So, you’ve sat down with your annual finances, stayed up until the early hours of the morning and drank the local coffee shop dry, and now your finished company budget is staring you in the face, challenging you to stick to it. It’s not easy—creating a feasible budget is hard enough, but sticking to it can be an absolute nightmare. However, with a little dedication and a bit of advice, making the company dollar stretch as far as you want it to is not such a daunting prospect.
Always, always, always have a slush fund—a portion of your budget unallocated to deal with major problems or expenses as they come up. No matter how well-planned the budget, if John from accounts somehow loses $50,000, or Mary the receptionist gets pregnant and requires maternity cover, or a virus crashes and wipes your server and causes all your computers to start displaying the lyrics to REM’s Bad Day, you’re going to be very, very thankful for every cent not allocated. Always plan for the worst, and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong then anything not spent from the slush fund can either go towards next year’s budget or a damn good Christmas party.
Learn to trim expenses wherever possible. Keep a weather eye on stock levels, employee overtime, charged expenses and company credit cards. Try and negotiate deals on rent every time the contract is up for renewal. Remember that if you can lower the expenses on the budget, you’ll have much more of a safety net inside your slush fund for that inevitable server meltdown.
Keep a close eye on the inflow of income, as this can also affect the slush fund and expenses. If you start to make more than you budgeted for, don’t clap your hands with glee and laugh all the way to the bank—put some of it into the slush fund or any other strained area of the budget.
Similarly, never let a month go by where you do not keep an eye on your budget, comparing it to monthly income and expenditures. Make it the same date every month, preferably some time around the 25th to give yourself enough time to start making changes before the next calendar month comes in. Check your cash flow, costs and potential liabilities with a fine-tooth comb, and when you’re done get somebody else to look at it for you. If you can snag an accountant to help out, even better.
Lastly, do not get downhearted if, at some point in the year, you realize your budget is completely messed up and you’re going to overspend this month. You need to remember that budget projections are a best guess only and nothing more—overspend is practically unavoidable in today’s uncertain economic climate. Face one simple truth—chances are that you will miss your estimates. Of course you try to avoid it, but if (when) it doesn’t make you the worst businessman ever or a dunce with no financial acumen. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and look for ways that you can get the budget back on track next month—firing John from accounts for losing that $50,000 may be a good place to start.
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Whether it’s a matter of making the most out of your marketing campaign and improving your ROI or capitalizing on word-of-mouth referrals, never let a lead slip through the crack—they could be your next diamond in the rough. Every single lead you receive through your business should be considered that one magic client who can help you elevate your business, taking it from where it is now to where you want it to be. The power of follow-up is immense and should be considered one of the best friends of bootstrapped budgeters.
First, it should be noted that trends indicate positive results when business owners verbalize their follow-up efforts with their prospective clients as “reconnecting” instead of “following up;” it’s much more personal and will help you achieve a better business relationship. For example, “Hello, this is Derek Heck from Bootstrapping Blog and I’m reconnecting with you in regards to our last conversation.” Pretty simple right? Yet countless business owners fail to do this on a daily basis. It’s similar to neglecting to insulate your pipes or letting a leaky faucet go unchecked—it seems minor at the time, but you eventually end up losing a lot of money through this type of negligence.
Or perhaps you do have good intentions and plan to follow up, but just haven’t had the time. Well, I’m sincerely asking you to burn your Procrastinator’s Creed contract and jump into action. If not, then your lead goes from blazing hot, to lukewarm, to somebody else’s client! Plus, by following up promptly, you will be telling your prospect volumes about how you’ll treat them as a client, meeting deadlines on time and providing a close watch over their account. Remember, clients don’t just want to know that they’ll get the service or product they’re buying, they want to know that they will be comprehensively taken care of.
So what’s a good timeframe for following up? Probably about a week later. You don’t want to come off as a telemarketer selling jewelry cleaner and calling back the next day. Let them breathe a little and have time to look over your proposal. And make sure you set a solid date and time, indicating when you’ll be reconnecting—call them exactly when you say you will! And make sure they actually write your appointment down when you plan it. Don’t be afraid to specifically ask them to get their planner out and write it down. If you don’t, you’ll end up getting more flakes than a bowl of Wheaties.
And how about a “blind” follow-up? You won’t always have the opportunity to speak with your prospect in the initial phase. For example, you may receive a lead through your website—if someone signs up for your newsletter. In this case, you should develop a standard follow-up template or autoresponder. Remember, the Web is faceless and without emotion—you need to constantly think of ways to reach out to people and remind them that there’s an actual human behind your website
Here’s an example a website lead follow-up:
I see that you visited my blog at www.bootstrappingblog.com recently. I hope you’ve been enjoying our content and have been able to apply some of what you’ve read to your own business.
Call-to-Action Paragraph.
And in case you missed it, I thought I’d pass this article along:
“It’s nothing personal.” Bullspit! There’s no such thing as nothing being personal in the business world. No matter who’s involved in a business equation, people are either spending money they worked hard to earn, or are looking to earn the other person’s money through hard work. Unless you’ve won the lottery, any blood, sweat and tears poured into your business makes the scenario very personal. Read Full Article
Please feel free to contact me and let me know how I can help you with your business. I eagerly welcome all inquiries.
Now go get ‘em tiger!
As a dedicated business owner, you probably spend much of your day focusing on how you can help your clients. Bravo! This is what you should be doing as a human being anyways, helping others as much as you can. However, some of us get on a path of helping others through our businesses and just keep rolling along with the same mentality. But as much as we applaud helping others, we also strongly suggest that you help yourself.
Along with your business, you also need to invest in yourself. A proper education will ultimately enable you to help a greater number of people to a greater degree. Think of it this way. Let’s suppose your current business is like Charlie from Flowers for Algernon before the procedure. The poor guy had a big heart and great intentions, but he couldn’t even beat a mouse in a maze. But afterwards, he was able to actually contribute to society. Not that we’re saying your business is mentally challenged, just that no matter how well intentioned your business pursuits are, you’ll always be able to offer a greater degree of help to others through continued education.
And if you’re one of those number-oriented people who goes to sleep by the sound of your ROI ticker, then your educational pursuits may require an extra degree of patience. Self-edification doesn’t always produce immediate, perceivable results, but trust us, your clients will see the difference and you’ll build their loyalty on a foundation of marble instead of balsa wood.
Besides, never before have we had access to so many experts and such powerful materials as we do now. From a full master’s program to a community college course, and seminars to certification courses, there are plenty of education avenues that will suit even a bootstrapped budget. And with the Web providing thousands of new articles on a daily basis, you can take the completely free route and hold yourself to reading one or two new articles every single day. Create a cranium-cramming schedule and put aside a certain block of time every day for your personal edification. To not keep up with what is out there is causing you to miss a lot of amazing breakthroughs. In addition, the trend has been that with the more knowledge we have, the easier things tend to be later on. If you put some front-end time and effort towards investing in yourself, then things will get much easier down the road, unless you regress like Charlie of course then you’re just plum out of luck.
The power of personal development is infinite. It’s amazing how set some of us become in our ways. Not necessarily in a stubborn manner, but because we become programmed to go on autopilot, functioning in ways that are familiar to us. We don’t even realize that we’re capable of so much more because we haven’t challenged ourselves in such a long time. Pursuing personal development open’s our minds to the limitless possibilities within us. Become a better you, and your bootstrapped budget will become a bad ass boot-up-the-competition’s-butt budget, or something like that.
Here are some of the programs that I am currently investing my learning dollars in.
We’ve all heard of people flipping real estate; buying the house for a low amount, doing some minor/major work on renovations and then selling for a profit. Now people are doing the same thing with websites, site flipping. But is it a fly by night profession or another great business avenue for people to take? In this article I want to dig a little deeper into the subject. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Concerns about site flipping
There are a few arguments I see a lot when talking about site flipping, one I see the most being the fact that quick built websites are ruining the quality of the internet. In my opinion, you can’t hurt the quality of a place with billions upon billions of websites already floating around google. Searching for “clinic” in google brings up 115 MILLION results. Now, building websites targeting this keyword really will not make a dent in he amount of quality information out there. So regardless if people think its wrong, you can still do it for and make a profit for it.
Build with quality in mind
Even if you’re putting up a website to just sell, you should still treat it as a website you’d be proud to tell people you own. Flooding the page with 20 ads but only have 500 words is not something (in my opinion) to be proud of.
If flipping is your game and you want to make a go of it, as always it starts with great content, a desire to make it work and a determination to keep going. I am a shining example of an entrepreneur who loves the thrill of the build, it is almost like a high but coming off it when heading into the “maintain it” stage of the lifecycle is when I get extremely bored and restless.
This is not uncommon, look over the history of the vast percentage of the fortune 500 companies and you will find that usually the founder is not the person running the company any longer.
So if your unique ability is in finding a niche, building a following, passing it off and doing it all over again this could be a very profitable business model for you.
In this economy – flip the coin over
With the daily economic doom and gloom that is shoved down our throats, it’s hard to remember that we are in the middle of one of the best buyer’s market we have seen in a long time. History has proven that more millionaires are created in a recession if you take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves when people are scared.
Buying websites may be one of the easiest of these markets to get into because I don’t think there is a lot of “noise” in this market yet. This blog is an example of the power of this. I had been looking and learning everything I could about online marketing when I stumbled on the marketplace at sitepoint.com and found this site for sale. It was inline with my passion, had a great community and I saw that I could provide value to the readers and have a place to build credibility for myself without having to start from scratch and presto here I am.
Now when this economy turns around I will have an asset that I can choose to keep or be able to sell when it is the right time to do so. I believe that in the future websites that have strong ranking, a big following and good content will catch the eyes of bigger companies wanting to get a foot up on the competition.
Either way I’m left with choices and that is never a bad thing.
At some point in your life you may wake up with a feeling of despair. One where you just can’t bear to continue with your current business project, speak to the same people, and do the same monotonous tasks.
When Marcus Buckingham, author and motivational speaker, works with someone facing this problem, he asks them three important questions:
Why this business? What is its broader purpose?
Who are you working with?
What exactly do you do with your business?
By exploring these questions, you can isolate the real reasons you are unhappy with your business. Often we can be enchanted with the idea behind our work or with our employees, making us loyal to a business that is not meeting our personal needs
The people you work with may keep you working a business with no opportunity for expansion. You may like preparing documents and giving presentations, but you may no longer care about your business’ mission or goals. Dedication to a business helping people may keep you working with doctors and nurses you despise.
These questions will help you gain a deeper understanding of your relationship with your business and what you really value from the experience. These elements can help you reassess what you truly wish to accomplish and possibly create an entirely new business model.