August eNewsletter

• Top 15 Ways to Thrive in a Soft (Recovering) Economy
• 7 Deadly Sins
• YouTube 101 for Small Business
• Intellectual Property 101: A Small-Business Guide to Intellectual Property
• The Three Natural Phases of Successful Small Business Growth
• Make It Big Locally

Small Business Forum: The Ladies Room: Women Working with Women
With refreshing honesty and candor, Darcie Harris, founder and CEO of EWF International, explores the stereotypes, beliefs and behaviors that can cause us to be our own worst enemies as we work with and for women. Drawing on insights learned from eleven years of consulting exclusively with women business owners and executives, Darcie inspires women to avoid oversimplification and identify the real issues that get labeled as simply "too much estrogen."

Tuesday, September 3, 2009
3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Boldt Construction
101 W. Hefner Road
Oklahoma City, OK 73114

RSVP to Shauna George at (405) 463-5011 or sgeorge@spiritbank.com.

SpiritBank and the Tulsa Drillers Invite You to a Ball Park Dinner
Spirit Tower 1800 S. Baltimore Ave.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
5:30 p.m.

Guest speaker and Tulsa Drillers' President, Chuck Lamson, will talk about the Drillers' current season and how Tulsa has hit a homerun with our new ballpark.

RSVP to Tina at (918) 295-7481 or tjclark@spiritbank.com.

Business Solutions Series: Enhance Operations & Maximize Technology In a Challenging Economy
Featuring special guest speaker T. Sean Teague of Dallas-based ManageWatch, Inc.

Tuesday, September 15th
5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Gaylord-Pickens Oklahoma Heritage Museum
1400 Classen Drive, Oklahoma City
(at the corner of NW 13th Street & Shartel Avenue)

RSVP to Shauna George at (405) 463-5011 or sgeorge@spiritbank.com.

Business Solutions Series Event: What Keeps You Up At Night?
Sleep better and accelerate your business growth with custom coaching from industry specialists. This interactive roundtable coaching session will be designed based on the input we receive from you. Contact us prior to the event with your insomnia-inspired business issue and get a customized response, along with coaching, at the seminar from industry leaders in fields such as Finance, Marketing, HR, Sales and more.

September 24, 2009
SpiritBank Community Room
1800 S. Baltimore Ave.
Networking, hors d'ouevres and drinks 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Custom Coaching Program 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

RSVP with your business related question to vsimmons@spiritbank.com or 295-7434 by Friday, September 11. All submissions will be kept completely confidential.

Top 15 Ways to Thrive in a Soft (Recovering) Economy
By Darcie Harris, Strategic Partner, CEO EWF International

1. Fear Not: Do not make decisions out of fear. Stay positive. See a soft market as an opportunity to improve. Hope for the best while you plan for the worst.
2. Watch Accounts Receivable: Don't let your accounts receivables grow; collect what is owed you in a timely way.
3. Know Your Numbers: Understand your key metrics & run your business accordingly. Run a forecast with a 10 percent or 15 percent decrease in revenues and come up with a plan.
4. Have a Plan B: Create a plan for what you would do if your business dropped off by 10-15 percent and be ready to execute your plan.
5. Listen & Anticipate How Customers' Needs Will Change: Conduct an Environmental Scan; how will world & national changes trickle down to affect your local market? Stay highly attuned to how your market may change & shift. Customers & employees have great ideas too.
6. Continue Marketing & Networking: Do not cut your marketing budget. If the pie is shrinking, make sure you get a bigger piece of the pie. Stay networked & connected.
7. Deliver Exceptional Service & Value: Build customer loyalty & create exit barriers.
8. Stay Lean: Comb through expenses to see where costs have begun to creep up. What costs have you begun to take for granted?
9. Reduce Debt: Renegotiate loans to lower interest rates; monitor cash flow rigorously & never run out of cash.
10. Keep Good Employees & Hire Better Ones: Now is the time to snag a great employee that your competitor has laid off.
11. Improve Systems & Efficiencies: Better systems create efficiencies, reduce costs, improve service & employee satisfaction.
12. Reduce Inventory: Don't get stuck with dollars tied up in inventory sitting on shelves.
13. Maintain Prices: Don't resort to giving discounts that may be hard to take away when times get better.
14. Keep Personal Credit Rating High: Your borrowing ability & loan costs depend on having good personal credit.
15. Look to Expand: Any downturn sparks new opportunities. Seek them out. Now may be the perfect time to capture your competitors' share of the market!

7 Deadly Sins
By Jay Goltz

From sloppy accounting to poor hiring, here are the business-killing traps that every entrepreneur must avoid.

Sloppy accounting
Done properly, accounting is a diagnosis of everything that's right and wrong with your company. You should be able to complete a pro forma income statement at the beginning of the year that shows your recipe for making money. Crucially, you need to understand the ratio of sales to expenses that will result in profitability. You want to be able to say, "This business needs to gross $800K for me to have a $100K profit," as opposed to merely saying, "I hope I can make $100K one day."

Unrealistic pricing
You must truly understand your costs, which include often-neglected components like scrap, freight, damages, theft and obsolescence. Once you do, you need to figure out what your cost of goods sold (COGS) number must be for you to make money. Keep in mind that your selling price is not your average selling price -- you have to factor in discounts, which will increase your COGS number.

Naive hiring
It takes patience and skill to hire the right people. Busy entrepreneurs can easily be romanced by the applicant who says, "I work hard and I'm a fast learner. I just haven't had the right opportunity."

Here's the trick to smart hiring: Call references, ask them the right questions, and listen hard to their answers. Key question: "If Bob is so great, how come he doesn't work for you anymore?" I want to hear this kind of reply: "Bob is brilliant. I'd rehire him in a second, but his wife got transferred." A long silence at the other end of the line tells me this candidate isn't worth my while.

Fear of firing
No sane person enjoys letting people go, but it's necessary if you want to run a great company. As in any competitive endeavor, it's critical to have the best people. It's easy to keep mediocre employees around, especially when they are nice and loyal -- but it will hurt you sooner or later.

Here's a good test: Would you be relieved if anyone on your team quit tomorrow? If the answer is yes, you've got a problem.

Lack of standards
One of your main jobs is to set standards in such essential areas as quality control, customer service and the company's public image. In my picture framing business, the standard for quality control is arm's-length inspection: If you can't see a problem at arm's length, you're fine.

Lack of controls
It's easy enough for customer service failures, pricing errors and quality issues to get lost in the shuffle. You need to identify and fix these problems before they do lasting damage.

In my business, one out of 200 times there's a problem with a framing job: the wrong mat, the wrong color and so on. Every screw-up gets a "hot ticket" assigned to it. The mistake gets fixed, and every month I have a record of what the problems are and who's causing them.

Poor branding
Recently I gave a speech to an audience of appliance dealers. I told them to focus on the layout of their stores, their signage, even how their employees dress. One dealer said, "We tried that branding thing and it didn't work." Wrong answer.

In business you brand yourself every day in a million ways. The real question is whether your branding helps or hurts your bottom line.

Most entrepreneurs aren't naturally talented in all seven of these areas, and that's the reason a lot of businesses fail. But failure is a great teacher. Learn and you will earn.

Read this article online at www.cnnmoney.com. 

YouTube 101 for Small Businesses
By Jim Kukral

YouTube is the number two most trafficked website on the Web for a reason, and that is that it's fun and useful, and as you will find out, not just for kids and non business people. But the first thing you have to figure out as a small business person is the possibilities that YouTube can give to you.

The video below talks about YouTube from your perspective and will give you some insight as to why you need to have your videos on YouTube, and how to navigate the site so that it works for you. Otherwise, why do it?

View YouTube 101 Video Online - Click here.

Read this article online at www.smallbiztrends.com.

Intellectual Property 101: A Small-Business Guide to Intellectual Property
By Darren Dahl

The two most precious resources for any small-business owner are time and money. That's why when the subject of intellectual property comes up, many owners run in the other direction. They see images of expensive lawyers and use that as an excuse to ignore the topic, reasoning that it is a problem for big companies to worry about.

The trouble is, with the rise of competition through the Internet and on the global market, understanding intellectual property is more critical than ever for small-business owners. Let's explore some of the common fallacies:

1. For small-business owners, it's not worth the time or effort to secure intellectual property rights.
Daniel Lubetzky, chief executive of New York City-based Kind Snacks, had high hopes when he and his company attended the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, Calif., in March. And who could blame him, since his Kind Plus bars had been named the best new product at the Natural Products Expo East last October?

But it didn't take long before Mr. Lubetzky knew something had gone wrong: He kept hearing how one of his competitors had copied the packaging, look and feel of his bars.

Fortunately for Mr. Lubetzky, he had secured crucial components of intellectual property like trademarks, trade dress (the look and feel of a product) and Web addresses after founding his company. Unlike a patent, which can cost up to $25,000 to secure, trademarks and Web addresses can be obtained relatively cheaply and without the aid of a lawyer.

With the legal documentation to back up his intellectual property rights, Mr. Lubetzky sent the offending company a cease-and-desist letter, which achieved the desired result. "Too many entrepreneurs forget there is more to I.P. than just patents," said Mr. Lubetzky, who happens to be a lawyer.

2. Once I get a trademark, my brand is safe.
It may be. But consider what happened to Tracey Deschaine, who runs a restaurant called Dixie Picnic in Ocean City, N.J.

When Ms. Deschaine opened her business in 2006, she secured trademarks on her business name and logo and on the name of her signature item, "upcakes," which are upside-down frosted cupcakes. The problem, she says, was that even though she had obtained the trademarks, someone monitoring the activity on the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Web site had spotted her application and secured upcakes.com as the Web address, or U.R.L., before she could.

"I had no idea that even though I have a trademark, someone else could just go register the U.R.L.," she said. "I wish I had planned ahead and bought the site before I did that."

3. Having a patent gives me the right to produce something.
This is a very fundamental misunderstanding. Actually, what a patent does is give you the right to prevent someone else from producing what your patent covers. "Having a strong I.P. position helps ensure that other people pay you for your innovation like they would a toll on a road," Mr. Kocher said.

But even if you do have a patent, there's no guarantee that someone won't try to get around it. There's also no guarantee that you will win if you fight that person. But if you have your I.P. ducks in a row and a commitment to do whatever you can to defend those rights, you do have a fighting chance, even in a fight against a much larger company.

Consider the example of Cryptography Research, a 20-employee technology firm in San Francisco that specializes in data security. Beginning in 2004, the company made the decision to pursue litigation against the credit card giant Visa, which Cryptography asserted was infringing on its patents covering smart cards. To pursue the case against Visa, however, Cryptography's founder, Paul Kocher, knew he needed a serious war chest in addition to his patent portfolio.

That's why he decided to sell off another piece of his business, patents covering technology that protects Blu-ray discs from piracy, to Macrovision, which is now known as Rovi, in 2007 for $45 million. "All of a sudden we became a formidable opponent for someone who thought we couldn't fight," Mr. Kocher said. In the end, the gamble paid off, as the two companies settled out of court, with Visa's agreeing to license the technology from Cryptography.

4. If I have a patent or trademark in the United States, I don't need to worry about the rest of the world.
It depends on your business model. Intellectual property rights, which also include country-specific U.R.L.'s, need to be obtained country by country, some of which protect them better than others. The cost can vary, too.

"In Japan, for example, it is notoriously expensive to acquire patents. In addition, the annual fees required to maintain the patents there are often prohibitively expensive for small businesses," said Gary Johnson, chief executive of Blue Spark Technologies, a manufacturer based in West Lake, Ohio, that makes small, flexible batteries used in things like radio frequency identification tags.

"What we have done is to develop a strategy to go after I.P. protection in a limited number of countries that we think we are most likely to sell or manufacture in, like the U.S. and China," he said. "A lot of the choice comes down to what your business plan tells you." To decide what your international I.P. strategy should be, consult a lawyer and conduct some cost-benefit analysis to see if expanding your I.P. rights makes sense.

5. People who collect patents but don't actually make anything are "patent trolls," parasites who can make money only by filing lawsuits against real businesses.
The term "patent troll" was coined in the wake of the epic lawsuit fought between NTP, a small holding company, and Research in Motion, which makes the hugely popular BlackBerry. The focal point of the dispute was a patent for wireless e-mail delivery held by NTP something that R.I.M. eventually would pay millions of dollars to license. But what most people remember about the story is the lawsuits and the notion that NTP was somehow in the wrong for trying to enforce its patent, mostly because it didn't make any products itself.

But consider that many inventors never set out to build a company, only to partner with someone who would bring their products to life. Thomas Edison, for instance, received more than 1,000 patents, many of which he licensed to other companies. "He created what we might consider the first innovation factory," says Mark Blaxill a co-founder of 3LP Advisors, an intellectual property consulting company based in Boston.

A more recent example is Trident Design, a company founded by an inventor, Chris Hawker, which patented and then licensed the design for the PowerSquid. Like Edison, Mr. Hawker's company invents products, builds an intellectual-property wall around them and then licenses them to other companies.

Read this article online at www.NYTimes.com.

The Three Natural Phases of Successful Small Business Growth
By John Jantsch

I've owned a small business for many years and have worked with thousands of small business along the way and I've come to sense what feels like natural states of successful small business growth.

A common small business plight is the frustrating cycle of expansion and contraction. I believe this is not simply due to the cycle of markets, but more often due to the lack of strategy and proper expectation around planned growth.

I think business owners need to think about growth a lot like a parent thinks about the growth and maturation of a child. But, many simply dive in and try to do things they are not ready to do, lacking the proper foundation of an ideal market, core message and systems and processes necessary to deliver a thrilling customer experience. Now, depending upon a series of what I like to call "success factors," things such as experience, resources, and networks, some business owners are able to move through these phases much more rapidly, but successful, long-term growth comes from moving in this same fashion no matter what.

Every business should look at progressing through as least three phases (although it's never quite this linear):

Foundation - This is most commonly associated with start-up, although I've worked with plenty of businesses that needed to return here after years of trying to grow without it. In this phase, you are tasked with getting your house in order. This is where you must experiment with finding your ideal customer, testing out ways to differentiate and finding your secret process sauce. This phase isn't simply about getting your marketing materials and web site created. This is the crucial strategy laying phase and it often requires starting and restarting, but the important element is a mindset of finding your niche and special approach. This phase takes time and patience, something that's hard to find while trying to pay the rent, but missing this step is a lot like skipping grade school and then wondering why college Comp is so hard.

Growth - Upon a strong foundation you can start to add the layers of a consistent brand. This, of course comes with a total understanding of your customer, a consistent message, and systems and processes that allow you to deliver a stunning customer experience. Growth now starts in earnest because your business is "referable." In other words, people start to voluntarily send business to your doorstep. During this phase successful long-term growth is built on taking what you've learned about your customer and what they value and expanding your reach, confidently into a larger universe of prospects, knowing that you now have the right message and have developed marketing systems that help you educate and build trust.

In this phase many businesses feel the pull to expand and capture new markets or add new directions, but the wise move in many cases is to actually refine and narrow your focus even more. By this time you've likely developed a great feel for your ideal customer or ideal kind of engagement and now is possibly the time to look at becoming a leader in your market or dominating a narrowly defined niche.

This is dangerous phase as well because in most cases this is the place where the owner, the one who may have built the foundation phase as a one person show, will probably need to add staff and start letting go of certain tasks. I say it's dangerous because some entrepreneurs struggle with the aspect of turning any part of their baby over to someone else and constriction is often the result. The need to build systems that ensure incredible delegation over aimless abdication is the key to success over failure in this phase.

Momentum - Once a business develops the sense of rhythm that comes with a strong foundation and steady expansion into a market, there becomes the space to think in terms of what I call momentum. In business, this is the phase where the business growth seems easy, seems to run itself. Like many things in life, this is simply the payoff for all the hard work put in to date, but it's more than that. It's a maturity that comes with an unconsciously competent awareness of opportunities to better serve your existing ideal customer base.

The momentum phase is often marked by other organizations expressing a desire to partner and align strategically with your brand. Your growth is sustained primarily though consistent referrals and a keen eye for spotting ways to do more business with your existing customer base.

This phase is not the done part, in fact, momentum is extremely hard to gain and strangely very easy to stall. (There's probably a physics equation in that) Maintaining growth and momentum comes from continuously monitoring, measuring, and adapting to the wants and needs of your ideal customer. It comes from staying one step ahead of your competitors and two steps ahead of the next new thing. It's achieved through your commitment to constant reeducation, your openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things, and willingness to take the time and space to get outside your business and learn from the experience that every industry has to offer.

My final point here is to attempt to provide any business owner struggling with growth the inspiration to appreciate that struggle is OK, in fact, it's to be expected, but also that you must locate where you are these phases of successful growth and commit to doing what it takes to move to the next phase as your primary short terms approach. Do this and your frustration can turn to focus - and focus may be the world's most powerful tool for growth.

Read this blog online at www.DuctTapeMarketing.com.

Make It Big Locally
By Sara Wilson

Taking your business far and wide doesn't have to mean crossing state lines or landing national accounts.

It may seem contrary, but taking your business far and wide doesn't necessarily mean crossing state lines or landing national accounts. Take Wisconsin Natural Acres, for example. By forging alliances with exclusive and highly reputable local retailers, founder Douglas J. Schulz, 49, has made his Chilton, Wisconsin-based business--and the natural gourmet honey it produces--a local favorite. He projects year-end sales to reach $500,000. Follow these tips to turn your business into an icon without ever having to leave town:

Be visible in the community.
Schulz and his team always try to do in-store demonstrations so they can educate customers about the product and adequately convey their passion for the business.

Arrange face-to-face meetings with local deal-makers.
Schulz has won over retailers' trust and confidence with the help of in-person meetings.

Tap into the power of the internet.
The internet can take a small business global-and it can help make a local business a phenomenon. Local review sites like Citysearch and Yelp have changed the way consumers make purchase decisions.

Get involved in the community.
There's no better way to promote your business than by getting to know the people in your community. Join the chamber of commerce or do volunteer work. Help others in your community prosper, and you'll likely prosper.

Choose your partners carefully.
Whether it's a retailer or a supplier, make sure the people you do business with are reputable and trustworthy.

Read this article online at www.Entrepreneur.com.