Small businesses reduced to survival mode

By Jeff Harrington, Times Staff Writer
In print: Sunday, December 14, 2008

TAMPA — Like many of the small-business owners crammed into the classroom-sized seminar, Judi Belanger had a problem.

Her Ruskin-based pet-sitting business, This Little One Stayed Home, was handling up to 15 customers a day until business dramatically fell off in September. She’s lucky to pull in one or two new customers a month.

"Money is tight and people aren’t traveling and leaving their pets," Belanger told fellow entrepreneurs during a Small Business Survival Expo last week. Organizers for Hillsborough County’s Small Business Information Center pulled together the expo in less than three weeks and were part-encouraged/part-dismayed when almost 400 people showed up.

"We’ve never done something like this before," Beth Calhoun, an expo coordinator, said before adding in a half-whisper, "Things have never been so bad before."

Amid all the bailout talk for financial and auto giants, the country’s vast and varied pool of small businesses, the proverbial backbone of the economy, is taking it on the chin.

Depressing data abounds: Small-business loans taken out have fallen 38 percent from a year ago; two-thirds of senior loan officers report tighter credit standards on loans to small companies. Small business makes up 90 percent of the retail and restaurant trade, one of the sectors suffering most in the recession.

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If you’ve read more than a couple of business improvement books, you’ve seen many focus on the same basics. The authors may be different and the examples used may change. However, the basic formula for success that they recommend remains the same.

After having read many of these books, and with a healthy dose of practical experience, I’ve developed my own formula for business success. Here it is, and you don’t even have to spend $20 for the book:

• Develop a great product/service.
• Care more about how it helps the customer/ client than you.
• Sell it in a fiscally responsible manner.

How does our Company, and how do you represent, this formula for business success?

Develop A Great Product/Service
This Company has a great service to offer. More than 50 years ago, George May realized that the many small companies created in the 1940s needed help if they were to survive the change from the war-time economy of World War II to the peace-time economy that followed. In the decades that followed, small and mid-size businesses have become the true economic engine for this country. They represent more than 99 percent of all employer firms, more than half the private gross domestic product, and 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs created annually in the past 10 years. Thousands of new businesses are being created every year, and thousands of others change ownership.

Care More About How It Helps The Customer/Client Than You.

Put the client first, and the rest will follow. How often have you heard the old adage: “People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.” In other words, don’t sell them; give them a reason to buy. It is all about the perspective. Are you thinking of yourself - what you need? Or are you thinking of the prospect/client - what that business owner wants and needs? If your words focus too much on yourself or George S. May International Company interests, the prospect/client feels it is all about us. However, if you focus your words and actions on the prospect/client, then that person feels the center of attention. Become “client-centric.”

Sell The Product/Service In A Fiscally Responsible Manner

There are very few business people who complain about price if they believe they are receiving value for their money. Value must always be the key element in any presentation we make to a prospect/client. The value to the owner must be key when making a telemarketing appointment, when selling a Survey Analysis, when presenting the reasons for a Go-Ahead, and when explaining the appropriateness of a MS Recommendation to a client.
We find out what is valuable to the business by remembering the key phrase: “What does the client want?” Value is defined by the prospect/client. The value of our services is obvious to us. Your challenge is to put the value we offer into an understandable value statement that the businessperson understands and accepts. Selling an unnecessary service to a business results is dissatisfaction. Motivating the owner to buy our services results in satisfaction.

The real point is to help your client. If you do that, you’ll win - incidentially! Helping a client in order to win, is not the same as helping a client for its own sake. And your client knows the difference.