Common small business mistakes have become a regular series here. Today, a couple of examples of blaming the customer. I called the local paper to have an ad pulled. The gal said OK. But it ran again the next day. I called back. The response was, “You didn’t call soon enough yesterday.” But I knew…
The best channel to communicate with customers is … the one the customer chooses. OK, you can stop reading right there, if you’ll take that sentence to heart. But for this installment of the Small Biz 100, I’m going to tell you a true story, as well as how to do this right. My husband…
While we talk about interactive web 2.0 type tools, there’s an older definition of an interactive experience. Michael McMillan told this story on the Harvey House listserv group, shared by Sandie Olson to Angie Koehn to me. My wife and I were crusing the Mother Road [Route 66] up in Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle…
Jon Swanson, formerly the Entrepreneurial Chicken, is writing about small business again. He helped again this year with a training event for a small retail cooperative. What I heard today made me more optimistic about the presentations in any time in the past 6 years of doing this. Today, one of the groups said, “We…
Customer service is just as important to the small town government as to the small town business. John Fiscus, a former mayor of Waynoka, Oklahoma, population 993, wrote this statement: The City of Waynoka is committed to its mission of meeting the needs of our citizens, both now and in the future. We want to…
Common mistakes can kill your small business, but most of them can be easily corrected or avoided. Today’s Bad Example: Breaking your promises to customersI asked for some examples of small biz mistakes on Twitter, and you answered! This time, let’s combine two real-world examples of mistakes: BarbaraKB Not “call me back” in the 24…
Common mistakes can kill your small business, but most of them can be easily corrected or avoided. Today’s Bad Example: Missing your customers’ perspective This postcard mailed to my liquor store is a symptom of missing your customers’ perspective. What if I was convinced to order the book? How do I do it? Look at…
Here’s a nifty site. It will reveal all kinds of great, useful demographic information with only the input of a 5 digit zip code. Want to know how many folks have a high school diploma? How about the rate of unemployment? Here it is. Whatever has been reported for a zip code seems to be…
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