The Small Biz Wiz

Marketing for Small Business' Tele Conference Call

The Wilders — 2007-09-11T23:12:28-05:00

Last week, we had a great Telephone Conference call on 'Marketing for Small Businesses.'

Our special guest was Mr. Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch

You can find a link to the audio portion of the call at:

http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/qblibrary/radio/smallBusiness/index.html

http://www.conferencecallsunlimited.com/podcast/QuckBooksCommunity/SmallBusinessMarketing.mp3

And by the end of the day Tuesday, we will post a transcript of the call on the site.

During the call, I several useful websites for Small Businesses were mentioned. See below:

1. To create a blog, which in many respects you can use as your main website:

www.typepad.com

www.wordpress.com

If you go to the following web address, you will get a special discount for QuickBooks users.

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/quickbooks/

You can also find useful information on blogging at:

http://quickbooksgroup.com/webx/SBCenter/Marketing/typepadAugust.html

2. To easily set up an email campaign, you can work with one of the following providers:

http://www.verticalresponse.com/

http://www.constantcontact.com

http://www.cheetahmail.com

http://www.icontact.com

http://www.aweber.com

3. To experience some top social networking sites, you can visit:

www.linkedin.com (good for recruiting talent)

www.facebooks.com (started as a site for college students, but now is used as a communication tool among webbies)

www.youtube.com (good for seeing user created videos)

www.taxalmanac.com (good for tax created information.. It is an Intuit sponsored website)

4. To build your own website, here are some of the places that can host your site for you

www.homestead.com

www.yahoo.com

www.godaddy.com

http://www.businessdiligence.com

** but don' forget. You might just want to use blog technology for your site.

Once again, I want to thank John Jantsch for sharing his wisdom about Marketing and we look forward to having him back again soon. In the meantime, you can check out his site www.ducttapemarketing.com or read his pearls of wisdom at http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/SBCenter/AsktheSmallBusinessExpert/marketing

Note: we plan to have another marketing related call in late September / early October. So stay tuned.

Future Business Owners

The Wilders — 2007-04-06T13:40:44-05:00

Check out some future Small Business Owners -- brought to you about Quicken Kids and Money, which help parents teach their kids about money

What is the right number?

The Wilders — 2007-03-28T16:00:41-05:00

Originally published at knowedge.wharton.upenn.edu

(Note: I am very interested in how small teams work, so from time to time, I will share some good articles with you)

When Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What’s the Right Number?

When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11. But when it comes to the workplace, where teamwork is increasingly widespread throughout complex and expanding organizations, there is no hard-and-fast rule to determine the optimal number to have on each team.

Should the most productive team have 4.6 team members, as suggested in a recent article on “How to Build a Great Team” in Fortune magazine? What about naming five or six individuals to each team, which is the number of MBA students chosen each year by Wharton for its 144 separate learning teams? Is it true that larger teams simply break down, reflecting a tendency towards “social loafing” and loss of coordination? Or is there simply no magic team number, a recognition of the fact that the best number of people is driven by the team’s task and by the roles each person plays?

“The size question has been asked since the dawn of social psychology,” says Wharton management professor Jennifer S. Mueller, recalling the early work of Maximilian Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer born in 1861 who discovered that the more people who pulled on a rope, the less effort each individual contributed. Today, “teams are prolific in organizations. From a managerial perspective, there is this rising recognition that teams can function to monitor individuals more effectively than managers can control them. The teams function as a social unit; you don’t need to hand-hold as much. And I think tasks are becoming more complex and global, which contributes to the need for perspective that teams provide.”

Each Person Counts

While the study of team size is one of her areas of concentration, Mueller and other Wharton management experts acknowledge that size is not necessarily the first consideration when putting together an effective team.

“First, it’s important to ask what type of task the team will engage in,” Mueller says. Answering that question “will define whom you want to hire, what type of skills you are looking for. A sub-category to this is the degree of coordination required. If it’s a sales team, the only real coordination comes at the end. It’s all individual, and people are not interdependent. The interdependence matters, because it is one of the mechanisms that you use to determine if people are getting along.”

Second, she says, “what is the team composition? What are the skills of the people needed to be translated into action? That would include everything from work style to personal style to knowledge base and making sure that they are appropriate to the task.”

And third, “you want to consider size.” The study of optimal team size seems to fascinate a lot of businesses and academics, primarily due to the fact that “in the past decade, research on team effectiveness has burgeoned as teams have become increasingly common in organizations of all kinds,” writes Wharton management professor Katherine J. Klein, in a paper titled, “Team Mental Models and Team Performance.” The paper, co-authored with Beng-Chong Lim, a professor at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, was published in January 2006 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

In an interview, Klein acknowledges that when it comes to team size, each person counts. “When you have two people, is that a team or a dyad? With three, you suddenly have the opportunity to have power battles, two to one. There is some notion that three is dramatically different from two, and there is some sense that even numbers may be different from odd numbers, for the same reason. My intuition is that by the time you are over eight or nine people, it is cumbersome and you will have a team that breaks down into sub-teams. Depending on the group’s task, that could be a good thing or that could not be right. There is a sense that as a team gets larger, there is a tendency for social loafing, where someone gets to slide, to hide.”

Ringelmann’s famous study on pulling a rope — often called the Ringelmann effect — analyzed people alone and in groups as they pulled on a rope. Ringelmann then measured the pull force. As he added more and more people to the rope, Ringelmann discovered that the total force generated by the group rose, but the average force exerted by each group member declined, thereby discrediting the theory that a group team effort results in increased effort. Ringelmann attributed this to what was then called “social loafing” — a condition where a group or team tends to “hide” the lack of individual effort.

“After about five people, there are diminishing returns on how much people will pull,” says Mueller. “But people, unless they are not motivated or the task is arbitrary, will not want to show social loafing. If the task is boring and mundane, they are more likely to loaf. If you tell executives this, they say, ‘One of the things I’m worried about is loafing and free riding.’ Whereas social loafing is decreased effort in a group context relative to individual context, free riding is rational and self-interested. If a person is not going to be rewarded, they say, ‘I’m going to free ride’ and they don’t participate as much. The two concepts are hard to distinguish, but they are just different ways to measure similar outcomes.”

The Number Six

Evan Wittenberg, director of the Wharton Graduate Leadership Program, notes that team size is “not necessarily an issue people think about immediately, but it is important.” According to Wittenberg, while the research on optimal team numbers is “not conclusive, it does tend to fall into the five to 12 range, though some say five to nine is best, and the number six has come up a few times.”

But having a good team depends on more than optimal size, Wittenberg adds. For instance, when Wharton assigns five to six MBA students to individual teams, “we don’t just assign those teams. We make sure they can be effective. We have a ‘learning team retreat’ where we take all 800 students out to a camp in the woods in upstate New York and spend two days doing team building and trust building exercises. I think this is what people forget to do when they create a team in a business — spend a lot of time upfront to structure how they will work together. We get to know each other and share individual core values so we can come up with team values. But most importantly, we have the students work on their team goals, their team norms and their operating principles. Essentially, what are we going to do and how are we going to do it?”

In the work world, says Wittenberg, it has been “reinforced that five or six is the right number (on a team). At least for us, it gives everyone a real work out. But frankly, I think it depends on the task.”

Recent research by Mueller would seem to support Wittenberg’s notion that preparation for team success is vital. In a recent paper, “Why Individuals in Larger Teams Perform Worse,” Mueller channeled Ringelmann’s theories on large group efforts and tried to explain why the title of her paper is true. For decades, researchers have noted that mere changes in team size can change work-group processes and resulting performance. By studying 238 workers within 26 teams, ranging from three to 20 members in size, Mueller’s research replicates the general assertion that individuals in larger teams do perform worse, but she also offers an explanation for this conclusion.

“Understanding the reasons why individuals in larger teams in real work settings perform worse may be one key to implementing successful team management tactics in organizations, since research shows that managers tend to bias their team size toward overstaffing,” she writes. In addition, “individual performance losses are less about coordination activities and more about individuals on project teams developing quality relationships with one another as a means of increasing individual performance. Because research on teams in organizations has not examined team social support as an important intra-team process, future research should examine how team social support fits in with classic models of job design to buffer teams from negative influences and difficulties caused by larger team size.”

But is there an optimal team size? Mueller has concluded, again, that it depends on the task. “If you have a group of janitors cleaning a stadium, there is no limit to that team; 30 will clean faster than five.” But, says Mueller, if companies are dealing with coordination tasks and motivational issues, and you ask, ‘What is your team size and what is optimal?’ that correlates to a team of six. “Above and beyond five, and you begin to see diminishing motivation,” says Mueller. “After the fifth person, you look for cliques. And the number of people who speak at any one time? That’s harder to manage in a group of five or more.”

Diversity: Bad for Cohesion?

Klein’s recent research has looked at another confusing area when it comes to teams — the value of diversity. Various theories suggest that diversity represented by gender, race and age leads to conflict and poor social integration — while various other studies suggest just the opposite. “The general assumption is that people like people who are similar to themselves, so there is a theory to suggest that a lot of diversity is bad for cohesion,” says Klein. “But there is also a theory that says diversity is great, that it creates more ideas, more perspectives and more creativity for better solutions.”

In their own research, Klein and Lim find a distinct value in having some similarity between team members. The authors describe how “team mental models — defined as team members’ shared, organized understanding and mental representation of knowledge about key elements of the team’s relevant environment — may enhance coordination and effectiveness in performing tasks that are complex, unpredictable, urgent, and/or novel. Team members who share similar mental models can, theorists suggest, anticipate each other’s responses and coordinate effectively when time is of the essence and opportunities for overt communication and debate are limited. Our findings suggest that team mental models do matter. Numerous questions remain, but the current findings advance understanding of shared cognition in teams, and suggest that continuing research on team mental models is likely to yield new theoretical insights as well as practical interventions to enhance team performance,” the researchers write.

Wharton management professor Nancy P. Rothbard has a similar theory on what she calls “numerical minorities” — including gender, race, age and ethnic groups. “Often times, a numerical minority can appear to be less threatening because it’s not unexpected that someone who is different from you has different viewpoints. But if they are more similar to you and they disagree with you, some groups find that more upsetting. It can raise the level of conflict on a team. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if the conflict doesn’t get in the way of being able to think through a problem and do what needs to be done.”

Klein has also looked into what factors determine who becomes important to a team. The single most powerful predictor? Emotional stability. “And the flip side is neuroticism. If someone is neurotic, easily agitated, worries a lot, has a strong temper — that is bad for the team.”

Within a company, individual teams often begin to compete against each other, which Wittenberg finds can be troublesome. “One of the problems is the in-group, out-group problem,” he says. “Depending on how we identify ourselves, we can be part of a group or separate from a group. At many companies, the engineering group and the marketing group are very much at odds. But at the same time, if you talked about that company vs. another company, the teams are together, they are more alike than the people at the other company. Teams are sometimes more siloed within a company and they think they are competing with each other instead of being incentivized to work together.”

When it comes to creating a successful team, “teams that rely solely on electronic communication are less successful than those that understand why communication in person is important,” says Wittenberg. “Email is a terrible medium… . It doesn’t relate sarcasm or emotion very well, and misunderstandings can arise. There is something very important and very different about talking to someone face-to-face.”

While teams are hard to create, they are also hard to fix when they don’t function properly. So how does one mend a broken team? “You go back to your basics,” says Mueller. “Does the team have a clear goal? Are the right members assigned to the right task? Is the team task focused? We had a class on the ‘no-no’s of team building, and having vague, not clearly defined goals is a very, very clear no-no. Another no-no would be a leader who has difficulty taking the reins and structuring the process. Leadership in a group is very important. And third? The team goals cannot be arbitrary. The task has to be meaningful in order for people to feel good about doing it, to commit to the task.” Published: June 14, 2006 http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

SBA, U.S.P.S. Announce Internet Tools for Entrepreneurs

The Wilders — 2007-03-09T15:26:34-06:00

SBA, U.S.P.S. Announce Internet Tools for Entrepreneurs · The SBA and the U.S. Postal Service have unveiled a new Internet tool for small business owners, designed to deliver business solutions to entrepreneurs... They have created online videos with some nice how-tos!

1) Delivering Success, an online video-on-demand resource of successful entrepreneurs, is a nationwide co-sponsorship with the Postal Service to provide small business owners with information through video interviews that are accessible and convenient for entrepreneurs. 2)The Delivering Success video interviews chronicle the experiences of successful entrepreneurs from around the country, offering guidance and sharing insight on the road to success. 3) The video interviews provide key information on the ingredients of small business success, including an overview of business basics, resources to help with business plan development, small business friendly financing, business promotion, and planning & research. 3) “Small businesses are the backbone of the nation’s economy, and the SBA wants to do everything we can to encourage entrepreneurship and provide business solutions and resources that are readily available,” said SBA Administrator Steven Preston.

The Wilders — 2007-02-15T13:45:37-06:00

Just introduced two new discussions to the site

- What's Impacting Your Business
- How do you get along (with others) in a family business

Check them out and join the discussion

New QuickBooks Community Newsletter

The Wilders — 2007-01-30T12:26:13-06:00

Well, the QuickBooks Online Community now has a newslettter blog, which is easy to sign up for and if you do, you will get the latest news from Mountain View (our home offices), our other offices (the two biggest in Tucson and San Diego) and all the buzz about what is happening on the QuickBooks Online Community site. So, sign up and keep in the loop.

Worth sacrificing family?

The Wilders — 2007-01-09T01:01:17-06:00

Since I used to work and live in Cambridge, MA, I read the Boston Business Journal l once in a while. And tonight, I was surprised to read that – well, not too surprised – that half the Small Biz owners/managers, work during family time. Not a surprise when your personal well being and our life passion is so tied up to your work. Staples, who conducted the interviews stated that the found that entrepreneurs report working long hours, not a lot of vacation, and that work becomes personal stuff and visa versa. And the big surprise that nearly half report working while they are driving. Probably using cell phones. I have to admit that even though I used a cell phone while I drive, I wish 'they would ban the use of cell phones and Blackberrys while driving. Other findings:
- 62 percent, work well beyond a 40-hour week
- 21 percent work a double week, logging an extra 40 or more on-the-job hours
- 68 percent, work on days off, checking e-mail, voicemail or making work-related calls
- 66 percent, work after hours and at night; Half, 51 percent, work on holidays
- 47 percent, work during what is supposed to be family time
To be honest, I am ok with putting in a little extra work and following your passion, but is it worth sacrificing family

Targeting Gen Y (nothing to do with accounting.. just a great report)

The Wilders — 2006-12-24T23:37:20-06:00

My friends at Resource Interacted developed a great report on technology and Gen Y called Decoding the Digital Millennials

Key findings about the Connected Gen Y group include that they:

- are connected -- online all the time. We have a tendency to think it just by Instant Messaging, but these guys live and breath with their mobile phone. And if you think they are increasingly using email, you are wrong. Email usage is flat

- like to make lots of decisions together. They are good collaborators and prefer not to work independently

- multitasks all the time, but is productive. The consume media like never before. 77% still watch TV, but 74% surf the Web, 71% listen to music, 54% listen to radio, 37% watch videos/DVDs, and 29% play video games (source: Harris Interactive)

- filter anything that is not relevant

- pride themselves on self-expression, as long as their identify is still tied to the group

- are optimistic

- feel entitled.

The Resource Interactive survey reminds us to keep it real, be original, provide a dose of entertainment, and listen to what they have to say.

OK.. check out the survey. It is must for all marketers.

SBDC, what's that?

The Wilders — 2006-12-19T21:58:38-06:00

A great resource for you: Small Business Development Centers

OK, you are probably asking me what are SBDCs? They deliver free 1:1 business counseling and low-cost training to over 600,000 businesses a year. SBDC counselors and trainers are a valuable local resource. They provide great advice on building your small business.

Lets face it--Most people are alone when they start a new business. And it is lonely out there. I know. Before I started at Intuit, I had my own small business. I owned a small independant bookstore. And I wished when I had opened the store that I had more than the Independant Booksellers Association to help me. I wish I knew a place I could go to where I could find out about financing, find out about tax issues, find out about legal issues and just have some sort of support group. I think SBDC provides that!

Check out the SBDC site

Credit Card dependency

The Wilders — 2006-12-16T22:31:11-06:00

More small businesses are relying on 'plastic' (credit cards) to finance their businesses. That shouldn't be a big surprise. I feel as if I don't even carry cash any more myself.

A recent report by the Small Business Association confirms this. Part of this is the result of lenders encouraging an increase in credit card loans.

Yes, we are becoming a credit card nation. I don't need to tell you the dangers of this. Paying high interest rates, accidently failing to pay on time, floating the debt, fraud, etc.

And then there are other dangers you can't even imagine or predict. I recently meet an entrepreneur who finances his whole venture with his credit card, hoping that his VCs would pay him back. Guess what happened. He never received his money, went broke.. and his company went under. Lesson of the day. Think twice before relying on plastic....