http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog.html?task=feedMeadow Creek Rss FeedOpen Coffee for the Entrepreneurial Community The White Board Coworking Community has organized a weekly coffee to bring the various elements of the Issaquah and surrounding area entrepreneurial community together for an open discussion on the challenges of managing a startup, the economic climate, the local weather and doing business in Issaquah. Our goal is to introduce people instrumental in the local economy, potential investors and advisors and local entrepreneurs. We will meet every Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. at Panera Bread in Issaquah Commons on Gilman Boulevard. You will find us in the back room. Among the regulars, you can expect to find Keith Niven (Director of Economic Development for the City of Issaquah), Andrea Lehner (Economic Development Manager for the City of Issaquah), Matt Bott (CEO of The Greater Issaquah Chamber of Commerce) and Amy Murphy and Richard Gabel from The White Board. We will extend invitations to individuals prominent in the startup scene, angel investors, advisors and all potential, actual and serial entrepreneurs. This is a get together for casual conversation and camaraderie. Join us and us and let’s see what the Issaquah entrepreneurial community looks like.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/startup-get-together---coffee-at-panera-bread.htmlFri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700The White Board is open and we want to make it easy for you to try it out. Find out if coworking fits your style and if you like the amenities and surroundings. Every Wednesday from today through the end of May is open coworking at The White Board. Stop in at Gilman Village and you\'ll find us above The Flat Iron Grill, suite 29. The door will be unlocked so walk right in and have a look around and if you\'re so inclined, sit down at a desk or table and start working. You can also enjoy some comfortable seating in the first room and maybe read a book. We look forward to seeing you. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/open-work-wednesdays.htmlWed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700The White Board, a coworking center, will be opening in Issaquah November 1st. Coworking is a new concept in work environments that provides workspace in an open room without private offices to encourage collaboration and community. Home-based workers, whether, corporate employees, professionals, entrepreneurs or independent contractors sacrifice the important interaction with others that provides both social satisfaction as well as improved productivity, creativity and motivation that comes from the sharing of ideas. Coworking at The White Board will offer an alternative to the seclusion and distractions of working at home or the pandemonium of the coffee shops. The White Board is located in historic Gilman Village above The Flat Iron Grill in Suite 29. There is approximately 1,700 square feet of space with an area of open and private desks and tables and another area of casual seating for meetings and conversation as well as a kitchenette and restrooms. And of course there will be plenty of white boards, a symbol of modern day collaboration. A variety of events will be offered by The White Board to support members and build a community. Educational, motivational, and entertaining presentations and workshops on entrepreneurship, business management, start-up funding and a variety of other topics will be an important part of the mission of helping businesses grow. The White Board should be an important element in supporting economic vitality in Issaquah. The Great Recession has created a whole new class of workers either disillusioned with traditional corporate career paths or forced by circumstance into self-employment. Coworking provides an economical way to provide workspace that promotes personal and business growth. Working local is a green alternative and less stressful option to commuting to Bellevue or Seattle. The White Board is wholly owned by Meadow Creek Business Center in Issaquah, Washington. Meadow Creek Business Center offers private office suites, virtual offices and meeting rooms. Offices and meeting rooms are available by the hour, day or longer-term lease. For additional Information, contact Audrey Slade: (425) 557-3663 Audrey@TheWhiteBoard.biz www.facebook.com/TheWhiteBoardIssaquahhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-white-board-prepares-to-open.htmlMon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700Well, my summer break is coming to an end and it is time for me to get back to school. Therefore, today concludes my social media/marketing internship at Meadow Creek Business Center. Looking back at what I have done over the past few months, it is easy to say I had a wonderful learning experience working here. To recap, here are some of the things I have accomplished: Edited the entire Meadow Creek website (in the first week) Started blogging for the first time Became a flyer making and Email designing expert Planned, prepared, and co-led business networking events Researched and wrote content for the Facebook of Lawyer Alesha Struther’s Spoke live on the Business and Bagels radio show Spent hours finding fun, interesting, and engaging content to build Facebook content libraries for various industries Researched local businesses to find those that may benefit from an all-inclusive social media marketing dashboard Ran the new social media marketing dashboard, Meadow Creek Connect, for Meadow Creek Facebook pages Attended meetings with the Meadow Creek team to brainstorm and plan the best strategies for helping small businesses grow And last but not least, I gained insight first hand into the small business world: business collaboration, overcoming obstacles, and plenty of hard work. In all, I have had a grand time working with the Meadow Creek team and am thankful for everyone who helped me along the way!  I thank Megan for showing me the ropes and both Megan and Christine for helping me tackle the printer/fax/copy machine monster. I thank Amberle for keeping me company in the cubicles and being there to bounce questions and ideas off of, and I thank Audrey and Richard for allowing me to work so closely with them and for giving me this great opportunity in the first place. I know I will be able to put the tools I have obtained in this internship to use in many facets throughout my school and working careers. I wish Meadow Creek the best of luck with the big strides they are making in social media with Meadow Creek Connect and also in Coworking with The White Board. I know Audrey will continue to rock the Business and Bagels radio show as well. I also want to wish my best to all of the small business professionals and entrepreneurs who I have met during this internship! It has been my pleasure to work alongside some very hard working people. Now I am heading into my third year of college in which I will experience many more firsts. I will spend my first semester living in the sorority, Pi Beta Phi, I will be a course assistant for the first time in a Communications class, and I will then escape to London, where I have never been, for the entire second semester. Now that I have some blogging skills I may need to utilize them during my adventures abroad, so stay posted and you may hear from me again! Until then, Clara Tollefson http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/clara_s-farewell.htmlFri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700Well today is my last day here at Meadow Creek Business Center, and the completion of my first summer internship. It has been fun getting to know everyone who works for Meadow Creek and the tenants who call Meadow Creek home. I have enjoyed meeting everyone through our events: Business and Bagels, Tenant Talks, and Lunch and Learns. Each of these events has opened my mind to other people’s opinions on a variety of subjects that I otherwise might have not thought of, and I appreciate the conversation and advice that I received throughout this internship. Besides preparing, executing, and enjoying our monthly events, I have had the great opportunity to dabble in many things here at Meadow Creek which has allowed me to grow on a professional and personal level.  I have been able to be a part of Audrey’s radio show Business and Bagels, research new business opportunities, create and write surveys and questionnaires, prepare and implement multiple events, write and provide content to our blog, create and write multiple content libraries for our new product Meadow Creek Connects, design flyers and pamphlets to promote our products/services, and be a part of the beginning of our two new business ventures: Meadow Creek Connects and The Whiteboard. It has been a pleasure working at Meadow Creek this summer and I will miss everyone especially my partner in crime Clara, and of course Audrey and Richard. I want to take this opportunity to thank Richard and Audrey for letting me test my skills and adding more tools to my toolbox. It has been fun and very beneficial. Thank you again!! Now it is time for me to take the long journey back to Oklahoma where I will finish my degree this December. Good luck to all future interns! Cheers! Amberle Montgomery  http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/my-last-day--it_s-been-fun_.htmlThu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700Meadow Creek Business Center is starting yet another project; a coworking space! Not every businessperson has an office available to them, which is why coworking spaces are a wonderful option. Individuals who no longer want to work in a cramped cubicle, a home office, or the local coffee shop can go to a coworking space where amenities usually include Wifi, printers, fax/copy machines, conference rooms, lounge areas, and more. We are excited to offer these facilities to the community and continue to help businesses grow. Meadow Creek’s new coworking space is called The White Board. More information will be coming soon!  Here is a quick video about coworking spaces and the benefits they come with: Coworking Video http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-white-board_-meadow-creek-coworking-space_.htmlTue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700Starting something new from the ground up is always a bit of a challenge. Right now at Meadow Creek we are taking on the launch of our social media program, Meadow Creek Connects. We’ve been reaching out to small businesses in Issaquah and surrounding areas that we believe would benefit from using this Facebook product. In researching the local businesses, I have found that many are lacking the special factors that make Facebook pages stand out; some do not even have Facebook at all. This is why we view this new program so highly. Businesses, small and large, benefit greatly from engaging with their customers through social media. This program makes it extremely easy for businesses to maintain a professional appearance and a constant engaging presence that draws customers in. However, convincing others that these features are truly outstanding and would surely help grow their business is the tough part. As soon as people hear the word “cost” or “price” we’ve lost their interest. This is unfortunate because, in contrast to many of the existing social media programs, you get way more bang for your buck with Meadow Creek Connects. While some companies charge over $1,000 just to design your Facebook page, we can design your page, provide a constant flow of content, help you establish a social media strategy, and more. This insures an increase in traffic and fans on your page in just 90 days for only $50/month (and that’s just the Basics option). We hope to see more businesses open their minds to this program that we are so confident about as we continue spreading the word about the wonderful opportunities that are made possible by using it. Here is the link to one company who has had amazing success with this program: http://www.facebook.com/HumbleSeedKits Click here for more information on costs and packages. We hope to see you at our next Lunch and Learn on Tuesday, August 14th at 1:00pm in the Meadow Creek boardroom! RSVP: frontdesk@mcpc.net http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/intern-update_-joining-the-revolution_.htmlMon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700We at Meadow Creek are proud to present Kim Arellano at tomorrow\'s Tenant Talks. Kim is not only a great tenant but an accomplished consultant, entrepreneur, leader, and speaker. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/tenant-talks-tomorrow-with-kim-arellano.htmlTue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700Happy almost Friday! I hope everyone has had a good week so far. Amberle and I have been busy planning and preparing for events lately; designing Emails, flyers, and getting the word out anyway we can! On Tuesday, we had Business and Bagels, our round table discussion and networking event. The topic this time was: If you had the time, knowledge, and funding, what would you do to grow your business? It was exciting to see some new faces at the event. We had a lively conversation about business, and the things we all would accomplish if there were absolutely no limits, all while enjoying our bagels of course. Now we are getting ready for next Thursday\'s event, Tenant Talks. Kim Arellano, with Workforce Evolution, will be discussing Psychology of the Sale. We cannot wait to hear her professional psychological perspective on business, as well as some of her expert tips and advice! In the midst of event planning, we are also working on those content libraries we\'ve been telling you all about for our social media program, Meadow Creek Connects. As you may already know, the content libraries consist of links to fun, interesting, and informational content particular to various industries that can be posted to Facebook, Twitter, etc. and help businesses engage with their customers. The content library I am currently building is for anyone in a field revolving around Travel. I have been finding content about amazing places all around the world, which is making me extremely excited and impatient to study abroad in London next year! I can\'t wait to be able to just hop on a train, be on my way to a new country, and explore all of the beautiful and historical places that I am discovering in my research. Maybe I will also find some fun places to stop while road tripping to Montana next weekend! Anyway, that\'s all for now. Have a great weekend everybody! http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/brief-update-from-clara.htmlThu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700Goofus and Gallant are no longer the young kids you read about in Highlights magazine in the doctor\'s waiting room as a child. They\'re both in their 50s now and facing a change in life. They\'ve both matured a lot and have families, hobbies, aspirations for a comfortable retirement and plenty of good years left in them to achieve their dreams. The only thing they\'re lacking is a job. After twenty-five years with the same company, Gallant was let go when his employer was acquired by a Chinese firm and operations were consolidated in Guangzhou. He was offered a position with the new firm, but he and his wife wanted to stay in the states while their children finished high school. Gallant felt the entrepreneurial itch and decided that the next phase of his career would be to start a consulting business and share the accumulated knowledge gained over his career with others. Goofus was fired for unauthorized derivatives trading and inappropriate conduct with certain female employees. He realized that he could never get hired again and with three alimony payments and five child support payments to make each month, he needed to do something fast. He was a good talker and knew he could make it as a consultant. Gallant immediately went to Meadow Creek Business Center to start a virtual office. He had a proper business mailing address, a business phone number with answering service, use of office equipment and started with 16 hours of office space time each month. In no time at all Gallant was properly licensed at the state under his new address and there was always someone there to accept his packages. His calls were taken by the receptionist and she became a familiar voice to all of his contacts making it sound like Gallant had an established office and staff from day one. When Gallant needed to focus without interruption, he used his office space time to get some serious work done. Goofus worked out of a spare bedroom at home. Given the recent scandal with the girls at the office, things were a little tense at home with wife four. Goofus had a difficult time concentrating on getting his business properly launched. His business mail was mixed up with the personal mail and usually ended up in the trash with the junk mail or stuck between the pages of Cosmo only to be found weeks later. His packages were often not delivered or when they were left at the door, they were eaten by the family dog. When people called, he was not always there to answer the phone and they got the family voicemail greeting of the happy couple saying hello in unison. When he did answer the phone, it was hard to hear over the baby screaming. When Gallant met with a client, he used his office space time or used the Meadow Creek Board Room to really impress them. He was launching his business like a rocket. Soon he had moved to a 40 hour plan and by the end of the year he had his own office at Meadow Creek. He and his wife couldn\'t be happier. Goofus met his clients at Starbucks. It was awkward having to wait for a table with all the other losers. The high school students didn\'t seem to realize they weren\'t the only ones trying to have a conversation and it made it very difficult to talk. His clients seemed a little reluctant to discuss much in a public area for some reason as well. His business is struggling and it\'s not looking good with wife four. Don\'t end up like Goofus, get a virtual office at Meadow Creek and be a winner like Gallant. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/goofus-and-gallant-start-a-business.htmlMon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700This morning on the Business and Bagels radio show, Audrey introduced a topic near and dear to her heart: life as a working mother. She discussed the constant balancing act that many working moms experience between work and time spent with family. Her friend and colleague in the Young Issaquah Professionals group, Kim Gonzales, made a special guest appearance to offer a second perspective on being a mother and a businesswoman. Kim talked about three different careers she has pursued while simultaneously raising three young children who also attended today\'s radio show. Kim worked as a college softball coach and also with the Health and Wellness Company before discovering her newest passion, selling jeans. Now she works with Love and Jeans, selling Vault Denim and other premium and designer brand jeans at a fraction of the cost. In this business, Kim attends small parties, bringing along 130 pairs of jeans for everyone at the party to try and find the perfect pair of nice jeans all under $100.00. Kim\'s approach to balancing family and work is all about separating the two worlds. She made the statement that having a few hours solely dedicated to your children is better than only being half present with them all day while working. Kim also lets her children be involved with her work, and uses it as a way to teach them work ethics. Lastly, Kim\'s one wish as a working mother was that someone would have told her she could manage it. She has been a successful working mother and believes other moms should know that they could do it too. After Kim\'s segment, Audrey\'s 9-year-old daughter Alyssa called in from Maine to give a child\'s perspective on having a working mom. While Alyssa mentioned that her least favorite part about her mother working is less time spent with each other, she also said that even though she\'s working, Audrey is always there for Alyssa when she needs her. Alyssa\'s sweet comments showed how much children really appreciate that their parents work even if it takes away some time with them. At the end, Alyssa made a comment that everyone can learn from; \"the most important part of a job is helping others, not money, because life is not about money it\'s meant for helping and sharing it with others.\" Don\'t kids just say the darndest things? Audrey also shared her list of 5 things that she wished she had known before reentering the workforce as a mother. For anyone who listened or listens online, you have the chance to win 16 free hours of office space at Meadow Creek Business Center by following these rules: restate one of the five wishes from Audrey\'s list, come up with one of your own, and send them to Audrey! Email- audreys@meadowcreekbc.com Link to listen to the show: http://www.chatwithwomen.com/media.php?do=details&mid=608 Make sure to tune in to Business and Bagels every third Monday of each month! KKNW- 1150am If you are interested in Radio Sponsorship on our show, please contact Audrey Slade at the Email listed above. For more information, go to meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/moms-mean-business.htmlMon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700I will admit that during my corporate years I do not recall receiving a performance apparaisal that did not delve into my, as it was often stated, inability to suffer the fool gladly. I also seem to remember that at the time, I was often unsure if they meant that as a good thing or bad thing. As years have passed and political correctness is all the rage, I now suspect that that was a criticism that I was suposed to correct. Evidently there was an addendum to my marching orders that I did not receive. I only got the part about this business is a mess, go fix it or we\'ll find someone else who can. If you can\'t turn a decade of losses into profitability in six-month, shut it down. Evidently there was another part about don\'t hurt anyone\'s feelings before you fire them and close the business they\'ve spent their entire career at. Ooops, mybad. I must admit, I\'ve mellowed with age and now wish to show my kinder and gentler side. Here is my definitive list of what all people possess: A gift Something you don\'t know A perspective you don\'t have An idea you haven\'t thought of Every person also deserves: Your compassion Your respect You to be at their side to defend their rights Not to get all mushy, but I as I have aged, I am beginning to think that there may be some truth to the notion that there is more to life than work. I refuse to jump to any rash conclusions, particularly since this would go against everything I have known to be true. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-qualities-of-people.htmlSat, 14 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700Tonight we are hosting a Sip & Social event, where you can kick off your shoes and relax. Come by Meadow Creek and have a glass of wine, nibble on delicious snacks, and meet new people. We do not want you worrying about pushing a product or your business; we just want to provide an opportunity to take a break from the daily grind. Tonight\'s Sip and Social will be from 5-7 pm in the Board Room at Meadow Creek Business Center. Also, Don\'t forget to tune into KKNW 1150 am this coming Monday (7/16) at 8 am to listen to Audrey on her radio talk show, Business and Bagels. Cheers to a great start to an awesome weekend! Until next time!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/kick-start-your-weekend.htmlThu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700Running a business can be a tremendous joy; it can also be a paperwork nightmare. The administrative side to running a business is important, but never seems to make it to the top of the priority list. Connecting with prospects and customer, executing jobs, attending events and, if you’re like me, picking stones out of your tires always rank ahead of most administrative tasks. They pile up on your desk until you can’t tell what your desk is made of. At some point you spend a morning going through everything and realize that you’ve missed dozens of deadlines, passed on several golden opportunities and forgotten too many commitments you’ve made because you didn’t stay on top of the paperwork. There are hidden costs and some not so hidden costs to all of this. Lost opportunities, late fees, penalties and productivity all result from the procrastination involved with paperwork. Even if you’re obsessive compulsive or have some kind of weird affinity for the administrative side of running a business and keep a clean desk that may even be worse. If you’re an entrepreneur, by definition you believe you have something valuable to offer the world. That puts a price on your head. That price should be a lot higher than value of doing paperwork. But the paperwork must get done, what’s an entrepreneur to do? Meadow Creek to the rescue! Let Meadow Creek be your virtual assistant. Let Meadow Creek handle your administrative work. You should have more important things to do. If you don’t think you do, we can also talk to you about that, but that’s another story. Let us help with your paperwork, filings, follow-up phone calls, scheduling, spreadsheets, data entry, letter writing, emailing and countless other tasks that need to be done. We can be your virtual office assistant and you can focus on growing your business. Virtual assistant time can is available on an hourly basis or sign-up for a block of monthly time at reduced rates. You will be more productive and your business will be more profitable. Studies show that entrepreneurs spend 20% of their time on administration activities. That\'s 20% of your time you could be using to grow your business. Wakeup from the nightmare and make Meadow Creek your virtual assistant. Richard Gabel Check out the plans here. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/a-virtual-assistant-will-make-you-money.htmlThu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700Do you ever wish that your business Facebook page would just update itself? Well, Amberle and I have been working on making that dream come true! You\'ve heard it a million times now, how useful and powerful social media is for business, and we know that finding creative and significant content to post on a regular basis can be a timely hassle. This is especially true for all you entrepreneurs and small business people out there, but we are here to help! To lower your social media burden, we have been searching the web, finding fun and interesting content for various business fields including Family Law, Social Media, Small Business, and Financial Services (more to come). We\'ve compiled hundreds of links to blogs, pictures, videos, articles, and everything in between. All of these links are then put into content libraries on Meadow Creek Connects, our social media program, where users can either pick and choose content from their field\'s library to post on Facebook or they can set up an automatic posting schedule. Other options include creating your own content to post or having us do the posting for you! This way, your business Facebook page will constantly have a great variety of content that will engage your customers and open the door for you to communicate with them. We recently held a Lunch and Learn event to show off our Facebook Dashboard and all of it\'s exciting features, like the content libraries and auto-post, and will be having another in July for those who missed out. Hope to see you there!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/social-media-miracle_.htmlWed, 11 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700Party season has arrived! This past weekend, to kick it off, I celebrated my 20th birthday and the conclusion of my teenage years. Now it\'s time to celebrate Independence Day! Every year in my neighborhood, the 3rd and 4th of July are two days full of festivities such as a pet parade, Bingo at the town hall, a pickle ball tournament, the street dance, and of course, the 4th of July parade. The street dance occurs every 3rd of July evening. Everyone gathers for dancing, live music and food. My house is right up the street from the dance so my family always has a party that evening and people come and go as they like to the dance and back. Then, the morning of the 4th, we all meet back up at my neighbors\' house for breakfast and to watch the parade. These are definitely some of my favorite traditions! Meadow Creek is in party season as well! On top of the 4th of July, we have three events coming up in the next few weeks. First, our Sip and Social networking event is coming up on July 12th. There will be free food and wine to snack and sip on while people get associated with one another and build connections. Then, on the 17th, we have our Business and Bagels event. Last time at Business and Bagels, Amberle and I led the discussion about Social Media and some of the useful and harmful ways it can be used for businesses. The following week is Tenant Talks, where one of the Meadow Creek tenants will give a presentation about themselves, their business, and any other projects or interests they are invested in. Make sure to mark these dates on your calendar and come join in on the fun! I hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July and I hope to see you all at Meadow Creek events in the next few weeks.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/celebration-time_.htmlMon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700You always hear the saying, \"It\'s the small things in life\", and I do not think a saying could be more on point. There are many things that I am most grateful for in my life, and most of them are relatively what we would call \"small things\". For example, my commute to work three days a week is a small part of my life but I am ever so thankful for it. I had the pleasure of experiencing the drive to Bellevue, WA (sarcasm) last week at 6:30 am, to attend the radio talk show (Business & Bagels) Audrey hosts every 3rd Monday of the month. Well, to say the least I did not make my 7:45 am debut, and my two hour drive through hell on earth was the most frustrating thing I have been through in a long time. Even though my one time morning drive from Sumner, WA to Bellevue, WA was a long and irritating experience it made me really appreciate my daily commute to Issaquah. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, my drive to work (Issaquah) is my daily escape; it is where I sip my coffee, listen to Pandora\'s best, and take in every aspect of the beautiful world around me. I let my mind slip into complete relaxation; there is nothing that can interrupt my bliss, not even halting traffic because there is none. Once in a blue moon I will have a slower drive to work but that is because it is raining and Seattle natives for some reason, one I do not understand, do not know how to drive in the rain; very ironic. Who would have thought, Seattleites scared of a little rain? It makes me chuckle every time. I feel very blessed that I get to drive to work without the hassle of crowded road way. My trip to Bellevue showed me that I do not want to work in a place where I have to deal with a chaotic commute on a daily basis. Only easy commutes or trains for this girl! I think the biggest lesson I learned was not to take the \"small things in life\" for granted. Too many of us ignore the small things in our lives, which I believe equate for the most amount of happiness in our lives. My advice is to take a minute to think about all the things that make you happiest, and I grantee they are not your fancy gadgets and expensive toys. Those things that make you the happiest cherish them, because they are the most important. (What I avoid- Bumper to bumper chaos) (What I enjoy- My drive into Downtown Issaquah) Until next time!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-small-things---my-daily-commute.htmlThu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700I know you\'re all wondering what the interns at Meadow Creek have been up to lately, so here is the update! Yesterday we had our launch party for Meadow Creek Connects, the fabulous social media dashboard that is going to make Facebook marketing a piece of cake for all the small business people and entrepreneurs that choose to give it a go. After some socializing, Richard and Audrey gave a presentation using the new 55\" flat screen TV in the Board Room to introduce the product, and Amberle and I gave our input and offered the attendees a one time only $100 off coupon for the initial Facebook set-up fee! These days, it can cost up to $1,500 just to have someone spruce up your business Facebook page, but the Meadow Creek Connects dashboard offers so much more than that. Those who opt-in have the option to do only the bare essentials (consult with us and tell us their social media goals) so that we can then build out a Facebook masterpiece for their business. We can design your Facebook page to make it attractive and professional, design a welcome page, invite people to your page using Sweepstakes (who wouldn\'t want a free iPad?), post content from our content libraries which are full of fun, interesting, and helpful information specific to your profession, and more. This takes the burden of time spent on social media out of the equation so you can focus on your pressing business matters while we take care of the marketing. That is just one option though; others may want to learn all about what the product can do, then drive it on their own without our help. There are many ways to customize the dashboard to fit every one\'s business and personal needs, which we are very excited about sharing at Meadow Creek. In addition to talking about Meadow Creek Connects yesterday, we also briefly spoke about the radio sponsorship opportunities that are now available at Meadow Creek. This is another opportunity we are eager to share, and our tenants are showing interest as well! Once a month, on KKNW- 1150am, people can tune in to Audrey on the Business and Bagels radio show as they commute to work from 8-9am. With our sponsorship offers, businesses can get 30-second radio commercials, MP3s of the radio show to share, cut and edit for additional use, guest spot features live OnAir and other opportunities to get the word out about their name and brand. On a different note, the Cash Mob at Fischer Meats had great success last week! With over $2,000 coming in before the 2 hour mark, and $500 worth of things given away, the grand total brought into three local businesses in three months has reached $5,000! Back at the office, Amberle and I have been working on multiple tasks. In preparation for the Lunch and Learn launch party, we made flyers, invite cards, coupons, surveys, and finally an Email blast using our special Email marketing program, Mail Chimp, to remind everyone not to miss it! We made similar products for the radio show sponsorship as well, and therefore have spent much time designing, printing, cutting, folding, and distributing over the past week. Now we are getting ready to do these things for our next upcoming events in July: Sip and Social, Business and Bagels, and Tenant Talks. Hope to see you there!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/news-from-the-interns.htmlThu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700This Monday morning marked the debut emergence of Amberle and me on the radio! I arrived at the radio station at 7:45 this morning where Audrey let me in and introduced me to Pam and Rochelle, the stars of Chat With Women Talk Radio. We talked briefly in the moments leading up to the show, which would begin at 8:00, and entered the studio to get seated and prepared for take off. In the studio was Benny, the man behind the scenes who directs the show, working with Pam and Rochelle and all of their hosts on the Chat With Women network. He\'s the one we look to for cues, cut-offs, introductions, interjections, music; you-name-it. So while Audrey got situated in the studio with Benny and found her seat in front of the microphone with her headphones and iPad, I hesitated. Not only was I a little bit nervous to speak candidly on the radio, I was afraid that my unfortunate and not-so-graceful cough that I\'ve had for the past week would ruin the show. Therefore, I suggested I stay out of the studio until it was time for my segment with Audrey at the end. Benny showed me to a small room behind the studio with a window looking into the studio and speakers playing the show so I could listen. The room was filled with little gadgets, switches, and buttons that looked awfully important, and Benny showed me one that I could use, labeled \"cue\", to affect the volume of the show in my little private room. I sat back and enjoyed listening to Audrey do her thing, sounding like a natural radio talk show host, and before I knew it, it was my turn to join her in the studio! I jumped in a seat at the high table next to Audrey, with my face \"one fist\'s length\" from the microphone, and put my headphones on. Rochelle kindly ran and filled a cup of water for me to sip on throughout the segment to calm my cough, and as soon as the music to Short Skirt/Long Jacket by Cake started playing, I knew it was time to go! The time went by faster than I expected as Audrey and I shared a casual conversation talking about my background and what I\'ve been working on at Meadow Creek Business Center; and fortunately Amberle joined us shortly after the segment began. By the end of the segment, after Amberle was introduced, I was holding my breath desperately trying not to cough until the break. Then I remembered when I started coughing hysterically that people could still be watching live on the web video camera! Those viewers are lucky enough to see not only behind the scenes at the radio show, but behind the scenes in between the segments when the talk show hosts really let loose. Radio that can be watched live is almost like reality TV with some parts scripted, some candid, and all together quite an entertaining show. Afterwards, we debriefed with Pam and Rochelle, discussing what went well, what could be done differently next time, and the ultimate direction we want the show to take for Meadow Creek. Overall, it was an exciting and eye-opening opportunity that I am glad to have taken part in and I\'m sure Amberle would say the same. Unfortunately, I have come accustomed to a life with no traffic in Oklahoma and that did not prepare me for the halting traffic I endured today on my way to the radio show. Instead of letting my frantic anxiety of tardiness get the best of me, I tuned into Audrey\'s radio show, Business and Bagels on KKNW 1150 am, and enjoyed the conversation which eased my nerves a little. Not to mention Audrey is a natural on air and that she rocked it today, as I\'m sure she will every Monday at 8 am. When Audrey presented Clara and I with the awesome opportunity to be on her radio show I was not a single bit nervous but as my car got closer to my final destination my heart beat grew faster and I knew it was time to rock and roll. I hustled myself into the building, praying it was the right tower ( I tend to get lost a lot), and waited patiently as the elevator climbed each floor, as I reached my destination the secretary was able to lead me in the right direction and found the studio. I took one deep breath, and quiet as the night I slipped into the studio where Pam escorted me to my respected spot. I gently put on my head phones, and placed the microphone directly in front of my mouth, now I was ready to join the fun! As I quickly realized radio was not as hectic and stressful as I thought it might be; it was very laid back and a casual experience. Being on the radio isn\'t much different than having a conversation with a friend, you just have the added fact that others can listen in on your conversation. I enjoyed the new experience to be live on air and felt honored to be able to express my opinions to all of KKNW listeners. I can\'t wait to see what Audrey has into store for the show in these weeks ahead; I know it will be great whatever it is. Listen to today\'s radio show… http://www.chatwithwomen.com/media.php?do=details&mid=558 Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/our-experience-on-business-and-bagel_s-radio-show.htmlMon, 18 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700Meadow Creek\'s radio show Business & Bagels on KKNW 1150 am hosted by Audrey premiers Monday, June 18th, at 8:00 a.m. Clara and Amberle will be the kick-off guests so tune in! We have no idea what they\'re going to talk about so it could be very entertaining. If you would like to be a guest on Business & Bagels and get some gratuitious exposure in the community, please Contact Us or call Audrey at (425) 557-3629.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/business-and-bagels-radio-premier-broadcast.htmlFri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700Hey! Clara and I have been busy all week working on building content libraries. Through my research for our social media library, I came across this video, and had to share. I have seen this video in a class last semester, but the second time around it caught my attention as much as it did the first time. It is very powerful and I believe that the creators to be completely on point. Social media is not going anywhere fast, but in fact embedding its self in our daily lives. Social media I believe (if not already) will become second nature to our society, just as is brushing your teeth every morning. Our brains will be on autopilot and not even realize that social media has hijacked our thoughts and actions. This is why I strongly support businesses of all sorts, joining the revolution.    Do you think social media is here to stay, or that it will wither away like past trends?   Until next time!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/social-media--not-a-fad-but-a-revolution.htmlThu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700As you may or may not know, Meadow Creek hosts a monthly event called Business and Bagels. Business and Bagels is a fun social networking event at Meadow Creek where a topic of interest is introduced, which then leads to a casual round-table discussion. On top of having the opportunity to meet and chat with other small business owners and entrepreneurs, attendees are provided with complimentary food to munch on during the discussion. This is a fun way for everyone to take a short break from the ever-long list of tasks that accompany the daily lives of growing entrepreneurs and small businesses. Business and Bagels is the perfect occasion to sit back, relax, and make connections with others whom you may not otherwise have the chance to meet; and through swapping personal experiences and advice, you will receive information that may prove to be of great value in their current positions. Wednesday, June 13th (tomorrow) will be the next Business and Bagels event. This time however, Audrey has put Amberle and me in charge of leading the discussion! After a brief conversation, Amberle and I agreed that social media would be an appropriate topic, considering we are both Social Media and Marketing Interns here at Meadow Creek. We also agreed that social media is an interesting topic and an extremely powerful tool in the modern business world. Therefore, we did some research and brainstorming to narrow social media down to a more focused topic, and landed on the idea of advertising versus interacting on social media. We all know that social media can and should be used as a source of promotion for businesses. However, finding the balance between advertising, and real interaction with customers is a key component to social media success. One of the greatest features of social media is the ability for businesses to interact with their customers in real-time, and one of the biggest mistakes businesses make with social media is simply using it to post special offers and advertise services. Using social media to engage with customers rather than to throw advertisements in their face everyday leads to happier and more loyal customers. Amberle and I want to see how others feel about these claims. We are curious about the ways people are currently using social media to grow their business, and what they hope to do with social media in the future. We are excited to hear opinions from the Meadow Creek clients and anyone else who joins us. We also hope to hear about additional social media strategies, pros and cons, and anything else that has worked or not worked for you at Business and Bagels tomorrow. 10-11:00am in the 2nd floor Boardroom at Meadow Creek Business Center See you there!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/business-and-bagels-tomorrow_.htmlTue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700Hello world! Well today marks the start of my second week at Meadow Creek Business Center. My first week was good to me and I had a nice transition from break mode to work mode. Last week consisted of learning and understanding the ways of Meadow Creek, and getting to know my partner in crime for the summer, Clara Tollefson. I am very excited to work with Clara this summer; it\'s nice to be able to bounce ideas off each other. Clara and I spent last week working on Business and Bagels; which is a monthly opportunity for Meadow Creek tenants to engage in lively conversation focused on a variety of topics. This month\'s Business and Bagels is TOMORROW, 10-11 am at the Meadow Creek Business Center in the Board Room. Tomorrow\'s topic will be about the difference between advertising and interacting on social media. Don\'t miss out on delicious bagels, awesome discussion, and meeting Clara and I, because we will be leading the discussion. I know I look forward to meeting new faces, which will be nice since some of you are my work neighbors. Another really exciting opportunity in the near future, is being able to be on Meadow Creek\'s radio show (KKNW 1150 am) which is hosted by Audrey monthly. Clara and I will be guest speaking Monday the 18th at 8:00 am, so tune in! We are both a little nervous to be live on air but I think it will be a lot of fun, and that the jitter bugs will leave as fast as they came. This week Clara and I will be building content libraries for our social media product (Meadow Creek Connects), and getting ready for the launch party of our product. We will be busy little worker bees this week researching and writing great content for current and future clients. On another note; I was reading Clara\'s week three blog and love that she included a little tidbit about her drive to work. Well we have something in common; cruise control is also my very good friend! I live in Sumner and even though I drive an hour to work and back every day, I love it. I get in my car, plug my Ipod in, place my coffee in its respected spot, and turn on cruise control. I drive the back way, because I avoid Hwy 167 like it is the plague, and it is very peaceful. After spending almost three years in Oklahoma you appreciate the green scenery that is enveloped with comforting mountains and towering trees. I take my hour drive to work to drink my favorite drink (coffee), listen to my favorite music, and get lost in the beautiful world we live in. My commute is my daily escape. One last thing, as I am new to the area of Issaquah, I need good places to eat lunch, any suggestions? Thanks! Until next time!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/amberle_s-2nd-week.htmlTue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700Happy Friday! Today concludes my third week interning at Meadow Creek. Let\'s see, what did I learn this week? Well, first of all, never speed on the way to work. There is bound to be at least one cop just dying to catch someone speeding on the drive from Bellevue to Issaquah. Today I was followed a ways by one, and there was an undercover sitting by Exit 17, (cruise control is our friend). Another thing that became ever so relevant this week is our severe dependence on technology! Audrey and I both changed offices this week, her move more drastic than mine, with a computer crash in the process. That created a slight bump in the road, but luckily Audrey has a new computer now and also her sidekick, the iPad, to fall back on. Speaking of technology, Amberle and I have been working on the next Business and Bagels topic, which will be about interacting on social media. We spent some time making flyers, handouts, a blog, and an Email to send out and get the brainstorming started in preparation for a lively discussion with the Meadow Creek clients and any other interested guests next Wednesday! I also made a flyer to promote the Meadow Creek Radio show that will air for the second time at 8am on Monday the 18th(KKNW AM 1150)! Audrey, who will be running the monthly show, invited me and Amberle to join her as guest speakers for a segment. We were happy to accept, but with the knowledge that we will be videotaped and that the show will be archived on chatwithwomen.com, Amberle and I are getting just a teeny bit nervous. Knowing Audrey, however, she will make the experience fun and stress-free. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/week-3-with-clara.htmlFri, 08 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700Hello everyone! I am very excited about the opportunity to intern for Meadow Creek Business Center this summer. Most interns spend a majority of their time at the local coffee shop getting everyone\'s specialty latte and running mindless errands. Not me; I feel I was very lucky to find an internship that will let me use my skills, learn, and grow in my career and as an individual. As an intern at Meadow Creek Business Center I will be able to wear many hats and use many tools from my tool bag. I will be doing anything from writing content to developing and initiating a marketing plan for Meadow Creek\'s new social media product. I am especially excited about Meadow Creek\'s new social media product; it will provide a unique service that I believe will benefit businesses small and big. I was able to attend an informative training last Friday about Meadow Creek\'s new product, and with a better understanding of what the product is I am proud to say that Meadow Creek is on to something great. I am currently a senior at Oklahoma City University, and graduate December 2012. Yes, Oklahoma! You might wonder why I am so far from \"home\" but I am not, Washington is my home. I grew up in Maple Valley and know the area very well. I moved to Oklahoma because I had an athletic scholarship for wrestling; therefore I was able to pursue both my dreams of wrestling and gaining a great education in one place. I retired from wrestling last June and have been focusing on school and a future career. Wrestling provided me many opportunities to travel the world and compete along great athletes, but I am ready for the next chapter in my life. I am pursuing a degree in Mass Communications with tracks in public relations and advertising. I have a passion for both tracks and think that they mold into each other very well. I also have dabbled in graphic design and hope to pursue more graphic design classes when attaining my masters\' degree. I have a job during the school year working for my university\'s student publications as the Advertising and Marketing Director. There I am able to work closely with local businesses who want to advertise in our school newspaper, our website, and android/Iphone application. I was also in charge of creating and executing the launch of our android/Iphone application. Sometimes I am able to tap into my creative side and design advertisements for clients who otherwise do not have the time or do not want to do the work. I am eager to use what I have learned thus far and use those skills to help Meadow Creak Business Center in their goals as a company; and along the way gain skills learning from Meadow Creek. This is all just a little about me, what I have done and want to do. I look forward to sharing my experiences as a summer intern here at Meadow Creek Business Center; so until next time!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/introducing-amberle-montgomery-marketing-intern-and-social-media-specialist.htmlTue, 05 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700So, I walked into work wearing a puffy North Face jacket today; maybe I am missing the Cabo weather just the slightest bit. Although, I am glad to say that some significant progress was made in my week back from vacation. As previously mentioned, I started off last week making flyers that display the extensive marketing and consulting services offered at Meadow Creek. I also reminisced while writing my second blog about my amazing trip in Mexico (and found some closure for my feelings of nostalgia). After that, Audrey filled me in on the upcoming Meadow Creek talk radio show that she will be hosting, and the topics she will be touching on such as entrepreneurship and small businesses, especially in the ways that they apply to women. Exciting news! Meadow Creek will be an exceptional addition to the list of hosts for Chat With Women, an established talk radio show that inspires and motivates women. With that, I made another flyer and a brochure to spread the word about the radio sponsorship offers that Meadow Creek will be providing. Clients can choose from any of the À La Carte items that include, but are not limited to, 30-second radio commercials and articles to be published on chatwithwomen.com, or any of 6 packages that bundle the À La Carte items for a better deal. This will be a great opportunity for Meadow Creek and clients to get exposure. In addition to marketing and consulting services and radio sponsorship, Meadow Creek has also been considering putting out a newsletter to keep tenants and others up to date and to remind them about the many ways Meadow Creek can help their business. Therefore, I spent some time playing around with newsletter templates, trying to find the best way to organize a great deal of information into a one page format because, let\'s be honest, many of us just want to get to the point and avoid the extra jargon. Finally, on Friday, we had a conference meeting with Summa Social, the company Meadow Creek is collaborating with to develop its Social Media Dashboard. We were given a thorough presentation of the website and all of its latest improvements, putting Meadow Creek one step closer to unleashing this product that will make social media exponentially more useful and beneficial to businesses. Then, I ended the week researching and writing content for the Facebook page of one of Meadow Creek\'s tenants. In all, we took some important steps forward at Meadow Creek during the four days last week. Today, post-blog update, I am excited to begin familiarizing myself with the new social media product and can\'t wait to explore all of its brilliant features!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/what-has-clara-been-up-to_.htmlMon, 04 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700Despite the poor jobs report today, the Seattle area is doing far better than the national average. http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.wa_seattle_md.htm On a more sobering note, the state is doing worse than the national average on the broader measure of unemployment that includes marginally attached (no job search in 4 weeks), discouraged workers (no longer in the labor force, but have looked for work in the last 12 months) and those employed only part-time due to economic reasons. The State of Washington rate was 17.6% vs. 15.6% for the nation. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/state-of-our-local-economy.htmlFri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700I spent a good portion of my career planning and executing business turnarounds in a large corporation. Almost all the businesses I worked on were formally profitable businesses that enjoyed leadership positions in their industry. Why were these once shining stars in need of a turnaround you ask. Because someone that was entrusted to lead the business decided to make themself look good and cut costs to improve earnings at the expense of the long term viability of the business. Sometimes this would be the President or General Manager, other times it would be someone farther up the chain of command like a Group VP or CEO that would force the issue. Years later, I or some other ruthless bastard would be sent out to fix the mess. This is not to say that there is no place for cost cutting. Businesses must react to changing economic and competitive conditions. The problems come when someone simply cuts spending to increase the bottom line and make themselves look good. Taking 2% of sales out of R&D isn\'t going to cause immediate problems. Planned product introductions will be pushed out a couple of months as the remaining resources are focused on those projects at the expense of future projects. Over a period of years, the company will slowly, but surely fall behind the competition. Earnings and market share will fall into a downward spiral that is hard to overcome. The people responsible will be long gone. Enjoying the benefits of moving up the ladder as a result of the short-term earnings pop they achieved. Publicly traded companies have a decided short-term focus. Not by choice, that is what the market demands and we are the market. Capitalist don\'t enjoy laying people off, that\'s what they are expected to do and if they don\'t, the market will find someone that can and will. So what does this have to do with private equity? I got to thinking about that terrible Mitt Romney and his cruel private equity ways and wanted to put some perspective on it. The goal in capitalism is to create value. That is done by fullfilling or creating a need and satisfying it at a profit. When this happens, jobs and wealth are created. Government Largesse This is usually the antithesis of value creation. Sometimes their are economic necessities. I would place the Wall Street bailouts in this bucket. The economic health of the entire nation was at stake. More questionable would be the Detroit bailouts. A regionally focused industry with a huge employment base was at stake. For me the problem was not so much that it was done, but how it was done. Loan guarantee giveaways to green energy companies and state-sponsored health insurers called CO-OPs have been nothing short of a disaster. Publicly Traded Companies As I described above, it\'s not perfect. Too much emphasis on the short term. Well managed companies do strike an effective balance a create significant value for its shareholders. All in all, the best system yet for running an economy. Private Equity Comparitively speaking, I think private equity drives the most value creation. The investors are most tuned in to value creation. Their ultimate end game to either leverage the company to take cash out or sell it involves equally sophisticated investors that aren\'t going to be taken-in by clever cost cutting. Any fool can cut cost. Managing a business to optimize profitability and create long-term value takes some real talent. Private equity companies execute turnarounds with a passion because each one is a unique investment. Not a small part of a corporate enterprise that can be swept under the rug. You can\'t run an economy off of private equity, but you can recognize it as a very effective value creation enterprise. Given the value lost through government loan guarantees versus value created by Bain Capital, if I was the President, I\'d take Bain off the table as a political issue. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/private-equity_-romney_s-bain-in-the-neck.htmlThu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700Yes it is true, after only one week working at Meadow Creek I left for a nine-day vacation in Cabo. But let\'s be honest, who could turn that down!? The family I traveled with has a timeshare at a resort called Chileno Bay, which just reopened a month ago after being shut down for some time due to economic difficulties. The resort is absolutely amazing, located right on the water with the friendliest staff, and get this; we were the only people there! We actually had the entire resort to ourselves, and when we arrived they informed us that our room was upgraded from a smaller hotel-like room to a gorgeous villa that Leonardo DiCaprio has stayed in! I felt very spoiled to say the least. We swam in the pool and ate chips with delicious guacamole and salsa every day, walked along the beach, went snorkeling, visited an art walk in San Jose and more. In all, we had a fun and relaxing trip, and only had to pay off one cop after my friend\'s dad turned down a one-way road going the wrong direction! So enough bragging, now I am back at the office and back to reality. In my first week at work I tackled the Meadow Creek website, cleaning things up a little bit, and today I have been working on a flyer to show off the wonderful marketing and consulting services that Meadow Creek offers but not enough people take advantage of. Using Microsoft Publisher again is giving me flashbacks to my last three years of high school when I made the first ever editions of The Academic Institute Yearbook. Fun times! But I am happy to be back at work and back with the Meadow Creek team. Even though the sun is not as bright in Issaquah as it was in Mexico, now I can stay focused and productive without wishing I was sitting outside by the pool all day! Okay, just to make you a little more jealous, here is a picture of the villa we stayed in!: http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/update-from-clara_.htmlTue, 29 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700The Washington Roundtable has given the state its 2nd report card on the business environment and keeping Washington competitive. The benchmarks are all graded relative to all other states. On the good side, top 10 results in Private Sector Job Growth and Patents Granted. Education, Infrastructure, Commute Time, Tax Burden, Unemployment Insurance and Worker Compensation Payouts may require summer school. Take a look at the reports below. Benchmarks for a Better Washington - Infographic infographic Washington State Wire - Report Card Assessment Benchmarks for a Better Washington - Description Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/washington-roundtable-gives-the-state-a-poor-report-card.htmlTue, 29 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700How much do you know about the economy here in Issaquah? Do you have any idea about how we compare to our neighbors in Bellevue, Sammamish, Renton and Redmond? Here are a couple of economic factoids on Issaquah from the 2010 Economic Census: Issaquah has the highest percentage of children under 5 years old Retail sales per capita are at least 3 times that of neighboring cities Issaquah has the highest percentage of females - they\'ve evidently been very busy the last 5 years The average commute time is 27 minutes - more people should be working at Meadow Creek Business Center for sure In order to know how to promote economic vitality in Issaquah, we need to know what makes Issaquah tick. Economic growth provides for the futures of all those toddlers out there. We need to make sure that both Issaquah\'s prosperity and natural environment are sustainable. Share your thoughts on how we can insure Issaquah\'s economic future. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-issaquah-economy---interesting-facts.htmlFri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700Meadow Creek\'s Audrey Slade, Director of Operations and Chair of the Young Issaquah Professionals group at the Greater Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, is making her mark on Issaquah. A recent arrival to northwest from farthest reaches of the northeast, Maine, Audrey is already a presence to be reckonned with. Audrey has been instrumental in introducing cash mobs to the local economy. A variant of crowd funding, cash mobs entail rallying people to a local business to have a good time and spend some money. There are usually some attractions such as free chair massages and discounted coffee or other treat from surrounding stores, but the focus is on one business. The retail business gets exposure and a brisk business day. Attendees enjoy the company of others in a party like atmosphere and learn about businesses that they may not have been aware of. Corporate welfare on a small scale? I don\'t think so. I see it as citizens actively trying to invigorate the local economy and give a lucky shop owner a good day and plenty of exposure. At the cash mob this week, King 5 TV showed up to film the event and interview attendees, organizers and the shop owner. In many cities, attempts to organize cash mobs have not produced the results they have here in Issaqauh. I guess Issaquah is a special place, blessed with people that care about local businesses and enjoy a good time. This is all well and good, but I am looking forward to getting my Director of Operations back someday. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/cash-mob-mania-in-issaquah---crowd-funding-variant.htmlThu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had some stiff criticism for the Seattle Public Schools. Instead of defending itself, I hope the School Board takes it to heart and makes some changes. A solid educational system is essential to produce the employees of tomorrow. The Seattle economy is dependent upon aerospace, software and increasingly biotech. The last time I checked, these industries required a well educated/trained workforce. The economic vitality of the region is at the mercy of Seattle Public Schools. Chamber to School Board: You\'re dysfunctional Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/education-and-economic-vitality.htmlWed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700The National Assoication for Business Economics reported that the economy keeps chugging along yesterday with some modestly improved forecasts for jobs growth, housing start and auto sales. It looks like 2013 when things will begin to look like they\'re getting back to normal. This is consistent with my experience yesterday having dinner with Lee Ruttenberg, Chief Financial Officer of American Mobile Power Systems. Our waitress at the Rock Bottom Brewery was a recent grad of Western Washington University. What a wonderful time to be graduating from college. As anemic as the recovery is and will continue to be, small business owners need to sieze the moment. It\'s time to rev up your small business marketing machines and grow your business. It\'s not going to happen on its own so you better start making it happen. Growing your bottom line is the way you create value for your small business. Meadow Creek has a number of programs to help you get started and maintain a steady program of small business marketing campaigns that are economical and focused on making money. Call us today for a free consultation. Jobs Outlook in U.S. Improves for 2012 Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/economy-moving-slowly_-but-not-surely-in-the-right-direction.htmlTue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 -070070% of small and medium sized businesses are using Facebook for marketing. 58% use LinkedIn and 40% use Twitter to market their products and services. Do you? Social media has proven to be an effective marketing tool for B2B and B2C businesses alike. Social media marketing, primarily using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, is an effective way to to develop prospects, retain current clients and increase market awareness of your company and its products. Social media marketing is also very inexpensive compared to most other inbound and outbound marketing tools. If you are interested in getting into social media marketing or learning how to do it more effectively and efficiently check our events page. We wil be holding weekly information sessions starting the week of May 27th on social media marketing and our new product, Meadow Creek Connects, a social media dashboard. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/social-media-for-marketing.htmlMon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700I\'ve always thought of New Years Resolutions as something akin to reading my fortune from the cookie after a Chinese meal. They\'re for entertainment value only and not to be taken seriously. I do save the occasional fortune that seems truely insightful such as those extolling my charming personality, my magnetic effect on those of the opposite sex and the ones that remind me that my hard work is about to pay off. My own New Years Resolutions like most, tend towards losing weight, attaining the physical prowess I\'ve not seen in thirty years and foregoing all of my bad habits. This is a decidedly negative way to bring on the New Year, eliminating all of those things that make life worth living and define you as a person. This year I\'m not making any personal resolutions, it\'s all about business. 2009 sucked the life out of me in business. As I predicted in prior posts, the recovery did begin and also as I predicted I didn\'t feel it. Corporate earnings are up, Wall Street bonuses are way up and and actually being paid out from earning and not bail out money and stocks are rebounding. Unfortunately we are still talking about the declining rate of increase in new unemployment claims and not employment gains. The financial system continues to be illiquid and small businesses are taking it in the shorts. A while back, I heard a Biznik friend of mine, John Erdman, tell a story of being a ball of fire. Without going through the entire story, he explained that you can never be enthusiastic or motivated enough. You can always deliver more energy to your environment, you can always do more to lift the spirits of others and you can always be more motivated to create success for yourself and those around you. He regularly tells this story at the end of his speeches. He invites everyone to place a red dot on their watch or cell phone as a constant reminder that they are a ball of fire. The first several times I heard this story, I didn\'t pay much attention. I told him I had a nice watch and I wasn\'t going to trash it with a round red sticker on the face. The last time I heard it I decided to give it a try. I put the red sticker on my watch and waited to see what would happen. A memeber of my staff soon asked what the red dot was all about and I jumped into the air spreading my arms and legs screaming \"I am a ball of fire!\" Scaring the hell of my staff was worth tranforming my watch into a party favor. Once their shock had worn off, I explained the red dot and inducted them into the Red Dot Society. Throughout the day I pepper my conversation with \"you\'re a ball of fire!\" They\'re not jumping in the air yet, but I\'ll give it some time. This will be a central theme in my efforts for the coming year and beyond. This year my resolutions are business focused. As such, they stand a far better chance of success. They also stand to keep all of my bad habits well funded in the coming year. Here they are, not my bad habits, but my resolutions: Say what I really think! To those that have known me, particularly in my corporate years, they might wonder what I think I\'ve been doing for the last 30 years. The level of discomfort that I may have occassionally caused in meetings with some frequency may have appeared to be an inexcusable lapse in corporate congeniality. Well, they aint seen nothing yet. Lie to me, imagine an alternate reality to justify the status quo, pretend to be someone you are not or speak when you have nothing to say and I\'m going to rip you a new one. No more Mr. Nice Guy! Stay focused! I\'m going to whip my ADD addled mind into shape. No more channel surfing going on inside my head. No more initiative overload. I reported to a felow that was formerly a principal of McKinsey & Company. At McKinsey there are always three problems, each problem has three issues and each issue has three solutions. Their consultancy has done somewhat better than mine so I\'ll go with the power of three. I\'ll limit myself to three big things to work on at any given time. Drive them to completion and move on. No longer will I find a peice of paper at the bottom of a stack on my desk and remember that I had vowed to complete a project six months ago only to have it lost under a tidal wave of my latest bright ideas. Take on a project and complete it or kill it. Be a ball of fire! No more enthusiasm from ten cups of coffee. I vow to maintain an energy level and excitement from the sheer brilliance of my thinking and not from a bottomless cup of coffee. No more manic behavior, crashing at about noon wandering about the office talking to myself with no amount of coffee able to sustain my morning high. If the project at hand isn\'t enough to spark my enthusiasm, I\'ll kill it and move on to the next. I\'ll put so many red dots around the office it will look like a page from a Dr. Seuss book. Happy New Year everyone. Be a ball of fire! Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/be-a-ball-of-fire_--an-old-article-of-mine.htmlSat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700Knowledge, experience and the ability to put it together into some meaningful thought is well beyond the capacity of most would be authors. They don\'t let incompetence keep them down. Here is the secret used by most business authors and reporters that know less than you, but make themselves look like freaking geniuses every day. Follow these simple steps and you\'ll find yourself in the Harvard Business Review next month. Step 1 – Come up with something completely obvious. Let\'s try this; establishing a personal relationship with your clients will improve your chances of closing the sale. You might embellish this little gem by going on and on about people buying from people they like. You can describe through this personalization process that the client will share more about their motivations, needs and insecurities that will allow you to customize your sales proposition to better meet their needs. This will lead to lengthy discussion of the rapture and ecstasy that is the win-win proposition. You will have established the value of your concept. Your prospect will be in complete agreement that this makes sense. This is the critical moment. You have buy-in, but they might be thinking this is nothing new. Fortunately, your article is in writing so it has credibility and there are a few moments of self doubt that give you an opportunity to move to the next step. Step 2 – Clearly affirm that this has not been done before and that the \"old\" way of doing things was quite the opposite. In this case, you would establish that the old way was strictly business. No interpersonal dialogue took place between seller and buyer. Something about how suits and ties were social barriers and life was ever so dull. People were so regimented that even after their three martini lunches, they kept to the script and talked business. This must be repeated several times before it is accepted as truth. Describe how in your enlightened world that people are free to let their defenses down and expose themselves personally, share their dreams and recount past mistakes and triumphs. Reinforce that this has never been the case and only a few enlightened individuals are daring to enter this brave new world with you coaching them every step of the way. You have established the need. They are now convinced that they are not behaving in this manner and that you have only just opened their eyes to a concept that will create sustainable competitive advantage for their business. Step 3 – Your 12 step plan to actualize the new reality. Can\'t coach without a plan. Your 12 step plan must reinforce that your disciples are pioneers in this endeavor. What value is there in teaching someone how to do what they and the rest of the world are already doing? The first several steps must be that they confess that everything they do today is stupid. This is Consulting and Coaching 101, but this teaching is of course timeless. From there the subsequent steps help them break out of this mold with the understanding that to discontinue your services will in fact lead to an immediate regression. Without knowing it, they will succumb to the \"old\" way of doing things and lead a life of misery and despair. Some may be tempted to think this could not possibly be true. You are wrong. I challenge you to think about this as you read business books, articles and posts in the future. Please comment on what you find and share examples of this with other readers. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/how-to-write-an-award-winning-article.htmlWed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700All this planning, passion, blood, sweat and tears are over-rated when it comes to entrepreneurial success. Obsessive compulsive worry-wart planning fanatics really need to chill out. For God\'s sake, trading your freedom for success is a line no one should cross. If you can\'t just go with the flow, but must march to some predetermined plan, what kind of success is that? Passion has its place, but for the life of me, I just don\'t see it in business. That\'s how people have heart attacks. Not advice I\'ll be giving out anytime soon. As far as blood, sweat and tears are concerned, when\'s the last time you saw a picture of a CEO on the cover of Fortune or Forbes breaking out in a sweat, crying or covered in blood. Correct, never happens. What you see the big boys doing is golfing, sailing and pontificating with their feet up on the desk. Let me offer up a couple real world ways of achieving entrepreneurial success without really trying. Success is always a function of where you\'ve set the bar. Hello, lower the bar. Wake up in the morning, success! Give yourself a gold star. Make toast without burning it, you are a sensation. Go to a networking event and convince someone you\'ve actually ever sold anything, you\'re a phenomenon. Don\'t sweat the big stuff, savor the sweet smell of success with the best of them. Get that bar down to a point you can walk over it. Let the rocket man next door shoot for the stars. Be smart and keep your feet on the ground and your goals too. If you\'ve made it through life without really trying so far you probably already know the next best thing to success is having good reasons why failure wasn\'t your fault. You actually succeeded, but someone else screwed it up. Just the right spin and it\'s sweet success. Just don\'t reach for the tab after pulling this one off at the local watering hole. Let Mr. or Mrs. Rugged Individualism pick that one up. Self reliance and personal responsibility will keep you awake at night. Give your business a try, but the smart money always has their excuses lined up and ready to go. What a wonderful segue into the ultimate formula for success. Forget the Horatio Alger stories. The one sure fire way of avoiding failure and guaranteeing success is to not try in the first place. Far more fun to sit back and make fun of those that crash and burn and discount the success of others. You\'ll always know that had you tried, you would have done it right and have shown all those clowns a thing or two. Visualizing success is far easier than putting it all on the line. There you have it friends, three solid alternatives to risking your money, dignity and easy going life style pursuing some entrepreneurial dream. Don\'t try, claim success if not for the unfortunate intervention of people and events beyond your control or set your goals for a no lose proposition. I\'ve shared with you the secrets of success, if you screw-up don\'t come cry on my shoulder. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/how-to-succeed-in-business-without-really-trying.htmlTue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700The world of computer-mediated communication is fresh and exciting as it changes every day and is constantly offering new approaches to social interaction, especially through the internet. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are constantly increasing in popularity and are used by people all over the globe. In fact, according to Digital Buzz Blog, statistics from January 2012 showed that Facebook now has more than 800 million active users, and Twitter 100 million active users. Furthermore, over half of consumers report that they are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan on Facebook. These statistics are proof that social media and business marketing can work hand-in-hand to promote and develop businesses on a whole new level. As a new intern at Meadow Creek Business Center working in the social media and marketing field of the company, my job will be to put social networking to good use for Meadow Creek and their customers. I am fascinated by the real-time connections made through social networking and curious to explore the ways businesses can utilize this phenomenon to increase their potential for success. My personal goals in this position will be to gain real world experience in social media and marketing, increase my knowledge and credibility in the workplace to prepare for a career in the future, and to use my creativity and social networking experience to benefit Meadow Creek Business Center in their quest to help businesses grow. Goals that I see for the company specifically are to promote and get the word out about Meadow Creek and their new up and coming social media product, continue to familiarize others with social media marketing trends, and to show businesses the many ways that social media marketing can help them progress when used correctly. As you can probably tell by my post thus far, with its structured format and formal tone, I am a college student. Only three days ago I finished my last two course finals and ended my sophomore year at the University of Puget Sound (UPS). I am majoring in Communication Studies, minoring in Studio Art, and therefore receiving the well-rounded education that liberal arts schools like UPS hope to offer (although I intend to stick to the communications field for my career path). Outside of academics, I am involved in the Repertory Dance Group at UPS, and recently became a member of the Pi Beta Phi fraternity. I will also be studying abroad in London during the spring semester next school year, and can\'t wait to travel and experience all that Europe has to offer. That\'s just a little about myself, I will most likely continue to write blog posts over the summer, and hopefully as I progress into summer mode my posts will become less scholarly and more entertaining! To conclude, here are some things I have thought about, discovered, and found interesting or inspiring in my research on day one at the office: What are the differences between social networking, and social networking for businesses? What are the rules of proper social media marketing etiquette for businesses? Strategies to make social media work for a business:? Branding: who is the target audience? What is our message? How will we present the message effectively using image and content? Facebook: Company philosophy on info page Personalization and introducing employees Create customer community Responsiveness to each individual Corresponding links with posts Variety in posts – smart balance of content How do we ease in social media to those who are not familiar with social media, are afraid to try social media, and those who simply do not have the time to use social media while running a business? http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/introducing-clara-tollefson---social-media-intern.htmlMon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700Building a marketing campaign that is sure to be effective and accomplish your goals is not that hard if you follow some very easy steps along the way. A killer campaign is one that has a defined goal, minimizes risk and has a high ROI. It is usually part of a planned flow of related campaigns and not a distinct event. Being part of a progression of activity and being a segue into the next campaign, containing multiple promotional tools and designed with achieving a return commensurate with its cost, insulates you from striking out completely. Here are some simple steps to follow: Establish the objective. This is usually to sell more of a product or service. While this may seem rather simple, marketing campaigns are all too often developed around a promotional tool and not revenue generating product or service. The content and call to action are after thoughts to the brilliant idea of sending out a postcard. Always remember that the objective is to make money, not create an award winning promotional piece. Link the objective to the prior campaign. A great marketing calendar will link campaigns so that most can be thought of as up-sell opportunities to the prior campaign(s). Others may provide alternate ways of accomplishing the same thing or satisfying the same need for those that were not engaged by the last progression of campaigns. Define the target market. As your campaigns progress in the up-sell mode, the target market will narrow in focus. Each addition to the product line will add cost to the solution. Instead of trying to sell to the same broad market, begin segmenting the market to those prospects or customers that will benefit the most from the features and benefits of the product or service that is the objective. Establish your value proposition. Make sure the value proposition is consistent with your company strategy. If you\'re strategy is cost leadership, make that benefit clear. If it\'s differentiation, are the features and benefits highlighted. If you\'re a nicher, is the target market focused and the features geared to that market. Select your promotional tools. Never use just one media. Marketing is both an art and a science. Sometimes one of your marketing weapons doesn\'t work. Don\'t place the whole campaign at risk on a single postcard. Use a variety of coordinated inbound and outbound marketing tools. Establish your call to action. What is it that you want your target market to do? Make it clear in your content and be prepared to act when it happens. Create a sales process specific to the campaign. Your team needs to know what to do when a prospect responds to your call to action. Nail down the response and subsequent steps. What are the anticipated customer touch points, how will you engage and convert? Create the content. Make sure the content is consistent between the various promotional media. Adapt as required to best utilize an email, blog, video, etc., but make sure the campaign holds together from the value proposition to the call to action for each. Setup a measurement and control system. People don\'t like to log data because it\'s never available at a convenient time. Keep it simple and make it easy to ensure it\'s done. Measure leads, prospects and conversions. Measure the value of the conversions and the costs of the campaign. Plan, launch and adapt. A good campaign is like a symphony, the team acting in a coordinated way and the promotional tools all working together to make money. Follow your numbers and determine if, where and when to adjust the tactics to maximize your return. Each step is critical. That does not mean you need a 50 page play book for each campaign. You just need to think it through and create the tools to compliment the campaign\'s execution. You can replicate much of this for the next campaign and develop a rhythm for a continuous business development effort. Once again, the objective is to make money! Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/10-steps-to-building-a-killer-marketing-campaign.htmlThu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700Every once in while you need to step back and look at the big picture to accelerate your business growth. All of the day-to-day demands of running a small business draw you away from that 20 thousand foot view of your business. That\'s where real progress can be made in better defining your value proposition, adding clarity to your marketing message and standing out in the crowd. Here are 5 simple ways to help gain traction in the market place. Define your strategy. Then shout it from the roof tops. Are you the low cost solution, offer a differentiated product or serve a niche market? Choose one and only one. This is the basis for your vision, mission, value proposition and content of all your marketing campaigns. Diversify your marketing. Don\'t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to marketing. There are hundreds of ways to promote your business, why restrict yourself to one? Your marketing calendar should leverage at least three to five promotional tactics at any point in time and focus on a specific product or service and call to action. There is strength in numbers and some methods will prove to be duds. You don\'t want to come up empty handed because the only tactic you were using didn\'t work out. Invest in competitive intelligence. You can\'t go to market effectively if you don\'t know your competition. What are they doing, how are they doing it, who are their customers, when have they changed strategy and tactics and why. Simple enough, you can\'t execute your strategy if you are the low cost solution if you don\'t know the market price points, you can\'t differentiate if you don\'t know the offerings available and if you\'re servicing a niche, who else is in that space. Invest in market intelligence. Your strategy will define your target market. You\'d better know that market inside and out if you\'re going to convince anyone that you are the preferred solution. Better validate that the market you think exists really does. What seems to be common sense from a supplier\'s point of view doesn\'t always translate well to customer needs and wants. Measure your results. Sales and marketing will likely be your biggest administrative expense. Invest wisely and the only way to do that is to measure your results. This doesn\'t have to be a burden, an accounting exercise or a complex ROI calculation. Just ask each prospect how they found out about you and after they buy, why they did or did not select you. From there you can make it as complicated as you want, but you\'ll know more than most even if you do nothing more. You should remember enough to capture a trend and have a good feel for where you should invest more and where you should invest less. I\'d still recommend capturing that data in a more sophisticated manner, but you get the idea. Taking time to think through these 5 sure fire ways to create a growth machine out of your business if it\'s just you or 1,000 employees will pay huge dividends. If you\'re way behind in one or more of these, match your activity to the resources available. You want to implement them in such a way as to have a maintainable process that creates a sustainable competitive advantage for your business. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/5-sure-fire-ways-to-make-your-business-a-growth-machine.htmlWed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700Sometimes eliminating what something is not helps provide clarity to what in fact it is. Such is the case with marketing. So much has changed in the landscape of marketing that it is not uncommon for people in business to be totally confused as to what marketing is and if they are doing it at all, much less correctly. Many small business owners I have talked to and worked with are horrified that they are not. So let\'s start with a list of the 10 things marketing is not: Website Blog Brochure Shopping Cart Vision Statement Value Proposition Call to Action Fan Page Elevator Speech Keyword So called \"Marketing Gurus\" have confused a level of expertise or the ability to spell a particular mode of online promotion with actual marketing. This is quite easy to do if you don\'t know anything about marketing in the first place. Hapless business owners equally clueless on what exactly marketing is are rich fodder for the clever snake oil salesmen. No talent required when your target market is dumb people with money. We could say something easy like marketing is: Product Price Place Promotion But that would be equally inept. It presumes certain prerequisites that most business owners have not even thought about. Either through ignorance, laziness or that some idiot convinced them that success was a product of passion. What works in the bedroom does not play well in the board room. No amount of marketing can help you if you don\'t know what you want to be when you grow up. No value proposition is going to help if you don\'t know the market. Your elevator speech might as well be Muzak® if you don\'t know the competition. A vision statement without a strategy is as worthless as an understanding with Kim Jong Un. A strategic plan and business plan are the prerequisites for any successful marketing campaign or dare I say marketing plan. It\'s not that I\'m anally retentive planning addict. The fact is that I am probably the least organized terminally ADD afflicted person I know. I just put whatever focus, concentration and logic I can muster into planning when it comes to business. It\'s a money thing. I don\'t like to lose it or for anyone looking to me to manage theirs to lose it either. Perhaps I should take the old adage about a fool and his money to heart and maximize my own income at the expense of others. Fortunately or unfortunately, I wasn\'t raised that way. So I marshal on shouting the virtues of planning and the dependency of effective marketing on a company strategy and business plan. Shouting at people when they\'re on the verge of rapture when in the throes of entrepreneurial passion is decidedly unpopular. Marketing is dependent upon knowledge. Promotion, i.e. all those clever internet tricks we thrive on, is dependent on strategy. Without that, there\'s no product, price, target market and compelling value proposition in the form of differentiation, niche/focus or price leadership. In short, content. No content, no website. No content, no blog. No content and the list goes on and on. The last vital truth on marketing is that it is all about making money. The snake oil salesmen will want to sell you the finest website money can buy, the slickest brochure imaginable, design events that rival .com Christmas parties and SEO you to the poor house. Marketing is ROI driven. Startups in particular need to be guerrilla marketers. Marketing doesn\'t have to cost a lot. Effective marketing is based on solid strategy, planning and coordinated campaigns with specific purpose. It doesn\'t all have to be perfect. And the next time a Guru tells you that everything going to the marketplace will reflect of the quality of your promotional material and you must spare no expense. Put all that pent up passion to good use and let them have it. Dr. Philip Kotler defines marketing as \"the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.\"  If you\'ve ever taken a college level course in marketing, you\'ve read one of his books.  The definition implies a lot of work.  Business success is a lot of hard work. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/what-isn_t-marketing_.htmlThu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700Follow this link to Opportunities at Meadow Creekhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/job-opportunities-at-meadow-creek.htmlTue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700Last night I attended \"Meet the Angels!\" sponsored by MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest. This Venture Lab event was moderated by Rebecca Lovell, Chief Business Officer at Geek Wire. There were panelist from seven local angel investor organizations: Alliance of Angels Keiretsu Forum NW Energy Angels Puget Sound Venture Club Seraph Capital Forum WINGS ZINO Society A description of each of these organizations and their representatives at the forum is included below. The panelist were all given the opportunity to introduce their organizations and then took questions from what appeared to be nearly 200 attendees. Here are some of the takeaways I left with. Of the approximately 600 thousand businesses formed each year, only 5% receive angel investor funding and less than 0.5% receive venture capital funding. Looking at the 5 angels that provided complete reporting (there is a spreadsheet below) deals were up 34% in 2011 over 2010 to 133, dollars invested were up 44% to $64.3 million and the average deal size was up 7% to $483 thousand. Based on very limited data, it appears that 20-25% of applicants make it to the screening process, about 50% of the ventures screened get to present and 50-67% of the presenters get funded. That would mean your chances of being funded by any given angel organization is around 5-8%. 99% of angels are not part of a group. The duration of the process can range from 3-6 months between presentation and funding. The biggest variable is due diligence. You can manage that variable by being prepared. Get a due diligence check list from the angel or another source and make sure you have the information necessary and create a drop box for file sharing. The due diligence will cover: Do you have a sustainable competitive advantage Is you IP protected Corporate governance and other legal entity issues Financials Market Competitors Management team References Not all angels will be expert in or even familiar with the due diligence process and this will effect timing. There also needs to be a lead angel that will step up to the plate and manage the due diligence process and negotiate the terms sheet. Alliance of Angels provided this list of \"must haves:\" Prototype Demo is the new PowerPoint Market traction High growth/high volume market With a long lead product, LOI with large customer Seattle ranks 4th in startup density (startups per population) and 2nd in valuations http://www.geekwire.com/2012/chart-seattle-ranks-fourth-startup-density-valuations As you might expect, the angels discourage high A Round valuations. They cautioned that not only will you chase people away, but that if you are behind your pro-forma financials, B Round financing will be that much more difficult and the angels and owners will suffer. Do not ask angels to sign NDAs prior to due diligence. You\'re saying you don\'t trust them. Angels want to own 20-30% of the company. This is one way they will back into a valuation. The angels suggested boot-strapping the business as long as possible and use angels at an inflection point i.e. going to market. You will lose some control when you accept angel funding. Find angels you can work with. The term \"noses in, fingers out\" was used to describe the angel approach to involvement in company management. You had better believe that all depends on how you\'re doing against plan. When the VCs move in, it\'s a much different story. This is a full-time job for them. The team Has to be people the angel can work with. Has to understand how to get the product to market All engineers, not a good team. - All family or all family and friends, not a good team. Can the team execute? All the nice words on the investor deck depend on this. Get a sales guy early. Owners should always feel the team is never good enough. Build a stronger team than you\'re comfortable with. Who is your next key hire? This is a question that is even included on one angel\'s due diligence check list. Don\'t screw this one up on your use of funds. Pre-money valuations will not be based on discounted cash flow off your pro-forma financials. Angels understand that they will be wrong. The best source for valuations is the last similar deal. Your financials will demonstrate that you understand your markets and your business with the quality of the assumptions you make and that you can plan by the depth of your analysis. The entrepreneur/team needs to demonstrate self-awareness: Know what you don\'t know Recognize your mistakes early Business plans had mixed feedback. One angel felt he could read into the CEO by reading the business plan. Another felt the investor deck was the business plan. I would suggest that it\'s pretty hard to put an executive summary or an investor deck together without a plan and impossible to make it through due diligence without one. Contact Meadow Creek for help or check out this Venture Lab event http://www.mitwa.org/events/venture-lab/creating-successful-business-plan-your-start Reasons why companies fail in screening: Inability to communicate Sloppy deck Final thoughts from the angels: Build a stronger team than you\'re comfortable with Don\'t cut corners early on Look at the team\'s core skill set, what can you do versus what you think you\'re going to do Building companies is a team sport Clear vision, does it align with the team and investors Know what you don\'t know Don\'t quit your day job too soon • Synthesis of the night: Team Execution Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/meet-the-angels_-1.htmlFri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800I just ran into this list of local VCs and angel investors at http://www.vocationvillage.com/seattle-venture-capital/ If you\'re looking for funding, here are some local investors you should contact. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-seattle-venture-capital-scene.htmlFri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800Speaking of funding, as George Harrison said,\"you know it don\'t come easy.\" There\'s as much competition for venture capital dollars as you\'ll see in the Super Bowl this weekend. You make your play and get the chance to go on to the next level or go home empty handed. Here are some interesting tips from Guy Kawasaki: 10 Slides 20 Minutes 20 Point Font The 10/20/30 Rule by Guy Kawasakihttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/making-your-funding-pitch-1.htmlFri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800According to the paper industry, Americans consumed an estimated 23 billion paper coffee cups in 2010.\" That is 23,000,000,000. In one country. In one year. Many of these cups are made from recycled materials, however, most recycled paper products only contain 10% post consumer materials. That still leaves us with nearly 21 billion cups made from new material. During his Ted Talk in 2008, Chris Jordan gave some staggering numbers regarding the paper cup consumption in the United States, but his real impact came through his photography. On average, Americans consume 410,000 paper cups every 15 minutes.\" This photo contains 410,000 paper cups...the average amount consumed by Americans in fifteen minutes. Remove the environmental impact and consequences that these numbers have and instead look at the fiscal ramifications. A conservative estimate on the 2010 paper cup consumption cost, when you consider that an inexpensive 16 ounce paper cup is $.04, is $920,000,000. For that price tag, one could purchase 20,445 BMWs. Or 2642 homes in Seattle. Or a professional sports team...with money left over. Now, here at Meadow Creek, our numbers are not nearly as staggering by comparison. Meadow Creek average consumption is 2000 cups a month. That works out to 24,000 cups consumed a year. When you consider that there are typically 250 business days in a year, that leaves us with an average daily cup consumption of 96 cups per day. We think there is a better way. In an effort to reduce our carbon footprint and limit our contribution to these staggering figures, we will be providing two new Meadow Creek Business Center mugs (free of charge) to tenants of Meadow Creek. It is our sincere hope that with access to a more sustainable option, we can cut back on our paper cup consumption and in a small way do our part. Additional mugs for your clients are available to purchase for only $2 a piece. While there will still be paper cups available, we do implore you to think twice before using them as we make this step towards making this place we call home a better place.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/meadow-creek-goes-green.htmlTue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association released their fourth quarter Money-Tree report on venture capital financing. Dow Jones Venture-Source also released their report on fourth quarter activity and both studies revealed similar results. Venture capital funding fell in the fourth quarter from the third quarter and from the fourth quarter 2010. Both studies also report that VC activity was up in 2011 over 2010. Local activity showed the same dip in the fourth quarter. Leaders in the local market were: Software Business-Support Services Consumer Information Services Biopharmaceuticals Reasons for the dip according to Greg Beams, Ernst & Young, include: Drop in IPO activity resulting in VCs not having fresh funds for investment The recession encouraging more companies to strive for positive cash flow earlier in the growth cycle reducing the need for funding The latter factor, along with an increase in sensitivity to risk in the VC community is probably responsible for the shift of investment to later-stage companies and away from earlier stage companies. Read the Seattle Times article Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/venture-funding-up-in-2011_-but-down-in-q4.htmlSat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800The weather has taken a heavy toll on our ability to make it in today.  We will be unable to provide services today, but expect to be back in tomorrow.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/snow-day-at-meadow-creek-1.htmlWed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800If you were going on vacation, you would think through the following: Where do I want to go? Is it crowded? How am I going to get there? Can I afford it? Should I seek advice on what to do, where to stay etc.? Should I invite a friend? What do I need to bring with me? Do I need a passport and/or visa? What do I do when I get there? How do I get home? You wouldn\'t go away without asking yourself these questions You may not have every day planned out, but you would have an itinerary, reservations, money in the bank or an available credit card and rough idea of what you were going to do. Why don\'t people take their business as seriously? Do you think it is time you had a business plan? Do you want a quality plan that is going to be worth the effort, but not cost a fortune? Contact us now if you\'d like to participate in a Business Plan Workshop. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/10-reasons-to-have-a-plan.htmlWed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to everyone! There is a lot going on at Meadow Creek and in Issaquah this week.  Please check out our events page for a Mastermind, Tenant Talks brown bag lunch and learn/network, the Issaquah Chamber Membership Lunch and the I-90 Networking Breakfast.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/events-this-week.htmlMon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Promotion is where the vast majority of change has taken place. The change in promotion is at least equal to the change brought on by the advent of printing, mail, radio and television. While some very entertaining videos would have us believe it is bigger than all of those combined, when adjusted for changes in GNP, population and whatever else, we believe it is as revolutionary as any of these events on the world of marketing. Forrester Research and Shopping.org With the change in place, the requirement of our promotional activities has changed as well. There has been much talk about the advent of in-bound marketing. This is marketing not meant to disburse information to potential customers regarding a company’s product offering, but to create an environment in which those inquiring the world wide web about information on the company’s product or service will be drawn to the company’s website and not someone else’s. This is not as new as many would have you believe. In my business career, the earliest search engine I recall is the Yellow Pages. In the mid 80s I had a neighbor that was a direct salesman for Yellow Pages space. Up until the early 2000s, it was still common to name a company leading with the letter “A” to display first in the Yellow Pages. Search engine optimization was far less complex back then. That was of course if you didn’t pay for a highlighted ad that would display ahead of the alphabetic listing or a ½ inch, 1 inch. ¼ page, ½ page or full page ad in the Yellow pages. If that doesn’t sound a lot like Google Adwords and SEO marketing, it should. But things are changing now. The Yellow Pages’ claim to fame had been in local search in the internet era. This, however, was short lived as a somewhat unbiased study showed that the Internet surpassed the Yellow Pages in 2008 becoming the leading source of local business information. Most of the available statistics on the Yellow Pages has conveniently been published by the Yellow Pages or SuperPages. Claims of relevancy are almost satirical given the reality of the world today. My business center was assaulted annually by Yellow Pages distributors. They would leave what appeared to be a pallet load in the lobby. I would methodically transport these remnants of a genocidal act on trees to the recycling dumpster saving one or two copies for the receptionist in the unlikely event someone would actually ask for one. The poor state of health of the Yellow Pages business is reinforced my the public filings of SuperPages showing a 61.3% revenue decline from 2009 to 2010. Search engine marketing has replaced the Yellow Pages as the premier in-bound marketing tool. SEO, Adwords, keywords, meta data et al are the tools of search engine marketing we’ve added to our promotional tool kit with the advent of the internet. The Yellow Pages are not irrelevant; they have just become far less effective as a broad based in-bound marketing tool, relegated to being marketed by spammy direct mail announced to be “not a bill” that looks like a bill compared the glory days when you made an appointment with a Yellow Pages salesman. Promotion has certainly been transformed by the internet. The objective of promotion or out-bound marketing is now as often to drive traffic to a company website as it is to a brick and mortar store. Print advertising is on the decline and taking magazine after magazine after it. Two newspaper towns are now one newspaper towns across the country as advertising revenue drops. Print based search engines still hold a surprisingly large share, even at the 18 to 24 year old range. It is, however, only dominant over online searches for the 65+ crowd. The trend is clear, off-line searches are losing their relevancy with each passing year. The change is not just a function of a more online population, but of environmental sensitivity to the massive amount of paper used in the production of print directories and the creation of “opt-in” and “opt-out” list for their distribution. Newspapers and magazines are also losing share to online versions of the same publications. Marketers still need to recognize that printed media continues to be an important factor for many businesses. The trend away from conventional media has also had a dramatic impact on the cost of using them. A careful evaluation of the effectiveness and economics of print media is still warranted for many situations. Network Solutions, LLC Recalling the lack of an online presence as one of the top 7 causes of small business failures, the low adoption rates of these internet solutions is a great concern. Small business marketing priorities must address the proper mix of online and off-line promotional activities. A surprising number of small businesses still don’t have websites. In all, two-thirds of small businesses have or intend to have in 2 years company websites. In the year between studies, the number of small businesses with websites increased by 10%. Online advertising and plans to advertise in the next 2 years online is a strong 2nd in internet solutions. Social media is 3rd with the 2nd largest percentage with plans to add social media to their internet solutions for small businesses. Network Solutions, LLC Marketing strategy decisions regarding “Promotion” must now give special emphasis to using social media to connect to clients and potential clients by building a community of businesses and individuals with a common interest. Social media provides a mechanism to create an ongoing dialog with your target market. Far more powerful than delivering a message, a conversation creates the opportunity to truly “connect.” The popularity of social networking as an internet tool stems from its phenomenal adoption rate in the span of its start in the early 2000’s. The usage rate in the 18 to 29 years old range seems to have peaked in the 80%+ range, the growth rate in all other age groups is still robust. The fastest growing demographic for Facebook is women over 55. Social media is not right for all businesses. It must fit into the overall strategy and marketing plan. Don’t include social media in your plan just because it’s the hot thing and everyone else is doing it. Only do it if it’s an integral component of your online promotional and in-bound marketing activity. Network Solutions, LLC Network Solutions, LLC As is the case with off-line conversations, the key to carrying on an online conversation is listening. If your Fans and Followers tell you something is wrong with your product or the way you are doing business, do something about it. Explain why you do it that way or make changes. Someone has taken the time to give you feedback and they expect a response. Feedback is not always pleasant, but the reaction of people that see they are being listened to is usually quite positive. Network Solutions, LLC The businesses using social media report positive accomplishments and increasingly so as they gain experience. Among the accomplishments 63% report stayed engaged with current customer, a 17% increase since the last report. The other 2 most dominant accomplishments are Developed higher awareness and dentified and attracted new customers. Network Solutions, LLC Most small businesses are updating their social media at least of a weekly basis. Over 60% of businesses using social media are updating Facebook, Twitter, blogs and location based services weekly or more frequently. These same businesses reported that social media used up more time than expected. Developing relevant content is a time-consuming process. In order to effectively implement a social media strategy, the sites must be dynamic with content changes and additions frequent enough to engage the audience. Posting must be checked frequently to make sure the conversation with your audience is continued and that complaints, if any, do not go unanswered. Many people are offering services to update company social media on a daily basis. Because the development of content and posting the content is time consuming, these services usually run about $500 per month. The return on investment may still be attractive, but there are more cost effective ways of managing your social media. Like many aspects of internet, many of the tools are free, but the time to learn and effectively use the tools is not. Social media can be an incredible investment in time and ruin your marketing ROI if not done properly. New content development shares the top spot for search engine optimization effectiveness along with on page content optimization. It is also just behind blogging as the in terms of the effort required. Social media is new content development intensive. It’s also a necessary element to almost all small business marketing strategies. Marketing & Innovation is the most important non-financial factor in competitive health for small businesses Marketing & Innovation has the lowest level of achievement of all of the factors Only 36% of small businesses rank themselves as being highly successful in finding efficient ways of advertising and promoting their business 42% find internet marketing solutions to be extremely important to their success Only 31% of small businesses have a social media presence, but 15% more plan to in 2 years Over 60% of social media users found that it allowed them to stay engaged with current customers and develop a higher awareness of the organization within their markets Conclusion The fundamentals of marketing have not changed. The objective of marketing has not changed. The focus of marketing has in many or even most instances changed and new tools are in many cases dominating the old standbys of the past. Embrace the internet in your marketing, but don’t lose sight of the fundamentals of your strategy and plan. SEO, your website, your blog and social media presence are not ends in themselves, simply new ways to create sustainable growth in profit and profitability. Social media is vital to the success of most businesses. To be effective, the social media strategy needs to be grounded by a viable business plan. The strategy needs to include multiple social media sites and maintained with a consistent flow of new content and actively monitored for contributions from your social media community in order to create the connection. In addition, your social media sites needs to look professional and reflect the image you want for your company. Meadow Creek Marketing and Consulting offers a social media management system that offers small and large businesses alike a means to implement a social media strategy with minimal effort to earn great results. “Social Media Marketing for Success” the product. The product provides a tool for: Engaging Educating Converting Components of the product are: Custom Fan page and sidebar Video tutorials on developing a Facebook marketing strategy 30-60-90 day community management marketing plan 1-on-1 quarterly review with Community Manager to analyze marketing results Develop methodology for Facebook ads Personalized Facebook marketing scripts and private messages Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Blog integration Access to industry specific and general interest content libraries Social Media Marketing for Success can be implemented for less than what social media hobbyist offer their services because we have the experience, software tools and understanding of the objectives that they don’t. You can use Social Media Marketing for Success on your own or have us take care of the entire program. Call Meadow Creek today and arrange for a free, no obligation introduction to Social Media Marketing for Success. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--promotion-1.htmlSat, 14 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800This Mastermind is for serious entrepreneurs, professionals and managers/owners of small businesses. This Mastermind will meet monthly and start with a brief meet and greet. We will then talk about a specific business issue and then share with each other our own exprerience or current issues relating to the topic. Successful entrepreneurs are skilled at surrounding themselves with people vital to the success of their business. Come to the Meadow Creek Mastermind and surround yourself with a group of advisors and contribute as a member of their advisor team as well. Feel free to bring a brown bag lunch. There will be time for informal networking after the session. Attendees can be expected to participate in the group discussion, either as an advisor or one seeking advice or both. You\'ll be in the company of people serious about growing their business in 2012. This is a great opportunity to kick start your business goals for 2012 and keep the pressure up throughout the year. The speaker will participate as well, offering his comments on the subjects, reflections on his business experience to those seeking advice and offering his own business challenges to break the ice if necessary. February 17th, 12:00 to 1:30 in the Meadow Creek Board Room RSVPhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/meadow-creek-mastermind-1.htmlThu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Place has most certainly changed and extraordinarily so. Marketing strategy decisions regarding Type/Location of Stores must now include a company website with e-commerce capability. There was once the dominance of the brick and mortar store and perhaps a call center for catalog sales. Service providers, both B2C and B2B, were call-in businesses. Find the number on your Rolodex or phone book and call in your request or order. Now a growing number of businesses have a web presence as shown in the following data from Barlow Research on small businesses from $100,000 to $10,000,000 in annual sales. 49% currently have a website 13% do not have a website but plan to within the next 12 months 38% do not plan to have a website within the next 12 months The study revealed that 84% of companies from $10 million to $500 million in sales have websites. The implication being that having a website to a great extent is a budgetary consideration. Given the large number of non-employer businesses included in the sample, one can also assume that the technical sophistication of the business owner is also a major determining factor. An important consideration in the impact of the internet on “Place” is not online shopping, but “web influenced” sales also discussed in “Pricing.” The use of online product, retailer and pricing information and reviews creates a hybrid marketplace. A company website has often become dominant over or equivalency to the brick and mortar company store. Many businesses have been able to rationalize the cost of large scale retail store chains and sell exclusively or near exclusively online. In other cases, new businesses have been started that sell product or services online that were once the domain of retail stores. Amazon.com Zappos.com Ebay.com Newegg.com Other major retailers have kept their stores, but have augmented “Place” with lucrative ecommerce sites. In this case the website augments the traditional brick and mortar site. Staples Apple Office Depot Walmart Sears To say this hasn’t been revolutionary would be grossly underestimating the impact the internet has had on marketing. Take for example the all important Christmas holiday shopping season. Fighting traffic jams, over flowing parking lots and holiday shopping melees involving pepper spray has not thwarted the great majority of holiday shoppers from hitting the malls to enjoy the experience. As discussed in the Pricing section, the value proposition for conventional retail shopping will need to be emphasized and the marketer will have to take a hard look at the cost structure of the brick and mortar presence and evaluate where the value is relative to cost in the evolving market. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--place.htmlThu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Other than the obvious change in cost structure in some web-based distribution models, pricing fundamentals too, have not changed. Price is set to maximize profitability in concert with corporate strategy regarding: Cost leadership Differentiation Niche focus Corporate strategy regarding its selection of differentiation, cost leadership or focus plays a key role in pricing of course, but what has changed is the influence of changes in distribution on pricing flexibility. Compared to brick and mortar, ecommerce sites are a low cost way of going to market. The e-commerce based company will have a cost advantage over the brick and mortar store. Today, those that want immediate gratification or enjoy the in-person shopping experience out-number those that enjoy the inherent free market advantage of searching, researching, comparing and ordering online. Many, and a growing number enjoy both. Armed with mobile computing devices like iPhones and Androids they shop in conventional retail outlets and enjoy instant access to product reviews and comparison pricing. Using cell phone apps and surfing the internet on their smart phones, comparison shopping, product and retailer reviews and product research while standing in a brick and mortar store is now commonplace. More than 50% of consumers already report using their phone while in the retail store to check-in, compare prices, and search for discounts according to a report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies. “Web influenced” sales must be a major consideration of today’s retail and industrial marketer. The implication for the marketer is two-fold. The need to highlight the value proposition of both a differentiated marketplace and a differentiated product will increase in parallel with the increase in the well informed customer with virtually instantaneous access to product and price comparison online. Today it is estimated that 46% of consumers have shopped online. Online sales, however, account for only 8% of total consumer retail revenues. This amount will obviously increase over time as the more “connected” youth replace their parents as shoppers with money to spend. Perhaps even more importantly, the explosion of visual content on the web, particularly video will weaken the differentiation advantage of the conventional brick and mortar store over the online marketplace. The online shopping experience is becoming more interactive. You can not only see the product online, but often see how you would interact with the product, learn how to use the product, see case studies on how others have benefitted from the product or service online and rate the product. YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine. The amount of online video content is only increasing and companies are learning to use this medium to get their message out and provide a richer shopping experience to online buyers. Consumers are also learning to use video to express their both their enthusiasm and satisfaction with a product or to vent their frustration on a product that they are not happy with. Woe be it to any company with a bad product review that goes viral on YouTube. This blog is the fourth in a series that will examine the fundamentals of marketing and how social media is being used effectively as a promotional tool in the marketing mix. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--price.htmlWed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Product Corporate strategy would typically define in some reasonably broad parameter product and place. Unless you’re in a web based business or a web substitute (more on that later) there has not been an appreciable change in product since Al Gore invented the internet. Yes, many products have become web enabled, but that’s a matter of product differentiation, not typically corporate strategy. There are also a plethora of products that would not exist if not for the web. Pity poor Blockbuster, never has a firm been through so many technological rollercoaster rides and not woken up to the reality of the competitive environment. First it was VHS versus Beta, stocking both technologies until VHS finally won the battle. Then the painfully slow migration from VHS to DVD followed. Again stocking both until VHS became a thing of the past. Finally the shift from DVDs to BlueRay was the last product shift. Why, having been through so many high impact changes did they not see the possibility of the expensive storefront changing from their large retail locations with tons of inventory to a relatively inexpensive vending machine stocking just the hottest titles. Redbox.com’s ingenious strategy of employing a very old distribution system in a new technology market is masterful. Blockbuster now has its own kiosks, but only 10,000 compared to 34,000 plus for Redbox. Netflix.com of course eliminated the storefront all together. Delivery of DVDs by mail and now streaming movies directly to internet enabled devices would seem even more of an obvious migration path than vending machines. Oddly enough, Blockbuster missed it and now their retail stores are going the way of full-service gas stations, dial-up internet service and mom and pop department stores. Both Blockbuster and Hollywood video have filed for bankruptcy. Similarly, Borders did not foresee or react strongly enough to the early success of Amazon.com. Here again, expensive storefronts with massive inventories were fatally inefficient compared to an online storefront and a centralized inventory. Barnes and Nobel did successfully develop an online presence and now finds its storefronts with far less competition for those that still enjoy the bookstore experience. Most technological innovation will result in this kind of new product opportunities and differentiation. Some of the greatest opportunities come from companies that leverage technological innovations to dramatically change the cost structure of an industry. Companies that adapt to a changing technological and competitive environment will survive and those that do not, will not. Natural selection if you will in the capitalist system. Think about the products that have all but disappeared during your lifetime and the impact those changes have had on once revered brands: Slide rules Photographic film Trading stamps Technological discovery, adoption, maturity and replacement are nothing new. Some technologies can have profound changes in the marketplace. Changes that can influence not only the growth of new products, but dramatically change distribution channels are rare and cause equally profound changes in the competitive landscape. This is exceedingly true with the internet, but does not change the fundamentals of product in marketing. This blog is the third in a series that will examine the fundamentals of marketing and how social media is being used effectively as a promotional tool in the marketing mix. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--product-1.htmlTue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Do not forget to visit our events page!  January is filled with great events at Meadow Creek and the eastside. Get 2012 off to a screaming start and participate in our regular events. Business and Bagels Tenant Talks Meadow Creek Connects Meadow Creek Mastermind Meadow Creek Strategyhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/events-at-meadow-creek-1.htmlMon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Fundamentals of Company Strategy The foundation of any marketing strategy has got to be a company strategy that defines the parameters of the business that you’re in. Among other things, it defines the scope of the product or service offering, target market, sales and distribution strategy. This is all based on a strategic analysis and strategic plan as depicted below in Michael Porter’s Wheel of Competitive Strategy. Strategy has always shared a lot more sex appeal in corporate management than operations management, but despite this it is often ignored. Strategic planning is a lot of work. Less work than managing through a death spiral, but ignored none-the-less. Without this, it is quite difficult to determine which of the three generic strategies you will employ: Cost leadership Differentiation Niche focus Porter’s 3 generic strategies hold true today. Companies, large and small alike, all seem to be in a constant exercise to define what they want to be when they grow-up. Just as in life, your ambitions should not change as a result of your latest success or failure, achieving your goals is a long term investment. Indecision and being caught in the middle of conflicting goals and strategies is the death knell of a company. The business plan defines how the strategic plan is to be implemented. It will have action plans to respond to the findings of the: Industry analysis Competitor analysis PEST analysis SWOT analysis It will determine how scarce resources will be allocated to the various elements of the business. The plan is preferably a document, albeit a living document subject to change as the economic reality of what works and what doesn’t unfolds. A written plan forces the author(s) to state explicitly what the strategy is, what the goals are and what the plan is to achieve those goals. Unwritten plans tend to be fly by the seat of your pants plans with a strategy and goals that are kind of, sort of all clear in someone’s mind at the moment. They become moving targets frustrating those with responsibility for making it all happen. Without such an analysis, the company vision, mission and values are not worth the paper they are written on. The entrepreneurs, small and large businesses alike must back up the passion with facts. Passion and hard work cannot successfully execute an unviable plan. Two-thirds of businesses fail in the first 5 years. The cause of this high failure rate is a very short list of consistent primary factors. Here is a list of often cited top 7 reasons. Starting a business for the wrong reason Poor management Insufficient capital Location, location, location Lack of planning Over expansion No internet presence This article will address Lack of Planning and No Internet Presence. The marketing objective at its highest level should always be to create sustainable improvements in profit and profitability within the context of the strategic plan. The basics of any marketing plan revolve around the fundamentals of marketing. For that, we can keep it simple and use Kotler’s 4 Ps: Product Price Place Promotion This blog is the third in a series that will examine the fundamentals of marketing and how social media is being used effectively as a promotional tool in the marketing mix. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--strategy-1.htmlMon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800The internet has not changed the fundamentals of marketing. The internet has not created a new “silver bullet” of marketing, but introduced many new considerations and an enormous number of new tools to be employed. All too often people are confusing internet savvy, website design and SEO skills with marketing and it’s not. These skills are important parts of online promotion techniques and campaigns and important elements of most marketers’ tool kits. Marketing, however, needs to be approached at a much higher level than internet tricks. The objective of marketing is to make money, something that seems to be lost on many “gurus.” We offer means to formulate proper social media objectives and cost effectively implement a social media strategy. In doing so, you can move your company ahead of the competition in connecting to clients and prospects by establishing a community with a common interest. Company websites, blogs and social media strategy are not ends in themselves, but essential components of the marketing mix that supports an overall company strategy, business plan and marketing plan. The incredible adoption rate by the general population and high level of interest by small and large businesses alike in incorporating social media into their promotional tools is merits a closer look. Many marketing professionals and particularly the “gurus” ignore the fundamentals and jump straight to improving web page ranking or some other measure of online promotional success without considering what the marketing goal is and how it should be achieved. For that reason, it’s worth starting out an examination of the impact of the internet on marketing with a quick review of what marketing is all about in the first place. Effectiveness of Online Promotion We’ll assume the latter so that we may take a closer look at the issue of marketing, specifically Finding efficient ways to advertise and promote your business, particularly in the context of internet business solutions. Small businesses see internet business solutions as increasingly important. More importantly, 42% see internet business solutions as being “extremely important”, an increase of 9% from the study released only 7 months earlier. Incorporating the appropriate internet tools in a cost effective manner that contributes to profits and profitability is a high value target in small business marketing. Network Solutions, LLC The proliferation of online promotional tools has tended to obscure the fundamentals of business and marketing management. We feel that if a company gets the fundamentals right, then a well thought out and well executed marketing plan will lead to finding efficient ways to advertise and promote your business and make converting marketing leads into buyers easier and far more profitable. The marketing objective is to make money. That means that online activity is expected to achieve a rate of return consistent with the strategy and business model. All too often, in a world of “free stuff” on the internet, people ignore the opportunity cost of putting those tools to use. It may seem to be the antithesis of conventional thinking that anything computer related is labor saving, but internet based marketing is anything but labor saving. Marketing in general is a very labor intensive activity and internet marketing is no exception. The labor saving aspect of internet marketing is the broad reach it has once the message or platform has been setup. The frontend of internet marketing is not particularly scalable, however, once in place it is massively scalable at virtually no incremental cost. The cost of setting up a website is independent of how many people will visit each day and how many page views they will have. If you want a website that has certain functionality a certain number of pages and a defined format, it’s pretty much the same job if regardless of traffic. Once in place, it can be accessed by 1 person per day or 1million per day with little or no incremental cost. It is the ambiguous nature of both the costs involved and the role of internet marketing that make it so important to understand its role, how it has changed the competitive landscape and keep it in perspective with the fundamentals of business management. We’ll do that by examining the impact of internet marketing on the 4 Ps. People add Ps all the time, but this is to sell a new addition or an alternative book. Good marketers can’t be bothered with that nonsense and focus in on more value added activities. Again the fundamentals of marketing have not changed. It’s vital to the success of any business to recognize these changes without forgetting the fundamentals and that is one of the great misconceptions of business management today. This blog is one in a series that will examine the fundamentals of marketing and how social media is being used effectively as a promotional tool in the marketing mix. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--what-has-the-internet-changed_-1.htmlSat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800Small businesses rank their Marketing and Innovation lowest in a recent survey of the components of their competitive health. This is not surprising given the confusion generated by the proliferation of new online marketing tools. So called and self-proclaimed “marketing gurus” confuse knowledge of a couple of internet tricks with marketing. Small businesses are disappointed with their marketing effectiveness as a result of having lost sight of the bigger picture while chasing inappropriate goals and implementing all the latest internet tools without integrating them into a well thought out marketing mix. This article will help small business owners and managers revisit their strategy and marketing plan in today’s web dominated world. The fundamental elements of marketing will be investigated with an emphasis on how the internet has introduced new strategy decisions and tools to be incorporated into the mix. Marketing Issues for Small Business The State of Small Business Report, January 2011 Survey of Small Business Success, sponsored by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business reports that the competitive health of small businesses is at a low point since the survey began at the beginning of the recession. The Report Card shows that Marketing & Innovation, ranked 2nd in importance for competitive health, received the lowest rank of all 6 indices. The study indicates while the competitive health is at a low point, small business owners are feeling optimistic about a strengthening recovery. It would appear that not many of these owners feel they are well prepared to capitalize on the recovery. A closer look at the elements of Marketing & Innovation reveal a decline in all 6 of the variables with Finding Efficient Ways to Advertise and Promote Their Business then Converting Marketing Leads into Buyers being a major issue. These shortcomings are more than likely contributing to concerns about Positioning Their Organizations as Having the Same Capabilities as Big Organizations themselves against larger organizations would appear to be contributing to that. Network Solutions, LLC This blog is the first in a series that will examine the fundamentals of marketing and how social media is being used effectively as a promotional tool in the marketing mix. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/facebook-for-business---social-media-in-your-marketing-mix_--issues-for-small-busness.htmlFri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800The Board of Directors of The Greater Issaquah Chamber of Commerce has elected Richard Gabel to be the Treaurer of the Chamber this coming year.  As Treasurer he will be a member of the Executive Committee of the Board.  Gabel is serving his second 3-year term as a Director.  He has also served previously as the Chairman of the Government Affairs Committee and Co-Chair of the Membership Committee. We encourage all of you to join your local Chambers of Commerce.  If you are interested in joining the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce, please contact Richard directly. Please read our blog on the merits of being a member of your Chamber of Commerce. Are You a Member of Your Chamber of Commerce?http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/gabel-elected-treasurer-of-the-greater-issaquah-chamber-of-commerce.htmlMon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800I recently published an article, \"Facebook and Twitter are Stupid\", with the intent of drawing out people\'s concerns regarding the use of social media as a serious tool in marketing.  I recognized that the article would also draw the ire of social media addicts that would do anything to insure their next Twitter fix and to suck the next naive and willing spirit into their unholy social media haze of sensory deprivation where all problems, particularly marketing, can be remedied by just one more tweet or post. Surprisingly, the majority of comments were from people who thought they were the last people on Earth to recognize that there was something seriously wrong with the social media craze.  It was as if they were the last humans in \"The Night of the Living Dead.\" As with all things, there is a happy median here.  While some Facebook zombies will need to be shot in the head before they give up their blood lust for being liked and friended, most can be reanimated with some honest appraisal of: What social media can do How it should be used What should be expected as a return on your social media investment Social media is an important part of most startup and small business marketing strategies.  Social media helps businesses connect with their target market and others that have an interest in the conversation they create the forum for. Social media is a two-way street.  It\'s one of the few marketing tools that is or should not be controlled by the business and that is its power in establishing the connection with your online community. What then, can social media do for you? Allows you to create a following of interested friends They get to participate in and become engaged in your business You can target a very specific market You will build your SEO and drive traffic to your website In social media, bigger is not better.  It\'s the quality of your friends, fans and followers, not the quantity.  The objective is to create a following that is: Interested in your business, industry and market Participates in the dialogue Will get connected with you in a serious way For most small businesses, this group might range in the 100s, not the 100s of thousands.  Given this, what should your expectations of a social media investment be?  A good social media strategy should yield a high return on investment.  It is potentially your most accessible segment of your target market.  What ruins the return for many is the cost of the investment and the lack of sustainability in the campaign. For too many, social media while being free for the most part is a tremendous investment in very valuable time.  Content needs to be relevant.  Not all post should be educational or a sales pitch.  Certainly not an endless series of inspirational quotes that has become so popular.  Relevant is the key.  A good mix of education, sales, community interest, contests, surveys etc. Accomplishing this is no easy task without a tremendous investment in time. Remember, social media is not a marketing silver bullet.  It is not the one final solution to all of your marketing challenges.  It is another campaign that needs to be coordinated with the rest of your marketing tools.  How do you then sustain a social media presence without sucking away precious resources? Meadow Creek has a social media management solution that will provide: Customized Fan Page and Welcome Page on Facebook A social media strategy A social media plan Content libraries to draw post from that are relevant to your fans friends and followers Links and populates Facebook with LinkedIn, Twitter and your blog If you would like to learn more, contact Meadow Creek today and register for our next Social Media Workshop or schedule a time to learn about how we can help you implement an effective social media strategy.  Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/does-social-media-work-for-business_.htmlFri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800In a recent Business and Bagels, one of our tenants was discussing his business and his products.  After a round table discussion, andother tenant exclaimed enthusiastically, \"If you were on Facebook, I\'d like you!\" This line got a great deal of laughter around the table, but the words really rang true.  There is little doubt that in the business world today, Facebook is the way to connect not only with your clients, but also your potential clients.  It is a great way to communicate in this fast paced web connected world.  A way to open the lines of communication about events, products, issues, praise, benefits and news. We want you to know:  We are on Facebook and want you to like us. If you have a moment, please find Meadow Creek Business Center on Facebook and \"like\" us.  This gives us the opportunity to share events, discuss important topics and communicate with each other.  I gives you an additional way to connect and with Meadow Creek staff and clients. If your are a Tweeter, then please also follow us.   Don\'t have a Facebook page for your business or don\'t really know how to utilize it?  Contact Audrey and she\'ll help you out!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/connect-with-meadow-creek.htmlFri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800Check out the events page for our next Tenant Talks event for Meadow Creek clients on our events page.  Alesha Struthers, Attorney, will be presenting: \"How to Hire Employees\" RSVP today!http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/tenant-talks-event-at-meadow-creek.htmlThu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800If you\'re reading this blog, chances are this is old news to you, but Meadow Creek Business Center has a new website.  The site was built by the good people at Binary Anvil.  John Kraft, founder at Binary Anvil, is a client at Meadow Creek.  If you like what you see and want Binary Anvil to build your new site, I\'d be happy to put you in touch with John.  You can also just call (425) 557-3649. We would appreciate you feedback on the site.  Tell us what you think, what you like, don\'t like and think we need to add.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/new-website-for-meadow-creek.htmlMon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800Issaquah, Washington based American Mobile Power Systems (AMPS) is expanding its staff and has named Richard Gabel as Director of Marketing.  At the same time AMPS also named Stephen Meldrum Director of Sales and Licensing.  Gabel and Meldrum will be working closely together in establishing AMPS international position in the green energy market. AMPS is a systems integrator of custom mobile power delivery systems for commercial applications.  AMPS provides the battery chemistry and microelectronic management systems necessary to power mobile computing devices, electric vehicles, cellular phones and countless other applications.  AMPS specializes in green solutions for the replacement of lead acid and other metal based and highly toxic battery applications.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/gabel-named-director-of-marketing-for-amps.htmlSat, 03 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800 Meadow Creek is now sporting a new and faster than greased lightening internet service. Friday evening with the help of Meadow Creek's IT consultant, Loren Campbell, owner of BCCNW, we made the final cut-over to Comcast service. New internet download speeds of 100 mbps will be a big improvement. Our two 15 mbps ADSL lines from SpeakEasy were great until the train wreck that occurred when they were acquired by MegaPath. Thanks to everyone for their patience as we suffered through the waiting period for the cut-over. Our condolences to anyone still stuck with MegPath. We also moved our phone service to Comcast. Meadow Creek thanks WCI for its many years of exceptional service. The only real problem we ever had was when Comcast dug up the lines when installing fiber optics in the office park.  http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/new-high-speed-internet-service-at-meadow-creek-1.htmlSat, 19 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800 Audrey Slade gave a great presentation on networking/connecting and social media today at Meadow Creek's Tenant Talks brown bag lunch session.  There was a great discussion on connecting with people, the importance of connecting to growing your business and using social media to extend and communicate with your connections. Nine people attended.  Check our events calendar for the next Tenant Talks.    http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/tenant-talks-at-meadow-creek---november-2011-1.htmlTue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800 Wednesday\'s Tenants Talk brown bag lunch was a huge success.  Susan Gilbert, Chief Strategist at Online Promotion Success, conducted a question and answer session on email marketing, SEO, public relations and social media.  Thank you Susan for sharing your insights with us. Tenants Talk is a monthly event open to all Meadow Creek clients.  If you would like to be a presenter, please let us know. http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/october-tenants-talk.htmlThu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700A fellow came through to tour our facility last week.  I was showing him an office and trying to get a read on where he wanted to be on price for his office.  To make sure he had a feel for all the options available to him, I suggested we look at an interior office.  He stopped me and said he wasn\'t concerned about the cost of the office, he knew he\'d make it up in personal productivity.  At the last minute I decided not to drop to my knees and thank him for understanding the benefits of an office, but it was a refreshing departure from the norm. As great as a home office sounds, there are just too many distractions.  Spouses, children, pets, doorbells, kitchens, phones and countless other distractions take their toll on personal productivity.  Think about it, if you get one additional hour of productivity a day, for most small business owners, professionals and entrepreneurs, that\'s 10% or less improvement.  That one-hour per day adds up to 20 hours per month and using a round, but high figure of $1,000 per month for a fully serviced office, that\'s $50 per hour saved.  If you don\'t see your time being worth $50 per hour you probably don\'t belong in a business center environment.  You probably don\'t belong in business. If you don\'t have an office or a virtual office, you need to take a tour of Meadow Creek Business Center.  We\'re running a great special through the month of October.  Contact us for details.  There aren\'t that many offices available so don\'t put it off. We look forward to seeing you soon.  Contact us and let us know when you would like to come in. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/your-office-and-personal-productivity-1.htmlWed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700If it\'s so darn important for the state to have a monopoly on retail liquor sales to protect our children, why is it that any stoner can open up a \"medical marijuana dispensary?\"  The gumbas running this state need a reality check.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/retail-liquor-initiative.htmlMon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700The northwest has a number of angel investor organizations that entrepreneurs should be aware of. Here is a short list of organizations and a link to their websites from the Alliance of Angels. NORTHWEST ANGEL NETWORKS Alliance of Angels - Seattle, WA Bellingham Angel Group - Bellingham, WA Portland Angel Network - Portland, OR Puget Sound Venture Club - Seattle/Bellevue, WA Seraph Capital Forum - Bellevue, WA Tacoma Angel Network - Tacoma, WA Vantec Angels - Vancouver, BC Boise Angel Alliance - Boise, ID Eastern Idaho Angel Group - Rexburg, ID Northwest Energy Angels - Maple Valley, WA Southern Willamette Angel Network - Eugene, OR Spokane Angel Alliance - Spokane, WA WINGS - The Medical Technology Angel Group - Seattle, WA Richard Gabel http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/are-you-looking-for-investors_-are-you-aware-of-these-angel-investors_-1.htmlFri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700Jazz up your online presence with video. Prospects will get to meet you in person online when they watch a video of you explaining what you do and showing or demonstrating your products and services. Post it on You Tube then embed it on your website. It doesn\'t need to cost a fortune. This is a guerrilla marketing tactic, not a way to go broke. Pick up a flip camera for under $150 and you are in business. Video is easy to edit on free programs like Microsoft Movie Maker and a host of others. No, you\'re not going to like what you see on your first videos, but you\'ll get better and your audience is not as critical as you are. People will watch your videos to learn and maybe be entertained. This is great content that search engines love so your SEO wil improve. Remember you can embed your video in places other that your website. Social media profiles can often include video as well as Google Places and others. So get to work and have some fun with video as part of your marketing efforts. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/energize-your-seo-and-get-personal-with-online-prospects-with-video-1.htmlThu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700Many entrepreneurs and small business owners have discovered a new way of doing business.  Tired of meeting in coffee shops and feeling they need to present a more professional presense to their clientel, they are using shared office space.  While it can take many forms, shared space at Meadow Creek Business Center is a furnished office with phone and internet service available for hourly and daily rental.  If you are going to meet with a client or just want a place to work without interuption, you can reserve an office for the amount of time you need. When your client arrives, he or she will be greeted by our receptionist.  Your client can then sit in the lobby while the receptionist contacts you to let you know you have a guest.  You can then greet your guest in the lobby then escort the guest back to \"your\" office.  Contrast this to standing around Starbucks waiting for a client to arrive and then waiting for a table to open up so you can sit down and have a conversation amid the din. We offer several virtual office plans that can include mail service, phone answering and office time.  The price of hourly office time is considerably lower when you are on a plan, but we also welcome walk-in clients.  You should call a head if at all possible to reserve a space.  If you are on a plan, you can even reserve your space online. We include a four person conference or meeting room in the offices available for the plans.  If you have a larger group to meet with, Meadow Creek has three other conference rooms available on a hourly or daily basis.  Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/how-does-shared-office-space-work-1.htmlWed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700 The PricewaterhouseCoopers & National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree TM Report for the second quarter was good news for startups looking for money. $7.5 billion was invested in 966 deals in the second quarter, the highest levels since the second quarter of 2008. Deals and dollars were up 19% from the first quarter. First half investments were up 12% over the first half 2010. Software, biotechnology, medical devices and equipment, IT services and media and entertainment led the way. Ten of the seventeen sectors experienced double digit growth. Internet specific investments, companies with a business model dependent on the internet, accounted for 5 of the top 10 deals. Clean technology, a classification that crosses the standard sectors, accounted for $942 million in investments. Seed and early stage investments were $2.4 billion with 464 deals. That was 32% of the total dollars and 48% of the deals. The average seed investment was $1.8 million and the average early stage investment was $5.8 million. The report can be found at the link below. MoneyTree TM Report Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/venture-capital-market-continues-to-improve.htmlWed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700The sad state of the economy hasn\'t made it easy for the entrepreneur or small business owner to grow over the last couple of years. The winners in this environment are the ones that don\'t give up and keep giving it all they\'ve got. The problem is how to give all you\'ve got. It\'s not an issue of finding more hours in the day, it\'s how to make yourself more productive. Productivity is about focusing your efforts on the things that matter most, working on the things that only you can do, minimizing the interference by other issues and being in a work environment that allows this to happen. If you are not using a virtual assistant or virtual office to relieve you of administrative burdens and the constant deluge of phone calls you should evaluate this as potentially one of the best things you can do to grow your business.  Don\'t just turn off your phone, you\'ll miss opportunities and degrade you customer service.  Let someone else do it and improve your service while increasing your productivity. When meeting with clients and suppliers, is the environment condusive to getting the job done or is full of distractions?  Meeting at Starbucks is going to insure you have a great cup of coffee, but not a successful business meeting.  The environment can be noisy, crowded and certainly not a place to share confidential information.  Definitely not a professional place to transact business and impress your clients.  Look into hourly office and conference room rentals in order to project a professional presence and close more business. These are just a couple of steps you can take that don\'t cost a lot and make you more productive.  You are your business\'s most important asset.  Make the most use out of your time as possible. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/invest-in-your-personal-productivity-and-grow-your-business.htmlTue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700If you went into business for yourself, there was probably some driving force behind it.  Not just the opportunity to make a lot of money, but an idea for a product or service that others would value.  This product or service would have a positive impact that would directly or indirectly bring a sense of satisfaction to you as well.  That is where the root of entrepreneurial passion lies.  It is what in the deepest sense motivates entrepreneurs and small business owners to continue their quest. Why is it then that it is so often kept secret from the rest of the world?  Not incorporated into the company\'s mission, vision or values.  Not jumping out of every web page, brochure or elevator speech.  Sometimes we think these passions are too personal to share with the outside world or even employees.  Some may think that if there is not a clear linkage to dollars and cents their passion has no place in company business. Not so!  If it motivates you, it shows a personal commitment to something beyond collecting your receivables.  If it motivates you, it will motivate your employees and motivate your clients.  People will be more comfortable working with or for someone that sees what they are doing or selling for the benefits it brings and the resulting consequence that inspires the passion in your heart. This is the stuff that great marketing campaigns are made of.  Communicating the inspiration behind the product or service being offered.  Sincerity and consistency will prove the point.  When you create content for your on-line and off-line promotional material, incorporate the source of the passion that motivates you. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/don_t-hide-your-passion.htmlTue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700Mobile computing is the new growth engine for computing devices and is the hottest thing in online promotion.  If you aren\'t prepared to leverage this phenomonon, it\'s time to get started.  Smart phones and tablets are taking over the world.  Smart phone unit sales have exceeded those of cell phones, gaming devices and notebooks in there first 5 years from introduction.  Tablets are on track to exceed smart phones. Mobile computing is all about content consumption.  If someone is going to consume web content, you want it to be your web content.  It\'s time to think seriously about:     Text advertising     Device specific web pages     mobi URL     QR codes     Social media on smart phones     Impact on customer testimonials and derision online at the point of purchase      The list of ways that mobile computing will effect our lives and the way we go to market will continue to grow.  Don\'t get left behind. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/are-you-positioned-to-leverage-mobile-computing-in-promoting-your-business_.htmlMon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700Remember to check our Events page.  We\'ll be updating our calendar this week.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/new-events-to-be-added-to-our-calendar-this-week-1.htmlSun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700You\'re a solopreneur, experienced entrepreneur or a owner/manager of a small business.  You want your business to take off like a rocket and not fizzle like a sparkler.  There are a couple of key considerations to keep in mind if you want to meet your expectations.  Nothing is worse than failure to launch when trying to jump start a new business venture or put an existing business on a aggressive growth trajectory.  Here are some considerations that should be part of every countdown. Strategy, do you have a strategy for your business and is it viable?  There is a difference between having a business plan and having a strategy.  Your strategic plan validates how you intend to establish and maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace given the environment within which your business operates.  It is the litmus test indicating that if you execute as planned, you should succeed.  This is the thing that should sustain you during your launch.  Having the faith that your business model will work despite any setbacks you might encounter. Business Plan, once you have established your strategy, how will it be implemented?  Operating by the seat of your pants may satisfy your need for independence, but it\'s not a good way to launch like a rocket.  The average successful entrepreneur works a 70-hour week.  If you\'re doing that you had better love your job, have the faith that you\'re going to succeed and be very productive.  To be productive you need a plan.  Who, what, why, where and when. Resources, have you thought it through?  This is part of your plan, but deserves emphasis as it is the fuel of your launch.  Our tendency is to always over-estimate our bandwidth.  Expect too much of ourselves and fail to meet expectations.  Setting stretch goals is one thing, setting impossible goals is all together another thing.  Success breeds more success and enthusiasm.  Failure is also contagious.  Fail to meet your goals repeatedly diminishes your enthusiasm and creates a lowered sense of expectations that meeting your goals is not so important. Entrepreneurship is the process of creating or seizing an opportunity and pursuing it regardless of the resources currently controlled.  The implication is that you will acquire the necessary resources to succeed.  This is the land, labor and capital from Economics 101.  Entrepreneurs are skilled at using their time to develop relationships with people that are vital to the success of their business.  These people may be the ones that can help you raise capital, share their industry or business experience with you, introduce you to partners, employees, vendors and potential customers or motivate you.  The point is that you need to think through your resource requirements.  You need to scale your plans to the resources you can obtain and put to use.  Without the necessary resources, the most elegant strategy and the best laid plans will not succeed. Measurement, how do you define success?  Is your rocket going to achieve orbit or are you shooting for the moon?  Either way, you need to measure your success or you might not realize your rocket is falling back into the sea.  Not everything is going to go as planned.  Your strategy, plan and resource requirements will need to be evaluated every step of the way.  Decide what is working and what is not, what needs additional resources to succeed and what efforts should be abandoned and where you are getting the biggest bang for the buck. Keeping your rocket on-course takes some quiet time each day.  Your daily agenda will not be dictated by your business plan.  Every day your intentions to focus on the big picture will be hijacked by the immediate needs of your business.  Your challenge is to run your business for moment while keeping an eye on the big picture, making sure that your actions are consistent with the overall plan and taking the necessary time to make that plan happen. Strategy, planning, resourcing and measurement are what will make the difference in your ability to launch like a rocket or fizzle out.  If you are looking for some innovative ways to keep your eye on the big picture and launch like a rocket, be sure to watch the Events Page for some programs I will be posting. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/launching-your-business-like-a-rocket.htmlTue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700Launching a marketing campaign can create an exciting burst of creativity, excitement and enthusiasm.  Every new campaign holds with it an anticipation of phenomenal business growth.  The instinctive action is to pour your heart and soul into and make sure it’s done right.  The old adage of “you have to spend money to make money” rings in your ears as you spare no expense to pull it off in style. I hate to be a kill joy, but stop right there.  You just can’t get away from the numbers.  Before you invest a single dollar or minute of your precious time, let’s think it through first.  Marketing is an investment and you don’t make the investment unless you expect to make a certain level of return. Too often, the combination of enthusiasm and lack of experience can omit this important part of the analysis from the campaign.  Add into the enthusiasm and lack of experience someone that isn’t paying the bills and there’s a real opportunity for trouble. Many times there is a knee jerk reaction to manage a campaign the way you’ve done it before without any consideration of a change in the circumstances.  Different business, markets, products, channels, price, cost and margins could very well have an impact on your marketing ROI if you even think that’s a relevant consideration. It is and they do, so let’s take a look at some of the critical thinking that should go into planning your next marketing campaign.  This would include everything from new product development and launch to an ad for an existing product or an event to promote your product or service. I’ll focus on simple promotional activities for the purpose of this article.  Let’s assume, or better yet, leave new product development for another article.  I was about to say that the expense and importance of something like the development of a new product would surely compel everyone to do the numbers first, but alas, I have too many examples of that going terribly wrong and at very large companies that prided themselves in financial discipline to boot. Let’s say you want to hold a promotional event to highlight a new or existing product or service to your target market or maybe some key influencers in the market.  Just as with an ad, there are some basic calculations to go through.  The number of potential people/businesses in the target market you can reach. The percentage of that market you can reach that you will actually communicate with. The percentage of those that hear your message that will be compelled to buy. The cost of the campaign, including labor. Your price, cost and margin of the product. Your marketing investment. Your marketing ROI. Pretty straight forward stuff.  The important thing for the savvy marketer to remember is that those percentages are pretty small.  For instance, if you are a small business, you may feel pretty good about your email list.  You have a thousand names and you’re going to invite a group of people to an event to promote a product.  The average open rate is going to be in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 %.  You send an email to 1,000 people and maybe 150 see it.  If you are very lucky, 7 or 8 take action and come to your event.  How many of them are going to buy?  Let’s say 2 and go from there.  The first lesson is being real about the impact your solicitation for an event or ad is going to have.  Marketing is a numbers game.  The more people you can reach that qualify as legitimate targets, the more you will sell.  Next stop is conversion rate.  By the way, I am purposefully avoiding as much of the internet marketing lingo as possible because the same measures apply to both on-line and off-line marketing.  The fundamentals are the same.  Whether we are taking about a newspaper ad, Google Adwords or an event, we want that promotional piece to be effective and increase the number of people that see it to take action.  You can do it by throwing money at it or being more creative or clever than the next guy.  Conventional thinking is that the more you spend, the better the outcome.  That’s not a particularly good mindset for small business owners.  Be a Guerrilla Marketer and use unconventional techniques to accomplish the same task without spending more or even as much money. The same is true with the event itself.  The inexperienced marketer will want to go all out and impress the attendees with outrageous food and drink, entertainment and other non-essentials that can slowly, but surely drive the cost of your campaign through the roof.  And don’t forget the hidden cost of the time spent on the project.  Sure, you might have to pay some of the people involved anyway, but there might be far more productive ways of using their time than planning an over-the-top or just unnecessarily involved event.  You want the product to out shine the event. This is an iterative process.  You don’t hit the sweet spot the first time.  You need to work it a couple of times to see where you will get the best ROI on your campaign.  There are trade-offs.  Don’t let people move forward without a financial goal for the campaign.  The uninitiated will proceed and perhaps give a budget of the incremental non-labor cost of putting a campaign together the way they see fit. You want a budget that reflects all the cost and the expected return.  You want to know what you’re getting for your money, your marketing ROI.  Most marketers don’t like to operate this way.  As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you probably don’t have the excess funds to throw around needlessly or for a low return.  Your marketing budget has a limit.  You need to make wise investments in marketing.  You’re a realist and know that they are not all going to work out.  Some will fall flat and other will amaze you, that’s why you need to have a portfolio of campaigns just like you’re with your IRA. Don’t expect anyone campaign to be a home run.  You’ll tend to be far more invested in the decision making if you take all claims with a grain of salt.  A smart marketer will manage his portfolio of campaigns somewhat dispassionately and no when to cut his losses and when to put additional money into a campaign that works.  That person will achieve the highest rate of return on their marketing investment and enjoy the opportunity to invest even more the next year. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/your-marketing-roi.htmlFri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700In my corporate days, there was a hackneyed phrase about not working harder, but working smarter.  This was a brilliant comment thrown out to a group of business heads when corporate or we had collectively decided that headcount needed to be cut in the face of a deteriorating economic climate.  It was usually made by the controller that didn\'t want to spend the time to allocate reductions based on where a business was relative to plan and simply wanted everyone to take out 10% or neophyte that had no business being at the table in the first place and wanted to sound clever.  This genius wanted us all to know that life needn\'t be more difficult operating with fewer people if we just worked smarter. Those of us that had to make it happen would then collectively turn our heads towards the individual and silently let he or she know that now would be a good time to shut-up.  First; there isn\'t a lot of flexibility to work smarter in large corporations.  They function like government to a great extent.  An endless stream of unfunded mandates from paperwork to corporate operating initiatives only increased non-revenue generating activities to be absorbed by a fixed or diminished set of resources.  Second; there was always only one way to work and that was harder. In small business or as an entrepreneur, I preach that you have to work smarter and harder if you want to survive, particularly in marketing.  Harder and smarter means you don\'t need to spend a lot of money on marketing to make an extraordinary impact.  You have to be a guerrilla and use unconventional methods to achieve conventional ends. I\'ve been in marketing for over 30 years now and can speak with the authority of experience and success.  You can deliver extraordinary results without spending a lot of money if you are agile, understand what the customer wants, understand the marketing weapons at your disposal, know your desired goal and are willing to devote the energy required to get the job done. Agility Don\'t study it to death, make it happen.  This article will be completed in less than 45 minutes.  My goal is not to convince you I should be a writer; it\'s to convince you that it doesn\'t take a big marketing budget to be a world class marketer.  Getting my thoughts into words and publishing it doesn\'t mean I have to read it, edit it, reread and submit it to a dozen friends to get their feelings.  My goal is to get my thoughts on this out to whoever is interested as fast as possible and move on. You do need to maintain a level of quality that reflects well on you and your business.  The measure of quality is not in this case meticulous sentence structure, but the quality of the advice.  Knowing your real goals is paramount.  Get your message out and place a premium on time-to-market. Goals Too many professional marketers completely lose sight of the real goal.  In case you didn\'t know it is profit.  I\'ve had many a stare down with staff in the past that seemed to think the goal was for them to win an award for best trade show exhibit or promotional video and not to create an effective tool to help generate the next lead or close the next sale and produce profit. I would get comments like if we only spend that amount we might as well not do it at all or our competition would make us look silly given how much they\'re going to spend.  My usual response would be that we have never signed an order at a trade show or won an order as a result of a trade show and neither has the competition.  The only one that will look silly is the one that spends the most being there. Customers don\'t care about award winning promotions.  They want to know what you can do for them that no one else can that will make them money or in the C2C environment, happier or more fulfilled.  You have common goals; you both want to make more money.  Your job is to convince the customer that they can make more money by using your product or service than the other guys\' and do that for the least amount of money possible.  In other words, maximizing your return on investment. Know Your Marketing Weapons It\'s difficult today to get people to think beyond their website.  Without going into a great deal of detail and making this article into a tome, the ways in which you can market your products and services both on-line and off-line have increasing exponentially and are in many cases free.  Even promotional tools that have been out of reach in terms of price for entrepreneurs and small businesses in the past are affordable today.  The increased interest in on-line promotion has made traditional off-line tools like radio and television well within reach of small businesses. A website alone will not drive business to your door.  You need to use a variety of on-line and off-line tools in a coordinated manner to drive people to your website or storefront.  There is no silver bullet in marketing; you can\'t afford to invest a disproportionate share of your available resources in a single marketing tool. One of the reasons I decided to get back into the marketing game was because of the number of so-called marketing gurus out there that didn\'t have a clue and were hurting people and businesses as a result. I had a client that was working with a marketing firm that was bleeding him dry.  There big idea was to rent a theater out for a first run movie and invite, with minimal qualifications, a prospect, their spouse and children to come see a movie and have a good time.  The thought was that they would make \"friends\" and when that friend needed financial advice, they would come looking for him. These events were costing him $10 thousand a shot and bringing in no business.  This was several years ago when financial advisors were dropping like flies.  My comment to him was that he didn\'t need friends, he needed clients.  Understanding it\'s all about relationships is one thing, throwing money into a theater at $10 thousand a shot with no clear goals is quite another. He declared bankruptcy about six-months later.  I looked into this marketing guru.  He was a mortgage broker when the real estate market collapsed.  He\'s now found his niche in social media marketing.  Very sad and very unnecessary.  Diversify your marketing investment. Work Harder A lot of the great marketing weapons are labor intensive.  Be prepared to put your time in or pay someone else to do it for you.  Remember that others cannot replace your involvement, only leverage it.  As an entrepreneur or small business owner, your involvement is required to get the content and message right. A great example is building a website.  Many an entrepreneur or small business owner pay someone a healthy amount of money to build a website and are dumbfounded when the developer delivers a site of forty pages filled with blank boxes and their logo at the top. Software techies aren\'t the ones you want to create content for you.  Even if you added the expense of a content writer, the writer needs to know what you know.  Who is your target market, what are they looking for and why, what can you do to satisfy their needs, how is different from other solutions, how have you helped people in the past and what is their next step or call to action when they\'re finished reading?  All of this must come from you.  Someone else can put it into pretty words and make it keyword enriched, but the message is yours. You can delegate and outsource just so much.  Your marketing message determines how the world sees you and your company.  You should and need to be engaged.  Again, leverage yourself with others. Conclusion The point is that with a commitment in time and some creativity, you can create a small business marketing machine with a minimal investment in dollars.  Understanding your goals, understanding the customer, being agile, using multiple marketing weapons and working hard can produce extraordinary results and grow your business beyond your wildest dreams. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/want-to-grow_-work-smarter-and-harder-1.htmlMon, 04 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700Let\'s face it, not too many people go into business for the pleasure of finding clients and customers.  People go into business because they have a unique idea for a product or service that they feel there\'s a need for.  Their pleasure is in delivering the product or service and seeing the results.  Developing market awareness, drawing prospects into a store or website, delivering the call to action and closing the sale, not so much. Same thing for small businesses.  The focus is on revenue generation.  Again, delivery, not prospecting.  Entrepreneurial startup or small business, it\'s the same story, marketing has got to happen, but it\'s just another expense with hit or miss results.  Without it, you will not grow, with it, you\'re hitting the bottom line with no guaranteed return on investment. The problem is that so many people are taken in by the one sure fire way to launch their business into the stratosphere.  So called gurus make big promises if you just sign on to their program focused on just one or two marketing tools.  This usually involves the expenditure of a great deal of money over a short period of time.  By the time you realized that you have nothing to show for your investment, they\'re history. Marketing is not about blowing your budget on single events or campaigns.  It\'s not about trying to hit a home run using one promotional scheme.  It\'s not about short-term efforts when you\'re looking for long-term gains.  And it\'s not about how much you spend. Marketing is about persistence, coordinated campaigns using multiple tools delivering a common theme and communicating your distinctive message to the right audience.  Marketing is about using unconventional techniques to reach conventional goals.  Your goal is profitability achieved by building lasting relationships with people and companies in your target market. If you want to grow your business, but don\'t have a marketing department to make it happen, use a virtual marketing department.  At Meadow Creek Business Center, our Marketing and Consulting unit can put together a real marketing plan for you and provide the arms and legs to execute that plan.  You\'ll have a fixed cost each month to provide the level of effort you can afford and that is appropriate for the goals desired.  With a real marketing plan, we can make sure you don\'t throw good money after bad.  Check out our credentials.  We didn\'t decide to call ourselves gurus last week after years of doing something completely different.  We\'ve done this before and are ready to help your business grow.  Check out our programs and give us a call today. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/grow-your-business-with-a-virtual-marketing-department.htmlWed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700I’ve seen a lot ways in which people have priced products and services.  Some are incredibly well thought out and others leave something to be desired.  Here’s a short list of pricing techniques commonly employed today: Price to market Price to closest competitor Price to achieve a specific margin Price to achieve a certain personal or corporate net income Price at an X% premium or discount to market Price at the same level as last year and where that price came from, who knows Price X% over last year Price to win Price to lose All of them can be legitimate methods for setting prices.  All of them are fraught with peril.  Without getting too technical, here are some factors that need to be considered when using those methods: Your cost structure compared to your competition Price sensitivity of the market Do you have the sales and marketing ability to convert lower prices into increased volume? How much additional unit volume will be realized from a price reduction? What value does the market place on your differentiation? How much additional volume will it take to achieve economies of scale in your supply chain? What is the market price? And the list can go on and on.  The point is that playing with price is complex subject requiring the need to understand the financial dynamics of your business, your organizational capacity to implement a new price effectively, your competition and the market.  Not easy, but the rewards are potentially enormous for those who dare tread the thorny path. One of the truly great successes in my career was largely the product of using price as a marketing weapon.  I had just moved into a $100 million factory automation business with responsibility for marketing and strategic planning.  The company was losing $1 million a month and corporate wanted me to go stick my finger in the dike or die trying. Pricing had been the responsibility of the controller.  I guess the thinking was that if the company was losing money, they were pricing too low.  That was a hard conclusion to follow as they were losing market share faster than they were losing money. The result was that what work was won was the work no one else wanted.  Complex projects with high risk that often resulted in delivered margins far below what was expected. I lowered our pricing dramatically.  I asked sales what price needed to be to win the work.  While I don’t recommend using the price that sales wants as a good strategy, asking the question is always good policy.  Based on our cost workups, I tried to get as close to the “winning” number as possible.  We started winning good projects and avoiding bad projects.  In two years, we had doubled our market share and were producing margins at record levels. This succeeded because: Price sensitivity of the market – highly sensitive, our projects would run $20 to $50 million, a 10% decrease in price was serious money. Do you have the sales and marketing ability to convert lower prices into increased volume – we had a dedicated sales force and our company had a quality reputation. How much additional unit volume will be realized from a price reduction – one additional win a year would have paid for the lost margin, but we won far more than that. A not so positive outcome came when running another business in the B2B world.  Sales and marketing were centralized so sometimes things happened outside of your control.  We sold a significant quantity of a branded product that made an essential contribution to our bottom line.  It was not the best product on the market and it was expensive.  It did, however, have committed customers that liked it enough to pay the premium.  The division marketing manager decided the best way to energize sales of the product was to slash the price and price to market.  Ordinarily, this would not have been an unreasonable thing to do.  Pricing to market is one of those no-brainers, all other things being equal.  He and I both knew they weren’t, so why he did it, I’ll never know. What hadn’t been calculated into the equation was: Your cost structure compared to your competition – we were a $30 million business competing in an industry dominated by $1 billion plus competitors. Do you have the sales and marketing ability to convert lower prices into increased volume – we had a centralized sales force that had no interest in selling the product. How much additional volume will be realized from a price reduction – we needed to increase volume 500% to breakeven, volume didn’t move. The moral of the story is pricing is a dangerous weapon.  With good analysis and proper implementation, it can win the war.  Done incorrectly, it can trigger a very undesirable competitive response and that is what we call mutually assured destruction. Don’t use the nuclear option without being very sure of yourself. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/price_-marketing_s-nuclear-weapon.htmlFri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700Ask most small business owners these days about marketing and you\'ll hear a litany of comments about their website, blog and social media. The remainder will say they don\'t need marketing; they get all their business through referrals, but they would like more. Marketing for small business means nothing more than promotion these days, promotion being exclusively web-based. This is very unfortunate for small businesses struggling in our great recession economy. The time, energy and money being poured into all of their online marketing is destined to be less than optimal and may very well not achieve a desirable end. First of all, most small businesses lack a strategic plan and a business plan. That suggest they don\'t know where they\'re going or how they\'re going to get there. They are counting on a succession of independent actions online to somehow take them to a desirable place. Marketing is not that simple. As an old mentor of mine use to say, marketing is a science. It is not just a giant exercise in creativity. Marketing is the hub of all that happens in a company if properly executed. Marketing embodies the company\'s vision and choreographs the dance between sales, R&D and operations. Too many small businesses are unfamiliar with the fundamentals, Michael Porter\'s 3 generic strategies: Cost leadership Differentiation Niche Or Kotler\'s 4 Ps: Product Price Place Promotion Scarier yet are all of the so called marketing gurus out there that are also unfamiliar with the fundamentals. That would include the website developers, bloggers, social media experts and SEO talents out there that operate only in their own silos. The objective is profit, not Google page rank. It is essential for small businesses, particularly entrepreneurs and non-employer businesses to get back to fundamentals in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their online investment in promotion. A company must have a clear handle on its overall strategy before it promotes itself. You want the world to view you in a particular way to make your strategy successful. Blogging the affordability of widgets when your strategy is to get a price premium on a differentiated product may not make sense. Writing website content optimized for the arcane application of widgets in a micro market segment would not help either. The coordination of your marketing strategy with all of the elements of your marketing tactics is essential. Only when they are addressed and coordinated will your marketing be effective and efficient. That\'s Guerrilla Marketing 101. Your product and your product roadmap must reflect your overall strategy, your pricing strategy and distribution channel. Your promotion must convey a message consistent with all of that. Your promotion plan or marketing calendar should have a consistent message and common objective. Typically, your offline promotion is designed to drive traffic to your website, blog or storefront. Your online objective is to encourage the reader to take action in the form of placing an order or to call for more information or to opt in to your mailing list. This coordination of message and goals and the use of multiple marketing weapons is what makes marketing powerful. This will maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing investment. That\'s the kind of marketing that leads to profit. You can\'t make payroll with page rank. Before you invest your next marketing minute or dollar, take a step back. Have you covered the fundamentals? Are you using enough of your available marketing weapons? Have you coordinated your attack on the market with a common message and goal? If yes, you\'re ready to engage the enemy. If not, give us a call before it\'s too late. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/small-business-marketing_-in-danger-of-extinction.htmlThu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700Anyone that has been in sales and marketing or played a support role in the process has probably gone through a few awkward moments and a couple of really, really bad experiences in the process.  Most of these experiences age well and you can actually laugh about them with the passage of time.  Others, we keep locked up in the dark recesses of our minds, only rearing their ugly heads when we wake-up at 3:00 in the morning with night terrors.  Enough time has passed that any personal shame and violation of non-disclosure agreements should not be too egregious.  I’ll share a few, hopefully as a way of purging my own demons saving myself a few nightmares in the future. Thank God for Golf I was running a standard products business unit in an automated material handling business.  It was a new unit created out of a desire to help get the company out of the financial black hole that was the custom automated system market.  It was launched with an innovative product that could be used for buffer storage of product on a factory floor with a spur off a piece of conveyor and placing cases of product in-between layers of a circular coil of flat steel.  As product was fed into the device, the coil would rise vertically as successive rings of steel were separated by the cases. The operative word here is flat.  The device required the coils to lay flat on each other for it to function and not damage the product.  This worked quite well when the coil was manufactured by welding steel pieces together each of which was about one-third of a ring. As luck would have it, our first customer was from Japan and wanted to use the product in a refrigerated environment for handling food.  Food was no problem; it was initially designed to meet the needs of a large soft drink company.  Refrigeration was a problem, condensation and the need to wash down the equipment would create a big problem for an un-finished coil of steel.  Rust is not an appropriate coating for food handling. We told the customer we would use an alternate material or coating to solve that problem and they made arrangements to fly to the U.S. to see their new equipment.  R&D and manufacturing were confident that we would have the working prototype in time for the visit.  I was delighted to have the first order signed before the formal launch and we planned a celebratory visit for a Japanese customer. Our supplier did not deliver the new coils until the morning of the visit.  I was concerned, but understood assembling the machine would take no longer than 30 minutes once the coils arrived.  On that morning I received a call from the manufacturing manager.  He asked if I could drive out to the plant so he could show me something.  It was a little mysterious and not something I wanted to do with our guest arriving in less than four hours, but there was something in the tone of his voice that said I should get myself out there. I arrived at the plant and we shook hands and he said “it’s out in the yard”, so we walked out back and approached a pallet with a tarp over it.  He unceremoniously yanked the tarp off the pallet and there it was.  What was supposed to be a flat pile of coils looked like a stack of 45s that had been left out in the sun.  For those of you born after the advent of CDs, 45s were small vinyl records that did not respond well to heat.  Instead of a flat surface, when exposed to heat looked like an endless series of little waves on the record. If memory serves me correctly, our stainless steel coils had survived the welding process, but responded in a catastrophic way to the heat required to apply a abrasive coating so wet cases of product wouldn\'t fly out of the device. The manufacturing manager stood and waited for my reaction, which I recall was something along the lines of “Oh s@#t!”  We were accustomed to setbacks like this in that business and had learned how to cope.  We smiled at each other and chuckled as we walked back to the plant.  Along the way I called the product manager and announced “change of plans, we’re taking them golfing today, I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.” After golf, we went out for the largest steaks we could find and had some drinks.  Many drinks in fact.  At some point in the evening, I mentioned that there had been an unfortunately delay in the receipt of our final solution for the coils, but that they would be able to see a working machine with steel coils the next day.  I don’t know if the alcohol had made our guests agreeable or that senior member of the party decided to let me save face when he agreed that would be just fine.  Given the expense of having such a large group fly from Tokyo to not see what they came to see, I suspect the latter. In the end, the project was a success.  They purchased several units and the materials solution for the coils worked out just fine.  This one I can look back on and laugh. Was It Something I Said? At that same business, I had started the customer service business unit.  Large scale system weren’t particularly profitable, but providing service and upgrades was.  We tried to orchestrate a smooth hand-off between the systems people and our group in order to develop a good relationship and dependence on our staff from the on-set.  There would be a period of debugging during the warranty period, but hand-off process was generally a smooth transition.  The fellow heading the systems group was new and this was the first time I had gone to a hand-off with him. We arrived at the site and were shown to a conference room and waited for the plant manager to arrive.  Actually we waited and waited and waited.  The systems guy told me this was par for the course, but we would eventually see him. When he arrived, the systems guy introduced the two of us and we sat down at the table.  At which time the plant manager proceeded to yell at me for what seemed to be an eternity.  I had never met this guy or been involved in his project.  I could only assume that he was not happy with it.  Having been in the position over a year, I was not unfamiliar with unhappy people, but this was something all together different.  I sat there trying desperately to figure out what in the world was going on while maintaining a look of intense interest.  As it turned out, the project was not really complete and the turnover was at the very least premature.  Walking off the project early was evidently the systems guy’s way of delivering a high margin on the project and letting service finish it up. When the customer finally stopped yelling and I do mean yelling, not just upset.  I assured him that we would complete the project and the resources would remain in place to get the job done.  We then thanked him for his time and left. On the way to the car, the systems guy said, “I guess I should have given you a heads-up that he wasn’t going to be happy.”  This time my response was “no s@#t!”  I do not look back on that one and laugh. Oil Spills are Bad for Business In another case of an unfinished project, my manager of projects had gone to see a customer where we were having some significant problems.  I flew across country to see if I could make peace.  I got there and met privately with the plant manager.  Without yelling he explained the situation and said he I didn’t get it fixed all hell and damnation was going to come my way.  We agreed I would come out to report on our progress every two weeks. This was a project for an oil company, a very large oil company.  This was a distribution center for lubricants and the pallets were very high and unstable.  When the automated equipment moved, the product did not always move accordingly.  When there is an oil spill, it’s hard to cleanup.  We didn’t have to clean birds, in fact sometimes nobody cleaned up anything.  When lubricants fall on a steel rail carrying a 100 foot tall crane traveling at 800 feet per minute, it will tend to have a difficult time stopping.  When a floor is covered in oil, automated vehicles will have a hard time stopping and going.  Everything needed to slow down so product would not spill. On one of my last trips there, we were making good progress and the client had asked us out for dinner.  I was standing on the factory floor looking at the progress with the plant manager when one of our technicians was struggling to make an automated vehicle startup.  We had several techs there along with a couple of software engineers, our project manager, my manager of projects and the customer’s maintenance people and they were all staring at the vehicle trying to figure out what to do. The vehicle was smack dab in the middle of everything.  As I watched the people stare at the machine I saw the entire plant slowly come to a halt as everything was in automation gridlock at this point.  I saw starting off once again at ground zero with the plant manager.  This time my response was “please God, make the damn thing move.” With no doubt the least understanding of anyone in the factory of what made the system tick, the plant manager confidently strode towards the vehicle.  All of the technical guys backed away, probably thinking he was going to start kicking it.  Instead he reached down and pulled out the red e-stop button.  The vehicle started beeping and went on its merry way.  Another dozen vehicles told to sit still by the control system also came to life and got busy. The plant manager walked back towards me with a big grin and by then I was grinning too.  The technicians were standing around looking at their shoes until one decided to give the plant manager a round of applause. The man that had no interest in being entertained by us for the last two-months, took us out that night and a good time was had by all.  I can look back and laugh at that one. Conclusion I realize now that my top stories are all from the same business and maybe you had to be there to be amused.  Integrated systems make for bigger problems and better stories than selling discrete products or components.  There are some good ones like trying to explain to someone that trying to use sophisticated electronic devices in the middle of the jungle somewhere in Africa to run a centrifuge for sugar cane powered by a diesel generator was problematic.  Or that optical sensors don’t function when covered with mud.  If you have a good story about sales and marketing snafus, please share them. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/my-worst-marketing-moments-1.htmlSun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700Small businesses make some common mistakes when it comes to marketing often leading to sluggish sales or leaving money on the table. A couple of quick fixes can energize revenue and pump up the bottom line. It doesn\'t take an expert or a lot of work to make it happen. Just apply some common sense to the fundamentals and you\'ll be on your way to marketing stardom. Each one of these points I have run into repeatedly and it\'s frustrating to think of the opportunity lost. Here they are in no particular order. Pricing While pricing can be terribly complicated, it doesn\'t need to be for most businesses. Follow these rules when coming up were your price structure: Know what your competition charges Don\'t be at the very top or the very bottom The bigger the customer commitment to you, the bigger the discount Understand value from the customer\'s perspective, the higher the value, the higher the price or rate Think through where you will discount and \"give\" to make a sale beforehand Packaging Everyone makes this mistake from time to time, I know I have. Evaluate how you package your product and promote it with the customer\'s perspective in mind. Often times you and the customer might as well be speaking different languages. What\'s important to the customer is what counts, not what you think should be important. Ask yourself what makes the customer feel pain when it comes to your product or service What products or services are best packaged together, what are the easiest up-sells How will your product make or save the customer money What makes you different in a way that will benefit the customer Promotion Advertising, websites and collateral material can all be black holes of expense, sucking in every last dollar you\'re willing to spend often times with no results. Try everything that makes sense until you hit upon the five to ten that produce the highest return on investment. Maintain a steady use of those and continue trying new ones. Measure the expense and return on each campaign Establish your expectations upfront Don\'t give up too quickly or fund too long, establish decision points to avoid the emotion Product Does anybody really want what you\'re selling? All too often we fall in love with our own product or service and leave the customer out of the equation. Avoid products that require you to convince the customer they need it. Yes, big returns can be realized if you hit the right one, but life is too short and a small business can\'t afford to be on the losing side of one of these bets. Your product or service should be easy to understand Features should translate directly into value from the customer\'s perspective Package and present products in a logical migration path Have a product roadmap to plan your own development Placement Going hand-in-hand with not trying having to convince the customer they need or want your service, deliver the service in the manner they\'re accustomed to getting it. Again, differentiating based on how the supply chain works may fascinate you, it does tend to be disconcerting to the client. The safe bet is to do what works and that\'s what others are doing Watch closely where the value is added and what the costs are in your distribution process Make sure you own the customer, not a third party involved in selling your service Conclusion These rules are not universal, every business is different, but more often than not they will apply to small businesses. You might ask where to find sources of differentiation if I take all these safe bets in by marketing strategy. Here you go: The one that can best view life through the clients eyes wins The quality of your product or service and how you promote, sell, deliver and service it Where you successfully decide to ignore the rules All of these points merge together and are not standalone. Marketing is both an art and a science. Creativity is critical, analysis is vital and decision making with a business perspective is essential. It\'s also fun. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-most-common-marketing-mistakes-in-small-businesses-1.htmlFri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700Entrepreneurs and small business owners often miss huge opportunities to make serious returns on their investment of time and money. All too often they have not set their goals and expectations high enough. If you don\'t expect to get there, you\'re probably not going to. Shoot for the stars and you might make it to the moon. There are three levels of entrepreneurship that I identify with goal setting: Timid - Replace my prior income as an employee by being self-employed Confident - Build a small business and make a lot of money Convinced - Launch a startup and go public The Timid The dangerous waters of entrepreneurship are no place for the Timid. If the prospect of searching for a new job is frightening, starting your own business is terrifying. If the jobs aren\'t out there, like today, then it is a reasonable alternative. You\'re going to need a lot of hand holding, mentoring and advice if this is the case. Commit yourself to using a coach or consultant and join some social networks that are focused on entrepreneurship, misery loves company. The Confident The Confident are the prime targets for kicking it up a notch. This group ranges from the professionals that not only want to replace their old incomes, but hire a staff and make a lot more to those committed to building a business that they feel comfortable managing. The Confident need to up their scale in setting goals. Why not grow a business you are not comfortable managing. Management is a talent that can be bought and should not be a barrier to growth. There is no rule that says you need to manage the company you own. The Convinced The Convinced have already set their sights high and are not the subject of this article. Setting your goals does not assure success, but it helps. How high people set their goals can be a function of many things: Circumstances of you decision to start your own business Education, business acumen, life experiences Personality Circumstances If you\'ve just been laid-off from a company that you\'ve worked at for 30 years, you\'re probably devastated. You did not plan for this and you realize your prospects for finding a new job are slim. If there is one form of discrimination that is alive and well in this country, it is age discrimination. Why is an employer going to pick you with your 30 years of baggage and ingrained ways of doing things and try to retrain you so you can retire in five years? You\'ve made a strategic decision to start your own business and you\'re scared. Knowledge Maybe you know a trade or have some other skill that you know there is a demand for, but don\'t know a darn thing about business. You have no education in business and your work experience was based on doing the work, not managing how it got done. Life experience also can shape your expectations. If you were raised in modest circumstances, you may not see yourself rising above that even if what you have to offer has great value in the marketplace. Personality Most importantly, your personality will guide your goal setting. Are you a \"the cup is half empty\" or \"the cup is half full\" person. Are you confident around other people or do you shy away in a corner in crowds. If you lack confidence or tend to look at things in a negative light, you will certainly not give yourself stretch goals. Solutions The good news is that all of these issues facing the Timid and the Confident alike can be solved. I will refer to one of my favorite descriptions of a successful entrepreneur. Successful entrepreneurs are particularly skilled in surrounding themselves with people that are vital to the success of their business. Coaches and consultants can keep you focused on the business opportunity and not the circumstances of why you are where you are today. They can guide you through the visioning process, strategic planning, business planning, action planning, goal setting etc. They can force you to look at the positive side of a business model and build your confidence and raise your expectations. If your funding is limited, working one-on-one with a consultant may not be realistic, but there are other ways. Some consultants have group sessions where entrepreneurs and small business owners can get together and discuss their business issues in regular sessions moderated by the consultant. Interactive and working seminars that result in an important deliverable like a business plan are also cost effective ways of getting the input, education and confidence building you need. Networking events are also a great way to meet people that share similar interests and/or have valuable contributions to make to your own entrepreneurial efforts. People that look at networking events as sales opportunities are misguided. Everyone there is looking to make a sale. Be smart and use the networking opportunity to discuss business experiences and needs other than the next sale. You will be surprised at what might result. At Meadow Creek Business Center, we try to offer our management consulting, marketing and general business support services in a variety of formats to meet the needs of small and medium sized businesses. Please attend our events and discuss how we might help you raise your sights and meet your goals. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/how-high-have-you-set-your-goals_.htmlWed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700The old adage “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” goes especially well in the entrepreneurial environment.  You have to do something if you expect something to happen, it’s not going to happen by itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m big on strategy and planning.  I think anyone that hasn’t done an adequate job of planning their business and developing their business model is a fool.  That’s a necessary element of a rational person moving forward with a business idea, moving forward in the sense of taking action, spending money and making and selling product.  Just don’t study it to death or worse yet sit around and not study it and just talk about your great idea.  There comes a time when you have to put all of that studying, strategizing and planning to good use and start doing it.  That’s one of the beauties of having a plan.  Taking those first couple of tentative steps can be tough.  If you have your plan, you don’t have to think about them, just take them. Start executing and at a proper check point, evaluate how it’s going.  Are you where you thought you would be?  The answer is probably not, that doesn’t mean it’s not working.  No matter how conservative we think we’re being in the planning process, most of us are still too optimistic.  Evaluate what progress you’ve made and what has delivered results and what hasn’t.  Make the necessary adjustments and evaluate your resources.  Will they hold out at this new pace or do you need more capital or to cut cost. That’s the easy part, evaluating the results of your actions.  The hard part is behind you, getting started.  Too many good business opportunities never get off the ground because of fear of taking that first step.  People will avoid that like most any other commitment.  Yes, that word that gets so many of us in trouble.  Actually moving forward with that business plan is a commitment to seeing it through.  You can’t be half committed to your business, entrepreneurship isn’t that easy. Sure, there are examples of people that have kept their day jobs while starting their business and gradually and seamlessly become full-time entrepreneurs, but they’re few and far between.  The average successful entrepreneur works a seventy hour week and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything other than eating and sleeping. So either get committed and move forward or admit that you’re just not ready to be an entrepreneur.  Save everyone around you the trouble of listening to the endless stream of new ideas for your yet to be conceived business and get on with your life.  Don’t waste any more time or money and find yourself a job. If you’re confident in your concept, your plan and yourself, Do Something!  Give your plan a kiss and get committed.  Start going through the action plans.  Make something happen and start your business.  Getting a business license, registering the name and securing your URL doesn’t create a business.  The entrepreneur needs to take action and make things happen to create a business. A dismal percentage of businesses survive the first five years.  I have to wonder how many of these failures are a result of lack of commitment.  Taking those first baby steps in launching your business are as hard as the ones you took a long time ago when you were learning to walk.  We all fell down flat on our faces dozens of times and I’m sure it hurt.  But it did pay off. All of you entrepreneurs out there that are still mustering up the courage to truly commit yourself to your business, do this.  Ask yourself what it would take to get you over the edge.  Is it a little more money to tide you over, someone to help validate you business model, some additional expertise in a critical area or someone to work with you along the way.  Whatever it is, go get it. Successful entrepreneurs are particularly skilled in surrounding themselves with people vital to the success of their business.  Whatever you need, there are people out there than can help you.  So stop sitting around and make it happen. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/make-it-happen_.htmlSun, 08 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700For over thirty years now I\'ve made my career in the private sector. Working both for a large corporation and owning my own business. I\'ve been through more economic cycles than I care to think about and have been given marching orders to cut cost with each one. Following my corporate career, I was quite convinced I knew the routine and understood the decision making process to effectively manage a business while reducing cost. I have, however, come to doubt my expertise in this area as I consider the approach I see being taken in the public sector. I think walking through a private sector example of applying lessons learned from state and federal governments might prove to be a real learning experience for all of us neophytes in the world of capitalism. Step One: Stick Your Head in the Sand We don\'t always see bad times coming, but we can see unhealthy trends and recognize bad times are here when we read it on the front page of the paper. The objective here is to not consider all of this bad karma. If you\'re spending beyond your means in good times and there\'s a lot of negative talk about the economy, don\'t have some knee jerk reaction and start moderating your spending. Public sector pay grades are based on budget, for God sake don\'t cut your own budget until someone puts a gun to your head. Spending money also buys votes and you don\'t want to lose your job. Making tough decisions is for losers, quite literally. The private sector also compensates based on the scope of your financial responsibility and you don\'t make friends cutting budgets. The twist that corporations throw is measuring financial responsibility by profits, not expenses, what\'s up with that? Look, in bad times, profits are going to bad for everyone. Is there that much difference in making no money and losing a little? Either way, salaries will be frozen and incentive compensation will be pathetic at best. Why knock yourself out cutting expenses and turning your employees against you. Stay the course like the big boys in public office. Step Two: The Best Defense is a Good Offense When finally forced to discuss the issue of deficit spending, elected officials don\'t get caught in the trap of discussing spending. The problem is not spending, it\'s revenue, tax revenue. If there\'s not enough coming in to pay for spending, the solution is to raise taxes, not cut spending. The citizens are just going to have to do with less to keep the government running. Take this lesson and run with it you corporate tools. The problem is not the bottom line it\'s the top line. The solution is to announce a variance to plan on line 1 and make no other changes to the forecast. Shareholders, you\'re going to have to suck it up. Our elected leaders are masters at this. Put a tax on the next ballot. Tell the people that you were given a mandate and you intend to deliver what the people want; spending. If the little people vote down the tax then move on to fees. Make the cheapskates pay for every last thing they do that involves public property and services. The private sector application to this important lesson is to turnover pricing to the accountants. If the investors aren\'t going to budge on their expectations and customer aren\'t willing to buy more than just raise prices on what they are buying. That should work, shouldn\'t it? Hell, it will take them a couple of months to synch up with new suppliers and hopefully by then the storm will be over and you can begin charging market rates again. No harm done and if there is, there will be plenty of new customers to be had in the recovery. Step Three: Make it Hurt! You\'ve tried to defer the problem to another generation, you\'ve tried to make John Q. Public pay for the shortfall and you\'ve gotten pushback every time. The budget has to be cut and the public is going to pay. Executed correctly, they will rue the day they ever asked you to make a tough decision. As a public official, you\'re no loser. You\'re going to win this war one way of the other. Bureaucratic bloat is your power base and you\'re not going to let the electorate spoil that. In the public sector, budget cutting is not a function of optimizing the goal of delivering essential public services with reduced resources. No, that\'s the capitalist game. In the public sector it\'s all about power and those that dared try to diminish the role of government by refusing new taxes are going to pay. It\'s the one-two punch. Hit their conscience and then their survival instinct. Put a torch to benefits for the most vulnerable in society. Take food from children and turn-off grannies utilities. Get on TV and make it known that these difficult choices were the result of the people\'s selfish decision to not raise taxes. Then close the prisons, let the inmates run loose and fire the police. That\'ll show them. Mayhem has a way of making the people rise up and demand action. If the corporate weenies could put this kind of plan in place they would understand the meaning of power. Limos and private jets may make you feel important, but that\'s nothing compared to having people beg you for help. Put the fear of God in someone and make them feel like an unworthy member of the human race and you\'ve got them just where you want them. Shut down customer service and let those pesky customers figure out their own problems. Stop shipping product and see what happens next. Keep all your people, they\'ll love you for it. Sure, things will get pretty screwed up and it\'s unclear what will be left of the business in the long run. Future consequences don\'t seem to bother our public officials. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/cost-cutting-hints-for-the-private-sector-from-the-public-sector.htmlWed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700I\'ve heard Microsoft is going to be leaving its Issaquah office in a consolidation move.  If this is correct, that\'s bad news for Issaquah.  My understanding was that this was primarilly an incubator for software developers working on third party applications. If anyone knows more about this, please leave a comment.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/microsoft-leaving-issaquah_.htmlSun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700I\'ve been working with Receivable Consultants International for over six-months now and the\'re unlike any credit and collections company I\'ve ever worked with.  In the past, turning an account over to collections was like writing it off.  They\'d make one call and if the other party didn\'t respond, that was the end of that.  I understand the accounts I was working with weren\'t that large, but they were certainly worth a couple of calls. My business is small and a $10,000 uncollected account is a big deal. Brian Flynn, CEO, treats all accounts with importance.  He also understands how to work with accounts and produce results.  What\'s really incredible is their fee structure. Not only do I get their attention, benefit from their expertise and intensity, but I get to keep more than I ever imagined. I am delighted with the service they are providing me and I highly recommend them.  Check out their website, its full of great information. Receivable Consultants Internationalhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/receivable-consultants-international-revolutionizes-credit-management.htmlSun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700What has your office business center done for you lately? Other than provide you office space, internet service and a phone? Probably not much, particularly if you\'re in a corporately owned facility. You\'ll get what you pay for and you\'ll pay for every last thing you get. That\'s not what I had in mind when I created the Meadow Creek Business Center in Issaquah, Washington. I\'ve never really been in the real estate business and never had the urge to be. My education iin marketing with an MBA in finance. My career background is in corporate strategy, business development and business turnarounds. When I acquired Meadow Creek, it was not to just collect rent and live in semi-retirement. My vision was to provide office space for startups and small businesses and be in a position to provide advice when needed and act as an advocate for my tenant clients. Most tenants are not particularly interesting in this aspect of our business. They just want their office and to be left alone. A growing number of them though are interested on how we can work together to help their business grow. Every year, fortunate tenants grow out of the business center as their office space requirements justify moving to convention commercial office space. The majority of these \"graduates\" maintain some of the services they used as tenants after leaving Meadow Creek Business Center. Our complimentary services include light consulting, tossing around ideas and from time to time some free implementation support. On a fee basis we do everything from market analysis, strategy definition, business plans, lead generation and sales and service support. Basically, we will do just about everything you need that as a small business, you don\'t have the staff for. Our motto is that we \"Help Businesses Grow.\" Maybe this is atonement for the first part of my career that was spent making unprofitable large businesses into profitable smaller businesses. I can only say that it is far more rewarding to make a small business into a profitable larger business. So what does it take to give your business center the capacity to truely make them a partner in your entrepreneurial efforts? What qualifications does your business center need to have to help transform a solopreneur into a leader of a successful thriving business? The same qualifications you would be looking for if you were chooosing and partner; expertise, experience, reputation and success. Most center managers are employees of large entities that make the decisions for them. They are experienced in making sure the receptionists show up for work, taking care of the books and giving tours. They more than likely have a fairly limited business education and breadth of experience. This is not meant to denegrate business center managers, I know many and they are great people that have generously shared their knowledge of managing business centers with me. They are not likely candidates to coach you on how to grow your business. The ability to help a small business grow is not only based on business education experience and success, it depends very much on connections and stature within a community. I\'ve made it my business to get connected in Issaquah, Washington politically, in business and in the community. I\'ve supported and weighed in on important local issues, supported local and regional candidates, served as President of the Issaquah Kiwanis and serve on the board of the Issaquah Chamber of Commerce as well as co-chair the Membership Committee. I think it\'s important to support the community in which you do business and I take great pride in pleasure in these activities. This participation also results in many connections that can be of great benefit to my tenant clients when they need help. Successful entrepreneurs are skilled at using their time to build relationships with people that are vital to the success of their business. I can connect my tenant clients to people they need to know to be successful. Not everyone is looking for anything more than an office when looking for space. I think most of them should be. If you\'re a startup, solopreneur, entrepreneur or a small business owner or professional looking for office space, ask yourself if you would be better off getting something extra with that office space. At Meadow Creek Business Center we help businesses grow. Let\'s make one of those businesses yours. \"The fact that you provide an excellent executive suite service at very competitive prices only tells a small part about how you serve your tenants. You are there to \"think tank\" development plans, offer marketing and business management suggestions and seem to always be ready to go out of your way to support everyone\'s success.\" John Long, John Long Law PLLC \"Meadow Creek Professional Center has done an outstanding job for my company. Our firm relies upon the team at Meadow Creek to handle everything from clerical needs to conference rooms, even accounting and outbound sales. They do it all expertly and with enthusiasm. All while allowing our staff to work just minutes from our homes. I would strongly encourage any small to medium size business to open offices at Meadow Creek Professional Center.\" Bryan Finney, Executive Director, Democracy Live Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/more-than-office-space_-your-advocate-and-consultant-1.htmlSat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700Selecting office space can get as emotional as buying a car. The trick is to start by separating what you need from what you want. This doesn\'t have to be extreme, for instance we could all get by with a Yugo, but that doesn\'t mean our legitimate needs might go further than that. How much time do you spend in your car, do you carry passengers often or is your passion music and you require a top of the line sound system. You might say the last is not really a need, but I would say save the emotional label for things like my neighbor just bought a Maserati and if I drive in with a Yugo I\'ll never hear the end of it. Or, my neighbor just put solar panels on the roof, if I don\'t get a Prius, he\'ll never speak to me again. Office space is the same, there are needs and wants. My idea of a decent office would be valet parking, to be personally delivered to my office in a sedan chair and a person standing at my side all day to see to my every need. None of these come close to my needs and are strictly wants. Very nice and desirable wants, but, nevertheless, wants and not needs. Besides, I blew my wants budget on my car. Here is a list of three fundamental needs that drive the office selection decision based on many surveys I\'ve taken over the years. They have remained constant and don\'t vary from year to year. Location, location, location Conference rooms and meeting rooms Other amenities like parking, phone and internet Location By far the highest ranked factor in determining what office space to select. People will make do with the other factors if the location is correct. Proximity to home, convenience to clients and other visitors and an appropriate setting. Find the place with these three factors correct and chances are you\'ve found your office. You\'re going to make this trip a couple of times per day so take care of 1# first. The shorter and more enjoyable your drive, the more productive you will be. You can stay up later and sleep in longer. You can work longer hours while not sacrificing family time. Studies have shown that the chances of going postal at the office are directly related to drive time. Do us all a favor and locate close to home, it\'s also the green thing to do. Don\'t forget your clients. There may need to be a compromise in the future. After all, you have to pay for your office and that usually involves clients. Maybe your clients don\'t visit you and in that case you\'re in the clear. If you do have clients visit your office frequently it should be reasonable close and very accessible. Other factors you might include in your location decision are the proximity to restaurants and shopping. You\'ll want to be near fast food and decent places to take clients. You\'ll save a lot of good work time that way. Proximity to shopping can also save a lot of time by being able to run errands at lunch or on the way home without investing a lot of your precious time. One-mile in the suburbs or one-block in the city can easily amount to another entire work week or two in additional time spent driving over the course of a year. Think about it, five additional minutes each way would equal 43 hours per year. Location, location, location. Conference Rooms and Meeting Rooms Most people do use conference and meeting rooms frequently. Even the ones that tell me when they first come through that they don\'t anticipate using conference rooms because all of their clients are remote. Low and behold they realize that clients aren\'t the only people you meet with. Suppliers, friends, collaborators, affiliates, partners, investors, charitable and not for profit boards and the list goes on. Sometimes you just need a bigger table to spread your \"stuff\" out on. Conference rooms and meeting rooms always turn out to be one of the most appreciated or maligned feature of a business center or executive suite facility. You\'ll want to look into how many conference rooms there are, how big are they, what do the look like, what services and equipment is available and how busy are they. Be bold and ask to see the schedule. The conference rooms will set the impression for your clients. Nice, but not too nice. Your clients aren\'t stupid; they know they\'re paying for the room they\'re sitting in. How many times have gone for a first visit to a lawyer, doctor or web designer and been in awe of their offices until you realized that you were going to be expected to pay for that overhead. Beware of business centers that have cut cost by cutting conference rooms. Remember, there\'s a tendency to want to turn conference rooms into more revenue generating space. How much will your office be worth to you if you can\'t get a conference room when you need it? Other Amenities Parking can be a huge issue, particularly on the eastside of Seattle, nestled against the foothills of the Cascade Mountains like we are in Issaquah, Washington. It has been known to rain a bit here and if parking isn\'t adequate, you\'ll pay for it big time and so will your visitors. Is there adequate visitor parking, how about the rest of the parking lot, are there open spaces, how far from an entrance are they? How\'s the phone system? Are they managing it or is it done remotely? Remote means delay and cost to any changes you want to make. How about the service? Is it voice over internet? Great way for the business center to save money on long distance service and equally great way for you to sound like an unintelligible cheapskate if not done right. Internet service is another way many centers save money. Ask about bandwidth. I have 30 times the bandwidth than the center had when I acquired it six years ago. My clients have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth. I\'m told that the 800 pound gorilla in the business center industry, a very large international chain, for a center my size has one-sixth the bandwidth in centers my size to half again as big. That\'s carrying both voice and data; I have a separate T-1 for voice. I\'d be hanging from a streetlamp in the parking lot if I tried that. Check to see if you\'ll be throttled, choked or extorted from for additional bandwidth use. The need for bandwidth will continue to grow. If the business center views bandwidth as a cost to be minimized and not a service to be maximized, you\'re in for a rough ride. Price Oh, did I forget to mention price? Yeah, that comes up too. All centers are going to be competitive on office space. Location has value and it will be reflected in the price. But don\'t forget about those others things. Are you going to pay extra to use the conference rooms? Will you have to pay for parking or will your clients have to pay for parking? The list goes on and at some office business centers, goes on and on and on. If you happen to be located on Seattle\'s Eastside, please stop by Meadow Creek Business Center in Issaquah and we can show you how it should be done. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/what-to-look-for-when-searching-for-office-space-1.htmlFri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700As a provider of office space, I’m often asked “why would I want to pay for office space when I have a home office?”  The first thing that comes to my mind is that I have a home office too and why don’t I just work at home.  My home office is actually quite nice.  It’s just off the front hall and has a great view of our front gardens and a little farther down a growth of pine trees along a ridge frequently visited by bald eagles in the area.  My home also comes complete with a spouse, two kids and two dogs.  This means my ADD addled mind can focus on work for no more than ten minutes at a time under the best of circumstances. At my office at Meadow Creek Business Center, I have to go looking for distractions if I need a break.  My office there is for work, home is where I am supposed to focus on family.  Sure, I’ll use my home office on weekends, but even that is only because I didn’t intend to buy a business 30 some miles away when I bought that home.  When I do come in on weekends, I see plenty of people that live five minutes away that have come to the office to work.  Psychologists say that it’s important to have clear boundaries between work and your personal life in order to be effective. This is kind of natural to me having grown up in the corporate world.  You have an office and that’s where you work.  People know where to find you, you’re available for collaboration and meetings and you’re not distracted by all of the day to day pains, problems and joys of your personal life.  There is a lot to say for the benefits of being in a collaborative environment, particularly if you are a solopreneur.  Let’s say you’re working out of your home office and you walk to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.  You might run into another person like a teenage daughter.  You in all good conscience want to talk a little business with her on a subject you know she’s interested in and say “what do you think about using social media to promote my business?”  The typical teen might say “I’m not going to make you my FaceBook friend dad” and walk out of the room. Walk to the kitchen from your office at Meadow Creek Business Center and you will more than likely run into another solopreneur or small business owner that has similar interests, motivations and problems that you have and would welcome the opportunity to knock around some ideas.  You might also participate in our mastermind sessions, socials and networking events.  Working with other people is vital to your success.  Not just suppliers and clients that you need to be guarded around, but people that you can discuss your business ideas with openly in a collegial atmosphere.  Successful entrepreneurs are gifted in surrounding themselves with people that are vital to the success of their business.  That’s hard to do in your home office. Having a real office is also a subliminal statement to yourself and to prospective clients, clients and suppliers.  To you, your office is a statement that it’s time to go to work.  You’re not only physically separated from home, but you have a business address, a business telephone number, a receptionist that is your face to world and knows how to make you productive.  Your mail isn’t mixed up with your utility bills and magazine subscriptions, your phone calls aren’t always for your son and your face to world is not your dog barking. Banks use to build giant stone structures that symbolized their permanence like king’s castles and pharaoh’s pyramids.  The bank was here to stay and could be trusted and counted on to be around forever.  Banks and other financial institutions like to build the tallest building in a city to illicit the same confidence. Your office located in an actual office building and not your home says much of the same thing.  You have turned the corner in your business, you have a real office and you too will be around forever and can be counted on.  Doing business with you is not a risk.  Doing business with you is not awkward.  Business meetings don’t take place in your kitchen, but in a conference room that makes your client feel important instead of abused.  You no longer have to wait for a free table at Starbucks to make a sales presentation.  With an office, you’re for real and conducting business like the best of them. Having an office is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.  Not everyone can afford a dedicated office their first month in business and that’s understandable.  Each business will reach the point needing and being able to afford an office at a different point.  The sooner, the better.  The payback is in personal productivity, prospective client perceptions and the dynamic effect of working alongside like minded people. Office space has not been this affordable in a long time.  Come to Meadow Creek Business Center and let us put you on the pathway to success. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/why-pay-for-office-space_-1.htmlWed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700No matter if you are an entrepreneur, small business owner or an executive of a large corporation, you should be a member of your local chamber of commerce.  Chambers of commerce are advocates for business in a community, they partner with local and state government to promote economic growth and job creation and they create opportunities for businesses to network, learn and benefit from being a member of a larger group of individuals with common interests and needs. All businesses need to be cognizant of what is going on in their community that may effect the way they do business and the cost of doing business.  Their chamber is their eyes and ears to events that may impact them.  Most chambers do not take political stands on issues, but serve to educate their members on issues that impact business so that their members will make informed decisions on those issues. Chambers work with local economic development officials to encourage prosperity within their community.  Local governments look to chambers to act as advocates of their community when companies are looking for places to locate or in the event of new community sponsored development or infrastructure projects.  Membership in your chamber adds clout to a chamber\'s support of growth and job creation. Start-ups and early stage businesses in your community benefit from chamber events givings them opportunities to meet people that can assist and guide them through the difficult early years.  Networking events can also provide them with the opportunity to make their business and its products and services known to a larger audience bringing important referrals to them. If you are not a member of your local chamber, give it some thought.  In addition to all of the benefits it brings to you and your business, it is a wonderful way to participate in public policy and invest your own time giving back to the community in which you live and/or work. Richard Gabel    http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/are-you-a-member-of-your-local-chamber-of-commerce_.htmlWed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800Home based business owners, entrepreneurs and small businesses lacking meeting space often do without because of the perceived high price of quality meeting rooms.  Their experience is probably based on contacting the local hotel and asking for a quote.  Room rental charges, audio/visual equipment and support charges, food service and other charges can really add up.  A two-hour staff meeting, training session or customer presentation can easilly be a $500 investment. For businesses in the Issaquah, Sammamish and Bellevue area, there is a cost effective way to put your best foot forward and provide a comfortable and attractive setting for your next meeting.  Your conference will be far more effective when everyone is comfortable and you aren\'t worried about breaking the bank by allowing ample time to get the job done. Meadow Creek Business Center in Issaquah offers meeting rooms and conference rooms at attractive prices.  You can bring your own food and audio/visual equipment if you like.  You can also have us make arrangements for food and use our PC projector at a nominal charge.  Sign-up for regular conference or meeting room usage and receive incredible discounts. If you think your desire to make the right impression is bigger than your budget, think again and contact Meadow Creek Business Center to plan your next meeting. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/why-aren_t-you-using-a-conference-or-meeting-room_-1.htmlSun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800The scenes from the state house in Madison, Wisconsin look eerily like those from Cairo and Tripoli.  Are they both representative of the common man rising up against dictatorial leaders?  I don\'t think so.  In Madison, or as we called it when I lived in Wisconsin, the People\'s Republic of Madison, I see a bunch of public employees trying to use the power of the mob to protect their own wallets and pocketbooks at the expense of the common people.  Public employees have long benefitted from weak and unaccountable government leadership and the deep recession has finally brought it to a head. Our government executives are really not a lot different than those in private enterprise.  Perhaps its the short term perspective that has crippled both public and private executives from making decisions that benefit the country as a whole over the long term.  CEOs are determined to make their quarterly numbers and keep their jobs while governors and mayors are too focused on winning the next election to upset a sizable voting block called public employees.  In heavilly unionized industries and in the government, the situation has been completely out of control.  In the private sector, the unions can shut down the factories.  Idle plants do not produce product and no product means no sales.  When wage demands go over the top, the only thing to do is to promise benefit packages instead.  They are less visible and defer much of the cost to the next generation of leadership, so why not keep the factories running. The same is true with state and local governments.  Government executives not wanting to appear anti-union agree to unreasonable benefit packages, the cost of which will be inherited by future generations of leaders and taxpayers. The solution is by no means simple.  In government and many industries unions hold monopoly power.  If a company or government wants people to get the job done, there\'s one and only one place to go for it. Are the unions the bad guys here?  I don\'t think that either.  They represent their members and try to maximize their compensation using any lawful means possible.  They are part of the short sighted leadership issue as well.  While older union members can look back upon many generations of union membership in a family and even employment in the same factory, that is no longer the case.  Pushing the envelope on wages and benefits has destroyed industries and reduced the union rolls.  Foreign competition, factories in low cost countries and out-sourcing have been the result. Local, state and federal governments will face the increasing necessity to out-source work if things don\'t change.  Our country is a much different place than when unions arose and saved workers from unfair labor practices.  The monopoly power now enjoyed by many unions must be revisited. Public employees, government officials and, most importantly, taxpayers must look at what is at stake here.  What we see in Wisconsin is not the little guy fighting for his or her rights against an all powerful government.  This is a monopoly trying desparately to hang on to its power at all cost. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/state-budget-crises-and-the-public-employee-unions.htmlSun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800Yeah you, one of the two hundred thousand home based businesses in the Puget Sound area. I know, you\'re a serious entrepreneur. You\'re going to be a big success someday. You\'re going to go viral, be discovered and the world will beat a path to your door. After the IPO you\'ll be worth a bazillion and start chillin with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. In the mean time you\'re working out of that spare bedroom with the desk made from cinder blocks and plywood you call a home office. The room is decorated with 15,000 happy meals toys and all the stuff from days gone by that you just haven\'t been able to part with yet. It is here that you find the solitude to focus on growing your business. The neighbor mowing the lawn, your dog wanting to go out, your spouse needing help doing something or other, the kids running amok, the phone ringing constantly with people looking for anyone but you and the hundreds of other everyday distractions have no effect. You are a motivated and driven entrepreneur and nothing is going to stop you. Who are you kidding? You\'re a startup or early stage business. You are the most important asset the company has, maybe the only asset the company has. That asset has to be productive. You have to actually be able to think, restraining yourself from not going postal is not good enough. You also need to present an image to the rest of the world that says you\'re for real, you\'re a winner and you\'re someone they should do business with. What does having your six-year old answering the phone say? Missing the important package because no one was home? And that business address of 1617 Primrose Lane? I suppose you\'ll just remove any doubt by meeting-up with the VCs at Starbucks. Let\'s get real. There\'s a lot riding on the next few years. Success versus failure. Wealth versus financial ruin. Your marriage, sanity and ego are all in play. Do it right! Maybe a fulltime office is out of the question, but a virtual office is an affordable way to make you productive and give your business a professional presence. With a virtual office, you\'ll have a real business address, a receptionist to accept your packages, greet your guests and answer your phone. You\'ll have an office to call home when you need to focus or meet clients. You\'ll have conference and meeting rooms available for bigger events. Administrative and secretarial support is also available when you need it. Your image will be reinforced when each time a client, supplier and investor calls they hear a professional, friendly and familiar voice answer the phone in your company\'s name. Not like a call center where your phone is answered by a different disinterested third party every call, but someone that knows you, knows your business and probably the caller. In short, your window to the rest of the world is being covered by someone that cares. A person that cares about you, your business and your success. Successful entrepreneurs are gifted at surrounding themselves with people vital to the success of their business. Meadow Creek can be vital to your success and through our educational, social and networking events you\'ll have many opportunities to meet other people that may be vital to your success. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/can-you-afford-not-to-have-a-virtual-office_.htmlSun, 06 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800We were doing our quarterly review of area business centers\' office space, virtual office and meeting room pricing. Rental rates are down from their highs of 2008, but not for setup fees, non-refundable deposits and hidden extras. I\'ve often wondered why corporations with high expectations on their rates of return were in the executive suite business in the first place. Now I know! Here\'s a list of things we ran into: Setup fee – this is pretty standard, but initial setup fee, administrative setup fee, phone setup fee, voicemail setup fee, directory listing setup fee, internet connection setup fee…wow! Moving in – some charge you a cleaning fee before you\'ve had a chance to mess things up Metered mail – some charge you a mark-up on postage Prepare certified mail – that\'s an adder Not able to pick up a package – pay a fee for overnight storage or for someone to take it to your office Need to borrow a dolly or hand truck to move your package – you may see that on your next invoice Conference rooms – almost all business centers limit tenants free access Need the internet during your meeting – plan on paying for that at most locations Lock yourself out of your office – pay up to get back in Security deposits on virtual offices – I wonder if you can pay that in virtual money? Special instructions for the receptionist today – that will cost you And the list goes on. Don\'t get me wrong, I\'m in the business too. We earn a living by providing a necessary and valuable service to our clients. At Meadow Creek, we are also in the hospitality business. We don\'t want our clients to be afraid of approaching the reception desk for fear that it will blow their monthly budget. Certain things are just expected when you\'re paying a healthy sum of money for an office. I spent the first 25 years of my career in management at a Fortune 500 industrial company. I can\'t claim to be an expert in business center management. Maybe the other guys are right. One thing I do bring with me from my past is the need to be easy to do business with. We are not going to nickel and dime our clients to death. We expect to be paid when we take on extra workload for our clients, but that doesn\'t include helping them get back in their office when they left their keys on the desk. I suspect it would be nearly impossible to implement this kind of strategy in an owner-managed facility. Clients would be lined-up outside my office wanting explanations for a dozen additional charges on their monthly billing. People trying to figure out how the first month\'s invoice for a $150 virtual office is $500. The large chains can do this by staffing their front desk with a young person with no authority. Have a problem with your bill, call corporate and deal with the call center in Bangalore. At Meadow Creek, you can find office space, virtual offices, shared office space and meeting rooms for a competitive price and no ridiculous add-ons. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/beware-of-hidden-costs-in-office-space_-virtual-offices-and-meeting-rooms-1.htmlFri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800As plain as the nose on your face. What does that mean? It means something that is obvious. It\'s right up there with; plain as day, is the Pope Catholic, is a pig pork and does a bear sh#t in the woods? We all look in a mirror many times a day. What do we see? We see what we are looking for. Is my hair combed? Did I remember to shave? Are my teeth clean? We confirm what we most likely already know and get on with life. I suppose if I was bleeding profusely from the side of my head, I might notice. For the most part though, my glance in the mirror when I\'m washing my hands is perfunctory and unlikely to shed any new insight as to what I look like. Most change comes very slowly. I\'ve put on 55 years and 55 pounds. That is not something I noticed in my daily looks in the mirror. I\'ve noticed the people around me putting on weight and getting old, but not myself. I know me very well and I don\'t need to look in the mirror to find these things out, I\'d have noticed in other ways. When I moved to Seattle, I bought a new home. This home had a big hole in the kitchen cabinets where a refrigerator ought to be. As the proud owner of a new home, I set out to fill the huge void. It required a giant built-in refrigerator that cost more than my first car. I cherished this refrigerator for at least a week before it became as plain as the nose on my face. It was there, it kept food cold or frozen and delivered ice and water from the opening in the front. Over the holidays, a major exception occurred and I took notice again. The refrigerator no longer delivered ice and water from the convenient nook in the front. This was a major disruption to my everyday life so I took notice. I decided the best course of action was to procrastinate. It still made ice and there was water available at the sink. Not chilled and highly filtered water, but it would do. I would turn off the icemaker and wait until the bin was empty so I could take it all apart and find out what was wrong. The process took about a week. I was becoming increasingly unpopular as my procrastination took its toll on the family. I didn\'t see anyone else trying to fix it so why should I feel guilty. As I gathered my tools and prepared for an afternoon of swearing at an inanimate object, I noticed something funny. There were six buttons on the door. The two on the left were crushed and cubes. The two on the right were on and off for the little light that let you fill a glass with water without spilling it all over the floor at night. I knew these four buttons. I used them all the time, we were like friends, but the other two in the middle were complete strangers. I guess I saw them every day, but ignored them, I knew what I wanted from the refrigerator and knew how to get it, so I didn\'t need them, they were not my friends. I looked down to see what they were. Their names were lock and unlock. It immediately dawned on me that the lock button might be there to prevent toddlers from pressing the levers you push a glass into and flood a kitchen with ice and water. I pushed unlock and tested the ice and water. They both worked. The family had endured a week without convenient ice and water. Four adults had missed the two buttons that were as plain as the nose on their face. They reminded me of all the things my phone, television and car are capable of doing that I haven\'t bothered find out existed or learn how to use them. My expectations are satisfied, so I don\'t bother. If I knew what was possible, my expectations would change. I have to wonder what I\'m missing in my business. If I can live with a refrigerator for eight years and not be familiar with six lousy buttons on the front door, the possibilities for missing critical things in my business are endless. My style tends to be highly focused. When I\'m in the groove, the building could burn down around me and I wouldn\'t notice. There is a task at hand and I\'m all over it. What\'s going on that I\'m not noticing. What changes have occurred slowly over time that I haven\'t noticed, but are now serious threats I need to be aware of. What new opportunities are there that I\'m unaware of. I haven\'t slept in a week. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/have-you-seen-the-nose-on-your-face-lately_.htmlSun, 02 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800It seems every town, school and entrepreneur is taken with the idea of a business incubator. Each party is hoping to make money off of the deal while serving a noble cause by providing a variety of different elements to promote entrepreneurial growth. I have not yet seen an example of a business incubator with sustained results.  Cities are hooked on the idea of business incubators as a way to foster economic growth. Quite often this is done in cooperation with a local college is eager to build community relations and ultimately make some money off providing training. One of the first decisions they confront is how to pay for it. The city will often feel that it is imperative to offer entrepreneurs free or highly subsidized assistance to increase their chances of survival. While its a nice thought that with a little boost, entrepreneurs would have a much improved survival rate it doesn\'t really address the real causes of failure. Incubators can provide a serious work environment, a professional facade of legitimacy to the outside world, training, , consulting, mentoring and camaraderie. Trying to offer these things for free or on a highly subsidized basis is often the death nell for such efforts. Even properly incubated, the majority of new businesses will fail and the taxpayers will want to know why they\'re throwing good money after bad. Also, sustaining the expense of a business incubator through tough times is nearly impossible for a city. Businesses are like kids, they\'re cute when they\'re little, but they can get ugly when they grow-up. Cities hoping to create economic vitality and a growing tax base through incubating businesses can be horrified by the results. Successful businesses do provide jobs and tax base. They also create pollution, traffic congestion and stress the infrastructure. On top of all that, if they\'re really successful, they\'ll be asking for tax breaks abatements and other considerations to stick around. Your bouncing baby business is suddenly a teenager. Experts say entrepreneurs fail for several reasons: Going into business for the wrong reason Lack of business experience Lack of industry experience Lack of funding Incubators can weed out the people starting a business because they want more free time. They are bound for failure and that would truly be throwing good money after bad. A simple conversation can usually identify who is going into business because of the combination of the entrepreneurial spirit and sound idea and who just doesn\'t want to have to take orders from a boss. Business incubators can provide training and mentoring to help with business and industry experience. This is possibly the most important function of an incubator. Not too many people have a broad based business experience. Putting them in a situation where they are the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, sales person, engineer, production and maintenance person can be overwhelming. They can also weed out those that simply do not have the financial resources to get their business off the ground. One of the easiest ways to do this shy of requiring a personal financial statement, is to charge for services and see who falls out of line. Services can be provided at an initial discount or just packaged in affordable ways. Funding can also be assisted by consulting and mentoring on putting the basic business plan, marketing literature, financial projections and offering statement together. Education on the sources of venture capital and business loans is another key contribution of incubators. As an owner of a business center, I\'ve been asked to create a business incubator many times.  I have finally succumbed to this idea.  I\'d be interested in hearing from entrepreneurs their ideas about business incubators and what services they would find most important. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/would-you-benefit-from-a-business-incubator_.htmlFri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800It seems every town, school and entrepreneur is taken with the idea of a business incubator. Each party is hoping to make money off of the deal while serving a noble cause by providing a variety of different elements to promote entrepreneurial growth. I have not yet seen an example of a business incubator with sustained results. Cities are hooked on the idea of business incubators as a way to foster economic growth. Quite often this is done in cooperation with a local college is eager to build community relations and ultimately make some money off providing training. One of the first decisions they confront is how to pay for it. The city will often feel that it is imperative to offer entrepreneurs free or highly subsidized assistance to increase their chances of survival. While its a nice thought that with a little boost, entrepreneurs would have a much improved survival rate it doesn\'t really address the real causes of failure. Incubators can provide a serious work environment, a professional facade of legitimacy to the outside world, training, , consulting, mentoring and camaraderie. Trying to offer these things for free or on a highly subsidized basis is often the death nell for such efforts. Even properly incubated, the majority of new businesses will fail and the taxpayers will want to know why they\'re throwing good money after bad. Also, sustaining the expense of a business incubator through tough times is nearly impossible for a city. Businesses are like kids, they\'re cute when they\'re little, but they can get ugly when they grow-up. Cities hoping to create economic vitality and a growing tax base through incubating businesses can be horrified by the results. Successful businesses do provide jobs and tax base. They also create pollution, traffic congestion and stress the infrastructure. On top of all that, if they\'re really successful, they\'ll be asking for tax breaks abatements and other considerations to stick around. Your bouncing baby business is suddenly a teenager. Experts say entrepreneurs fail for several reasons: Going into business for the wrong reason Lack of business experience Lack of industry experience Lack of funding Incubators can weed out the people starting a business because they want more free time. They are bound for failure and that would truly be throwing good money after bad. A simple conversation can usually identify who is going into business because of the combination of the entrepreneurial spirit and sound idea and who just doesn\'t want to have to take orders from a boss. Business incubators can provide training and mentoring to help with business and industry experience. This is possibly the most important function of an incubator. Not too many people have a broad based business experience. Putting them in a situation where they are the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, sales person, engineer, production and maintenance person can be overwhelming. They can also weed out those that simply do not have the financial resources to get their business off the ground. One of the easiest ways to do this shy of requiring a personal financial statement, is to charge for services and see who falls out of line. Services can be provided at an initial discount or just packaged in affordable ways. Funding can also be assisted by consulting and mentoring on putting the basic business plan, marketing literature, financial projections and offering statement together. Education on the sources of venture capital and business loans is another key contribution of incubators. As an owner of a business center, I\'ve been asked to create a business incubator many times. I have finally succumbed to this idea. I\'d be interested in hearing from entrepreneurs their ideas about business incubators and what services they would find most important. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/would-you-benefit-from-a-business-incubator_-1.htmlFri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800I am a big strategy fan, mostly because I have restructured so many companies that did not have one. Others had one that had not changed in years despite significant changes in the market environment. A Strategic Plan must be a living document that reflects the realities of the world around you. Your strategy must reflect the way the world works, not the way you would like it to work. Truly innovative strategies in fact change the way the world works, which does not happen on its own. You have to make it happen. What is your strategy? It is not very difficult. To start, it is a multiple-choice question. You can be one of three things: cost leader, differentiated or a niche market supplier. Selecting one does not insure your success, but picking more than one certainly insures your failure. You have to decide what you are going to be when you grow up and how you are going to get there. Most of the Strategic Planning process is evaluating the environment in terms of the customer, competitors, technology, government and substitute products. From there you assess your relative strengths and weaknesses, identify the internal and external opportunities and threats to determine the best way for you to compete. It can all as complicated as you want to make it. If you do not have a strategy, keep it simple on the first pass, and then start getting elegant. The next step is to identify the gaps between where you are where you want to be. Your Business Plan will incorporate the actions you will be taking to fill those gaps. This can be the hard part. I have seen so many Strategic Plans that assumed deficiencies could be dealt with cheaply and quickly when an impartial observer could say the plan was doomed. This brings up a critical step in the planning process. The voice of reason from an independent source that can give candid feedback on your plan, particularly if you are a solopreneurs, is essential. Even if you have employees that you have included in the process, every company has its own killer assumptions. Things they believe to be true and have institutionalized in their group thinking process that simply are not true. Independent eyes and ears are invaluable. I have described very briefly the planning process in the style of Michael Porter. I have worked with Michael Porter and the Monitor Group in the past and that is why. There are plenty of other strategy gurus out there. You can read their books and fashion a planning process around their particular styles. They will likely not differ much. The important thing is that you have a framework for Strategic Planning and use it. It will define the way you look at the world and run your business. At least when you have time to come up for air in between managing the day-to-day affairs of your business. For those of you that are strategy deprived, I will be writing some more articles to take you through the process. I am also hosting events that will focus on strategy. If you live in the Issaquah, Washington area or do not worry about falling off the eadge of the Earth if you try to drive there, I hope you will join in. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/what-is-your-strategy_.htmlSun, 05 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800I am always amazed at the number of people that do not have a proper business plan.  I am equally amazed at those who feel that their fill in the blank plan will make them successful beyond their wildest expectations.  What amazes me even more are those entrepreneurs and small business owners with or without plans that do not have a strategy or strategic plan. All the detailed planning in the world isn\'t worth a darn without strategy.  A well thought out strategy is an analysis of your business plan relative to the world around you.  A Business Plan provides the roadmap for actions to be taken in the near term to achieve stated goals.  Your Strategic Plan validates the expectation that those actions will in fact achieve those results and with what inherent risks. The strategic plan is a vision and roadmap to future success only to the extent that it is: Founded upon a rational vision. Impediments to the goal are anticipated and dealt with. The plan is flexible enough to respond to a changing environment. The organization responsible for making it happen knows the plan, believes in the plan and is motivated to make it happen. The alignment of these fundamental requirements seldom happens.  To a very real extent, that is what separates successful companies from those that are not so successful.  Dumb luck occurs with surprising frequency, however, a well thought out plan coupled with effective management and implementation has a far greater chance of success. While a sound methodology is imperative to construct a good plan, nothing will compensate for the lack of good business judgment and an engaged organization.  This is not to say that Strategic Planning is a democratic process requiring the involvement of many layers of the organization.  Quite to the contrary, that is a recipe for failure.  Management must take responsibility for the plan and draw from the best and brightest of the organization at any level to construct it. With a management team or possibly just the owner in some organizations, committed to creating a strategic plan one of the first decisions to be made is to go it alone or use third parties to facilitate, bring additional knowledge and perspective to the process.  In large organizations, this is often not necessary.  Small and medium sized businesses never having created a strategic plan benefit most, but are typically least inclined to do so. Some or all of the components of developing a sound plan may be absent: A process or methodology for developing a plan. Individual(s) capable of separating themselves from day to day business issues and look at the business in the context of a longer time frame. Individual(s) with business experience to recognize common issues and draw from similar situations to add a broader perspective to the process. Individual(s) with industry experience to recognize common issues and draw from similar situations to add a broader perspective to the process. Individual(s) capable of translating high level plans into action/implementation plans and financial scenarios. A neutral party that can draw out thoughts of all involved, keep a group focused and committed to an objective. A party that can help communicate the plan and sometimes legitimize a plan to a skeptical organization. A study I like to quote defined successful entrepreneurs as skilled in using their time to develop relationships with people that are vital to the success of their business.  Certainly the strategic planning process is one in which this gift is most called for. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/don_t-write-a-business-plan-if-you-don_t-have-a-strategy.htmlTue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800If you\'ve survived the recession, you are probably eager to start growing your business again. Hopefully, you\'ve taken the opportunity to get you marketing side of the business in order so that when the business begins to flow you\'re positioned to take a larger share. If not, it\'s not too late to make it happen. Small business owners generally spend 16 hours per week on the \"administration\" of their business and less than half that amount of time growing their business. To the extent that the most valuable resource a small business owner has is his or her time, one cannot solve the marketing problem without addressing the administration problem. Marketing involves time and every minute you invest in administration is taking away from marketing or revenue generating work. The problem is that the administration has to be done and most people don\'t go into business for themselves so they can market, but so they can do what they enjoy like build homes, paint homes, do finish carpentry, plumb, plaster, wire, roof, provide mortgages, keep books or all of the other valuable services represented by the members and associate member of the Master Builders Association. For most, sales and marketing is last thing on the list of things to do even when business is slow. Here are 4 simple steps to getting the situation under control and increasing market share during the recovery. Organize One of those things easier said than done. Some people are organized and some aren\'t. You can usually tell by looking at person\'s garage. Most people organize their garage once a year and promise themselves they are never going to let it get messed up again. It generally last for about a month and degenerates until the following Spring and the cycle begins anew. Your administration probably follows a similar cycle revolving around tax time. Don\'t try to over organize, it will never happen. Simply establishing a process for how you\'re going to handle the paperwork associated with your business is good enough. Something simple like bills in the red bucket, time sheets in the blue bucket, proposals in the white bucket etc. and a schedule as to when you are going to go through those buckets each month will do. Not having a pile of unorganized paper sitting on your desk will make the process far less forbidding and it will take much less time. Be Easy to do Business With This is another process issue. Not having a plan as to how you work with people makes the job more difficult. Organize your thinking as to how you want people to perceive you as a supplier and what you need to do to make it happen. Simply bootstrapping your response to every phone call, piece of mail, job site request or any other communication is creating a nightmare of disorganized thinking and forgotten promises. If you want to grow, you had better get your sales process nailed down. A checklist of the elements of your sales process and the actions you need to take will make the job easier and increase your close rate. Have a Plan Take the time to decide what you would like to do to promote your business over the next 12 months. If you don\'t have a plan, there will not be much incentive for you to do anything at all. If you lay out a schedule of things you would like to do and the results you want to achieve, then there is at least a motivation to do something. This can be a one pager that lays out 4 things you want to do over the next year to bring in new business, retain existing accounts, thank your customers or reward your best customers. It\'s a reminder that there is work to be done and a cost to not doing it. Get Help Most businesses are one person shows. One person just can\'t run an entire business, but most are not ready to take on a full-time employee. Here are some easy and inexpensive ways of bridging the gap between doing it all yourself and having a staff to help out. Use Phone Answering Being interrupted by the phone constantly throughout the day is unproductive. It interferes with what you are doing, who you are talking to and usually makes for a bad conversation with the person that called. Have a virtual office and let someone take your calls and respond at the right time when you can provide your full attention. Use a service that is going to learn enough about your business to talk intelligently to people that call and know when a call is urgent and needs to be responded to immediately. Make sure that there will be a limited number of people answering so that your customers get to know them and view them as a virtual extension of your business. Use Marketing Services You know you don\'t like doing it and will find every reason to do something else, so have someone else do it. They can work with you to develop a plan and then make it happen. There are things in your business that only you can do and marketing isn\'t one of them. If your business is going to grow, you have to do something to make it happen. Let others do the heavy lifting on the marketing side and save your time for closing the sale. Use Administrative Services Without time spent on administration you, don\'t get paid, your suppliers don\'t get paid, proposals don\'t get submitted and generally the business grinds to a halt. At the same time it is the least productive work a business owner can do. It needs to be done, but not by you. Get a virtual assistant to keep your affairs in order. Hopefully, 2010 will have a strong 4th quarter and we\'ll be charging into 2011 like a raging bull. That is not very likely for the economy as a whole, but that doesn\'t mean you can\'t. Richard Gabel http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/how-to-grow-a-small-business-1.htmlSat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700Once you\'ve decided to go into business, there are certain administrative steps you need to take in order to get started on the right foot.  Missteps here can cost you a lot of time and money later on.  Do it right from the start and your entrepreneurial journey will be much easier.  There is nothing more self-destructive than having to unwind a big administrative mess when you should be out growing your business. All this assumes you have a business plan that has been critiqued by others and qualifies as a legitimate and sustainable business.  You will have to spend some money establishing the groundwork for your new business and there\'s no sense in doing that if you haven\'t qualified your concept. Your Experts First order of business is to find an attorney and an accountant.  Yeah, I know, you\'re going to find all you need to know on the internet on the cheap or for free.  Starting a business is serious stuff and you need to do it right.  Studies have shown that successful entrepreneurs excel in surrounding themselves with people that are vital to the success of their business.  These are people that bring skills and knowledge that you do not possess yourself in order to satisfy all of the needs of your business.  Your initial consultation with an attorney or an accountant may be free or discounted. Depending on the nature of your business, you may also want to consult with a intellectual property rights attorney.  If the value of your business is in your unique designs in the form of art, technology, designs etc., you will want to protect it.  If you worry about protection after you\'ve done something clever, it may be too late. Name Your Business You will need to have a name for your business.  Sometimes your legal entity name will not be very descriptive of what it is you do and not be keyword rich.  In that case, you may have another name or names that are DBAs (doing business as).  You can check these names out in the states where you will be doing business to see if they have been previously registered.  You can do this yourself through most state government websites.  Access links to the Secretary of State or the Department of Revenue and do a search on the name you want to use.  You can also check with the U.S. Patent Office.  Once you\'ve identified a name you can use, it\'s time to talk to your experts. Place of Business You will also need to decide what your business address and phone number will be.  Most entrepreneurs start their business in their home.  This is not always the best place to have your business mail delivered or for business calls to arrive to.  There is an inherent lack of privacy, once you\'ve told the world where you live and have made you home your office.  It is often far better to have a virtual office as your business address and phone number.  Some of the benefits are: You achieve a degree of separation of your personal and business life You don\'t confuse your business mail with your personal mail Someone is always there to receive packages Your clients don\'t call your home at all hours unless you want them to A person will always answer your phone calls without the background sound of dogs, children and spouses You determine if you are in a position or are prepared to take the call You will have a professional place to meet clients when necessary The cost is nominal Legal Entity It is now time to officially establish your business.  You will need to discuss with your experts, what form of legal entity you should choose.  You can read up on the meaning, pros and cons of each form on as many websites as there are stars in the universe.  What the web will not be able to tell you is which is best for you depending upon your current situation, the nature of your business and your plans for the business.  Changing the form of the legal entity in the future can be a very unpleasant task, so good advice is worth its weight in gold. Your attorney can draw up the required documents.  Again, I understand, all of your friends started their businesses and don\'t have any of these documents or used fill in the blank forms off the internet.  How many of them have businesses that are worth $1 million.  If you have partners/co-investors or plan to, this can get complicated.  Your partner may be your best friend today, but you never know what the future may bring. The Government Resistance is futile.  You will be taxed, regulated and administered by the federal, state and local government.  Failure to comply can be costly.  In addition to the documents required for your particular legal entity type, you will need to file: State and local business licenses Any required specialty business licenses IRS legal entity election form Once you have filed all of the necessary paperwork for your state business license and your IRS election form, you will be assigned a state identification number and Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) by the IRS.  These numbers will be necessary for the other paperwork and filings. IRS employment forms Personal property affidavits for the county Employment eligibility forms for Home Land Security Department of Social and Health Services new hire reporting Possibly others depending upon your location.  The point is, when it comes to government requirements, most of us don\'t know what we don\'t know.  Use an expert.  They can tell you exactly what you need to do and you can accomplish most of it online. Accounting Work with an accountant to discuss your bookkeeping needs.  An accountant can give you guidance on setting up your chart of accounts.  If you don\'t know what a chart of accounts is, the accountant may suggest bookkeeping services.  You will probably need accounting software and perhaps, depending upon the nature of your business, specialized project tracking or invoicing software. Employment Even if you don\'t have employees, your form of legal entity may require you to pay yourself.  In that case you will probably want a payroll provider.  This not only makes it easier to get the checks out, but takes care of all of the necessary state and federal filings.  Yes, the paperwork never ends. Even if you don\'t have any employees when you start.  It is probably a good idea to have an employee manual so you never forget when the time comes.  With the amount of employer/employee litigation today, you need to document the relationship your business has with employees. Conclusion This is less of a step by step manual on how to start a business and more of what is hopefully an eye opener as to the complexity of starting a business the correct way.  If you\'re serious about your business then you will want to make sure you get started in a way that protects your future.  The need for expert advice at this stage is critical so let me repeat the conclusion of a Princeton study on entrepreneurship: Successful entrepreneurs are skilled at using their time to develop relationships with people vital to the success of their business. In the words of Clint Eastwood; \"a man\'s gotta know his limitations\".  All of the people vital to the success of your business aren\'t going to be industry gurus, sales and marketing geniuses or technology wizards.  Some will be the people that understand the business side of the equation. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-basics-of-starting-a-business---preparation.htmlFri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700Back in August of 2009, I wrote \"Let the Recovery Begin\". The recession now having been declared over in July 2009, makes my declaration of recovery off by a month. While I qualified my forecast for a strong recovery as being another jobless recovery and tempered by state and local budget crises, I did think that the duration of the recession would create a greater bounce. Pent-up consumer demand, I thought would lead to a more vibrant recovery. At the time, an old friend wrote to tell me exactly how wrong I was. I may claim now a technical victory, but he was certainly correct. My head was definitely exactly where he said it was. I took my wife out to dinner for her birthday at a business club. Being a Thursday and the last day of the month for one-quarter of the members to reach their food minimums, I suspected quite a crowd. As we were shown to our table, I asked her if she had any idea how much it cost me to buy out the entire dining room for this occasion. We were the only ones there. Awkward, eventually a few more tables were seated, but it did not look like we were more than a year into an economic recovery. Last week a very nice grocery store near our home announced it was closing. It was a large store with high quality produce and meats, gourmet cooking items and an impressive wine selection. It is admittedly difficult to compete against the large chains in the grocery business, but the store had been there for seventeen years. Again, another couple of dozen people unemployed and long lines of people clearing the shelves of inventory at a twenty-five percent off sale didn\'t look like a recovery. My only client seeing boom times does bankruptcies and mortgage modifications. Others have gone bankrupt, have had their venture capital funding pulled or are chewing through their retirement savings trying to wait out the stealth recovery. It may be cynicism brought on by the election season and the accompanying negative advertising blitz, but I think the recovery is a hoax. Corporate earnings and the stock market may be up, but the economy is not growing fast enough to put the millions of unemployed back to work. The economy is not generating enough new jobs to absorb the new entrants to the workforce. Young adults looking for jobs aren\'t finding them. They\'re competing with displaced workers with experience willing to take dramatic pay cuts to get back to work. That\'s a tough spot to be in. In an even tougher spot are those people over fifty looking for work. To the extent that discrimination exists in hiring, age trumps them all. With the official unemployment rate at around 10% and the unofficial rate that would include those that have given up and those under-employed topping 17% we are still in deep weeds economically. The real recovery will not begin until the economy is consistently creating over 200,000 jobs a month. Until that time, the number of unemployed will continue to grow and the recovery will remain in stealth mode. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/if-it-doesn_t-walk-or-talk-like-a-recovery_-it_s-not-a-recovery.htmlWed, 20 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a business trip for a staff meeting. I watched as the second plane hit the tower on a TV in the lobby of the Embassy Suites. We started our staff meeting and the Group President came to the conference room and told us we should leave, there was a plane somewhere in the area that had been hijacked. My boss continued the meeting for a while and then we made plans to get home. We tried to return rental cars at the airport and the police told us to leave the area. I ended up giving my car and my hotel room to a person on the staff from Canada. The borders were closed and he was stuck. Four of us headed back to Milwaukee in another rental car. We pulled into a large rest stop on I-80 along the way. There crowd of people there eating lunch. There was some chatter, but for the most part, you could have heard a pin drop in a place you usually couldn\'t hear yourself think. Later in our journey under beautiful clear blue skies, we saw a plane heading east. It stood out because under normal circumstances the blue sky would have been covered with the contrails of aircraft. Days later we realized that must have been Air Force One returning the President to Washington. I grew up in New York and New Jersey. I had been in the World Trade Center many times. It was an awesome sight. The escalators rising from the Path station to the lobby looked like the stairway to heaven they were so long. I had eaten in The Windows on the World a couple of times for business. It was incredible to look down out the windows and see aircraft below you. The next time my alumni magazine from Lehigh University arrived, the In Memoriam section that was usually a half page, was three pages long. Each entry started with \"Died, September 11.\"http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/where-were-you-september-11th_.htmlSun, 12 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700Yesterday afternoon my mail was dropped off at my desk. I just got around to opening it. The first thing that fell out of the large padded envelope was a box of matches. Next a tubed Romeo Y Julieta Verona\'s Court cigar. Thank you God, I\'ll enjoy myself tonight. Next, I fished out a gold colored hard envelope holding an invitation printed on lexan. Wow! Someone is really trying to buy me, in style of course. There was the invitiation, I was being invited to a grand opening of (names are ommitted to protect the innocent and the guilty) accompanied by alchohol, more cigars and the chance to play with some big boy toys. I was impressed. The envelope itself probably cost more than the printed postcard I last sent out in a direct mail campaign. The postage was well over a dollar, the cigar was $6 plus, the matches and the invitation itself most have cost a fortune. This was a great package that was sure to produce results in the hands of the right people. Sadly, I am not one of them. I was not one of them before the Great Recession. They were looking for a small number of people to RSVP as space was limited. They still had to have sent out several hundred to get the desired number of responses. Here in Seattle, home of several of the richest people in the world, I was flattered to be invited. I will always be appreciative of anyone that sends me a cigar. But my marketing orientation got the best of me. Only this morning, I was on the phone with a lady from a call center discussing prospecting for clients. I described the clients I was looking for and she said no such list exists. She asked if I had anyone tell me that they could filter a list as I had described and offered to make calls for me. I replied yes, that a couple of people said they could do it. She very adamant in her plea for me to put my plans aside. A proper list doesn\'t exist. My money would be wasted. So as I plan to enjoy my free cigar tonight, I take this morning\'s lesson to heart. Someone had spent a bundle of money to reach out to me and invite me to a party celebrating something I couldn\'t possibly afford. Their list was crap. Not that I haven\'t been taken by purveyors of lists before. One would think how hard can it be to come up with a list of people with a lot of money burning a hole in their pocket. Marketing is a hunt best done with a shotgun. Putting a lot of money into your hunt and then using a rifle, rarely achieves the returns desired. Try a bunch of things and see what works. There is no silver bullet for every situation. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-perils-of-direct-mail-marketing.htmlWed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700Entrepreneurs, small business owners and remote employees of large corporations all have something in common. They all have a need to work effectively and present themselves as being professional. If your office is your home, car or suitcase, chances are you struggle with this. Taking calls on your cell while running through the airport trying to catch your flight, explaining your value proposition to a client in your car attempting to navigate through traffic or resolve a customer dispute with your dog barking in the background isn\'t the most effective way to do business. Yet many people accept this as their lot in life. They\'re available 24/7 to who ever wants to call them, but rarely do people get their undivided attention. These are the same people that meet their clients in coffee shops, huddled at small tables squeezed in between twelve teenagers grouped around the table for two and someone having a loud disagreement with their spouce on their cellphone. It may sound ridiculous now, but people do this every day around the world and have convinced themselves they operating at peak efficiency, lean and mean, unbeatable in the world of business. Imagine a different way of doing business. A call comes into your virtual receptionist, she contacts you to see if you\'re in a position to take it. You\'re in a noisy place so you ask her to let the caller know you will call him back in 20 minutes. You suspect there might be an issue with the caller, so once you\'ve found a quiet place, you contact a colleague to get briefed. Now fully prepared to discuss the issue with the caller and in an condusive environment you make the call. You are prepared and focused, thanks to your virtual office. When it comes time to meet with a client or prospect, you can reserve office space at a number of nearby locations convenient to you. You look professional, like someone a person would want to do business with. When you\'re on the road most of the time, you may not want the overhead of a dedicated office. That doesn\'t mean you don\'t need an office on a regular basis. You want to communicate on your terms so you can be effective, yet you want to be available when needed. Your virtual office gives you this along with the administrative support necessary to give you the time to do those things only you can do. Contact us today to setup your virtual office! Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/virtual-office-creates-a-professional-presence.htmlSat, 07 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700A good friend of mine in Finland had taken on a global powerhouse in their own backyard and won a market share battle. For a startup to have the audacity to take on the preeminent global leader was heroic enough, but to do it in a product with huge barriers to entry was even more inspiring. As is the custom in Finland, we were rotating between the sauna and cooling off with ice-cold vodka after a long day of work. I asked him what his greatest business challenge was. He surprised me by saying it was getting factory labor. Finland\'s social welfare policies allowed an individual to live a comfortable life without working. This created a difficult environment in which to grow a business, not to mention the enormous tax burden on those who did work. At the time, I thought how different our countries were. We did have a social safety net. What we did not have was a system that allowed for the perpetual abuse of the public dole. Those programs that were relatively unlimited certainly did not provide for a comfortable standard of living. America was the land of personal responsibility. It was a place that valued individual initiative and pull yourself up by the bootstraps success stories. Sure, there are some that need extended assistance for whatever reason and some that are just slackers, but America as a whole was the land of rugged individualism. Today, my biggest challenge is finding employees. One would think on the tail of the Great Recession that would not be a problem. Reported unemployment is still pushing 10% and real unemployment is somewhat north of that. Based on salary surveys, our going rate is at a premium to the local average. The work environment is safe, friendly and clean. Plenty of people apply for the positions. Virtually no one shows up for scheduled interviews. After discussing this situation with my staff and talking to others, there is only one conclusion. People are simply documenting their job search in order to maintain their unemployment benefits. Our \"jobless\" recovery has been going on for about a year now. Politicians try to show their empathy to the public and keep their jobs by continuously extending unemployment benefits. The right has tried to stop this on budgetary considerations. No one has addressed the fundamental issue of what kind of country do we want to be. The result of any recession is that many workers find themselves having to accept positions that they previously would not have considered. In the absence of the pain of no income, some may feel that they can ride out hard times on unemployment until everything gets back to normal. The problem is that normal changes and things are very likely never going to be as they were a couple of years ago. The other critical element is that there will always be new people entering the workforce. The individuals that have been out of work for over a year are going to find they are unemployable. New entrants are going to look more attractive. The long-term unemployed will be assumed to have lost whatever job skills they once had. Both the new entrant and the seasoned veteran will have to be trained. One comes as a clean slate; the other will carry whatever baggage has accumulated over the extended unemployment. Instead of buying the votes of the unemployed and using the endless extension of jobless benefits to appease voters angered about the condition of the economy, it is time for some tough love. America needs to get back to work. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. Politicians are playing fast and loose with our country\'s values in an attempt to lock in large blocks of voters. We are on the verge of making a large segment of our population state dependent. That is not good for them or our country. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-dawn-of-socialism.htmlTue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700I have invested a considerable amount of time in social media. I\'m not an expert by any means, but I have written dozens of articles made countless posts attended and hosted events. I\'ve even hosted workshops on how to use social media to your advantage, specifically to drive traffic to your website. At the same time, I refer to social media as the narcotic of the masses. Not the masses of people from pre-teens to octogenarians \"talking\" to their friends on Facebook. No, I\'m referring to the masses of solopreneurs that think whatever it is they\'re doing on business oriented social media sites is somehow going to make or break their business. This gets to a larger issue of the capacity for face-to-face social interaction that Apple has successfully eliminated from our society. Where ever you go these days, most of the people around you are plugged into an iphone or an iPod, detached from the real world around them. They no longer respond to verbal input. They can only be communicated with through touch and visual cues. In the case of texting, these people are the electronic equivalent of meth addicts. They no longer respond to visual cues. Even iPod dependent drones are reluctant to drive with them. What does this have to do with social media? Our society is quickly losing its capacity for verbal communications. Social media allows would be entrepreneurs to maintain their personal barrier from the human race. They believe that they will create a reputation, establish a brand identity, communicate their unique selling proposition and close a sale, all without having to deal with a customer face-to-face and communicate in the language of their choice. Sure, many successful businesses function almost exclusively over the internet. Internet porn is a booming business. Sex sells unlike almost any other product or service, but unfortunately, there is not the same instinctive desire to consume such things as management consulting or pet burial urns. At the end of the day, the vast majority of businesses require face-to-face contact to close the sale. Therefore, entrepreneurs, unplug the iPod, remove the Bluetooth, shut down the laptop and get out into the real world and show us what you\'ve got. It just isn\'t going to happen any other way. By the way, if you\'ve read this, please remember to Like it, become a Fan and re-Tweet it. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-social-media-plague.htmlMon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700What has The Man done for you lately? If you\'re Too Big to Fail, you picked up some TARP money and paid yourself a big fat bonus. Pretty much hush money for not telling the world whose idea it was to have Fannie and Freddie go into the sub-prime loan business. If you\'re out of work, you\'re getting an endless series of unemployment benefit extensions. Not particularly good for you or the country, but sure to get your vote. If you\'re an entrepreneur trying to ride out hard times by dipping into savings, the only thing you got was a 10% penalty from the IRS on an early withdrawal. There are a lot of people and businesses out there that fit into the Too Small to Survive category. Middle class and upper middle class displaced workers that previously enjoyed comfortable life styles. They soon find that unemployment benefits cover utilities and groceries, but not mortgages, health insurance, car payments and college tuition. Entrepreneurs and small business owners hoping to ride out a six-month recession are now into it for a year and a half or more depending upon when bad times hit their business. If you didn\'t have deep pockets, you\'re toast by now. It\'s time for the government to start thinking about those caught in the middle. The Too Big to Fails have been taken care of. The long-term unemployed are in danger of becoming unemployable and permanent wards of the state. In the end, suffering some pain and being induced to accept a position that may seem unattractive is a better alternative. The Too Small to Survive are in need of relief, but they are the ones that will suffer the most when the Bush tax cuts expire at year-end. This is on top of being the most at risk victims of the piling on of new regulations. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/too-small-to-survive.htmlSat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700Only Nixon could go to China and only John Kerry could debunk \"progressive\" economics. It would take a tax and spend, big government, soak the rich, nanny stater like Sen. Kerry to clear up any misconception on the realities of the economic impact of the progressive agenda. All of that progressive rhetoric is for getting votes, but when applied to the real world, it just doesn\'t work. Senator Kerry just bought himself a new $7 million yacht. Good for him, I have no problem with that other than envy. Faced with almost $500,000 in sales tax and a hefty annual excise tax if he he took his new toy home to Massachusetts, he very reasonably decided to leave it in neighboring Rhode Island. Rhode Island evidently repealed similar taxes over a decade ago resulting in it becoming to some a \"nautical tax haven\", but I\'m sure to others a source of growth in employment in the maritime industry. Politics is one thing and how you spend your own money is a whole different thing. Sen. Kerry has shown us all how the real world works in a way no conservative ideologue could. Progressive economics just doesn\'t work. Soak the rich and they take their yachts and play somewhere else. With their yachts go the jobs. Nanny staters pile on entitlements to buy votes and someone has to pay the bill. Tax and spend states have to continue to raise taxes as a result. Without the rich to kick around anymore, the middle class takes it on the chin. The same lesson can be applied at the national level. Is there any doubt why we\'re in a jobless recovery? Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/an-important-lesson-on-economics-by-sen_-john-kerry.htmlThu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700Not too long ago, a couple starting a restaurant approached me. They had to have a business plan and they had to have it now. I asked what the hurry was and they indicated that their future landlord was insisting on it. I thought good for the landlord. Eighty percent of restaurants fail in the first two years so it might save everyone involved a whole lot of trouble by insisting that they think through and document what they intended to do. From the perspective of the couple, they were about to enter into an agreement that would have an all in value of several hundred thousand dollars backed up by their business and guaranteed by everything they had personally. Despite all of this, they were only interested in getting a document to the landlord so they could get the lease. The first phone call gave me the impression that they thought that I should simply pull a business plan off the shelf, slap their name on it and send it to them. I suggested that there was a little more involved than that and they ought to come in and tell me what they had in mind for their business. I have never consulted with anyone in the restaurant business. I have never consulted with anyone that has been in an industry with which I have had any prior experience to my knowledge. I simply understand business and can apply that knowledge to the industry knowledge of the business owner. Even so, I was quite certain that spending some of the best years of my life watching Gordon Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern made me more than qualified to appear reasonably well informed. The next day I met with the couple. They showed me what the landlord was looking for and it was a comprehensive analysis of their business. Nothing unreasonable and actually a very good summary of what any business plan should contain. It was obvious the landlord was serious about tenants having a clue. They looked totally bewildered so I started the conversation. The wife had experience running a restaurant, so I was told. The restaurant would have a Mediterranean theme, evidently a nondescript portion of the Mediterranean. I then probed a little deeper. Do you have a menu? Yes. Have you priced the food? Yes. Do you know how much it will cost? No. Things started to go downhill quickly. How many tables will there be? We don\'t know. Will there be a bar? Yes, no and then we don\'t know. Will you be serving breakfast? Probably not. Will you be serving lunch? Yes. Will you be serving dinner? We don\'t know. It was obvious that I knew more about the restaurant business than they did. I was in pain listening to this and wanted to scream, but kept on trying to help. I tried to explain that it would be difficult to create a business plan around a restaurant that had no defined capacity. That without knowing how many meals a day they would be serving and how many seats there would be, that sizing the space required, the staff needed and the equipment and furnishings could be a challenge. I then asked them a little about the market. The facility was to be in a strip mall. I asked if there were any other restaurants in the mall. They didn\'t know. Any other restaurants within three or four blocks? Don\'t know. Any population centers nearby like apartment building and condos? Don\'t know. Any office buildings? Don\'t know. There was a brief discussion about having me meet with the landlord with them. I said I would be happy to do that thinking the entertainment value of that meeting would somehow compensate me for this free introductory session. I never heard from them again. I don\'t know if they realized they had no idea what they were doing and scrapped the whole concept. Maybe they went on to find someone that wasn\'t such a stickler for detail and would just give them a damned business plan. Then again, maybe they thought the pained look on my face indicated I was afflicted with something they best not expose themselves to again. A similar call came in a couple of days ago. Someone wanted a business plan for a childcare facility. She wanted to know what it would cost. I explained that was a function of how detailed she wanted the plan, how much work she had already put into it and how much of her own time she was willing to devote to it. It was soon clear that this was another case of just give me a damn plan and stop asking me your ridiculous questions. I asked why she wanted a business plan and she responded it was for an SBA loan. She didn\'t want it; the SBA wanted it. She said she would try to find someone that had childcare experience that could get her a business plan fast. I wanted to suggest that she call McKinsey, that they probably have an entire global initiative covering home-based childcare centers. I bit my tongue. This happens frequently. People consumed by the entrepreneurial spirit only to have the full force and effect of their unlimited passion thwarted by some jerk that expects them to know what they\'re doing. They call and want a piece of paper that will make these people go away and stop bothering them. I could suggest they go online, find a fill in the blank form and have at it. The problem is that you have to know how to fill in the blanks. Curse this lust for knowledge that the people with the money say they need to have. I am convinced that the best reason for an entrepreneur to start a business plan before spending a lot of time and money is to begin to discover what they do not know. I am sure that half of those people would give up their plans before they even started. It is not that I do not like entrepreneurs, I consider myself one. I do not like failure. I would rather see someone call it quits before they even get started than to crash and burn after they put their heart and soul into a business venture. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/why-do-you-want-a-business-plan_.htmlTue, 15 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700Leadership may seem like an unusual topic for solopreneurs. An individual working alone may not appear to be a likely candidate for leadership training. Leadership is, however, a necessary component of an entrepreneur\'s skill set. First and foremost, they are managing the most difficult employee ever, there self. What could possibly be harder than inspiring, teaching, correcting and managing a person that knows you inside out, is free to take advantage of your weaknesses and knows the answers before you even ask the question? Second, more so than in bigger businesses, solopreneurs must view the people around them as part of their team. Working with, listening to, guiding and coordinating advisors, suppliers and customers is vital to the success of their business. Third, the successful solopreneurs will someday become an employer and have a staff to lead. Bad habits die hard and a solopreneur should develop good leadership skills early in order to be prepared for the task ahead. Leadership Skills A Duke University survey of CEO\'s of large and small businesses identified leadership skills in order of importance. The following is the top half of the list. Skills Rated as Most Important Promoting an ethical environment Acting with authenticity Understanding and interpreting the competitive environment Developing trust in relationships with other employees Demonstrating optimism and enthusiasm for organizational objectives Demonstrating dedication and effort Promoting a sense of responsibility for the whole organization Creating cohesive teams within my business unit Communicating strategic frameworks Engaging other employees in the strategic vision Understanding and interpreting changes in the economic environment Acting fairly towards others Developing strategic frameworks Promoting teamwork Serve as a role model The study found a very distinct differentiation in the ranking of \"sense making\" skills. They describe an executive\'s ability to assimilate, interpret and communicate internal and external factors affecting the business. The external sense making skills (in bold) were more highly rated that internal sense making skills. In fact, all of the internal sense making skills ranked in the least important category. In this and related studies, the skills most correlated to increased financial performance of a firm are those relating to: Inspiring others 5. Demonstrating optimism and enthusiasm for organizational objectives 10. Engaging other employees in the strategic vision 17. Inspiring other employees to raise their goals Leader responsibility 1. Promoting an ethical environment 7. Promoting a sense of responsibility for the whole organization 29. Helping other employees balance their personal interest and responsibilities with their professional interest and responsibilities (the lowest ranked skill) Let\'s look at the skills relating to inspiration and the responsibility as they relate to solopreneurs. Inspiration The inspirational skills speak to knowing what you\'re doing, believing in what you\'re doing and being committed to a high level of success. Demonstrating optimism and enthusiasm for your objectives implies that you do have a clear set of objectives and you are personally convinced they can be achieved. That suggests that there is a well thought out plan in place. The same is true with engaging other employees in the strategic vision. The direct implication is that there is a vision and a strategy to support it. This gets to those external sense making skills that were ranked so high in the survey. Understanding the economic and competitive environment, the ability to create a strategic framework for how your business will create value and competitive advantage in the context of that environment and the ability to engage others in the vision. The solopreneur may not have a board to convince or employees to engage in the strategic vision, but there are other stakeholders that do need to internalize the plan and support if not rally others to its cause. Those people vital to the success will need to believe in you and your business. Your advisors, bankers, suppliers and customers which each have a need at various levels to understand your plan. Nothing is less inspirational than settling for good enough. Lofty goals are infectious. A solid strategy, a well thought out business plan with aggressive goals cannot help but inspire. Too many entrepreneurs set modest goals and as a result, they and their business never reach full potential. Big fish eat little fish and with only one-third of small businesses surviving 10 years, it\'s best to try and be the big fish, even if it\'s a small pond. Responsibility The skills identified as relating to leadership responsibility embody keeping your own house in order. Some entrepreneurs are willing to do just about anything to ensure the survival and success of their business. Again, bad habits die hard and usually grow over time. The corners you cut in the early years will likely define your style and your brand for a long time to come. Promoting a sense of responsibility for the whole organization means taking care of stakeholders. Your family also depends on the success of your business. Keep them in the loop and don\'t forget your responsibilities to them as well. Remember the people and companies that helped you along the way. You may out grow them, but they should always be treated with caring and respect. Successful entrepreneurs are skilled at building relationships with people that are vital to the success of their business. Ask yourself if you are building relationships or just using people. It\'s hard as an entrepreneur to have a rational conversation on work-life balance. The average successful starting entrepreneur works a seventy-hour week. That doesn\'t leave a lot of time for anything else, but eating and sleeping. This is one that you will have to wrestle with yourself. Conclusion Leadership skills are not the domain of CEOs of large corporations. Solopreneurs need the same skills to be successful. The ability to interpret the economic and competitive landscape, develop a sound business strategy and a plan to execute the strategy transcends company size. The need to inspire is perhaps even more critical for solopreneurs as is taking responsibility for those around you. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/leadership-and-the-solopreneur.htmlMon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700I was recently doing some research for a presentation to a group of entrepreneurs. Since much of my consulting business is to entrepreneurs, this is not the first time I\'ve jumped online and to dig up what I could find on what an entrepreneur is and what makes an entrepreneur successful. What I came up with was eye opening and caused me to take pause and examine my own entrepreneurial activities. Most of the research was sifting through economic census data and reading highly footnoted articles. Despite all of that, I came away with a view that knit together all of the statistical data with the academic analysis, common sense and experience. I don\'t think my audience is going to like what I have to say, but people seldom do. In the words of Jack Nicholson, \"you can\'t take the truth\". Let\'s first look at what a small business is. The SBA has a variety of ways of determining what is and is not a small business. The number of employees, 500 to be specific, measures most manufacturing companies. Most service businesses are measured by revenue, $7 million is the common cut off. Other industries are ranked by as few as 100 employees and up to 1,500 employees. Others ranked by assets and still others ranked by as little as $750 thousand in revenue to over $25 million. Nice to know, but difficult to work with so I will default to the 500-employee cut-off. Statistically speaking there are no large companies. Of the almost 27 million firms in the United States, less than 0.1% are big businesses. So, for our purposes, they don\'t exist unless you want to account for about half the jobs, payroll and revenues. Six million U.S. employers are small businesses. This is somewhat awkward since that leaves us short almost 21 million companies. Underground economy? Nope, they\'re the non-employer businesses. Almost 21 million firms are non-employer companies that are run by the solopreneurs or the partners. The Holy Grail of job creation is making the entrepreneur successful. Not only does each of these firms support at least one entrepreneur, non-employer businesses grow up to be employer businesses. In the process, entrepreneurs learn what it takes to manage future growth and new ventures. From this metamorphosis evolves the serial entrepreneur. In this case, unlike any other word preceded my \"serial\", this is a good thing. What makes these people tick, what about their background, genetic code, life experiences and personality make some entrepreneurs successful while the other two-thirds of them go down in flames. After years of multi-variant analyses, longitudinal studies and countless sociological profiles, nothing of real value has turned up. Or, at least nothing of value that wasn\'t shot down by the next fascinating study. Oddly enough, it is not who an entrepreneur is, but what they do that makes them successful. I searched for a definition that would seem to be an obligatory part of any discussion of entrepreneurship. I was taken by the simplicity of this definition and by its elegance. There is much to read between the lines. Here is a definition of entrepreneurship provided by Harvard University. Entrepreneurship is the process of creating or seizing an opportunity and pursuing it regardless of the resources currently controlled. Creating an \"opportunity\", we hear a lot about that. The clever entrepreneur, a visionary, seeing what the rest of us fail to see and turning it into a billion dollar empire. Researchers discount this as not including all of the external factors that in large part determine success or failure. And what about this \"seizing\" an opportunity? I guess this might have some other meanings, but at the very least, it would suggest that an entrepreneur might use someone else\'s idea because they had the determination to make it happen. I would hope that the highly revered entrepreneurial community is not going around stealing other people\'s ideas. If not, where do they get them? The same thing with this business of \"pursuing\" if they don\'t have the \"resources\", do they steal them too? Fear not, for some bright people on the west coast at Stanford and Berkley came up with an answer. They decided that successful entrepreneurs are: Skilled at using their time to develop relationships with people that are vital to the success of their business. Fascinating! Despite a world where everyone is deafened by their iPod and mesmerized in a texting trance, entrepreneurs find time to talk to other people and learn from them. These people actually share valuable information and creative ideas with others. The entrepreneur calls this networking. I always thought networking was the process of handing-out, as many business cards as you could to as many disinterested people that strangely enough wanted you to have their business card as well. The networking I know is something akin to a shark feeding frenzy. An event where the conversation can barely be heard above the constant clicking of business cards being peeled off of monstrous stacks held in reserve for the next person that isn\'t otherwise occupied trying to make a sale after their elevator speech complete with CSP, USP, key words and call to action. These crazy entrepreneurs aren\'t selling at all. They\'re building relationship, establishing their reputation and trying to help others. The fools aren\'t even trying to make a sale. Yet, it works. Oddly enough, just like the rest of us mortals, the successful entrepreneur doesn\'t go into business with all the answers. They don\'t have an A to Z business background, they don\'t know everything about intellectual property rights, establishing a corporate structure, product design, marketing, sales, accounting, who the major market movers are, who are potential joint venture partners and the list goes on and on. Evidently, through these relationships, they learn, what they don\'t learn, they find out the names of the people that can help them. In some case, money changes hands, in other cases it\'s the free exchange of ideas and information. I must try this out! By the way, there was one other school that chimed in on entrepreneurial success, Princeton. The average number of working hours per week of a successful starting entrepreneur is seventy. This catches the typical American dreamer by surprise. I have always viewed myself as a hard worker. I thought surely I\'m putting in enough hours to claim a passion for my business. After adding up my 10-11 hours a day during the week and 6 to 8 hours over the weekend, I\'m clearly a 60 hour a week guy, a slacker in the entrepreneurial world. I\'m still pondering this one. Having covered how to be successful, also keep in mind how to fail. Throwing caution to the wind and marching onward into the entrepreneurial fog without taking care of the business fundamentals sends 65% of entrepreneurs to a sometimes mercifully quick and sometimes a prolonged and agonizing death by the 10th year. Passion is no substitute for knowledge. If you don\'t know how to plan, organize and manage your business, do what the successful entrepreneurs do and find out who does through networking. The bottom line for entrepreneurial success is to be social and network tirelessly, not for sales, but for ideas, resources and partners. Work hard and remember the fundamentals, do the proper planning and be prepared for the unexpected. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/successful-entrepreneurs-1.htmlTue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800Entrepreneurs face self-imposed limits to their growth based on preconceived notions of their own abilities and confidence in others. These limitations translate into anemic visions of their business potential. I have observed barriers to business vision based on five stages of business development. Each stage is a learning process for the would-be entrepreneur. A different management style accompanies each and stays with the individual throughout their career. Each stage also has its own set of economic dynamics that govern the financial return of the entrepreneur\'s efforts. Some skip stages and accelerate quickly, while others are mired in a particular stage and never reach the next level. Being stuck in any of the stages does not mean that the individual will not enjoy the business experience or in many cases not enjoy financial success. It only means that they will not achieve their full potential. This provides for greater opportunities for those that may ultimately buy the business and move it forward. Understanding the implications of these stages may provide the entrepreneur with greater incentive to take the next step and consultants such as myself the opportunity to help guide the way and enjoy some financial gain as well. Stage I: The Hobbyist. The would-be entrepreneur has cold feet. Maintaining their day job, they flirt with their entrepreneurial aspirations. Perhaps compulsively attending social media events, they talk about their business at length, but have not fully committed themselves to making it happen. There is no particular management style at play in this stage, just an individual with a dream. There is an internal struggle here of balancing all of their practical constraints of supporting themselves and perhaps a family or an expensive lifestyle against the risk inherent in actually starting a business in earnest. This is where most small businesses die a slow and agonizing death. Little has been invested, but much is lost in the fleeting entrepreneurial aspirations of the people that will always ask themselves, \"what if?\" Stage II: Self Employed. The Hobbyist has crossed the Rubicon. Now fully committed to making a go of their business, the day job is gone and their livelihood is dependent upon the success of the venture. Belief in themselves and self-motivation got them across the threshold and will dominate the management style at this stage. Everything that happens good or bad to the business is theirs to own. They make all of the decisions and do all of the work. Most successful entrepreneurs get through this stage with near obsessive-compulsive behavior towards their work. Long hours six or seven days a week to make it happen and get the venture from cash drain to profitability and stability. Survival instinct drives the Self-Employed until the venture is providing for their needs. Financially, they are severely limited, particularly those in personal services. Financial return is a strict relationship between price and the hours they can bill-out. Even in product-based businesses, the Self-Employed are constrained by the number of potential clients they can find and convert to customers while still managing the affairs of their business. Stage III: The Entrepreneur. The Entrepreneur has fully committed to the business and has made the first steps towards leveraging themselves through employees or other commitments to suppliers or through alliances. At this stage, the venture truly becomes a business with the introduction of a more financially dynamic enterprise transcending the simple equations of dollars per hour. The self-motivation and belief that got the Entrepreneur past the Self-Employed stage is still at work. A new management skill is now learned and that is instruction. The entrepreneur will typically hire people to do very specific tasks and direct their every move. They are still feeling the survival instinct and not prone to fully delegate or empower employees. The successful entrepreneur will learn how to view and describe their business process and communicate it effectively to their employees. This can be a very inefficient stage financially as the human assets they employ are under–utilized and their management time is disproportionate to the financial advantage gained. At this stage, a multiple-employee business is still a one-person show. In my experience, most businesses hit the glass ceiling at being Self-Employed. Stage IV: The Small Business Owner. In Stage IV, the Entrepreneur has relinquished full control of the business and has added a layer of management or supervisors to their organization. The survival instinct is no longer a primary motivating factor. Growth is the primary motivation and the Small Business Owner is utilizing management skills to run an organization. This stage is difficult for the Small Business Owner. It is the first time they will effectively cede control of their business to others. Typically, this stage is the most awkward from both a management and financial standpoint early in the cycle. The former entrepreneur still clings to control over the business. The management team enjoys senior level positions and commensurate pay, but little authority. They are implementers for the Small Business Owner and simply relieve the Owner of direct supervision of a growing organization. I have seen Small Business Owners pay six-figure salaries to managers they give no authority to and still roam the shop floor making sure everyone is doing their job. This is another stage that many businesses will never break through. A Small Business Owner unable to relinquish control will be hamstrung by the cost of a management team that is never fully utilized losing the potential financial advantage of an organizational structure. Stage V: Organizational Leadership. This is truly the break through stage of any business. Ownership has taken on a strategic role in guiding the organization\'s future and management is empowered to both contribute to strategic decision making as well as implement strategy. Attainment of the leadership stage usually has a cascading effect on the style of successive layers of the organization. Full utilization of individuals\' ability to contribute provides for the greatest productivity of the organization and financial return. Many large corporations never reach this level. I have seen corporate officers with compensation in seven figures unable to make decisions of minor consequence relative to their total responsibility without running it past the CEO. Either the CEO has done a poor job in hiring or has communicated their lack of willingness to respect the authority of their reports no matter what policies they may have stated. In other cases, I have seen small businesses run as if they were Exxon Mobil. There you see strategically focused CEOs providing leadership to an empowered organization of often less than 50 people. For businesses large or small, the objective is to have an organization that is fully utilized in order to maximize financial return and the full potential of the business. Too many startups hit a glass ceiling due to the owner\'s inability to let go. Achieving the proverbial \"next level\" is usually far easier than the owner thinks. It is very often a matter of personal growth and transferring the belief in themselves to belief in others. What stage are you stuck in? Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-other-glass-ceiling---entrepreneurial-growth.htmlTue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800The recession has created a new wave of entrepreneurs. Disenchanted corporate executives will often choose to start their own business versus extending their corporate careers. With close to three-quarters of new businesses failing within 10 years, this is not an easy out to finding another position or without risk. Too often new entrepreneurs, even well funded and knowledgeable former executives, will enter their new business adventure with apprehension and not be fully committed. Startups treated as hobbies are doomed. A successful startup is one with a fully committed entrepreneur that is playing to win. The hobbyist will usually work from home, meet prospects at Starbucks and conduct business from his or her home or cell phone. Their business and personal lives are hopelessly interconnected and the ability to achieve an effective focus on the business is lost during the crucial early years. While the work environment and the professional façade presented to clients cannot compensate for a poor business concept and lack of a plan, it can make the difference for a viable startup. Quality work requires focus. If the phone constantly interrupts you, ringing you will not be effective. Similarly, if you are not focused on the caller because you were interrupted, it will show. At the same time, you need to be available to your prospects and clients, an imperative for being easy to do business with. What is a person to do? Meadow Creek Professional Center now offers Club Meadow Creek. Club Meadow Creek provides an ala carte menu of essential business services coupled with various levels of office time. The entrepreneur can keep expenses down while making sure the opportunity to come to an office to focus, meet with prospects and clients and discuss business with like-minded entrepreneurs is always available. With phone support, a familiar voice always answers the phone and can make sure you want to take the call before forwarding it to you. Clients and prospects will take comfort from a person answering the phone, a familiar voice and the opportunity to pass on a quick message or get a question answered. We can also provide a business mailing address so that important communications are not mixed up with coupon envelopes, utility bills and flyers at home. Someone is available to receive and sign for packages, office equipment is ready and waiting and administrative services are a phone call away. Clients and prospects will also find meeting in an office or conference room more reassuring than the local coffee shop. You are conducting business and a proper place to meet can help project a professional presence. You have also probably heard enough about branding to last you a lifetime. All the headshots, clever profiles and PR cannot compensate for the lack of a proper place to conduct business. Club Meadow Creek provides a professional work environment at a price affordable to even entrepreneurs just out of the starting gate. If you are working out of your home, car or suitcase, a Virtual Office is a necessity for doing business. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/play-to-win_.htmlThu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700Having suffered through more than a half-dozen economic traumas in my professional career, I had grown complacent and philosophical about economic cycles. That of course ended as we entered the latest recession and as one of the self employed I found myself more than inconvenienced, but one of the traumatized. Instead of focusing solely on the managing through the consequences of economic distress, I found myself in economic distress. I still follow my advice to clients and keep pursuing new lines of business and creating opportunities for greater growth through the cycle. I have no doubt that as we enter recovery, my business will be far more profitable and larger. The returns will not translate into a higher standard of living, but only the ability to recover personal wealth for some years to come. I am left with trying to understand what happened and to discern the fundamentals of the financial crisis. My conclusion is basic; financial stability is predicated on a fundamental relationship between risk and return and that relationship was nullified through misperception created by advanced risk transfer instruments. The creation of highly complex financial instruments designed to transfer risk have altered the perceived relationship between risk and return. Credit risk transfer through credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and a variety of other derivative products have blurred the risk return relationship. The fact of the matter is that while these instruments have transferred and dispersed risk, they cannot eliminate it. What has happened is that the failure rate of individual obligations has overwhelmed the viability of the financial instruments designed to mitigate the risk. The larger problem is that personal, corporate and government behavior was influenced by the perceived lack of risk eliminating sound decision making that was traditionally tempered by the risk return relationship. Public policy makers unfettered by traditional measures of risk made policy and influenced regulatory agencies in ways contrary to established norms to satisfy their desires to provide opportunities to individuals that were beyond their means and to allow corporate sponsors to grow beyond rational expectations. Corporations and individuals made similar irrational decisions intoxicated by the perceived lack of risk. The combined effect culminated in an overload of risk in the neatly packaged securities, insurance contracts and safety nets. When the risk return relationship ceases to exist, greed runs amok in the capitalistic system. Greed drives the capitalist system. I do not mean that in the pejorative sense, but as the natural human behavior to want more and therefore, what is the foundation of the work ethic that has made capitalism the only viable model for modern economies. Greed, as I define it, is kept in check by an understanding of the consequences of over-indulgence and if not that, limits placed on individuals, corporations and governments by their stakeholders. Greed and irrationality creates economic bubbles and ultimately the system collapses. The solution cannot be the banning of sophisticated financial instruments; that is impossible to control in any rational manner. Full disclosure of the use of the instruments and their inherent risks will create an environment of their prudent use and rational decision making that may prevent the unsophisticated from becoming victims of their own ignorance and greed. The melt down cannot be blamed on any one group of individuals; it was the collective failure of society to recognize the consequences of their own actions or maybe fluoridation.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-diminution-of-risk-or-how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-debt.htmlWed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700The recession appears to have reached its nadir or close to it and a recovery is soon to follow. The current recession has shed 3.7% of GDP since the end of 2007 equaling the 1957-58 recession as the deepest downturn since the Great Depression. As with most serious financial disruptions, the pessimist and those that wanted TV airtime were prognosticating another depression. This recession fell far short of that. The Current Crisis vs. The Great Depression Current Crisis The Great Depression GDP Decline 3.1% 36% Unemployment 9.5% 25% Stock Market decline 48% 87% Mortgage Delinquency 10.5% 50% Bank Failures 92 Thousands The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco While we are not out of the woods yet, it is time to start contemplating what the recovery will look like. I believe that it will share an important characteristic of the 2001 post dot-com recovery or \"The Jobless Recovery\". The movement of jobs to low cost countries will continue, rising health care cost and the uncertainty of health care reform will discourage employers from hiring. Low cost countries will maintain a competitive advantage in labor, raw materials and energy costs for the foreseeable future. Green initiatives like renewable energy sources and \"cap and trade\" will have an associated cost of doing business in most economically developed countries and exacerbate the situation. Corporations will attempt to reduce domestic labor cost by replacing jobs with technology where they cannot be exported. The net effect will be a continued reduction in the traditional manufacturing base over time. New jobs in technology and the green economy will develop more slowly than manufacturing jobs in prior recoveries. Unemployment at the end of the 2nd quarter was at 9.3% while Okun\'s Law would suggest it should be at 8.6%. Fewer of the unemployed are on temporary layoff than in prior recoveries. The disastrous budget problems in state and local governments will also reduce the stabilizing effect of public sector employment. On the other hand, the long duration of the current downturn has resulted in an extraordinary level of pent up consumer demand. Typically, the longer the recession, the bigger the bounce in the early stages of recovery. In the case of our current crisis, that may be mitigated by the extent of the trauma to the financial system and banks reluctance to take on risk. My guess is that as in previous asset bubble bursts, memories are short lived and the pursuit of profit will once again reign supreme in short order. Longer term, spending initiatives by the current administration on top of the prior administration\'s reckless spending, and stimulus spending programs that evolve into permanent government programs will establish long-term record deficits. While some Fed officials say there is no empirical evidence of a link between government deficits and inflation, at the very least this will bid up the cost of money in the future. Economists have warned throughout my adult life that our current account deficit was unsustainable and that life as we know it would change as a result. It has not happened yet, so I will leave the prospect open that government deficits can also go on forever without recourse. Therefore, with any luck, we are moving into the next cycle. I, for one, will be trying my darnedest to identify the next area of speculative excess and get in and out early. There will be one, if not tulips bulbs, dot-coms or real estate, something else that triggers an irrational speculative spark.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/let-the-recovery-begin.htmlMon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700One of the most often seen questions on market studies I have worked with over the last 30 years is: \"Is the company easy to do business with?\" To many entrepreneurs, this might seem surprising. You have been so inundated with the mantra of Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) and Irresistible Offers that this may seem an odd question to ask. With the objective of an immediate sale based on your USP, what could be easier? Well, the fact of the matter is that very few purchases occur on the spot and that multiple customer \"touches\" are required to make a sale. You will call a customer, meet with the customer, the customer will call you, you will call them, you will meet again and so on and so forth until there is a meeting of the minds, a win-win scenario is achieved, the planets come into alignment and you make a sale. This whole process is repeated over-and-over again throughout the delivery process, for after-sales support, customer relationship building contacts and for the next sale. Multiply this by as many prospects and customers that you have and life can get hectic. For the road warriors, e-commuters and home based businesses; the Virtual Office can be a real blessing. Quality work requires focus. If the phone constantly interrupts you, ringing you will not be effective. Similarly, if you are not focused on the caller because you were interrupted, it will show. At the same time, you need to be available to your prospects and clients, an imperative for being easy to do business with. What is a person to do? A Virtual Office provides you with an opportunity to be easy to do business with. A familiar voice always answers the phone and by coordinating with your schedule can provide you with some quality time to get some work done. The customer inquiries they cannot respond to will be passed on to you so you can return calls when you have the time and a place to focus. Clients and prospects will take comfort from a person answering the phone, a familiar voice and the opportunity to pass on a quick message or get a question answered. The Virtual Office also provides a business mailing address so that important communications are not mixed up with coupon envelops, utility bills and flyers at home. Someone is available to receive and sign for packages, office equipment is ready and waiting and administrative services are a phone call away. Clients and prospects will also find meeting in an office or conference room more reassuring than the local coffee shop. You are conducting business and a proper place to meet can help project a professional presence. You have also probably heard enough about branding to last you a lifetime. All the headshots, clever profiles and PR can compensate for the lack of a proper place to conduct business. A Virtual Office provides you with the necessary tools to be \"easy to do business with\" at a price affordable to even entrepreneurs just out of the starting gate. If you are working out of your home, car or suitcase, a Virtual Office is a necessity for doing business. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-virtues-of-being-virtual.htmlFri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700Social media web sites have provided a non-threatening environment to aspiring entrepreneurs to gain encouragement, education, camaraderie and networking opportunities not previously available. Forums, events, articles and other online as well as in-person features and functions provide a valuable venue for making the entrepreneurial experience more enjoyable and productive. To many entrepreneurs, it is an invaluable lifeline of support in the treacherous early years of starting a business. These sites also provide a vehicle for many players in the entrepreneurial and small business world to sell their services, espouse their views on business and brand themselves. This feature of social media provides a vast resource of expertise available to the entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs do not have a broad background in business and find the advice and knowledge available on these sites a necessary component of completing their business training. The founders of these sites do not vet new members by education, experience and business acumen. These are open forums and with that should go the warning: Caveat Emptor or Let the Buyer Beware! You have probably been inundated by messages regarding personal and business branding. For the entrepreneur, branding is an essential component of building a reputation of competency. It is actually quite simple, tell the world what you want them to believe and often enough and they will listen. Entrepreneurs must be aware that just because someone says they know what they are doing, that they are highly sought after, an expert in their field or the best thing since sliced bread does not make it true. Yesterday\'s mortgage broker is today\'s business coach. Yesterday\'s financial planner is today\'s marketing guru. The economic disruption has created an opportunity for many to explore new career paths. This can be a liberating and rewarding experience for many. The problem is that expertise, work experience and competency is usually a long time in coming. Social media addicts need to be aware that people are not necessarily, who or what they say they are. They should check out an individual\'s profile before they take their musings on business as gospel. Most entrepreneurs are putting their life savings at risk. The odds are that only one-third of them will survive. Before acting on the advice of others, they need to do their homework and determine if the individual is someone they really want to put their life savings at risk with. There is plenty of good, sound advice available on social media sites that can help entrepreneurs survive and flourish and advice that is a recipe for disaster. Entrepreneurs, choose your counsel wisely! Business is a serious endeavor. The comfort of social media sites and events can soften the harsh realities of the business world, but they cannot make them go away. Unlike so many of the messages on these sites, competition is a necessary function of being in business. All the hugging, wine drinking, picture taking and reassuring applause from your fellow social media members and friends will not make your business succeed. Passion without a thorough knowledge of your markets and competition will only get you the next hug, not the next sale. Going into business for your self can be the experience of a lifetime. Your participation in social media can be an important part of that both personally and for your business. I have met truly amazing people and made great friends in the social media world. I would recommend to anyone that to participate in these organizations, but to also proceed with caution. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/competency-and-social-media.htmlFri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700If you have been keeping up with my articles and blogs, you already knew the recovery would be under way and this summer would be a welcome relief from the agony of the past year. If you have not, then the recent economic news and pronouncements of the end being in sight by people in high places may have come as something of a surprise given all of their negative thinking, lowering of expectations and blame gaming we\'ve been subjected to for the past year. Unfortunately, our leader has also claimed victory and credited his stimulus plan for recent gains despite the fact that hardly any money has yet to be spent. My readers would have seen that coming as well. So now we are at bottom and the question is how fast will the economy recover and when will the price tag for all of the bailouts, stimulus spending and runaway government politically motivated spending come back at us like a ton of bricks. The answer to the first question is probably faster than most people think. Given the severity of the recession and the length of the downturn, there is a tremendous amount of pent up consumer demand. This will be somewhat tempered by banks, still licking their wounds over the humiliation of being caught handing out money like pretzels at a happy hour, they will undoubtedly find a new sense of conservatism and money will become very hard to come by. As for the latter, the threat of inflation hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles and there\'s nothing we can do about it now. For the small business, most of that is rather academic in any case. The bottom line is that opportunities will abound. If you haven\'t been taking the initiative as I have recommended and pouring on the marketing during all of this unpleasantness, you should start now. Yes, you do need to start getting your balances sheet in order. Paying down some debt is a great idea if you\'ve been strapped for cash, but the best way to do that is to make as much money as you can this coming year and that means a crash program on sales and marketing. Spend some time rethinking your strategy, and if you don\'t have one, this would be a good time to get it done. With the changes that have taken place and having reset our position in the economic cycle: Are your target markets still appropriate? Do you have the right set of products and services? Are your old competitors still there and are there any new ones? Are your top customers still around, will they continue to be? Is your pricing still competitive and reflect the value of your offering? Who\'s making their payments on time and who isn\'t? Have the needs and priorities of your market changed? Any new laws, regulations, standards taxes etc. that will affect the way you do business? As long as I\'ve hit some of the marketing Ps, let\'s not forget pricing and packaging. Your customers may be willing to spend more, but they will continue to be cautious. Providing extended terms or selling products and services in longer term contracts with upfront cost billed throughout the life of the contract may be more appealing. Make sure you have a teaser offering that is very economical to lure in new customers and demonstrate your value. This is a good time to experiment.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/don_t-sit-out-the-recovery.htmlThu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700My own view is that political correctness has resulted in the dumbing down of America. We can no longer have intelligent conversation about important issues of the day for fear of offending someone or that \"political correctness\" will be used against us to prevent otherwise compelling arguments from being made. This same phenomenon can be self imposed in the business world. An old mentor of mine once referred to \"killer assumptions\" that were engrained in the corporate culture that prevented rationale assessment of business issues. This can be such questions as having to be in one business, a loss leader, in order to also be in another more profitable business. There can also be predetermined ways to organize a particular business, what technology, resources or manufacturing has to be home grown or internal versus outsourced. Virtually any critical assumption in the analysis of a business issue can be considered an incontrovertible fact versus a specious assumption depending upon corporate culture. Corporate culture is largely a product of a company\'s historical experience. Certain assumptions can be valid for decades, but the market environment is constantly changing. No company wants to waste valuable time and resources testing preconceived assumptions every time a decision is made. At the same time, a periodic review of a company\'s perspective should be made to ferret out the \"killer assumptions.\" These assumptions can remain sacrosanct and to question them becomes a matter of violating \"political correctness\" resulting in scorn and isolation from one\'s peers. It often takes the introduction of new management from the outside to question the wisdom of these ingrained beliefs. Even then, to violate deeply held beliefs on how a particular business works can lead to departures with the epitaph that there was not a good fit with the corporate culture. There is a fine line between encouraging the reexamination of the corporate belief system and opening up every business discussion to what would essentially be reinventing of the wheel. A reexamination of the corporate belief system should be part of the strategic planning process and left to the best and brightest. However, those who question the corporate going–in assumptions should not be shot unless their arguments are without merit and waste time. The bottom line for both corporate and public discourse is that there should be no taboo. An argument should stand on its own merit. To shoot down discussion based on whether it is insensitive socially, environmentally, politically etc. is no way to run a country. Likewise, being unwilling to discuss rationale fact based business argument because it is contrary to preconceived thinking, long standing beliefs and the way we\'ve always done it is no way to run a business. Political correctness attempts to take the discomfort out debating divergent opinions. That\'s not the way the world works. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/is-being-politically-correct-blinding-your-business-vision_.htmlMon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700I am always improvising my elevator speech when I go to various events.  When I\'ve had too much coffee or my persona drifts back into the \"corporate\" Dick Gabel, it often takes on an edge that startles some.  That was the case earlier this week when I announced that business is war, entrepreneurs were in a kill or be killed situation, most of them were going to die and if they didn\'t have fire in their belly they ought to find a job.   I then offered my mercenary services, but I had probably lost my audience by then.  That was not what they wanted to hear. I once volunteered at a local charitable organization helping low income entrepreneurs.  I gave a strategic planning presentation explaining that as entrepreneurs, they had to recognize that there were barbarians at the gate.  I explained that their customers would want everything for nothing, their employees would want their money, their suppliers would want their money and their banks would want only as much money that allowed them to survive.  Today I would remove the qualification on the banks.  I told them if they wanted a friend in business to get a dog.  I then went on to describe how their business plan would define the rules of engagement with all of these hostile parties.  For some reason, I was never invited back.  Apparently they preferred my earlier kinder and gentler ways of describing the business world. In the world of social networking, chambers of commerce, internet marketing and networking organizations it\'s easy for entrepreneurs to drift into a false sense of security that starting and growing a business can all be accomplished from the relative safety and non-threatening atmosphere of social events, workshops and the privacy their laptops.  If only that was the case.  If you take that approach, it only turns it into a war of attrition.  You hunker down in your trench until you ultimately run out of money.  Your vision, your dream and your business join the frighteningly high body count of business failures. Two-thirds of start-ups will not survive.  In today\'s environment, it is probably much higher.  The survivors will be the ones with a plan, make that a viable plan, a determination to win, the willingness to go out and meet people and ask for their business and a lot of luck.  It\'s not a pretty picture, but that\'s the truth. My corporate background is in business restructuring and turnarounds.  I\'ve seen the deadly consequences that this war can have on large well capitalized businesses.  The death of those companies takes a good decade at the very least, unlike the entrepreneur that is usually just shot down in his or her tracks.  All of the group hug sessions in the world are not going to change the odds.  Capitalism is a monetary exercise in the survival of the fittest. This is not to say that as an entrepreneur you will not develop friendships with employees, customers, suppliers and competitors that will last a life time.  You will, unfortunately they will probably out last your business.  So why do I write this depressing stuff when all anyone wants to do is have fun and realize their dreams? Time after time I hear entrepreneurs say they have all of these great ideas and plans, but they need someone to give them a push.  To those that say all they need is a little push to get them going, it\'s time to wake-up and make some decisions.  They need to look at themselves and their business and ask two very important questions. Do I really have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? Does my business plan have a snowball\'s chance in hell of succeeding? Unless you can honestly and emphatically answer yes to both of those questions, it\'s time to get a job and move on with your life.  If you do answer yes to both of those questions, then you don\'t need a push, just look over your shoulder.  Those are the four horseman of the apocalypse coming at you.  Run, don\'t stop running, don\'t look back, just keep running and do whatever you have to do to succeed.  Ask for help when you need it.  Don\'t ask for a push, if you\'re asking for a push it\'s already too late.  Ask for advice, ask for expertise, ask for money, ask for the order, but don\'t look back just keep running.  They\'ll get the slow ones, but not you.  You\'ve got the drive, there\'s fire in your belly and you\'re going to be one of the winners. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/do-you-have-fire-in-your-belly_.htmlTue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700Every once in a while a conversation triggers some memories that have stuck with me through the years. They are usually humorous, ironic or particularly prophetic. Everything else has been compressed and relegated to external storage and basically irretrievable, just like on my own network. Today, my daughter was putting together her resume. She\'s in her senior year of high school and is trying desperately to get a summer job. She wanted some examples so I went to a file drawer in my home office and pulled out a lifetime of resumes. I pulled out the first one I did during my high school years. She asked how I did some of the formatting on it, wondering what Word function let me do it. I informed her with some embarrassment that the resume was created before personal computers. The fact that it was created with a typewriter left her somewhat in awe. I suppose it was something akin to watching The Woodwright\'s Shop and watching someone create a piece of furniture entirely with hand tools. I immediately took on a greatness as a person familiar with the ancient arts of creating things with out a CPU involved. This triggered a flashback that gives away what era I grew up in. I recalled my early career as a young Turk and financial analyst at a large corporation. The first IBM personal computer had been delivered and I had appropriated it. It had been placed in a remote room in IT to explore what magic this mysterious beast could perform. I occupied that room much like students of years earlier occupied college administration buildings. I planted myself in front of the machine and made it my own. Surprisingly intuitive, I managed to make use of the VisiCalc program. The functionality of VisiCalc over the AutoTab program I had been using was phenomenal. Early on, the CFO came to see the new technology. The IT folks were probably quite disappointed to find me there using their new baby, depriving them of the opportunity to personally show it off. In hindsight, it was perfect to demonstrate the utility of this new tool, but this was still a time of IT on a pedestal. Ordinary humans were not yet in the picture, but there I was doing my thing. After some preliminary introductory remarks the conversation paused and given the CFO was my mentor I felt obligated to say something more technically astute than \"this machine certainly make it easier to add, subtract, multiply and divide.\" So I asked how much memory the PC had. I really had no idea what I was asking, but in corporate speak it said volumes. At that point in time associating memory with computers said I was tech savvy - mission accomplished. One of the IT guys answered the question and I, hoping to elevate myself to IT visionary in the CFO\'s eyes asked if that was enough. The answer has stuck with me, \"Oh Dick, I can\'t imagine any application would ever require more than 16 Kb.\" I accepted that response as Gospel at the time. None of us in that room could possibly imagine what God had wrought in the PC. Today, kilobytes are like pennies with memory now being dosed out in gigabytes to PCs.The same individual confirmed years later that while a champion of creating canned spreadsheet applications that would merge hundreds of files into one, was no IT visionary. I had returned from an assignment at an industrial automation unit. We were a little more technically advanced than most of the company. Corporate headquarters was in the process of of being networked and we were in a staff meeting being briefed by IT and were told we would all get email addresses. I suggested, given my prior experience, that we should all hold off on having business cards printed so we could include email addresses. Our resident non-visionary replied, \"I don\'t think we\'ll ever get to the point that we use email to communicate outside of the company.\"Another defining moment. This one I will say I understood just how unimaginative that comment was. We were already doing just that at the automation unit. Several years later, I was getting old and technically uninspired. We were having a sales meeting at a new unit I had transferred to. There were a couple of interns that had helped me put some information (or should I say content) together for a presentation. I asked if they would like to present some of the material. They said yes, so I planned to split the presentation. At the time, using a light box or PC projector was not a proven science. Getting the PC to talk to the light box wasn\'t a no-brainer and transferring files was not yet accomplished through a thumb drive. I decided that I\'d play it safe and use an overhead projector. When I finished my section, the intern took her place and just stood there with a perplexed look staring at the overhead projector. About twenty years younger than most everyone in the room, she announced she had never seen one these and didn\'t know how it worked and couldn\'t understand why we weren\'t all using the PC projector. Her audience let out a collective sigh as we all were instantly dated, something middle aged men find particularly humbling in front of attractive women in their twenties.More recently, my office building was brought to a stand-still with a deadly customer service faux pas. We were without coffee. An emergency call went out to the coffee service and that afternoon the tech showed up. Our coffee machine needed a new mother board.Most evenings at the Gabel household end with four of us sitting in the familyroom with the TV on and all of us staring at our laptops, fighting over the power cord when our batteries die. Who would have seen this coming? Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/great-moments-in-technology.htmlFri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700My cell phone let\'s me watch TV, view movies, email, surf the internet, take pictures and an untold number of other things I\'m sure I have no use for, but it isn\'t worth a darn for communicating. For one thing, if we\'re going to be married to a cell phone 24/7 we want it to be unobtrusive, namely small. Small means that once you put the phone to your ear, the end of it doesn\'t reach much past your ear lobe. That puts quite a distance between your mouth and the microphone. Under ideal circumstances, through the miracles of modern science, your voice can often be heard clearly and without interference in a laboratory environment. That of course assumes the laboratory is not in a dead zone like my house. It is inconceivable that with more cell towers over powering the landscape than political signs in November that there is a square foot in this country that can\'t receive a cell signal. But sadly, there is. The more important issue is the total lack of fundamental etiquette in cell phone usage, particularly as it pertains to business. When I am speaking to someone and their cell phone rings, they\'ve lost me. Even if they don\'t take the call, I am usually treated to a painful electronic rendition of their favorite song. Ring tones more obnoxious than you can imagine are always considered cute by their owners much like yipping dogs. If they take the call and only tell the caller they\'ll call them back, I\'m still lost. I\'ve just been told that our conversation isn\'t important enough for them to turn off their cell. The movie theater yes, but me no. If they take the call and start a conversation I\'ve simply been put in my place. I have no value to this person. Even when I get a quick glance from them with an expression that seems to say \"Look at me, I\'m always available to my customers.\" All his or her customers except me at this particular moment. I am also put off when I call someone and I get them on their cell. Such calls are most often accompanied, in crystal clear clarity and high volume, the sounds of traffic, dogs asking to go out, babies needing a change, children needing anything and everything and spouses unhappy about their better half\'s lack of concern for any of the afore mentioned problems. Somewhere in all that there is the garbled sound of what I assume is the answerer\'s voice. The person at the other end of the phone cannot possibly fully engaged in a conversation with me nor me with them. I do want to hear a voice at the other end of a line when I place a business call. Even if it is not an emergency, there is something reassuring to find that I\'m not dealing with a one-person show or that an actual human knows that I have called and I don\'t have to wonder about if and when the caller is going to check their voicemail. Using your cell phone as a single point of business contact is like using Starbucks as your conference room; yes you can do it, but it\'s really lame. Clients want to do business with professionals, when they have conversations with you, they want your full and complete attention, they don\'t want to have to ask you to repeat yourself constantly because they can\'t hear or understand you and they most certainly don\'t want you to interupt a conversation you are having with them to take a call. Most answering services are incredibly transparent. A different voice answering all the time, the background noise of a hundred other operators answering calls and a disinterested tone of voice that does more harm than good for the reputation of your business. Humerlis can provide a solution for this problem facing most small businesses and professionals. We can be your virtual office and help your business grow! Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/cell-phones-make-a-bad-impression.htmlThu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700While it may be unfair to lay all the blame for the demise of the domestic auto industry at the feet of the United Auto Workers, the union certainly deserves the lion\'s share of the blame. From a selfish standpoint, its hard to fault their actions, they hold a monopoly on factory labor and they have successfully exacted hard to believe wage, benefit and work rule concessions from the Big Three for decades. All of this was done without killing them, but slowly wringing the life out of them. With peak automotive employment long since past, the union has only to protect the hard earned rights of the old timers to worry about. The young men and women that may have expected a lifetime of work in the industry had better make other plans. The crocodile tears running down the cheeks of the UAW workers with every additional plant closure make good TV. The idea that they can\'t understand how after three generations of the family working in any given plant that the gravy train is now over shouldn\'t be a surprise.If the Big Three wanted to make cars, they had to do it on terms dictated by the UAW. With so much talk these days about \"too big to fail\", I have to conclude our anti-trust laws need a second look. I\'ve already expressed by feelings on the industry side of that equation in my last blog. Let\'s consider the labor side.There is no doubt that unions corrected many abuses in the past. For the most part, they appear to be the abusers these days. Where a union has established a strangle hold on an industry\'s supply of labor, they proceed to suck the life out of it. In the northwest, we can see the machinist union doing the same thing the UAW did to the auto industry to the commercial aircraft industry.Why are unions exempted from the anti-trust laws? Wouldn\'t it seem that a more free market approach would be to allow say three unions to exist with a supply of labor and compete for a company\'s work. Union A might approach GM and describe the high standards they set for their members including minimum education standards, supplementary training, random drug and alcohol testing and a commitment to working with the company to improve productivity. Union A would contend that their workers deserved a premium pay package.Union B would approach GM with an aggressive offer with lower pay and benefits, but without all of the membership standards of Union A. They might require a higher rate of employment for a given job than Union A, but would work with GM to discipline unproductive workers and attempt to improve productivity.Union C would have the misfits that give unions a bad name today. These would be the workers that show up drunk or hungover, sabotage management\'s efforts to improve productivity and come down with the flu enmasse when someone was disciplined. Union C would probably retain the rights to the proud UAW name.GM or any of the Big Three would then have the opportunity to decide which union it wanted to do business with. This would seem to bridge the gap between keeping America competitive in manufacturing and protecting workers\' rights. The unions would behave in a more capitalistic fashion, desiring that their customers grow and be successful, while attempting to get a higher wage for the value added skill set they were offering.Over time, Unions A, B and C would gravitate their offering to what sold. Each would try to differentiate their labor offering in a way that would bring value to the customer, the Big Three. In this environment, we could see another reindustrializtion of America.When I managed a business in the northwest, we had a factory in the northwest and one in Mexico. The workers in the northwest lost sleep at night worrying about losing their jobs to the Mexico plant. The people in the Mexican plant worried about losing their jobs to China. In the foreseeable future, American factory workers cannot compete with Mexico or China on a wage basis. They can compete on the basis of education, training, ingenuity and a competitive spirit. That is not going to happen within the current model of our large labor unions. It\'s time to rethink how our anti-trust laws apply to unions. They have a monopoly and as such serve only themselves, not their members and not their customers, just themselves. This comes at a cost to American industry, American workers and American economic power and influence. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/unions-and-the-anti-trust-laws.htmlWed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700The term \"too big to fail\" screams for a new look at anti-trust legislation. While original anti-trust legislation looked at the unfair advantage of monopolistic behavior over potential competitors, consumers and later in restricted innovation, the thought that the demise of a single corporation could have a calamitous impact on our country\'s economy takes it to another level. It is inconceivable that we should allow this situation to exist. First we need to put some parameters on what it means to be too big to fail and perhaps more importantly what it doesn\'t mean. It is not solely an issue of size. A very large diversified firm may not have a singular presence in any particular critical market that its demise would have much of an impact on the economy as a whole. It also does not mean that the impact of failure would have a serious consequence on the equity market. It may indeed have such an impact, but if that reflects a general market environment that was contributory to the firm\'s failure, then it would only be symptom of a general problem. What it does mean is that the failure of the firm could not be absorbed by free market forces and would necessitate government intervention to mitigate unacceptable consequences. Such firms would typically be focused in a limited number of related oligopolistic markets. It would mean that the remaining players would not be able to absorb market demand for critical products and services and/or acquire the necessary assets of the failing company in order maintain supplies critical to the general economy in what may not be a robust economic environment. It would also suggest that the form of the oligopoly or monopoly was vertically integrated as well. Exxon Mobil may appear to be a likely firm to be anointed the \"too big to fail\" moniker, but maybe not. If for whatever reason Exxon Mobil failed, it would no doubt shake the cobblestones out of Wall Street. All other things being equal, the market would not collapse. Oil producing nations would fall all over themselves\' to find other buyers. If demand was there for product, tankers, refineries and retail outlets would be readily available and marketable assets. Being capital intensive, the employment displacement would not be commensurate with the size of the failure. Another key consideration is the nature of the product and the length of a customer\'s commitment to the product. Oil and its derivatives are fungible. The consumer has no vested interest in Exxon Mobil after topping off his or her tank. The car doesn\'t care if the next tank full comes from Texaco. Likewise, most industrial products would have other sources and brand indifferent customers. This means that a chapter 11 bankruptcy would not be a cure more deadly than the disease. So one of the largest corporations in the world would not in my mind be too big to fail. By contrast, the failure of General Motors would have considerable collateral damage. Employment is an issue as is the supply chain. There is also, albeit less than in the past, a geographic concentration of employment in the automotive industry creating a potential regional or local depression. The consumer\'s vested interested in the supplier is also not momentary. The relationship between the consumer and auto maker is typically around 7 years and then some in order to maintain resale value. A chapter 11 bankruptcy while helpful in solving its labor disaster, would be particularly problematic in maintaining the ongoing business. If it somehow did survive, the labor issue alone would probably force Ford and Chrysler to follow suit. Arguably quite deserving of failure, it would meet my standards for \"too big to fail.\" So where does that leave the financial industry. Current events of the day speak for themselves. Where size counts, then regulation is the answer. Where economies of scale are not as real as so often purported, then breaking up the financial juggernauts is in order. Corporate America and in fact the corporate world is obsessed with being large, very large. There is a preconceived notion that bigger is better. If that is so, why is the breakup value of most companies greater than its current market capitalization? For more on that, you\'ll have to look at some prior blogs like \"Big Business Looks a Lot like Big Government\" and \"Executive Pay.\" For my take on how this relates to labor unions, you\'ll have to wait for next month. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/time-to-revisit-the-anti-trust-laws.htmlMon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700I\'m feeling better about the economy these days.  While I hesitate to read too much into one good week on Wall Street, I do take solace in a couple of encouraging events that suggest there is more good news to come.  First, a couple of takeovers in the pharmaceutical industry.  In addition, Berkshire Hathaway announced that they were resuming takeover analyses adding that opportunities abound.  Stocks are now selling at pennies on the dollar having given back over a decade of gains.  If that isn\'t enough to attract massive inflows of capital to all but those that think the world is in fact coming to an end, the prospect of a market on takeover steroids and M&A growth hormones certainly will. Ben Bernanke said the most important thing for the recovery today is the stabilization and health of the financial sector. A stock market with a renewed pulse will increase the likelihood of opportunities for much needed non-governmental equity infusions into our beleaguered banks. Speaking of Chairman Bernanke, he said this evening on 60 Minutes that he saw the economy reaching bottom and stabilizing in 2009 with a recovery in 2010.  I have two important takeaways from that comment.  First, assuming the Chairman is being appropriately conservative for an individual in high office, I feel good about my earlier prognostication that a recovery would begin this summer.  Second, since we have nothing to fear, but fear itself, perhaps Mr. Bernanke\'s somewhat optimistic assessment might encourage others in high office to start leading and stop talking down the market and perpetually covering their own reputations by referring to the mess they inherited.  Bravo Ben!  He was even so bold as to say this was not the next depression. If we could fine every half wit each time they paralleled today\'s economy to the Great Depression one dollar, we could fund the well deserved bonuses to the AIG executives.  Speaking of which, why are we putting our honorable military personnel in harms way when we have highly compensated AIG and Merrill Lynch executives.  Why don\'t we air drop them into Tora Bora and tell them to flush out the Taliban for us using their incredible cunning and instinct. There was one more tidbit I heard on Bloomberg late one night last week.  An analyst in Japan referred to the same phenomenon I mentioned in my last post regarding the consumer leading us out of the recession.  He used the term \"austerity fatigue\". That is the insatiable human desire to spend money and how after a period of time, the most cost conscious, fiscally conservative and self disciplined individual will burst if they don\'t spend money frivolously.  If this is true of the most disciplined people on the face of the Earth just think what will happen in the most undisciplined most self indulgent country in the world.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/good-economic-news-from-high-places.htmlSat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700Every recession or economic anomaly is caused by the lack of a greater fool. Hard to believe given that everyone and their brother was involved in this one. From politicians that wanted to keep the populace happy by giving everyone a shot at their own home, other politicians that were happy to let it happen and fuel economic growth, the bankers, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, builders, building material suppliers and everyone else with a finger in the pie, investment bankers, shareholders of every entity involved and finally back to the politicians and government agencies that were supposed to be providing oversight, they were the fools. That would include about every last one of us. Unfortunately, one day, the greater fool didn’t show up. The narcotic of easy money had us all in a self-indulgent stupor. We were all rich by our 20th century standards, but this was the 21st century and life was good. The party was raging on Wall Street. The market was unstoppable, credit was there for the asking and home equity was growing faster than John Q. Public could refinance and buy more fun stuff. The greater fool was expected to show up day in and day out. The greater fool came and bought up all the home loans nicely gift wrapped as collateralized debt obligations. We look back in hindsight and say they were very complicated financial instruments that only a few gifted people could understand. They were only hard to understand when intoxicated by endless creation of wealth without even trying. This epic binge even had the Wall Street geniuses deserving of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year drunk out of their minds with easy money. Then one day the greater fool didn’t show up. The nicely wrapped packages stopped moving and with age they began to smell like trouble and trouble they were. The whole thing fell apart, lock, stock and barrel. A quick trillion dollars of government bailout money averted a total meltdown. We are now being entertained by many of the same fools trying to get the economy back on track. CEOs are pilloried for flying in corporate jets by the guy who flies around in a personal 747 and a Speaker of the House that complained that the Air Force wasn’t providing her with a big enough jet when she assumed the position just a short time ago.  Both of which, by the way, are presiding over an entity taking in far less than it is spending. The same people that crucified the Big Three CEOs for coming to Washington without a plan, don’t have one of their own. Secretary Geithner handily reduced the market capitalization of the U.S. economy by 4-5% by showing up to a press conference without anything to say other than whatever he was going to do could cost up to $3 trillion. Absolutely brilliant! What was even more spectacular was that the market expected anything more than it got. History will look back at this period and describe the government, business and the public at large as the three blind mice. Hopefully we can get the constant recrimination, holier than thou self righteous rhetoric over with and get on with the economic cycle. Between the press thriving on bad news and politicians trying to lower expectations, some people think the recession will go on for another year or two. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of time. Americans are not used to hardship. They will not tolerate unemployment for long, they will not stand peacefully in bread lines and they will not reelect the people that allow that to happen. While I find the inclusion of so much pork and financing of political agendas versus job creation in a stimulus package nauseating, just like Geithner’s press conference, I don’t really expect anything better out of Washington. The system works in mysterious ways. I do have faith that despite our best efforts to use and abuse the bailout and the stimulus package, enough good will come of it to get the system in gear. Faith and mysterious ways may seem sophomoric. I’ll live with that until I read something from somebody that really seems to have their arms around this situation. The fact of the matter is that rarely in the event of a shock to the world economy does anyone have it figured out until after the fact. Policy makers face a constant barrage of self fulfilling prophecies, medicine with side effects possibly worse the disease itself and the overwhelming temptation to take advantage of the situation. Yet it seems to work. I do have some back of the napkin calculations of my own to reinforce my faith. Let’s say 300 million Americans equate to about 75 million families. Then let’s say 10% of those families bought homes with cheap and available credit they had no business buying. Then we’ll assume that those 7.5 million families bought $300,000 homes with 0% down. That’s $2.25 trillion in toxic loans that could potentially go bad. So $3 trillion should cover the mortgage backed securities problem with some left over for government and corporate malfeasance, an increase in the normal default rate due to the recession and million dollar bonuses for all the clever people that work out the details. With the financial system now intact, the stimulus package will take care of pent up demand for free flowing money from Washington to fund political agendas. The powers that be can then stop talking down the economy and start helping to fix it. Most of that will be taken care of by the American people. We’ll put up with frugality for just so long, but we are the consummate consumers. Americans will ultimately mortgage their future to get out there and start spending again. The consumer will drive the recovery and they will drive it like a bat out of hell. I’m not sure there will be many winners in this debacle, but the losers with be the usual suspects; the least fortunate of society and future generations. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-greater-fool.htmlThu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800No matter what your political inclination, the election of a new President always brings anticipation of some positive early action that will bring the various political tribes in the country together. After all, whether you voted for him or not, the country has a new President and we should all want him to be successful beyond our wildest dreams. So far, it has unfortunately been a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” This must be particularly distressing for younger Americans that enthusiastically embraced President Obama’s message of change. Why they thought this election was any more about change than any other election, I don’t know. The opposition rarely claims that the “in” party is doing a great job and if elected they will continue along the same path. The new President is off to a rough start. One of the early moves, to announce the plans to close Gitmo in one year was about as meaningful to most economically distressed Americans as Bill Clinton’s jumping all over the gays in the military issue with a not so definitive policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That provided a level of comfort to no one, not gays, straights or homophobes. Likewise, the closure of Gitmo is still plagued by the lack of resolution of the fundamental problem of what to do with these fine fellows and how to put Americans back to work. The cabinet choices were particularly distressing. A lot of well seasoned talent is being moved into or back into the White House. This is quite understandable for a President with very little experience to want to be surrounded by experienced help. Again, distressing I’m sure for those expecting change beyond imagine; But more disappointing was the ethical issues attached to several of the nominees. The President’s willingness to stand by them for a period of time was eventually interrupted by the recognition that people that owed more in taxes than most Americans make probably didn\'t enjoy broad spread sympathy. The most disturbing and by far the most critical issue is the stimulus spending package. What is supposed to be a short term jobs program looks more like a long term political agenda. The much talked about infrastructure projects that we sorely need amount to a pitiful 5% of total spending. The bi-partisan support that the President was looking for has not materialized. It’s time for the President to determine who is in charge. America gave the nod to him, not Nancy Pelosi. If he wants bi-partisanship, he needs to take charge of his own party before he can provide leadership to the other side of the aisle. As it stands, this stimulus package will be his undoing in the next election no matter what happens to the economy. If the economy rebounds smartly, there will always be an argument that it would have anyway. The recession is in its 15th month, a long downturn by any standards. With that in mind, we will be running deficits the size of Montana for the next several decades to pay for all of the long lived projects that are being sold as stimulus. If the economy does not rebound, he will be excoriated for not spending more on projects offering near term job creation versus political whimsy. Either way, the stimulus package is a loser for the new President, the economy and the American people. I’ve stated earlier that I’m all for a stimulus package. I think they tend to be of dubious value; however, they relieve a great deal of pain on the margin and provide a psychological boost to a nation overwhelmed with bad news. I encourage the President to show some leadership and reallocate the spending to where it will do some real good. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/won_t-get-fooled-again.htmlFri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Faced with disastrous near term prospects, you could join the rest of the herd and cut costs wherever you can, hunker down and wait for good times to return. An alternative I would suggest is to take advantage of your competition while they are hibernating. More than likely, they\'ve cut advertising losing the mind share of existing and potential customers, cut back in other areas costing them in quality and customer service and possibly in sales alienating existing accounts. What better time to go on the attack. Whether you are a one person show or a large organization there is no better time to invest in current accounts and get new ones. This does not necessarily require significant expenditures, just a positive attitude and desire to grow no matter what the economic climate. Here are a couple of ideas you can use to leverage existing customers and new customers alike. Newsletter - If you don\'t already have one, start one. This is an inexpensive way of communicating with your customers and prospective customers. Not only do you send a message that keeps your name in front of them, you can introduce products and services that play to their needs in tough times. Training - This can be a great revenue generating opportunity or a goodwill offering. With headcount reductions, responsibilities are being transferred between individuals fast and furious. People new to your product or service will need help. If the opportunity presents itself, make it generic so people with competitive products or just interested in product will be drawn to your program as well. An economical and convenient way to do this is via teleconferencing and file sharing. Telephone Contact - While driving or flying around to see all of your customers may be prohibitively expensive, calling them and all of your prospects is a personal touch that will count. Calling to see how they are doing, if they have any complaints, to discuss a new product or just wish them happy holidays is worth the time and effort. Questionnaire - This has many of the same benefits of a other contact methods and gives you great marketing intelligence. If you want to know what the market would find worth buying in a recession, ask. This is a great time to go on the offensive. Let Humerlis help design and implement your customer contact plan. We have the people and the technology to help you make a positive impact on your bottom line. Call us today and we can begin helping you grow. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/when-the-going-gets-tough.htmlFri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800I have a difficult time with CEO pay.  On one hand I would like to think that it is determined based on market forces and should not be subject to government scrutiny.  On the other hand, it is most certainly influenced by the CEO fraternity of board members and compensation committees.  As a result, I have to defer to my gut feel. I do not begrudge people like Bill Gates the ability to accumulate as much wealth as they can.  He didn\'t do it through an egregiously high salary, he did it by building a company that he owned a major stake in.  Likewise, Oprah created a franchise that made her fabulously wealthy as did Martha Stuart.  But what about your basic CEO who\'s just another hired hand?CEOs can have a profound impact on a company.  Some might say that if a company\'s market capitalization goes up by $1 billion, why not pay the CEO $100 million.  First, CEOs do not accomplish a darned thing on their own.  The ones we\'re talking about usually have 50 to 100 thousand employees or more at their beck and call.  Second, there is a little thing I\'ll call the reasonability test.  In a capitalist society, we all understand that the farther up in the organizational structure you are, the more money you are going to make.  Reasonability is usually a function of where you are in the structure.Personally, I can comprehend a person making a million dollars in total compensation a year.  I use total compensation since unless you do, other forms of compensation will be manipulated to maintain the status quo.  I can even understand someone making $5 million a year.  And just to be on the safe side for all those people who consider me to be an under achiever and incapable of understanding what good people are really worth, let\'s say $10 million is entirely reasonable.  That would make CEO pay 285 times that of a shop floor worker making $35 thousand a year.  Hard to imagine they both put their pants on one leg at a time.To hear about some CEOs making $100 million plus gives me pause.  Let\'s say that even my wife would not be able to find a way to spend all of that real time.  While money is something that no matter how much you have, you always want more; let\'s be reasonable.  If in one year you sock away a $100 million, do you really care what happens next year.  The CEO, as top dog is the visionary.  What is the company going to be when it grows up?  What are the long term market trends?  How does the company leverage globalization to its advantage?  How can it make some money off being green?  How do you tap into the $700 billion bailout fund?  If the worst thing that can happen is that you are fired and are forced to take another $100 million in severance, do you really care? Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/ceo-pay-1.htmlThu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800Current events seem to have raised the bar on stock market volatility. Today, seemingly no news is good for a 5% swing up or down. While a 5% swing in an individual stock may not be out of the ordinary, day-to-day fluctuations of that magnitude for the market as a whole certainly are. Does this mean even in a post recovery market, we can expect to see 10, 15 and 20% movements in individual issue share price be something of the norm? If so, how will that effect corporate governance? Even today, corporate America is mired in managing for the market. Anyone in a large corporate environment, from the CEO to plant managers lives for the quarter in order to meet analyst expectations. Changing the rules, or more vigorously enforcing the rules on public disclosure has made it more difficult for corporations to manage analyst expectations. With the price of missing expectations now even higher, corporate behavior will necessarily change. Like with anything, if the cost of failure increases, the propensity to take risk lessens. You might jump at the opportunity to point out that there are some people out there that should have been more reluctant to take the risks they did and you would be right. We are, however, talking about industry as a whole now. If corporate behavior is now expected to be considerably more risk averse, what outcomes can we expect? My own guess is that we can expect to see the hurdle rates for new investments in products, facilities and equipment and acquisitions be significantly higher. Innovation will suffer and perhaps productivity. Let\'s hope that the market settles down and cooler heads prevail. The long term impact of a loss of innovations and efficiency is not something we want for the American economy. The bailouts have pushed a big burden downstream and we\'ll need a vibrant business environment to absorb it in the future. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/is-volatility-here-to-stay_.htmlTue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800If you are not somehow preoccupied with the financial crisis, you are probably homeless, out of work and out of your mind.  Virtually everyone has been effected by the worldwide meltdown of the banking system.  It is only human that when faced by crisis, we look to see who to blame.  Given the magnitude of the problem we are fortunate that the government is going to do the work for us.  Nancy Pelosi has instructed Barney Frank to get to the bottom of this sordid mess.  While disasters such as this always have a host of people to blame, some of the best minds in the world have already seen the forest through the trees and simplified the problem for us.  The Europeans have determined it\'s all our fault.  Evidently, the world\'s policeman went bad and held a gun to their heads and forced them to buy the mortgage backed securities.  Their problems had nothing to do with their own lack of due diligence or an over levered European banking system that makes ours look puritanical.  With the burden of singular guilt for the largest financial disaster in most lifetimes,  I doubt that old Barn is going to have to look too hard for a singular scapegoat.A large part of the blame is most certainly deserved by the financial community.  With excessive pay packages only matched by professional sports and Hollywood and a once stellar reputation envied by Congress whose own reputation makes George Bush look like a national hero, what better group to place all the blame on.  What\'s more, these bad actors have also been the beneficiaries of decades of deregulation emasculating the powerful bureaucracies in Washington.This is obviously a preordained conclusion of the coming inquisition.  The American people are irate and need a place to lay the blame.  This is a slam dunk if I\'ve ever seen one.  Unfortunately, without a complete assessment of the events leading up to this, history is bound to repeat itself. In the third quarter of 1999 Fannie Mae announced a pilot program to ease credit requirements on mortgages it would acquire from banks and other lenders.  The objective was to encourage banks to extend mortgages to individuals that would not otherwise qualify for conventional mortgages.  The pilot program was hoped to go nationwide by spring of 2000. In a September 30, 1999 article in the New York Times, Fannie Mae Eases Credit to Aid Mortgage Financing by Steven Holmes, the action was described to be as a result of \"pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people\" and \"pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.\"  In a particularly prophetic way, the article states: \"In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980\'s.\"The banking system makes a great bad guy at this point, but without addressing the manipulation of that system for public policy and political purposes, we will have lost an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.  This program survived administrations of both parties and \"we\", after all, are the shareholders that demanded ever increasing growth at what can now only be considered, any cost.  Let\'s hope for a miracle and see if Congress takes an introspective look at the problem while deciding what new regulations they can apply to increase their control over a segment of our economy they have significant responsibility for destroying. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/who_s-to-blame-for-the-financial-meltdown_.htmlMon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800My own ability to remain philosophical about the stock market ended about 20% of my life savings ago.  I must admit that I have become somewhat cynical in the last month as the market tests new lows on a daily basis.  This has afforded me some enjoyment in the dark humor surrounding the pathetic attempts of the media and financial experts to explain why the market dropped another 5% on the previous day.  My favorite explanations revolve around addressing known facts as surprises thus prompting another market correction.  The idea that our economy may be slipping into recession is particularly fascinating.  Economist typically officially declare the economy in recession about the same time that a recovery is underway.  Understandably, they are working on delayed reporting of data that meets their official definition.  Most of us understand that when you can\'t sell your house, your retirement savings are worth 50% of what they once were, you can\'t borrow money and massive layoffs are daily news that we\'re probably in a recession and it\'s going to be a nasty one.  The market dropped another 5% yesterday presumably because we didn\'t know this until we got the minutes of the Fed\'s last meeting.Last week, the market took a beating when the Treasury Secretary Paulson told the Senate that they would not be buying bad assets, but instead purchasing stock in troubled banks.  If my memory serves me correctly, that was good for another 5%.  Excuse me, but wasn\'t that decided over a month ago when the European leaders came to Washington and the British bailout plan got universal kudos?The point is that there is no good explanation of what is going on in the stock market.  Obviously, we are in a recession and when that happens, stocks go down.  The wild day to day fluctuations are just an indicator that the people we were counting on in the financial community are not as bright as we had hoped.  The correlation between pay and intelligence is not very high.  Good old fundamental valuation techniques have been replaced with hysteria.  Until the hysteria dies down and there is some stability in the market, even trending down, there can be no consumer confidence and without that, no recovery.Oh look!  Obama picked his Treasury Secretary and that\'s good enough to increase the market capitalization of American industry 6%.  Good grief.Another hit for capitalism.  While the Wall Street geniuses that reduced market value by 50% get 8 and 9 figure incomes. future Treasury Secretary Geithner will have to make due with his 6 figure government salary. Richard Gabel http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/explaining-the-unexplainable.htmlFri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800How much a business should be making is not an easy question to answer, although all too many answer it without a lot of thought.  Too often those who put themselves ahead of the business consider the answer to be as much as possible no matter what the circumstances.  This can only be acceptable if more senior management have an equally short-term, self serving and/or simple minded view of life.  A somewhat more thoughtful, but nonetheless equally inane response is to establish the profitability of the industry leader as the benchmark.  The majority of companies that I have worked with were once profitable industry leaders, subsequently pillaged by management trying to make themselves look good.  Any fool can cut cost and increase short term profitability.  It takes a little more talent than that to actually run a business for the long term.  All businesses have intrinsic costs and an intrinsic value to their customers.  That leaves a level of profitability that is largely dependent upon whatever competitive advantage the company happens to enjoy. If a company cuts cost below that required to maintain its position net of that competitive advantage, it will lose share and or profitability.  These changes are cumulative and the longer the imbalance is sustained, the more pronounced the imbalance and more rapid the decline.  Likewise, recovery becomes longer and more expensive.Strategy needs to honestly reflect this.  My experience has been that companies have a far easier time recognizing issues of competitive advantage versus the time and cost to correct them.  Common solutions are Hail Mary plays like leap frog product development plans involving concurrent design and production, solutions based on cumulative dependencies on developing technologies and a belief that it can all be done on a shoestring budget.  Others include the development of something far less expensive and time consuming, a false reality.  The continuous redefinition of their served market to show share growth while maintaining unsustainable low levels of spending to show profitability.  Either way, the business is doomed.A good strategic plan should not always be a pretty picture.  Recognition of the harsh realities of the competitive environment is imperative.  If it is unacceptable, the company should explicitly state an exit strategy such as divestiture or milking the business (a more accurate description of this would be running it into the ground).  It has always frustrated me how difficult it is for firms to accept the latter even when it is obvious that the net effect of their actions is just that.Strategic planning requires a dispassionate view of the business.  Most importantly, it takes seasoned management to recognize the real time and cost required to effect change and the supremacy of that judgment over what someone wants to or thinks a business can make. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/how-much-should-a-business-make_.htmlWed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800Maybe it\'s the Christmas season, but I\'m beginning to have visions of recovery ahead.  My internal plan is that life will be much brighter this summer.  Many experts say that we\'ll have to wait until at least 2010 for good times, but I don\'t put too much stock in \"experts\" these days.  Even if they are correct, I hope that just as I didn\'t notice we were in recession in the first half of 2008, I may similarly be spared recognizing that we are in recession in the second half of 2009 if that ends up being the case.  Given the recently stable if not slightly increasing stock market of late, there are others are out there that agree with me.  Our best leading indicator says a recovery ahead.  Unfortunately, this prognostication comes from Wall Street now having all the credibility of Governor Blagojevich. My next indicator is the political climate.  We\'ve lived with deficit spending for decades with few very brief exceptions.  Between wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bank bailout, the automotive bailout and the upcoming Obama stimulus package, we have redefined the term \"spending money like drunken sailors.\"  I\'m nt complaining.  While  stimulus plans have not been proven to be terribly effective, the situation is bad.  After what has happened to my portfolio, no amount of deficit spending is too much to straighten this mess out. Obama is intent on making right a disaster that, politically, will be all to easy to pin on the Bush administration.  So far it appears he will spare no expense in stimulating the economy until it moans with pleasure.  That\'s even before he starts trying to deliver campaign promises and paying back all the members of Congress that have been restrained by the other side for so long.  The next couple of years will I\'m sure prove to be a virtual spending orgy.  Like military spending, you can\'t spend that much money without hitting on something that works.The Fed is now giving money away to banks.  One can only assume that at some point it will dawn on the banks that lending that money and charging interest on it may make good business sense.  If not that, the fear of the next administration coming down on them like a ton of bricks with regulations will.Finally, I\'m an optimist.  The current recession will be 18 months old mid-year.  That will make it long by historical standards.  Perhaps enough human suffering to punish us for our excesses.  We can then, as is our tradition, marshall on in a more measured and mature manner than we have....until once again we get caught up in our own success.http://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/recovery---light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel_.htmlSat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800It was on Good Friday.  My wife informed me that we were not going to be eating meat, but she wanted to stop in and get some fast food while we were out.  I saw a sign for Skipper\'s in South Everett, Washington and pulled in.  I regretted doing so almost as soon as I had done it.  The place looked run down and there weren\'t many cars in the lot, although we were a little early for the lunch time crowd.  As I got out of my car, an older, disheveled looking man was pulling a dead bush out of the landscaping.  He called out welcoming us and hoped we enjoyed our lunch.  I had not yet figured out if he was an employee doing some legitimate gardening or a homeless man that thought the dead plant would be a fine addition to his shopping cart.  Being born and raised in New York, I am naturally suspicious of anyone going out of their way to be nice and expected that he was looking for a handout. When we got in the restaurant and walked up to the counter there was another older and again somewhat disheveled looking man behind the counter.  I decided then that there was probably no need to warn him about the guy in the parking lot stealing his dead plants.  This fellow too couldn\'t have been more friendlier.  Not friendly in that annoying way like the Starbucks employees at the drive-through that are instructed to be your friend for a couple of minutes while your latte is assembled by someone else.  This guy had just the right touch and even helped us select the right meal to match what we wanted.We placed our order and proceeded to a table.  We were both taken back by all this friendliness.  It was a little like being in Disney Land.  The only difference was that Disney Land is a fantasy and you know it, this place was real, a little thread bare and in need of remodel, but it was ok because the people made all the difference.  Shortly after taking our seats, another gentleman came to our table with our meals.  It was fast food, paper plates and plastic forks, but he carried himself like he was the maitre de.  He brought dignity to an otherwise unremarkable meal.  He asked if there was anything else he could get us and then left saying he hoped we enjoyed our meal. He came back a little later to again see if there was anything else we needed and to ask we were satisfied with the meal.  This was not an attempt to just take up time as the restaurant had become crowded.  My New York cynicism was melting away.  I was truly impressed.  We finished our meal and as we walked out, the man behind the counter said goodbye and the \"maitre de\" said \"I hope you will honor us by coming back again.\"  The gentleman working on the landscaping waved as well when we were getting into our car.We were in awe.  Some simple fish and chips at Skipper\'s had become a remarkable experience.  While I am not in the area often and have not returned to that restaurant, it has had a profound impact on me.  I can honestly say that every time I have been in a fast food restaurant since then, I have felt guilty for not being at Skipper\'s.  Not any Skipper\'s, but that Skipper\'s with those incredible people.I have given a lot of thought as to how I might create that kind of experience in my own business.  What distinguished the Skippers experience from all the others was the degree of genuine sincerity in the people.  I am convinced that they meant what they said.  It is not something that can be recreated by handing an employee a script.  I\'m not sure a teenager working at McDonalds is even capable of feeling the kind of sincerity that these guys conveyed.  At that age, their entire existence revolves around keeping their parents in the dark about their lives.  Sincerity is not induced by incentive compensation either.  Incentives play on greed.  That can create positive business results, but not sincerity. Sincerity comes from employees loving their job.  Employers and managers can certainly create an environment that facilitates this and that is an essential element.  The more critical element is in the hiring process.  You can\'t just hire people that have the qualifications and want a job.  You have to hire people that want to do the job you are hiring for and not just a job.  If you love what you do, it shows.  If you are just willing to do a job in order to get paid, it also shows.All the customer service systems, procedures and incentives cannot replace employees that loves their work. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/my-very-best-customer-service-experience.htmlThu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800The question of what to do with the decision making and tasks that you have identified should be far more straight forward and quantifiable than the series of things you\'ve done leading up to this point. The answer can usually be determined by answering several questions. Do you have available staff to do the work? Do you have staff qualified to do the work? Do the responsibilities logically fit with any available qualified staff? Is your work load constant or does it vary throughout the year? Is there enough work to keep one person busy full-time? Do you have the time or interest in managing an additional person? Do you space for an additional person? Do you have the additional office equipment for an additional person? For most small business owners operating out of their home, the answer is easy. You don\'t have enough work to keep someone busy full-time, you don\'t have time to manage this person on a daily basis, you don\'t want someone coming to work in your home during the day and don\'t have the equipment for the person to use. You need to sit down with Humerlis and work out a plan. Other small businesses may have a spouse that works with you part-time and the work load could be shared, but you are more motivated by quality of life concerns. Your business has taken over your life and threatens to take over your spouse\'s life. It\'s time to get some outside help and start enjoying the success that you\'ve earned. For those of you that already have employees, the primary issues are the availability of time and qualifications of the employee. Replacing one over worked employee (yourself) with another is not the solution. If you have employees, with time to pick up the slack, are they the right people. A bookkeeper is an unlikely source of good customer service telephone support. Likewise, if you have a salesperson, don\'t ask them to do your bookkeeping unless you have a fondness for audits. Like anything else, select the right tool for the job. Examine your human resources available and determine if: Can they do the work that you want to delegate? Do they want to do the work? Don\'t risk losing a good person if saddling them with new responsibilities might push them over the edge. Will this draw them away from far more important tasks? The failure to delegate can only be out done by the failure to properly delegate. At the same time don\'t be too cautious about giving people new responsibilities. Looking busy is not the same as being busy. People like others to think they are busier than they really are. It\'s not because we are lazy, there is a sense of pride in being busy. We are by and large industrious people and we want to be busy. It makes us feel important and valuable. If we are not busy, we may be unimportant and expendable. Test the waters and assign new responsibilities to \"busy\" people if they are the right person for the job and see what happens. People generally appreciate the confidence you are displaying in them. Develop a rational for why this decision making or task is appropriately part of their new responsibilities. An explanation that you\'re just tired of doing it yourself is not a morale booster and unlikely to lead to positive results. Also, be prepared to answer the question that if they are getting additional responsibilities, are they also getting additional pay? If you concluded that there is no appropriate person to assign the responsibilities to, then Humerlis can probably help you achieve your goals. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/outsourcing-in-a-small-business-environment.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800The question of what to do with the decision making and tasks that you have identified should be far more straight forward and quantifiable than the series of things you\'ve done leading up to this point. The answer can usually be determined by answering several questions. Do you have available staff to do the work? Do you have staff qualified to do the work? Do the responsibilities logically fit with any available qualified staff? Is your work load constant or does it vary throughout the year? Is there enough work to keep one person busy full-time? Do you have the time or interest in managing an additional person? Do you space for an additional person? Do you have the additional office equipment for an additional person? For most small business owners operating out of their home, the answer is easy. You don\'t have enough work to keep someone busy full-time, you don\'t have time to manage this person on a daily basis, you don\'t want someone coming to work in your home during the day and don\'t have the equipment for the person to use. You need to sit down with Humerlis and work out a plan. Other small businesses may have a spouse that works with you part-time and the work load could be shared, but you are more motivated by quality of life concerns. Your business has taken over your life and threatens to take over your spouse\'s life. It\'s time to get some outside help and start enjoying the success that you\'ve earned. For those of you that already have employees, the primary issues are the availability of time and qualifications of the employee. Replacing one over worked employee (yourself) with another is not the solution. If you have employees, with time to pick up the slack, are they the right people. A bookkeeper is an unlikely source of good customer service telephone support. Likewise, if you have a salesperson, don\'t ask them to do your bookkeeping unless you have a fondness for audits. Like anything else, select the right tool for the job. Examine your human resources available and determine if: Can they do the work that you want to delegate? Do they want to do the work? Don\'t risk losing a good person if saddling them with new responsibilities might push them over the edge. Will this draw them away from far more important tasks? The failure to delegate can only be out done by the failure to properly delegate. At the same time don\'t be too cautious about giving people new responsibilities. Looking busy is not the same as being busy. People like others to think they are busier than they really are. It\'s not because we are lazy, there is a sense of pride in being busy. We are by and large industrious people and we want to be busy. It makes us feel important and valuable. If we are not busy, we may be unimportant and expendable. Test the waters and assign new responsibilities to \"busy\" people if they are the right person for the job and see what happens. People generally appreciate the confidence you are displaying in them. Develop a rational for why this decision making or task is appropriately part of their new responsibilities. An explanation that you\'re just tired of doing it yourself is not a morale booster and unlikely to lead to positive results. Also, be prepared to answer the question that if they are getting additional responsibilities, are they also getting additional pay? If you concluded that there is no appropriate person to assign the responsibilities to, then Humerlis can probably help you achieve your goals. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/outsourcing-in-a-small-business-environment-1.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800One of the most common difficulties facing small business managers is dealing with the concept of delegation. Delegation is a vital element in ensuring the efficient use of scarce resources. In a small business the most vital resource is the owner or manager. Unfortunately, the lack of delegation can overwhelm that resource and decrease not only the effectiveness of the owner, but all of the company\'s assets. The effect of this inefficiency is to hold the firm back from achieving its potential. Once the problem is understood it is much easier deal with. This paper addresses the issue in the context of not only the small business, but the one-person organization. Delegation is the process of transferring responsibility for completing a task, whether a physical activity or decision making to another party. The most common barriers to delegation are: Reluctance to give up control on the part of the owner. Lack of confidence in the available staff. Absence of staff to delegate to. The reluctance of the owner to delegate authority or responsibility may come from several sources. Lack of prior experience in delegation. Habit of doing everything and making all of the decision when the company was first founded. Misperception that delegation means giving up control. Many small business owners do not have prior management experience and, therefore, have not had coaching and training in management techniques. Delegation is sometimes perceived as a sign of weakness. Delegating is thought to indicate an inability to make decisions or lack of sufficient energy and commitment to keep up with the needs of the business. Quite to the contrary, delegation comes from an appreciation of the importance the owner has to the business. Recognition of this single fact should drive the owner\'s desire to effectively manage his or her time so that their efforts can be focused on the most important aspects of the business. Control is maintained by: Establishing clear limits to authority for others. Defining expected results, measuring performance and following-up achieved results. The most difficult impediment to success can be summed up with the adage that \"old habits die hard.\" Once the commitment to delegate decision making or executing tasks to others is made, identifying the individual to delegate to is the next step. Often times the lack of highly qualified professionals on staff becomes a convenient excuse to not delegate. Here is where most small business people can begin to realize the real opportunity that delegation has to them personally and financially. Only the most organized people manage to spend their working day focused on high value added activity. Most of us spend far too much time doing mundane and repetitive tasks out of force of habit or lack of desire to spend the time to show someone else how to do it. As a business owner, your time is worth a lot of money, not only to you, but your family and employees as well. They are depending upon you for their financial security and you owe it to them to do the best job you can. It\'s your business and there are actions and decisions only you can make. You need to get out from under the pile of paperwork and get to work on those things that are really going to drive the growth of your business by adding meaningful value to your customers. If you are paying bills, you are not introducing new products, creating billable hours or planning serious business initiatives. You are doing a task that someone else can do for you for far less money than your time is worth to your business. At this point, many of you will say you are a one person show and there is no one to delegate to. You may be reluctant to hire an additional person for a variety of reasons: There is not enough work to fill one person\'s time. You do not want to deal with having to manage a staff member. You have a home office or can\'t justify renting additional space for someone. You do not have the extra equipment that would be required. You do not want to incur a significant fixed cost of having full-time staff. There are alternatives to using your own employees. Outsourcing is not the exclusive domain of large corporations, nor does it mean sending work half-way around the world to be done by people you will never see. You can turn many of the day-to-day activities you are currently bogged down with over to third parties. This will free-up your time to do higher value added activities like growing your business or spending more time with your family. There are several steps in this process in order to make it a profitable investment for your business. If your business does not have a Business Plan, develop one (Many will say even at this point that there is not enough time to do this. If so, just go to step 4) Include in your Business Plan the executable actions required to make it a reality and the timeframe in which they should be done. Determine if the Business Plan can be executed given your current work load (Most people will say no). Take an inventory of the activities you spend your time on at work. Determine which activities require your involvement and those that don\'t. Decide on your business priorities and how you would invest your time if had more of it. Think through the process that you go through when you are doing those tasks that you will delegate or outsource. Select the person or company that you will work with to document that process and turn the responsibility over to them. Decide on performance measures that you will both track to ensure that the tasks continue to be done efficiently. Execute the plans you now have time for. Each element above will be addressed in other white papers by Adaptive Business Systems. We at Adaptive Business Systems will be happy to assist in any phase of this process. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-delegation-dilemma.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800Defining the process for every day decision making and tasks is both difficult and essential to successful delegation. Thinking through how you go about doing something is not as easy as it might seem. Several steps will help get through this and create valuable documentation for your business that is essential not only for delegation, but in establish consistency that will improve the quality of services provided that translate into enhanced customer service and improved business performance. Determine the importance of the task or decision you are developing the process for.Establish the amount of time and effort that the person should use to accomplish the process.Start with broad issues and concepts that determine rational results.Refine the process by narrowing the decision making process to the extent consistent with the importance, time and energy decisions you have made above.Put the process into words with specific steps to be followed.Create forms to document the use of the process for record keeping and future process improvement.Work with the individual to take over the task and teach the process as well as improve the process with their help with the benefit of their independent perspective.Continue to monitor results, adherence to the process and improve the process with lessons learned.Protect your investment. For every day task, we usually do not follow a particular process, but go by \"feel\" based on our accumulated knowledge from years of experience. Whatever process you do follow may be designed to make decisions quickly on these matters that you do not enjoy or do not have time for. As such, it is probably suboptimal. Now is a good time to rethink how decisions should be made and things are done. The first step in developing a process is to determine how important this task or decision is. As you rethink the process match the depth of your instructions to the potential value created. It is easy to fall into the trap of defining a perfect process where all possible factors effecting a decision or task are considered and analyzed prior to taking action. While this may lead to improved decision making, it may also slow the process down to the extent that the business suffers and unnecessary expense is incurred in the process. A balance must be achieved between the time and effort required to make a decision or complete a task and the value to the company of the time invested. What may be obvious and straightforward to you, may not be so to the person you delegate to. The decision making process is like a funnel. Capture the broad issues at first to ensure reasonable results and add to the process from there to refine the results to the extent that is necessary and useful. Many of the things that you delegate will be very discrete processes that don\'t require sophisticated decision making. But behind every discrete process is more elaborate thought that helps explain and understand the process. The knowledge behind the process is the difference between rote decision making and informed implementation of a business process. The former is usually quite transparent to third parties while the latter creates a perception that the individual is as a real member of the organization and a valuable person for a third party to talk to. The value of the business is enhanced when individuals interacting with company stakeholders are perceived as informed and capable of independent decision making and, therefore, assisting whomever they are interacting with. Don\'t just tell someone what to do, give them written instructions. Any process with a reasonable chance of being followed can be put into words. Words leave far less of a chance than being misunderstood and can be passed on to others with changes in staffing. Forms should also be established to document that the process is being followed and the results achieved. This is a quality control function that establishes a consistent implementation of your business methods as well as a vehicle for review and periodic process improvement. If a process is not consistently followed it is more than likely because the process is not good. Most people are not by nature inclined to not do what they are told. Lack of adherence to the process more than likely means that it is not adding value or time constraints do not allow for the process to be used. If the anticipated results are not achieved, then there is also cause for improving the process. Periodic review is an important facet of any quality program. What makes perfect sense to you may not mean a thing to someone else. Take time to sit down with the person responsible for implementing your process and walk them through it a couple of times. Make sure the steps and their rationale are clearly understood. Make changes and notes to the process based on your discussion to improve clarity. At regular intervals, use the tracking data to evaluate the effectiveness of the process by the results achieved. Your business changes over time and the no process is likely to be as effective or of the same relevance at some point in the future. Make a point of scheduling periodic reviews. One last note is to protect your business process. What you develop should be considered a valuable intellectual property asset of the company. How you go about doing things should be a competitive advantage you have over the competition. Don\'t allow others to take what you have developed at significant investment in time and energy and use it as their own. This information reflects your accumulated experience in managing your business and creating customer satisfaction. While the process documentation needs to be readily available to the individuals that use it, the hard copies should be numbered and tracked, marked confidential or copy righted. Hard copies might be printed on paper that shows a special watermark when copied. Electronic files should be protected. This may seem silly at first, but business process is a valued asset of the largest corporations. The adoption of highly structured quality programs and \"business systems\" are corporate priorities as they are enthusiastically received by the investment community. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/business-process-1.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800Deciding what task and decision making you should let go of and pass on to others may be the easiest part of the process. You have more than likely already made those decision and you remind yourself of those decision every day along with a lot of other people. What am I talking about you say. Ask yourself the following questions and you will probably have a really good start to give away pile. What things that you haven\'t done keep you up at night? What do your customers complain about? What do your vendors complain about? What does your CPA complain about? What do your employees complain about? If you are loosing sleep and other people are complaining, there is an excellent chance that the problem is things that you have neglected to do, don\'t like to do or don\'t do well. The fact that you think about them or others are thinking about them means these are things that need to be done and need to be done well. Sure, you\'ve survived so far without paying attention to this stuff and probably done quite well. But if you are going to take your business to the next level or just afford yourself some additional time and peace of mind, it\'s time to start paying attention to these details. Unfortunately, this list contains those things that aren\'t really getting done today that somebody needs to do. That means you aren\'t going to save any of your time by delegating these responsibilities, although you may sleep better at night. The next step in the process is to find out where you are spending your time doing things other people could do as well or better. To keep the process simple, let\'s try narrowing it down from the top this time. Make a list of the things that happen in your business that absolutely positively require your involvement. Some of the criteria for this elite list of duties might include: Expenditures of certain amounts of money. Pricing of significant proposals. Decision regarding employees. Decisions involving long-term contracts or commitments. Decisions involving critical customers. Actions and decisions that require skills and knowledge that only you have. If you are a one-person organization or a small business, the threshold for these criteria will be lower than for larger firms. That means that this list alone may be a full-time job. Over time, you will want to develop an organizational capacity to handle more of this list, but that is another initiative all together. The next list is what is left over. You now have to look at the list of things you must be involved with and determine how much time that takes each day. If you are working on new initiatives form a business or strategic planning process, you need to include time for those activities as well. If not, it\'s time to scrub the list again. In that case, it is often helpful to list the things that are done that really don\'t need to be done. The larger the organization, the larger this list will be. While large corporations have made the mandate of non-value added activities an art form, smaller businesses tend to keep these items in check. None-the-less, a periodic review of activities does ensure that people are not wasting their time doing things that are of little or no value. Managers, in large businesses and small, tend to underestimate the capability of people in the organization. Managers tend to be unaware of half of what their subordinates are doing on a daily basis and if they did know, would be very impressed. People will appreciate the show of confidence when new responsibilities are given to them. They also tend to rise to the occasion and will work hard to make it happen if you give them the chance. Don\'t forget that with additional responsibility should also come additional reward. Now it\'s time to decide what to do. It may be a matter of funding. If you have no one else to delegate the list to, outsourcing it will cost money. What is the expected gain of taking care of these items? Consider the source of possible economic return. List 1 – Those things that aren\'t getting done that need to be done Improved customer relations. Higher quality service. Improved vendor relations. Better bookkeeping and record keeping. Improved employee morale and lower turnover. A good nights\' sleep. List 3 – Those things that are getting done that you do not have to be involved with Higher quality decision making on your part on List 2 items. Sufficient time for you to work on Business Plan actions. Time for important things in your life other than work. If your business is like most, the opportunity for growth created by higher quality customer service and more focused effort on other growth programs is tremendous. Like anything else you\'ve done with your business it takes a little faith and confidence, but the payoff is there. At Humerlis, we can help guide you through this process. We can also provide many of outsourcing needs to make you more productive, your business more successful and your life more rewarding. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/selecting-tasks-to-delegate.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800If there\'s one thing worse than not having a strategy, it\'s having a strategy with no implementation plan. It\'s all in the execution. no matter how much research goes into the plan, unless somebody does something, it\'s not going to happen. In most small businesses, you have to do something whether you are the only person or leading the way. What\'s even worse than not having an implementation plan? One that is not realistic. Stretch goals are nice for deciding where your end point is going to be. It forces you to think outside the box. But the end result is unrealistic. Stretch goals for individual implementation steps are a different thing all together. Once you find yourself falling behind in implementation steps, you will become disenchanted with the process and so will anyone on the path with you. A realistic plan will allow you to enjoy the success along the way and feed your enthusiasm. You know your business and probably know what steps are necessary to make your plan a reality. How do you put a good implementation plan together? Lay out the steps required for implementing your plan. Take inventory of your resources and the resources that will be required to make it happen. Given the time available, will you be able to keep your strategic plan moving at a pace that will sustain itself or are new resources going to be needed? (see our blog \"The Delegation Dilemma\" for tips on freeing up time.) Having established a reasonable time frame that will allow you to keep your business running while maintaining a pace in your strategic plan, you need to decide who will do what. Create milestones that include a deliverable, tangible accomplishment or event that you can measure your timing by. Also include financial performance measures that expect to be impacted by the implementation of your plan. What results should be achieved and when? Track your results, if you are not achieving the expected results: Change the Plan! The day to day demands of your business can make it difficult to maintain focus on the big picture of your strategic plan. Celebrate your success along the way with people that are a part of the process. Keep them engaged and mindful that the process is very important to you. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/executing-business-plans.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800The strategic plan is a vision and roadmap to future success only to the extent that it is: Founded upon a rational vision. Impediments to the goal are anticipated and dealt with. The plan is flexible enough to respond to a changing environment. The organization responsible for making it happen knows the plan, believes in the plan and is motivated to make it happen. The alignment of these fundamental requirements seldom happens. To a very real extent, that is what separates successful companies from those that are not so successful. Dumb luck occurs with surprising frequency, however, a well thought out plan coupled with effective management and implementation has a far greater chance of success. While a sound methodology is imperative to construct a good plan, nothing will compensate for the lack of good business judgment and an engaged organization. This is not to say that Strategic Planning is a democratic process requiring the involvement of many layers of the organization. Quite to the contrary, that is a recipe for failure. Management must take responsibility for the plan and draw from the best and brightest of the organization at any level to construct it. With a management team or possibly just the owner in some organizations, committed to creating a strategic plan one of the first decisions to be made is to go it alone or use a consultant as a facilitator in the process. In large organizations, this is often not necessary. Small and medium businesses have often never created a strategic plan and are starting from scratch. Some or all of the components of developing a sound plan may be absent: A process or methodology for developing a plan.Individual(s) capable of separating themselves from day to day business issues and look at the business in the context of a longer time frame.Individual(s) with business experience to recognize common issues and draw from similar situations to add a broader perspective to the process.Individual(s) capable of translating high level plans into action/implementation plans and financial scenarios.A neutral party that can draw out thoughts of all involved, keep a group focused and committed to an objective.A party that can help communicate the plan and sometimes legitimate a plan to a skeptical organization. Call Humerlis today for a free initial consultation. We can give you an assessment of our ability to help you through the process and what the level of effort may be. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/strategic-planning-in-a-small-business.htmlWed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800A Business Plan is an essential element of running any business. Your firm can be a billion dollar multi-national or you and your dog working out of the garage, you need a plan. A plan\'s value is not so much the finished product, but the thought process and decision making that go into building it. A plan forces you to think through what it is you want to do, where you want to go, how you are going to get there and what problems you might encounter along the way. It will force you to address the rationality and practicality of your goals. A plan is like a road map, it won\'t guarantee that you won\'t get lost, but it will help you figure out where you went wrong and how to get back on track. You might consider a written document a burden of the large corporation. Instead, think of it as a sanity check on how you are investing your time and money. It\'s a lot easier to spend other peoples\' money in a large corporation than it is to spend you own in your business. You might think that a plan for your own business might never see the light of day. Sharing your plan with your CPA, banker and even your family would be a great way of communicating what it is you do and may encourage more enthusiastic support as well as critical thinking in helping you achieve your goals. A plan is also an essential element in proper succession planning. So what is a plan? You can go to any library or bookstore and find dozens of books outlining the single best way to develop and construct a business or strategic plan. Fortunately, 90% of what they say is all the same relieving you of the burden of spending the rest of your career trying to figure out which one is correct. The things that business plans need to address are common to all. The last 10% is how to go about putting it together. There is no one best way, the important thing is to have a way to put your plan together and do it. The most common elements of a business plan are: Identify where you are and where you want to get to with your business. Describe the environment your business operates in. Competitive Regulatory Technology Market Vendor Other Stakeholders (people that has a vested interest in your business including you) A SWOT analysis Strengths, your company\'s competitive advantages Weaknesses, where you fall short of your competitors Opportunities, opportunities you see in the market place Threats, challenges to be recognized and reckoned with An Action Plan to capitalize on your Strengths and Opportunities and defend against and correct your Weaknesses and Threats. Land, what facilities and equipment will you need Labor, will you have enough hands to make it happen Capital, what\'s all of this going to cost A PDCA methodology should also be included as a way of making sure you stay on course. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-business-plan-1.htmlTue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800Plan, Do, Check, Act is a very simple method of keeping yourself grounded to reality. We all do things for a reason. When we do something we expect a certain outcome. Sometimes we do something and we don\'t get the result we expected. We call those mistakes. We learn from those, some faster than others. As we learn, we change what we are doing to see if that works and gets us the desired result. We keep changing until that happens or we get close enough to claim victory. Plan, Do, Check, Act is an organized way of going through this learning process. As discussed in our whitepaper \"The Plan\", your business plan needs to include specific actions and specific results that you expect to achieve by having taken those actions. The reason that this is so important is that there is money involved, in most small businesses its not going to be somebody else\'s money, it\'s your money! Just like when you go to the store and you put money down for a gallon of milk, you expect a gallon of milk and if that\'s not what you get, you\'ll go some where else. In business, when you invest your time and money, you expect something for it. If that\'s not what you get, it\'s time to try something else. This type of methodology isn\'t reserved for strategic plans; you should use it whenever practical to make sure you get the results you\'re looking for. It is more appropriately used in longer duration projects where there is time to implement corrective action. A simple analogy is that Plan, Do, Check, Act is the thinking person\'s way of sticking to your guns. Instead of just blasting forward with what you thought was a well laid out plan. You reassess along the way. You do not charge on no matter what with blind confidence that if you just do what you said you were going to do everything will work out. On the other hand, you don\'t quit at the first sign of trouble. In the most complex applications, you would define degrees of deviation from expected results that would cause you to act. Within certain parameter, you would consider the results as expected, and outside of those parameters, you would consider the implications and reasons for them. Applying this technique to a one person organization may be as simple as asking yourself if the results you are achieving are what you expected. Remember, surprises can be both positive and negative. It can be just as tragic to not fully recognize unexpectedly high positive results as not recognizing poor results. Take the case of introducing a new product or service. If preliminary results are exceptionally positive, then future marketing, production and support plans should be reconsidered and revised in order to take full advantage of the opportunity and not create ill will with customers that you can not deliver to or allow competitors to move in while you struggle to cope with the additional demand. Conversely, if preliminary results are disappointing, marketing plans and product design need to be reevaluated, while production and support might be delayed or scaled back. As a professional or business person, one-person organization or multinational corporation, the issues are the same. You invest time and money with the expectation of certain results. As you implement programs, you want to be sure that things are on track. Killing an initiative that is not delivering the desired results if no corrective actions can be formulated is a smart thing to do. It is not a sign of weakness, lack of commitment or fear to stand firm. Likewise, modifying plans as you move forward to adapt to lessons learned is also smart business. Marching steadfastly to a plan blind to unexpected signals may show guts and determination, but not much business savvy. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/plan_-do_-check_-act-1.htmlMon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800Over eager shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart trampled and killed a Wal-Mart greeter on Black Friday. This event is a tragedy on its own, but was made even worse in the way it was reported in The New York Times and reprinted in dozens of papers throughout the United States. The Times described the incident as \"a sign of consumer desparation amid a bleak economy\". How in the world did they come to that conclusion other than to determine that the death of a Wal-Mart greeter wouldn\'t sell papers, but news of out of control mobs reacting in desparation to an economic meltdown surely would. All the news that\'s fit to print, I think not. Next up, two shoppers fighting over the last pumpkin pie at Costco will be described as a food riot. The third estate has a responsibility to convey the news to the public with as little bias as humanly possible. We all understand that the press is politically biased and that their discussion of candidates for public office needs to be taken with a grain of salt or ignored all together. Unfortunately, when the public reads articles regarding the death of a person or the state of the economy, it has the right to consider the article to be objective reporting of news and not sensationalism meant to sell papers. Branding this incident as a \"sign of desparation\" extenuates the hysteria that has accompanied and driven the wild fluctuations in the stock market, declining consumer confidence and the resulting loss of jobs throughout our country. It is indeed ironic that Black Friday turned in a respectable 3% growth over last year. The consumer will lead the way out of the recession and reporting like this will postpone our recovery. I don\'t see the press changing the way it conducts business anytime soon. Newspapers are hit hard in a recession by the loss of ad revenue. I can only assume there is a disconnect between the editors and the publisher on what\'s more important, ad revenue or sensational news stories. Our deepest condolences to the family and friends of the Wal-Mart greeter. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/the-role-of-the-press-in-a-recession-1.htmlSun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800The business community has long claimed that private enterprise was inherently more efficient in providing goods and services than the government. The premise being that government was prone to bureaucratic bloat with ever increasing taxation, over regulation and the centralization of authority. If big government created these practices, big business seems to be making them into an art form. Anyone that has worked in a large corporate environment outside of a headquarters understands the concept of an unyielding monolithic organizational structure, taxation through resource allocation fees and administrative charges, authority limits that constrain the most mundane day to day operations and unfunded mandates through proscriptive processes, dictated revisions to plans with stretch goals and expense reductions without revenue revisions. The corporate notion that these practices merely instill greater work ethic, best practices, economies of scale and competitive advantage sounds much at odds with the argument voiced by big business that big government thinks it knows better how to spend your money than you do and doesn\'t trust you. Corporations by and large pay on the scale of responsibility and incentivize on profitability. There is, therefore, a classical capitalistic drive to grow larger. Like government, corporations have an insatiable appetite to grow, not out of need, but out of desire. Well managed companies do grow organically and can utilize acquisitions efficiently to create growth quickly. Far too many companies, unable to grow organically, utilize acquisitions as the only method to grow. This rarely results in the creation of shareholder value, but in shareholder mollification. Again, like government where the tax payer foots the bill for growth, the shareholder picks up the tab for corporate growth. There are examples of well run corporations that do make big government look lethargic and inefficient. Unfortunately, far too many big businesses look painfully like big government. It\'s time for the markets to recognize this and force change. Capitalism is nursing an enormous black eye as a result of the current financial crisis. Big business can do its part in the recovery by practicing what it preaches and differentiating itself from big government. Richard Gabelhttp://www.meadowcreekbusinesscenter.com/blog/details/big-business-looks-a-lot-like-big-government.htmlMon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800