We talk a lot about niches here at Darby so Twitter is quite a blessing to us.  We’re still in our infancy in exploring Twitter but I thought we’d share our thoughts and our use of it.

For a long time Twitter was unknown to many people and only existed to the few early adopters that had started using it.  In the last two months, I’ve seen an explosion in the number of people who are either on Twitter or are asking, “what is Twitter?”

If you venture to the Twitter home page, you’ll see that they describe the service as a way to exchange short messages and answer the question, “what are you doing?“  However, this is misleading.  I find that most people really don’t care what I’m doing and I, likewise, usually don’t care what other people are doing.

The power of Twitter is finding your niche.

Twitter seems vast with its millions of users and messages so it’s essential that we filter those users and message to our specific needs.  Twitter has a feature available that is called a hashtag and it helps organize everything.  Hashtags are essentially categories that are made on-the-fly.  To create one, you simply type a hash mark, “#”, and then the name of your category inside your message.

For example, I live in Denver, I’m a vegan, I love hot sauce, I’m passionate about small business and I love to write software in a programming language called Flex.  I can listen to conversations about all those subjects by entering their hashtags (#denver, #vegan, #hotsauce, #smallbiz, #flex) in my Twitter desktop program called Tweetie and I can now see people’s messages on those subjects.

One of the more active hashtag categories that I listen to on Twitter is #smallbiz.  Small business owners from all over the world discuss how to grow their business and post great links to blog posts or other useful information.  Interestingly, Darby Software is a small business that caters to other small businesses so this is a great place to allow us to connect with other entrepreneurs that help teach us to grow our business and it’s a place where we can help others grow their business.

If you have not already read the first post in this series, I encourage you to take a minute or two to do that. Today I would like to talk a little bit about hiring help. I hear and read so often about the LONG hours small business owners put into their business day after day, all too often to the point of complete burnout. I also hear from those same people that either they cannot afford to hire help or cannot find someone to do the same job they can. I would like to address both of those and I will start with the latter.

If you are reading this post as a small business owner, you already know there are so many aspects to running a small business, some of which are no fun at all. What are the tasks in your business that you dislike? Paying bills? Sending invoices? Shopping for your inventory or office supplies? Organizing your files? These are all things that a part time person can do for you, either as an employee, or as a contractor.

Barbara Sanfilippo spoke at a conference I attended last year and had a fantastic idea. Even if you LOVE every aspect of your business, there are probably things in your personal life that you dislike that takes up time you could be spending on your business. Barbara absolutely despised grocery shopping and taking and picking up dry cleaning, so she paid someone to do those things for her, freeing up time to do the things she enjoyed.

Now on to affordability. You will be amazed at the responses you will receive if you place an ad on craigslist for a $10-$12 per hour job. I am guessing that most likely as a small business owner, you charge a much higher rate than $10-$12 per hour. If you free up your time from doing some of the smaller, yet time consuming tasks, you can spend more time doing the things that make more money for your business. Say for example, you charge $35 per hour and you spend 10 hours per week doing tasks that someone else can do for $10 per hour. Those extra 10 hours would net you $250 ($350-$100) and you will be doing the things you enjoy. I think if you do the math for your business, and take into consideration your sanity, you will find it worthwhile.

Adwords is a tricky beast.  You put hours and hours into your product or service only to be restricted to a couple words to sell it to the world.  Rather than curse Adwords for their brevity, accept it and get better at it.  Twitter is a great tool for practicing this — not only for Adwords but for communicating with customers every day.

Copyblogger has a great post on how using Twitter helps you become a better writer.  Twitter has helped me understand a couple things about writing since I’ve started:

1. Don’t waste attention. It’s valuable.
2. Use strong verbs.
3. Adding filler in your message waters it down.
4. Call to action.  Don’t beat around the bush.

Every word counts.  If it’s not necessary, don’t say it.

O.K. So you have a great new product or service to offer consumers,  your marketing skills are showing because your business phone is ringing, and the public is placing orders. Now… why is is so difficult to actually collect money from these people who seem so satisfied with what you provided them?

As a business owner who likes to speak to other entrepreneurs I get this question a lot - what procedures do I have in place so that I don’t have to be the “bad guy” and hound my clients for money all the time?

I spent the first 15 years of my working life in the debt collection business and I swore that collecting money would not be a part of any business that I owned.  The days of typing up an invoice - mailing it - waiting - and waiting - and waiting are over, nothing leaves my shop without a credit card number in-hand.  You see I get paid first, then, if they don’t like my service or product I will refund the customer… at my pace.  There is a small fee associated with processing credit cards but the 2% is worth knowing that I never have any accounts receivables… NEVER!

There are two points that I want to make; the first is about processing credit card payments. You do not have to be a giant retailer to make this happen if you have a computer and an Internet connection you are 80% of the way there (if you do not have these two things you should consider not owning your own business). From there you simply obtain a merchant account through your local bank or “Google the process” and credit card payments can be happening within hours. My second point is about receiving payment upfront. There are two ways to go about this, the hard way is to be convincing - convince your customer that this is a policy that you will not budge from and hope they comply. The second way to easily get money up front is to be excellent.  If you have a reputation for offering outstanding products and service, people will give you credit card information that they wouldn’t trust their own families with.

“Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.”

This is an excerpt taken from the book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael G. Gerber, a book that I believe every person should read that is either thinking of starting their own business or who already owns a business and is wondering if it’s all worth it. As a partner in two small businesses, Darby Inventory and Pineapple Interiors, I take at least a  few minutes each week to reflect on how much I am working on my businesses versus how much I am working in them and how I can make adjustments where necessary. Again, quoting from the book, I ask myself these questions:

• How can I get my business to work, but without me?
• How can I systematize my business so that it could be replicated 5000 times if I wanted to?
• How can I own my own business, and still be free of it?
• How can I spend my time doing the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?

It is so easy for small business owners to get caught up in the day-to-day of their business and then suddenly wonder where they went wrong. It’s never too late to start improving the way you are running your business–and more importantly your life! Do you have ideas to share on how you have improved your business? I would love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Ed Sim posted a fun, inspiring video on his blog a couple days ago.  The video made me think about how when people talk about entrepreneurship they use the phrase, “change the world“.  But  companies who have changed the world on a global scale are McDonalds, AIG and other corporate giants.  Those are not companies we get inspired by.

Instead I think the motto of entrepreneurship should be, “change a world”.  In this era where everyone wants something personalized, custom-made and built specifically for their tastes, a product created for the masses is ignored.  Whether you want to be the best tandem mountain bike company or you want to solve the world’s business card organization needs, create an incredible product for a specific problem and target a specific niche.  The niche is where you can find your most knowledgable, passionate customers.  Once you find those people, they can help you grow your business beyond the niche.

A number of years ago when I was working in Corporate America the CEO of our company sent a few of us to one of those Tony Robbins weekend motivational seminars. Even though I spent a good 25 hours there over the three days, there is very little that I remember about what was said. However, one thing that I do remember Mr. Robins telling us (along with the fiery hot coal walk of course) was… “if you’re not growing, you’re dying”. At the time it seemed a bit cliché but over the past few weeks that saying has hit me square between the eyes!

It has recently been brought to my attention that the world of marketing and PR has changed dramatically in the last few years.  Recently a small group of us started a new business and for me it has been a sharp learning curve.  For small businesses today the Madison Avenue advertising models of the 1960’s such as we see on TV’s Mad Men looks nothing like today’s world of web-based, word of mouth, electronic marketing.  Blogging, Twittering, social networks, web site optimization, and back-linking your way to a loyal customer base are all a part of the “new rules”.  I have spent the last few years asleep at the marketing wheel and now I am doing what I can to get caught up.

Here are a few things that I am doing in my growing-not-dying process…

• Reading blogs from every type of business that is similar to mine
• Reading books and articles that speak to the new world of marketing
• Realizing that social networks are more valuable than just reaching old football buddies
• Writing blogs – good, bad, read, or ignored – getting my thoughts out there

I am no longer dying - I am growing.  Look Mr. Robins, I just wrote my first blog!