Foreseeing trends and acting on them before everyone else does gives you two distinct advantages: You can act on opportunities before anyone else does and you can mitigate challenges before they actually happen. Imagine how different your business could have been if you knew the 2008/2009 recession was going to happen BEFORE it actually happened. There were plenty of people who accurately predicted it and acted accordingly.

Or, imagine how different your investment portfolio might be if you knew that Home Depot was going to be as big as it has become. If you foresaw the rise in do-it-yourself home renovations, you could have bought the stock really cheap a few years ago and seen your portfolio grow. (Obviously I’m not here to give investment advice but I’m just using it as an example to show you the impact of seeing and acting on trends).

About your trendwatching: How to schedule it and what to know
Trendwatching for your business can be done in three different steps. The first step, which I will show you in this issue, will take more than ten minutes. But once you’ve done this step, the second step (discussed in the next issue) won’t take any extra time throughout your week (it is included in the things you already do) and the third step might only take ten minutes every week or two. So once you have done the first step, it is only the third step that needs to be scheduled for a ten minute effort every couple of weeks to keep your finger on the pulse of trends in the economy and in business. That’s it!

I recommend that you schedule ten minutes every one to two weeks to do this. The reason is: if you schedule it less frequently than that, you won’t be able to see as many trends and you won’t be able to act on them as quickly. The ability to detect trends is a combination of seeing all of the clues and also seeing them evolve over time. But if you schedule it more frequently than that (like daily, for example), the trends won’t move enough from one day to the next and it won’t be a good use of your time.

Also I should point out that in a ten minute trendwatching period, you’ll only be able to trend-watch a few different trends. What I’m about to show you is going to help you zoom in on just a few things that can really help you. So don’t think that you’re going to stare into a crystal ball and immediately be able to see every possible trend that could impact your life, business, investment portfolio, personal health, the environment, the economy, etc.

And lastly, before we get into the actual how-to, you need to remember that trends are generalizations and trendwatching is an art, not a science and there are a lot of factors that can reverse a trend in a flash. Two examples of dramatic trend-reversals in the last decade were the tragic 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and, more recently, the quick intervention by world governments to prop up the failing global economy. Both of these extremely dramatic examples show that trends in particular directions can be reversed by external forces. They are difficult to foresee and they don’t happen often.

Now I’ll show you the preparation step to make your trendwatching really useful to you. If you don’t get it done now, do it as homework because you’ll want it done for next week’s issue.

Trendwatching Step 1: Preparation

Start a trends file: Your trendwatching will be more effective if you pull together all of your trend information into one place. I like using a mindmap (like MindMeister) or GoogleDocs but you might prefer some other format (like a spreadsheet or Evernote or even a piece of paper). You just want a place where you can jot notes and collect links or news items. It needs to be useful and you’ll end up adding lots of information to it.

Identify your areas of focus: Since you can’t possibly see all trends ahead of time, you need to identify a few potential areas where you want to focus in on to see trends. Usually this will be your industry or business model or customer needs or the marketing methods you use. Those four elements are good places to start. List a few of those and write down what the current situation is.

For example, a social media coach might list the following elements that they want to watch trends on, plus the current situation for each element:

• Top social media: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter
• Things my clients want to know: How to do it to grow my business
• Ways I market my business: Social media, AdWords, word of mouth

(Of course there are other things that could be relevant but I’ll use these as examples).

Trends tend to move in similar waves to business lifecycles and the economy: A trend will have a period of growth, a peak, a period of decline, and a valley. So as you watch the trends, you’ll want to track where each of these trends are along that wave. Are they growing? Have they peaked? Are they declining? I’ll show you how to do that in steps 2 and 3. Be aware that this will tend to trend in one particular direction (growth to peak to decline to valley) but new innovations, new consumer adoption, and dramatic events can extend a particular stage of a trend or accelerate a trend through the stages. Blogs, for example, might be in an extended decline, Facebook might be in a peak but could quickly decline if something better came along (which may have been the case for Myspace when it was “replaced” by Facebook).

Determine the causes: Trends don’t just happen. The trends you are focusing on developed because of a number of influences coming together at the same time. Brainstorm what these factors might be and add them to your trendwatching document. It’s okay if you don’t get a comprehensive list and it’s okay if you’re not 100% accurate. Over time, you might think of additional factors that influence your areas of focus and you’ll want to add these, too, and you are free to make refinements as you go.

To briefly draw from our example, you might write:

• Facebook. Influencing factors: A desire to be more connected with others; technology that allows for sharing; word of mouth to invite others on (“the more the merrier”); a consolidation of platforms (for games, video, blogging, chatting, pictures, etc.).

• Twitter. Influencing factors: A desire to be more connected with others; a combination of desktop-based and mobile technology; a desire for real-time information.

• How to use social media to grow business. Influencing factors: Businesses see other businesses succeeding and want the same thing; businesses recognize that more and more people are joining social media; businesses are always looking for new marketing opportunities.

These are just some quick ideas to illustrate what kind of influencing factors would contribute to the trend you are focusing on.

Identify the key influencers: Every trend has key influencers who become the big name in that trend. Sometimes they are early adopters and other times they are just well-known people who have jumped on board. Twitter, for example, has some key influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan, Mari Smith, Justin Bieber, and Ashton Kutcher. Although they might each talk to different groups of people, they wield a fair amount of influence over their particular group.

That’s all you need to do right now. In the next issue of Tips In Ten I’ll show you how to take the information you’ve done here (or you’re about to do for homework) and use it to discover trends to help your business.

Trendwatching is fun, it’s really easy to do, and it can make a dramatic difference on your business by allowing you to act faster than your competition on opportunities and carefully prepare for challenges before others know those challenges are there!

Related posts:

1. Become A Fortune Teller in Just 10 Minutes – Part 2
2. You will not make a fortune overnight, especially selling advertising space
3. Competitor Research in Just 10 Minutes per Day

Fair enough. Almost all of us had those calls from clients. Well, guess what. The economy has pretty much sorted itself out. It’s not perfect. It’s not completely healed. It will still ache when it rains. But it’s getting better. Economists tell us that we may still see a blip or two on our radar but we can see some hope in the near distance, too.

So… what now? If you survived, congratulations. There’s an adage about recessions that I really like. It’s a little harsh but it’s true: Recessions are a way of cleaning out weak businesses to make strong businesses stronger. It’s a survival of the fittest situation on a corporate level.

If you’re still in business, that’s great!
Your business may feel like it’s reeling from the staggering blow of a boxer with a mean right hook… but it’s still standing. You’re still in control. Go out there and win more business. Fight back by making more calls, connecting with more clients through social media engagement, revisiting your business’ strategy and deliverables. In a sort of “Fight Club” of economics, the recession has stripped away everything else, leaving your pure business. If you’re still standing, you’ve got some opportunities to start taking advantage of this right away.

To put a positive spin on the situation, your business might have been beaten up but it also worked over your competitors and sent not a few of them to the economic morgue. Even though customers might still be shy about spending, there are more of them out there who were once served by your competitors. If you win them now and serve what little buying needs they have, when the economy turns around and booms again (and it will!) you’ll have a bigger customer base to succeed with.

So, what does that mean for you right now? Shore up your processes. Make sure your customer service is focused and systematic. Perfect your deliverables and create new ones to serve the needs of the new customers you’ll be getting. Revisit which of your competitors bit the dust and make sure that you have the offerings that serve all of their customers.

And, If you’re no longer in business, that’s not so bad (believe it or not).
Okay, so I don’t want to get so congratulatory to the businesses who are still standing and leave some of my no-longer-in-business readers in the dust. If your business didn’t make it through the recession, I have two things to say: First, I’m sorry. I understand the challenge and heartache that you’re facing now. Second, it may not feel like it right now, but you have a unique opportunity to start over. Yes, start over with a new business. Don’t think of it as an uphill battle but as an opportunity to start doing things at the very beginning of your new business that you wished you had done at the beginning of your last business!

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. 5 Things You Need to Do In Your Small Business Right Now
2. Are you in recovery?
3. What’s stopping you?

While there is still a lot of effort to be put into climbing out of this hole, we are hopeful that economists are correct in their prediction of a current economic recovery. While I am not an economist, I am an avid reader and I watch the trends and signs closely and everything does indeed seem to be pointing in the right direction.

So, if that’s the case, are you in recovery mode?

Here’s what I’m talking about: During the darkest depths of the recession, many businesses stopped spending to save on expenses. They redoubled their efforts to drive income (although the wise person will note that if everyone is watching their spending, they’re not buying, so increased sales effort doesn’t always work because it’s a vicious cycle).

And things are turning around and will boom again within the next couple of years. Unfortunately, many small businesses will wait until things are booming again before they finally unlock their wallets to begin buying. That’s a bad strategy. If they do that, they miss out on the highly lucrative growth period between the depths of the down market and the heights of the up market.

So, how can you take advantage of this growth period?

1. Start by investing in your business. Customers are starting to buy again and your business needs to be fresh and ready to serve them. Is your website up to date?
2. Slowly increase your inventory. You don’t have to create a huge backlog, but orders will start coming in and you’ll want to have some inventory to sell. (Colleagues of mine who are service providers are booking up weeks and even months in advance now).
3. Prepare for increased capacity, perhaps by hiring and training additional staff or developing systems and processes that will increase efficiency. It’s best to do this now while you are still a little slow and only just starting to pick up rather than waiting to be bombarded with orders before you do something about it.
4. If you have a good system of upsells, cross-sells, or incremental sales, then lower your prices to generate more marketshare right now. If you don’t have a good system of upsells, cross-sells, or incremental sales, then put one in place first.
5. Consider raising your prices. Don’t make too big of a leap but bump them up slightly in the next six months because, if the market blossoms in the next couple of years then your prices will already be where they need to be.

Now is a good time to start spending because you’re probably beginning to get some more income coming in but many prices are still low because there are lots of businesses still in “recession reaction mode” with extremely low prices to stay afloat.

Lastly, this is the perfect time to stop and look back over the recessionary period and think about what you learned. Are there things you’d do differently in the future? It could be as simple as melting down emotionally at the beginning because you thought that the world was about to end but realizing one year later that business marches on and you’ll be okay. Or, it could be slightly advanced, like the top ten things that you need to do if a recession were to strike in order to stay profitable. Once you’ve figured out what that “if it happened again” list is, write it down, put it in an envelope, and on the envelope write something like: “In Case of Emergency, Open Envelope”. This is your recession survival guide and it will help you to keep a clear head if and when the economy flushes down the drain again.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Embracing the recession
2. What’s stopping you?
3. A Year in Review

I’ve also learned that it’s not related to a single industry or model of business. I’m aware of an autobody chain that has had its best year ever; I know of a couple of consultants and coaches serving different industries who have generated more revenue now than ever before, and even my own businesses have done better than I had forecast when we entered the recession.

An example from a small business owner I know

Recently, a friend of mine (who is among the consultants I mentioned above) talked about how to deal with his growing client base and to-do list. I mentioned that he should think about raising his prices. I was reminded of that conversation when I read this New York Times business blog post: Finally, A Business That Is Too Busy.

In the article, the blogger describes a Chicago pizzeria that is so busy, customers have become upset. The pizzeria is busy because their pizza is good. So, what should they do?

The blogger, Jay Goltz, who owns 5 Chicago-based businesses, gives the same advice to the pizzeria that I gave to my consultant friend: Raise prices.

“But my business can’t handle charging higher prices”

Raising prices is not easy. It’s a delicate situation because your current client base has come to accept the value and return you provide to them at your current price. It’s not something that customers want to hear, but it is a necessity from time to time.

One of the big reasons to raise your price is that you need new customers so you should always be marketing. But if you find that your prices are so attractive that customers are clamoring over you because the value is tremendous, you’ll always end up with too many clients. And yes, it is possible at times to have too many clients.

A possibility that my consultant friend suggested was this: “What if I continue my current rate for my current customers and charge my higher rate for new customers?”. I can see how this type of “grandfather clause” can be attractive, especially since it helps the business owner avoid that difficult email to his clients. But it’s not good for anyone in the long term. Eventually the prices will need to change.

Tips for small businesses to raise their prices

So, how do you raise your prices? Here are some tips I’d suggest:

1.   Make sure that your service and value has been flawless or this could be the excuse many clients have been looking for to leave.

2.   Find a way to add additional value to your existing clients so that your message isn’t just “we’re raising prices” but rather, “we’re increasing value.”

3.   Send out a warning email first, setting a date at which all future projects will be charged at the higher rate. Avoid just making the announcement: “Hey, guess what… it now costs more.”

4.   Make a modest step up in your prices. Unless you’ve suddenly become some kind of internet celebrity, don’t make your price increase too steep or you’ll lose everyone who has worked with you.

5.   Be prepared for a mix of feelings: Great clients will recognize your value and will continue to pay your new rate happily. Good clients will agree to your new price because you’ve proven yourself so far. Poor clients will push back a little, perhaps grumble slightly, and might or might not leave. Bad clients will try to convince you otherwise (in which case, you need to stand your ground and be confident in the value you deliver).

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. The Risks of Unbundled Pricing
2. 5 Things You Need to Do In Your Small Business Right Now
3. Are you in recovery?

It also means something else: It means NOW is the time to start building your business.

Why now to build your business?
Lots of entrepreneurs (especially ones who are moonlighting) wait until the economy is good before they take the risk and market their business. They want to see some immediate return on their investment and that’s more likely to happen when money is flowing. But smart entrepreneurs will start ramping up their business right now, while we haven’t yet recovered, so that they’ll be positioned in a much better way once recovery does occur.

Don’t wait until you’re in the busy midst of a strong economy to make changes to your business. Here are 5 things you need to do in your small business right now to put yourself on the right footing.

1. Increase your marketing. Seriously think about doubling it if you can. Or, if that takes too much time and money, try to bump it up by at least a third. The investment you make now in your marketing will come back to you with a much higher return once the economy is better (in the same way that you might buy a house at a low price in a bad economy and sell it at a higher price in a better economy).
2. Develop systems and best practices to automate your workload. It’s hard to create systems and best practices when you’re in a tornado of selling and customer fulfillment. But when things are quiet, this is the best time to develop and refine those processes. Then, when things pick up, you have everything in place already. It’s much easier to make small tweaks to existing processes when you’re busy than it is to try to create those processes from scratch.
3. Improve your follow-up systems. New customers are great. Existing customers who come back and buy from you again are even better. They are more profitable for you. So you need to develop special programs and marketing efforts to reach out to those customers. Again, now is the time to do it when things are slow. You’ll be able to experiment with what works and what doesn’t. When things pick up, you’ll have a strong system of successful follow-up to generate more existing customer revenue.
4. Clean up your files. When things get busy, piles start to form around the office: There’s a pile of bills to be paid. There’s a pile of receipts. There’s a pile of scrap papers full of ideas. There’s a pile of unsorted papers (which will go into other piles, won’t they?). Now is the time to get those in order. Redevelop your filing system so it’s usable for you. (Hint: if you have stuff in piles, your filing system is not usable). This is also a good time to think about doing the same for your bookkeeping.
5. This is also a good time to do some product development. When things are busy, you don’t have a lot of time to put into new product development or into refining existing products. You’re too busy filling orders. So when things are slower, it’s time to increase the value of your existing products and it’s time to create new revenue generators.

If what the economists are saying is true, this is the calm before the storm. We might see a few more quiet months and then we should see some serious recovery. Take the time now to ramp up your business so that you’re ready to go when more people are buying.

No related posts.

Unfortunately, I’m seeing a dangerous trend in the market that impacts this product or service development. It’s related to the economy, of course: Companies are spending less on product development and many are choosing to wait until the economy improves before they bring new products to market.

While I do appreciate and preach (and practice) prudence in business spending, and I wouldn’t want a company innovating itself out of existence, the trend toward less innovation is worrisome.

I’d like to suggest that the best time to innovate is now. The best time to turn ideas into products is now. The best time to take new products to market is now.

Here are my reasons:

• Chances are, it will cost less because other businesses (who may become your vendors) are slashing prices to get work. Spending some now will probably mean spending far less than if you were to buy the same products or services when the economy is good.
• Your competitors are choosing the no-spending/no-innovation path. They’re just keeping their head down and hoping to make it through the recession! If you take a different approach, you’ll differentiate yourself from your competition.
• You may not sell a bunch of these products or services now, but you’ll have time to perfect them before the market picks up again. Then, when the market is chugging away (like we all hope it will… and like we all know it has in the past), your products will be market-ready for people who are eager to spend!

Now is the time for innovation! What’s stopping you?

Please don’t let it be me! I will offer this, for the first 3 people to comment (valid comments) on this blog post, I will offer 2 coaching sessions (1 hour x 2) free of charge – to speak with you about your doubts, your ideas, process outlining or project implementation.

Now is the time to step up to the plate, now is the time to embrace the current economic situation and fly with your ideas.

Have a great day,

Heather Villa

Related posts:

1. Business “best practice” in today’s economy
2. 5 Things You Need to Do In Your Small Business Right Now
3. Should You Listen to Your Customers?

Millions of people have watched their investment portfolios and job security vanish before their very eyes. Chances are, you’re among them.

The news is depressing, and it is challenging to suddenly lack confidence in your ability to retire at 65. So what is your response going to be? Most of the people who watched their portfolios and job security disappear are going to take the wrong action: they are going to do nothing and hope that they come out on the other side of this dark economic tunnel unscathed.

My advice to you? Don’t join them! Don’t run on autopilot for the next months or years and “hope for the best”. Instead, embrace the recession.

Yes, you read that correctly: embrace the recession. Consider the recession your opportunity to start a business and redefine your economic future. Now, some people might think that a recession is a bad time to start a business, but I think it’s the perfect time. Here’s why:

1. People still buy things in a recession. The key is to offer a product or service that is still purchased in spite of the economic downturn.
2. Other businesses, which were operating before the recession, are facing the economic challenges of staying afloat because their business model is designed to profit in a strong economy. You, however, are coming in lean and mean because your business model recognizes the recession and allows for it.
3. Working from home can be cheaper than going to work. With gas prices and food prices spiking to all-time-high levels, it might actually cost less to stay home and work there. Cut back on those restaurant lunches, fill the tank much less frequently. Oh, and don’t forget that some of your home ownership expenses will now become tax deductible.
4. As a self-employed business-owner, you’ll have greater career confidence because you will be deciding the future of your job, not someone who is higher up in the organization. What’s more, with every sale you make, you’ll be building your own job security and hastening your retirement (rather than lining someone else’s pockets without any assurance that you’ll have a job tomorrow).

There are other benefits, too: You’ll reduce the stress you might feel in commuting through rush hour traffic at the beginning and end of the day, and you’ll also be doing some good for the environment!

So, that leads to the next question: How should you embrace the recession?

My first piece of advice would be to find your passion. What do you love to do? I love to work with other people and help them guide and manage their business. I do this through consulting and project management services.

Next, see what the market needs. By performing a marketplace analysis, you’ll have a clear idea of what people are buying during these tough economic times. That will allow you to shape your products or services to suit them.

When you find something that you enjoy doing and that other people need, you’ve got a great match! You probably need to develop the product or service so that it is a profitable offering. You likely need to create a website and other marketing material so people can find you and transact business.

And then you start selling.

This list looks simple, but it’s a lot of work. Don’t feel like you need to do it all yourself. You’ll actually come out ahead if you do the work you can do well and you outsource the rest to skilled, competent service providers who are experts in these areas.

Don’t wait for your portfolio to disappear. Don’t wait for the pink slip to show up on your desk. Take charge today and embrace the recession!

Related posts:

1. A Year in Review
2. What’s stopping you?
3. 5 Things You Need to Do In Your Small Business Right Now