10 Quick Tips for Small Businesses
in the 21st Century
by Al Bryce
www.wordpress.21stCenturySME.com
Copyright 2013 by Al Bryce
Smashwords Edition
Introduction
Business is just common sense
Set yourself goals and targets
Research your market and keep researching it
Find a niche
Get help where it’s needed
Justify spending every penny
Nothing is secret
Marketing is about volume sort of
Embrace online
Monitor your marketing
Be proactive
Introduction
Over the last 5 years working as an advisor to start-up businesses I’ve met with over 1,000
people to advise them about starting and running a small business. I’ve seen people from all
sorts of life, with all sorts of skills and all sorts of reasons for becoming entrepreneurs. I’ve seen
businesses start-up and flourish and I’ve seen them stutter and fade away. I’ve watched good
business ideas fail to launch and I’ve seen some poor ones (in my opinion!) go on to success.
This first hand access to SME successes and failures has allowed me to develop my own theory
on the correct way to run a winning small business strategy in the digital age. In the middle of
2012 I setup the 21st Century SME blog to share these ideas. Both before and during this
period I also created and ran my own SMEs, which have been invaluable in allowing me to test
out my theories of running successful small businesses. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t,
so that when I speak with people about starting up and running their small business, I can do so
out of a position of practical experience rather than one of theoretical knowledge.

themselves to self-analyse. It could even be a post-it on the wall asking “What would my
customer think?”.
We all have the ability to make common sense decisions, we just need to ensure we’re making
them for our customers rather than ourselves.
Set yourself goals and targets
“An archer cannot hit the bullseye if he does not know where the target is” Anonymous
Why are you setting up or running a small business? There could be a number of good
reasons. You might like to keep your own hours. Maybe you want to get rich and retire early.
Could be that you love the thrill of creating something or solving a problem. Perhaps you’re just
unemployable! Whatever it is, you should ensure you’re acutely aware of what that reason is
and what you’re in business for.
There’s no right and wrong answer to this one. It’s entirely dependent on you but it’s amazing
how many people I’ve met who haven't taken the time to think this through. Not only do I think
this is an important exercise, but I think you need to expand on this further and set out not only
why you started in business, but what your business goals are. Write them down. Only then
can you accurately plan how you’re going to achieve them.
I’m not saying you need to write a business plan (that may sound odd from a professional
business advisor but I’d rather create a kick-ass marketing strategy than a business plan). But
you should at least right down a list of your top business goals. Once you have these, you can
break these top level goals into smaller targets that have deadlines and explanations of how
you’re going to make them happen.
Remember to make your goals SMART:
● Specific - what exactly do you want to achieve?
● Measurable - How can you tell when you’ve achieved it? How can you chart your
progress?
● Achievable - Do you have the resources to reach your goal? There’s only 24 hours in a
day.
● Relevant - Getting 100,000 visitors to your website may be a good achievement but
unless you’re converting them into paying customers then it’s pointless
● Timely - Specify when you will achieve your goals by. We all work better when we have

an industry body set-up to support their members. As well as other benefits, they often
have access to the latest industry information.
Much like a business strategy, you need to ensure that you treat market research as an active
task. It’s easy to get caught up in a bubble when you’re running a business but remember that
over time customer’s demands shift, products and services change and your competitors are
always evolving. You need to ensure you’re ahead of these changes and there are tools
available to help you:
● Community Network - as part of your marketing efforts you’ve probably set up a
community somewhere be it a Facebook page or a Twitter feed - make use of this one-
to-one access to customers and ask them for their thoughts on the industry, your
competitors and your own company
● Google Alerts - set up alerts for your competitors (so you can keep tabs on what they’re
up to), your product or service (to hear about any new advances first) and your key
phrases (to keep in the loop of the public’s latest thoughts)
● RSS Feeds - another great way to quickly and easily keep up to date with the latest
movement of your competitors and the leading industry authorities. Google Reader is a
free tool that allows you to see whenever any website or blog you choose to follow has
added new content - it saves you navigating separately to each website you’re interested
in.
● Survey Monkey - if you’ve built up a mailing list of customers then every so often you
might want to ask them for more in-depth feedback. Survey Monkey allows you to set-
up questionnaires that you can easily share to your networks and analyse the data they
provide.
Your Mouth - most businesses have at least some face-to-face contact with their customers.
Use this time to ask them for their thoughts - people tend to be receptive when asked for their
opinion!
Find a niche
When you start up a small business the temptation is strong to try and make your business
appeal to as many people (i.e. potential customers) as you can. But is this really the best
approach?

There can be a downside to all of this however. Think if you’ve ever come across any of these:
● a poorly made, evidently homemade website
● a terrible logo that looks like it was made with Microsoft Word
● email newsletters that show the email of everyone it was sent to
● late invoices or payments from an SME because they are too busy to get it sent out
So what I’m trying to get at is there are some occasions where stubbornly refusing to pay
someone else to do something for your business can harm your brand and end up costing you
more than you would have paid in the first place.
Think about you financial books for a second. How long do you spend doing them yourself?
Let’s say it’s a fairly conservative two hours a week. That’s 104 hours a year, or to put it another
way, three full 8-hour days a year. If you spent those three days a year out actively selling your
product or service, could you create more value for your business than the cost of a
bookkeeper? I bet you could!*
In the very early days, it might just not be possible to outsource because of limited funds but if
the aim is to build a business then very quickly you need to consider outsourcing the elements
that you don’t have the time or the skill to do effectively.
*This doesn’t include the potential tax efficiencies and benefit from prompt invoice factoring it
could bring you either.
Justify spending every penny
Businesses need money in order to survive. If you can’t pay your bills or pay yourself then you
don't have a business. It doesn't matter how many orders you have unless you’ve got the cash
in your bank account. Unless you’re a millionaire starting up a business for fun then it’s more
than likely that you need to get a handle on your costs from day one - and that can mean
making decisions you don't necessarily want to make.
It’s tempting if you’ve never been your own boss before to say “I will buy the latest Apple iPhone
for my business because I want it and I’m in charge”. What you should really be thinking is “can
my business afford the expense of £500 per year on a phone or will I get the older model and
pay half that?” There are a few techniques you can try to change your mindset:
● Work out how many products you need to sell or how many billable hours you need to
charge to pay for a purchase and you might start to look at things differently. The 40

it’s too fiddly a job for them to do and they know you can do it right.
So don’t be afraid of giving away your insider knowledge, because someone somewhere will
already of done it. And by doing it yourself you can build up your reputation and start storing up
goodwill for the future.
Marketing is about volume sort of
As a marketer myself I have no problem in sharing my belief that the fundamentals of marketing
are pretty easy. Find your customers, find out what they want to buy and try and sell it to them.
But we know it’s a bit more complicated in practice. With the rise in online marketing we can
now tailor our marketing towards individual customers. But I believe it still holds true that:
the more people you can get your SME in front of, the more you will sell
I can almost hear the screams of seasoned marketers after reading this but I’m not saying that
you shouldn’t have an idea of your ideal customer. The type of person or business that will buy
from you is an important determination. However, once you’ve figured out that you want to
market to female golfers living within 25 miles of Edinburgh (or whatever it may be), you surely
want to promote your business to as many of them as possible?
And not just the volume of target customers but the frequency of your communications. ‘How
often?’ is an obvious question, but unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily have an obvious answer.
Ask yourself this: how often do my target customers want or need to hear from me (even better
go out and speak to them and ask them!). For many businesses, quarterly is a pretty standard
timeframe. It means that if throughout the year they decide that they need the product or
service you provide, it hasn't been longer than 12 weeks since you were in contact with them
but you haven’t been inundating them and creating a negative vibe.
Claiming that it’s about the volume of communication isn’t a very scientific standpoint and may
find me ostracised from the marketing community (if I was ever actually in it) but do you want to
be a successful small business or a successful marketing consultant?
Embrace online
It really amazes me how many businesses still don’t have some sort of web presence these
days. I know that many SMEs don’t necessarily need a fancy website or a Facebook page but I
struggle to understand why any business working in 2013 can get away with ignoring the
Internet. I mean, when was the last time you looked up the Yellow Pages to find a business

Marketing isn’t an exact science (although perhaps many may disagree). So however targeted
and planned a marketing campaign is going to be, there are no guarantees. There’s a famous
quote by John Wanamaker who is regarded as the father of modern advertising that says “half
the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
That may be true in the days of mass media, where you spent your money on a billboard and it
was read by perhaps thousands of people who would never buy your product but these days we
can be a lot more focussed and measure the effect of our marketing to help us make better
decisions in the future.
Here are my top five tips to measure your marketing:
1 Ask the customer - anytime a customer makes an enquiry with you you need to find out
how they heard about you. If, after 6 months, not one person has mentioned the leaflet
you spent £200 on printing and an hour a day delivering then it’s not working so you can
divert your energy into other marketing. Over time you’ll build up a feel for what is
promoting the most customers to purchase.
2 Analytics - Install the free Google Analytics programme onto your website or use your
built in analytics (most website have them) and get to know them. The amount of
information they contain is staggering. At the very least you want to be able to find out
where the traffic is coming to your website from. If you use social media channels then
knowing which are most effective can be a timesaver.
3 Stats - keep an eye on your number of twitter followers, facebook fans, website visitors
or email subscribers. The goal is usually to grow them (with the focus on quality not
quantity) but looking our for patterns or spurts of growth will give you indicators of the
types of marketing that sits well with your prospects
4 Tracking codes - if you do lots of online marketing then you can use a tool from Google
called URL builder which allows you to create unique weblinks that you can use for
specific campaigns. At the end of the campaign you can simply check how many
specific actions your campaign generated.
5 Campaign Phone Numbers - maybe not one for very small businesses but if you’ve got
a decent marketing budget then it may make sense to buy a block of 0845 (for example)
phone numbers. They all divert to your main office number but by assigning a campaign