lot more fun to do something someone says can’t be done?
Motivating goals are those that make someone wake up each morning ready to take on the day versus figuring out a way to muddle through it looking busy even though time is being wasted. They are those things that people want to come to work for instead of calling in sick because they just can’t stand spending all day in the office. Most SMART goals encourage toiling through the day in an effort to fool everyone around into believing someone is working really hard. A motivated workforce is tough to stop because momentum builds daily.
Bold is charting a course competitors don’t dare take because the fear of failure or success is too daunting. There’s a very fine line between failure and success, and most companies and individuals will walk right up to the line and toe it without ever stepping over it. What is the worst that could happen if you stepped across that imaginary line and really went for something? You’ll never know until you try, and most people simply aren’t bold enough to try—we’re too scared we might not be able to return to the comfort zone we currently live. That’s the beauty of the comfort zone however—it’ll always be there in one fashion or another.
I encourage you to DUMB down your goals the next time you’re charting the course for yourself or your company. Who knows what you might achieve?
10 Ways to Improve Cash Flow
This article gives 10 tips and a brief overview on ways to improve cash flow for any sized business. A must read for any business executive tasked with this objective.
Quick Hit SEO to Do List
Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don’t have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they’d like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I’ve attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.
Submit Your Site to Directories
Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won’t go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of “weight” with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!
There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for “directory submission service”). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it’s very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don’t get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get “credit” for being listed in a lot of the online directories.
Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry
Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone’s face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn’t as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?
Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building “natural” links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.
Engage in a Free PR Campaign
While print media isn’t as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don’t go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you’re truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.
Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere
Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.
If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others’ blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.
Promote Your Site Everywhere
Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you’re simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don’t want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.
Basic SEO isn’t that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you’d promote your business offline—it’s all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.
10 Ways to Improve Cash Flow
Just about every business would like to improve their cash flow. Below are ten ways which may help your business achieve that objective rather quickly:
Bill Promptly; Take Advantage of Payment Terms
The faster you can invoice a client, the quicker the clock starts to tick for the customer to pay in order to meet the terms of the contract you both agreed upon at the beginning of the relationship. Conversely, if you’ve agreed to terms of Net 30 with one of your suppliers or vendors, don’t pay the bill immediately; wait a little bit to take advantage of those terms and keep the cash in your (hopefully) interest bearing account a little longer.
Offer Payment Incentives; Penalize Late Payers
Many times businesses set forth payment terms of Net 15 or Net 30, but they neither offer any incentives to beat those terms nor penalties if the terms aren’t met. Consider adding both to your invoices to decrease your accounts receivable days outstanding. Chances are most of your customers will pay promptly if there is an incentive involved.
Run Credit Checks on Potential Customers
While this sounds like a no-brainer suggestion, many businesses today take whatever business they can acquire and run checks only when problems arise. Often times it is too late to run a check after issues surface. It’s better for your business over the long haul to reject a customer immediately that slow pays or is consistently delinquent. Slow payers are frequently troublesome clients aside from their propensity to get behind on paying you—they are typically the impossible to please variety that will nitpick your organization and sap its resources.
Sell off Under Utilized Assets and Fully Depreciated Assets
Once an asset has run through its useful life and is no longer a depreciable asset, consider selling it off if you can get good value for it. You’ll get an influx of cash that can help you replace that asset or upgrade to a new technology or model and possibly reduce your debt in the process. Many assets will last well beyond their useful life so you may be able to fetch top dollar from a smaller business looking to improve their operation by adding used equipment.
Encourage Partial Payments
If your business is in a bit of a cash crunch, try encouraging your clients to make partial payments on the front end of projects or working arrangements. Most will be agreeable to such provided you make some concessions on your end such as small pricing incentive or discount to do so. This helps you improve your cash on hand while helping your client spread payments out so that everything doesn’t hit all at once in one lump sum.
Comparison Shop Suppliers Online
The Internet makes comparison shopping a breeze, and some of your vendors and suppliers may take you for granted by not adjusting their pricing to reflect current market and competitive pricing. By checking the competitive landscape every quarter or so, you can gain some leverage by knowing how much you should be paying for particular items especially those that are more commoditized.
Stick to Budgets
This is another suggestion that may seem rather obvious, but there are several projects that suffer budget creep throughout a fiscal year. A couple hundred bucks here or there may not seem like much for a particular project, but it will quickly add up if there are multiple projects going on across an organization.
Spread Out Payments; Don’t Pay All at Once
Spreading out payments through a month versus paying everything on one day can really alleviate a cash crunch due to the natural flow of business and customers’ payment preferences. All of the money due to you in a given month doesn’t come in on one day so why should all of the money going out? This little tip can save a lot of headaches even though the temptation to pay everything on one specific day to get it out of the way may seem logical at times.
Add a Shift Versus Taking on More Space
A lot of small to medium businesses are quick to add office or production space when it may be more cost effective to simply add another shift. If your business is a morning shift only operation, how much could you save by simply adding a second shift versus adding production capacity? Chances are you could save quite a bit of development and rental costs by better utilizing the space you have today.
Pay by Credit When Possible
Paying by credit seems to have a stigma attached to it, but it can buy you some extra time to stockpile more cash to pay things off if you play the terms correctly. Since there are also some low rate credit options available, it may be more cost effective to take on a little interest expense until the cash reserves are built up enough to pay things completely off.
Cash flow problems don’t have to cripple your business if you take a step back and evaluate your options objectively. Implementing a few of the tips above can improve things almost immediately and put you back on the right track to a positive cash flow.
2nd SEO Class
Just a quick reminder note that SMB Consulting will be providing the second Search Engine Optimization training class this coming Thursday, June 14, 2007 from 9 AM until 4:30 PM at the McConnell Technology Training Center off Industry Blvd. here in Louisville. It’s the same material as the first class so it’s not too late to learn SEO from the ground up. The class is very hands on, too.
If you’re interested in attending the class, there are a few spots still available. Please e-mail info@smbconsultinginc.com for more details or to sign up. Registration is $650 for the first person and $450 for each additional person you bring which includes all training materials and lunch. All you have to do is show up on time–we’ve got you covered with pens, highlighters, computer lab, and a customized textbook.
Hopefully, we’ll see you in class this week or in one of our upcoming out of town sessions. The next sessions will take place in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Nashville, and possibly St. Louis so if you live in one of those locales, shoot us an e-mail so we can begin to iron out the details for the classes.
For more information on SEO or the training material, you can visit the SEO section of our main website at http://smb-seo.com.
Opinion: Why Carry a Gun?
You’ve all heard the phrase from the pro-gun crowd: “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” True statement which I agree with in principle, but there was an incident in Jeffersontown, KY (a sub-city of Louisville) where a retired J-Town cop (Richard Koenig) and a citizen (Darren Pickerill) got into a bit of a road rage battle over a 4-way stop sign that makes you wonder.
To make a long story short, Pickerill, the citizen, is in the hospital in critical condition as a result of six to eight shots fired by Koenig, the retired cop. Apparently, Pickerill went out of turn at the 4-way intersection that incited a verbal exchange that quickly escalated into a shooting spree. Unconfirmed initial reports suggest that Pickerill possibly showed a gun as the two were arguing over the 4-way stop, and that propelled Koenig to open fire. Pickerill allegedly never fired a shot. All of this over a stupid 4-way stop sign? Amazing!
Yes, the guns in this case are not to blame, but would either of these people be in the position they are in today if neither of them had a gun? The worst that could have resulted is the two might have gotten into a physical confrontation where one or both got roughed up a bit, but they’d both live to talk about it and possibly even laugh about it one day. No one is laughing now, and I’d imagine Koenig is going to have some legal battles to wage as a result of his quick trigger. Pickerill is in pretty dire shape all because of the threat of showing a gun that caused another to flip out and shoot first.
I can’t say what I would have done in the exact situation because I’ve never been in it, and I hope I never am. I can say that I’ve been furious at 4-way stops several times because they really aren’t that hard to navigate, yet some people seem to think they are like solving a Rubik’s cube or something. It deeply concerns me that there are seemingly more and more people out there hunting for situations like this so they can shoot first then cry “self defense” (as Koenig is in this case) if something bad happens.
There are way more dumb drivers roaming the earth than any of us would prefer, but it’s not the end of the world when you encounter one. Flip them off, yell a little, maybe even stand on the gas to get around them, but let it go just as quickly as you blew up. You never know who might be packing heat looking for any reason to unload some rounds to compensate for some pitiful insecurity they have.
The moral of the story for me is nothing good comes from carrying a gun around even if you never plan to use it. The sheer fact that it’s there is a threat that it COULD be used, and people don’t tend to act rationally when they experience a little road (or instant) rage. The gun itself provides zero protection–using it does. Why tempt yourself and fate?
SEO Class Recap
On Thursday, SMB Consulting hosted a SEO Training Seminar/Bootcamp at the McConnell Technology Training Center off of Industry Blvd. here in Louisville. We had six attendees that seemed to really enjoy the class especially the hands on nature of it. Analyzing keywords seemed to generate the biggest “ah-ha” type of moments, and spying on competitors provided some eye opening information that is sure to help with the optimization efforts moving forward for everyone. One area that didn’t seem to matter as much is the history of search engines (beginning of the class) so less time will be spent on that as things progress.
One thing I personally learned is to combine the workbook with the textbook I generated for the class. I apologize to those that attended this particular class for the confusion the two books seemed to cause. I thought it might be better to have a separate workbook in order to go back and perform some of the tasks without having to weed through a larger book, but I was wrong and the updated book has the contents of both. The new book has been e-mailed out to everyone in the class so please contact me if you did not receive one.
We’re having another SEO Class on June 14, 2007 at the same location (visit http://mttc.org for more information and a map) from 9 AM to around 4 PM. There are a few spots open if you (or someone you know) might be interested in attending. Get more information about the class by visiting the SEO training section of our website (http://smbconsultinginc.com/seo-training.html). We’re also planning SEO Training in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Nashville, and St. Louis should you live in one of those locales and have an interest in learning how to optimize your website for the search engines.
New Blog Address, Same Blog
We’ve changed our web address to tie in with our business website to make things a little more cohesive. The new address for the SMB Consulting Blog is: http://blog.smbconsultinginc.com although the old address (smbconsulting.blogspot.com) will still get you to the same spot via a redirect.
Hopefully this will encourage more people to visit our primary website from the blog and vice versa.
