Nov 22
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Eleven Lessons from the Entrepreneurial Life of 2011

By Communications, Jaggers Communications News, Social Media

Right around eleven months ago, I announced the launch of this business, Jaggers Communications. It was an emotional, then heady era, as I made the transition from employee to business owner beginning on January 1, 2011. I can honestly say I’ve loved every minute of the entrepreneurial life, even with its related stresses and increased responsibilities.   Here are eleven lessons I’ve learned in my first eleven months of being out on my own:

  1. Ask and ye shall receive. Don’t ask and you’ll never know what the answer would have been. I hemmed, hawed and stressed over asking my employer about allowing me out of a non-compete clause, providing a small list of clients with which to launch my business. I asked. They said yes. Everyone is happy!
  2. Pay people quickly. It’s awful when you’re a small business waiting for a check to arrive. I try to minimize the wait times on my vendors and freelance team members receiving their checks because I know the pain waiting can cause.
  3. Plan ahead, work ahead and manage your time closely. I’ve been fortunate to have worked in the agency atmosphere where time budgeting is as crucial as budgeting of resources. I’ve been trained to log time and evaluate where inefficiencies exist. It’s helped me to become an excellent time manager and is the answer to “how do you do it all?” a question I’m asked with frequency.
  4. Share the story of your business as a method of connecting with your community. I have continued to blog about social media, communications, PR, my business and my community throughout the year, between three and five times a week. My web traffic has increased 400% in the last year and is the leading method of marketing I use to promote my business and connect to prospective clients.
  5. Outsource your weaknesses. I’m not a great bookkeeper — that’s why I have an excellent one I pay an hourly rate to help me stay on top of Quickbooks and balancing my accounts. I also have individuals I turn to for Web development support, media advertising buys and technical troubleshooting.
  6. Delegate! I had a bit of unexpected and sudden surgery in late May — an occurrence that forced me to evaluate quickly what “needed” to be done by me, personally, and what I could delegate to the cadre of capable individuals with whom I work. Nothing like urgency to force changed behavior! I am happy to say that the delegation lesson worked beautifully and has encouraged me to continue to evaluate projects and tasks to shift them to the most appropriate team member.
  7. Spend the money on the stuff that matters. I wasn’t ready at the beginning of the business to invest in my brand identity and in fact, felt that the business was still evolving and settling its focus. This quarter it was time, and I happily made the investment to have my brand identity created the right way. Thank you, Watermark Design!
  8. When the client doesn’t fit the business, walk away. This is hard for any entrepreneur in a growth phase; you want to take all the business you can bear. Saying “no” to new work doesn’t fit the entrepreneurial spirit very well, but when the business at hand is not right for the firm, it is the right decision.
  9. Don’t freak out, just get busy. There were a few times during the year when a flush of uncertainty would come over me. I’d realize the workload in the coming months wasn’t as crystal clear as I’d like it to be; that the billable hours weren’t quite meeting my goals. I WOULD freak out, but just a little. Then I’d put my head down, and concentrate on publishing, speaking and promoting, ultimately drawing in new prospects and starting or resuming conversations that led inevitably to new business. It’s a process that works, and thanks to my business development manager, Erika Gennari, one that is keeping on track much more regularly!
  10. Keep putting your money where your mouth is. (Yes, I know; a grammatically incorrect colloquialism, but I’m making a point, here!). I am a big believer in walking the talk, practicing what you preach and (insert another tired cliche here). I encourage my small business clients to use social media to market their businesses and I consistently demonstrate the behavior I’m recommending. When I share my experiences as applied to their businesses, I am addressing it from a firsthand perspective.
  11. Believe in yourself. I don’t know if it’s hubris or arrogance on my part, but I believe in the quality of the work I do. Clients of mine, with sole proprietorships tell me of the struggle they face in marketing their businesses. It’s awkward, they say, because promoting the business is self promotion, and they’ve been raised to be modest! I think when you do something well and you know it, it’s a bigger crime to hide your talent and not share it with the world. Tell your story! You owe it to yourself and your business to help manage your own success.

I’m still learning the ropes as an entrepreneur, but I’m enjoying the journey as much as the work.

Nov 18
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The Truth About Social Media: Five Facts for Your Business

By Communications, Social Media

When it comes to social media the hardest part to swallow is the investment it takes.

It’s not about money, and what I have to share may make you question the way you’ve been engaging in social media for your business. The truth is this: it takes time. Not just time, but an investment of yourself as a person to be successful in using the tools of social media. It takes transparency and a willingness to share information. It takes (gulp!) being real, both for your customers and your potential customers.

Now just relax for a minute. I know you think you’ve got this handled for your business. You may be saying, “We’ve got a blog. We have a Facebook page. Our marketing person is using Twitter. We’re engaged!”

Are you?

I’m referring to businesses here, but a business engaged in social media is not a business engaged in social media.

(What?)

A business engaged in social media is people, a.k.a. representatives, employees of or ambassadors for the business engaged in social media. I have never seen it work better than when said people have personal brands (i.e., are interesting). The people responsible for the reputation of your brand must live their lives with a significant portion of brain cells thinking, “I can’t wait to put this online” if they’re not already in the act of doing it, as we sit here, mulling over truths in social media.

These people blog about your products or services, they post photos on Flickr, they tweet, they comment on others’ blog posts, they rate books on Amazon and movies on Netflix, they Google everything. They’ve entered, edited or sourced an article on Wikipedia. They’ve used another wiki and/or Google Docs to collaborate with others. They have hundreds of contacts in LinkedIn and friends on Facebook that span ages, races, genders and socioeconomic statuses.

And yet … are you tapping into these people and their vast networks to promote your business? Do you know how?

Pour yourself a drink while I prepare to launch onto your consciousness five facts about social media engagement for your business. It’s going to hurt a little bit, but trust me, this post ends with a path to recovery.

 

Five Facts About Social Media Engagement for Business

  1. You must have a plan. Social media engagement should be looked at as an arm of your business. You have a business plan or at least know what your goals are, how much money you need to make this year and how that translates into sales of products or services. You need goals for social media engagement as well or else you simply won’t know when or if you’re achieving what you intended.
  2. You do not need to be everywhere. There are hundreds of tools. Choose to engage deeply in a few; not in a shallow, dipping in infrequently, many. Don’t be tempted to dive into them all; you’ll only drown.
  3. You must have passion. If you’re going to engage on behalf of your business, you have to really be enthusiastic about your brand. Not excited? Then perhaps someone else on your team is; and that’s OK — one of the most difficult truths for business leaders (the C-suite folks) to accept is that they aren’t necessarily the right people to be engaging in social media on behalf of the brand. Empower those in your organization who live it; deeply and constantly, and while they might do it differently than you would, Mr. CEO, that doesn’t mean it isn’t right.
  4. You must know who you are, and be OK with it. If you’re still struggling to define your business, if you can’t provide a profile of your “best” or ideal customer, if you’re going in five different directions and you aren’t sure WHAT your primary business offering is to your community, then that will come across in your online content. You’ll confuse your audience. Take a step back, figure out who you are, then come back and engage with focus.
  5. Engaging successfully in social media can take 20 hours a week* or more … if you don’t have time to engage, yet you have identified social media as important to your business development, look at prioritizing your current activities. What’s at the bottom of the list? Can it go completely, or be outsourced to someone else?

If your team cannot devote the resources to do it right and across a few key platforms, pick one and do it really well. Which one? That depends on your business, but for most B2B businesses, the online tool where you will find the majority of your contacts and prospects is LinkedIn. Too old school? Not when your whole team has fully gotten up to speed, fully loaded contacts and learned a few key ways to use LinkedIn to help your business grow. If you’ve gotten #2 and #4 figured out, spend some time identifying the strongest personal brands in your organization. Who are the people who can engage on your behalf, and make a difference? Finally, create a plan with goals (here’s a self-serving plug: Jaggers Communications can help you with that) and stick to it, evaluating your progress along the way. For those in your organization who don’t yet think that social media is important, you need to be able to demonstrate the return on the investment of all the time your team has spent engaging on your company’s behalf.

How are you doing? Are you ready to accept the truth about social media?

*20 hours is, of course, not continuous time. Blog posts can take an hour apiece; monitoring, updating social networks, engaging in online conversation using Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, commenting on blog posts and more take only a few minutes at a time, but it adds up. This is an estimate of all the time above, combined.

Nov 16
Love0

Working in Unusual Conditions: How do you cope?

By Communications

The kitchen and sun room at my house are undergoing a complete overhaul. This means we’re without a kitchen entirely for approximately four weeks. (I can hear you laughing. I’m just telling you what the contractors said. I don’t actually believe that number, either.) So today I’m working from my couch with headphones trying to ignore the sound of a nailgun and general construction mayhem happening in the next room. I would work in my home office but it’s currently filled with the contents of my kitchen and sun room.

I’m plugged in to Spotify with headphones and trying to maintain concentration on projects that must move forward today. Work has to get done, no matter the circumstances.

What do you do to cope in unusual working conditions?

 

Nov 15
Love0

The Business Implications of Diabetes: One in 10 Afflicted by 2030.

By Communications

The International Diabetes Federation is reporting that people living with diabetes will number 552 million by 2030 unless urgent action is taken.  The kind of diabetes referenced is Type 2, commonly caused by obesity and resulting in symptoms such as kidney failure, heart disease and failing eyesight. (Personal note: I have had dozens of family members with Type 2 diabetes and have supported the American Diabetes Association for many years.)

Diabetes is an expensive disease; pharmaceutical companies provide medications, insulin and products to help patients monitor and track their blood sugar levels. The problem is, that patients with diabetes often go undiagnosed or reject the diagnosis because the lifestyle changes and diet required to manage diabetes or avoid it are not easy, and often people diagnosed later in life aren’t interested in making major life changes. This inevitably leads to serious complications; strokes, heart attacks, poor circulation sometimes resulting in amputations, kidney failure and eye disease. In other words, more, longer-term health problems that are costly to the patient and the health care system.

I’ve been involved with organizations trying to spread the word about ways to manage your life with diabetes. We’ve done outreach to at-risk communities, worked with medical professionals to provide motivating language to patients, delivered help and education to patients to help them better understand the risks of the disease and how important managing diet and getting exercise is before and after diagnosis. It’s often an uphill battle — not unlike encouraging smokers to throw away their cigarettes.

Since, as a nation, we’re focusing on the business of health care and how it affects our economy, our citizens and our quality of life, the confluence of this report and the Supreme Court review of the Obama administrations health care bill  is interesting. Since dramatic change is unlikely to occur quickly enough to change the prediction of the increase in diabetes patients, our health care initiatives would do well to plan for one in 10 Americans to be facing serious health issues in a mere 20 years. That’s frightening from a financial and a cultural perspective.

How can we effectively communicate to Americans the need to maintain a healthy diet, exercise and avoid this disease? For some, scare tactics work, whether it’s the financial cost of the disease or the toll its symptoms take on the patient. The frustrating part of the diabetes diagnosis is this: it’s entirely preventable. The trouble is, each person has to make up his or her mind to care, and to change behaviors. It’s not easy, but in the end, it saves us all money and keeps our loved ones around and enjoying life much longer.