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How to Choose the Right Mentor for your Business

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Choosing the Right Mentor

As you work to select a mentor, it’s important to ask yourself some important questions. Taking the time to do so will help you to understand what you really need so that you can make this decision appropriately. As you start evaluating individuals as possible mentors, consider the following:

4 Questions to Consider for Mentorship

Do You Look Up to Them?

As you attempt to select a professional mentor, one of the biggest questions to ask yourself is if you look up to them. If you find that you have a great deal of respect for an individual and the work that they’ve done in your industry, they may make a great mentor. However, if you don’t respect them or look up to them very much, and they’ve simply been working in the industry longer than you have, the situation may not be a good fit. Take the time to learn a little bit about the person that you’d possibly be working under and do some self-reflection to see how you feel about them.

Can You Work Well with Them?

Take the time to ask yourself if you can work well with the individual, as well. It doesn’t make sense to choose a mentor if you like what they’ve accomplished in the business world but struggle to get along with them. If you find your teeth gritting and your blood pressure rising each time the person speaks with you, they’re likely not going to make the best choice for a mentor, regardless of what they’ve accomplished in the industry. Unfortunately, some people just aren’t compatible to work together, and you can’t force it.

Can They Assist You with Your Goals?

Can the individual that you’re considering as a mentor help you as you work toward your goals? Do they have skills that they can teach you or information that they can pass on to you that will help you learn so that you can advance your career in a direction that you’re interested in taking it in? These factors are important to consider as you work towards selecting a mentor that you can work with.

Are They Well Connected in the Community?

It’s important to select a mentor that is well connected in the community so that you’ll have a person that may be able to assist you with networking, finding connections as you grow your career, and resume-building opportunities. These qualities will help ensure that the individual can be a strong mentor figure and assist you, instead of you attempting to build all of these connections on your own and struggling to do so.

As you attempt to select a mentor, take the time to consider these questions. Doing so will help prepare you for the process so that you’re well prepared to choose an individual that you can work well with and that will match up with your needs. A mentor is an important part of your employment journey, and choosing one correctly can help you quite a bit as you go on your way, so making the correct choice becomes very important as you forge your career path.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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3 Easy to Implement Advertising Ideas for Small Businesses

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Small Business Advertising Ideas

Most small businesses attract customers the old-fashioned way—via “word of mouth.” While word of mouth marketing works, it’s a painfully slow process to build a business. If you have a business, no matter how small it is, the best way to grow your customer base quickly is to advertise.

Here are some easy-to-implement advertising ideas you can do so you can effectively reach your target market:

  1. Make your Business Newsworthy

If you want newspapers and magazines to write about your business, you need to make your business newsworthy in the eyes of the press. A write-up in a publication won’t cost you anything and can help get the word out about your business. So how do you go about it? You need to think of interesting stories that can create a buzz for your business. Examples of these are:

  • If you have a salon, you can devout a weekend giving free haircuts to orphans or the homeless.
  • If you have a small pharmacy, you can start offering delivery service to your customers.
  • If you have a store, you can have a Kids are the Boss Day and let children of your employees handle the day’s business.
  • If you have a restaurant, you can make a conscious effort to make your business eco-friendly

The key is to come up with stories that hit home emotionally. The story may not be directly about your product offerings but it’s a great PR tool for you.

  1. Make a YouTube video

As focus shift from television to computer screens, YouTube has become one of the most important platforms online. With over 30 million visitors every single day, and five billion videos viewed daily, YouTube is an essential tool for any business looking to reach a large audience. You can create a video demonstrating your product and post it on YouTube. Or you can even create a series of videos that revolve around your product and its benefits and place them all on a YouTube channel. Here are some of the types of videos you create for your business:

  • A how-to video demonstrating how to use your product.
  • A Q&A about your product or service
  • A series of video testimonials from your customers
  • A video how your product is made in the factory
  1. Maximize your Facebook Business Page

The Facebook for Business Page has easy-to-use and affordable advertising tools for small businesses, use it to your advantage. You can boost a post and make it appear on your target market’s New Feed or promote your business page by clicking the Promote button. Here are other ways to advertise on Facebook:

  • Facebook Events – get the word out about your business by creating an event on Facebook. You can invite your friends and prospective customers and watch your guest list grow.
  • Content syndication – if you already have a website or a blog, you can use Facebook’s Social Plugins to enable them to be shared quickly.

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How to Break this Year’s Business Goals into Small Pieces

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Business Planning Tips

Every marketer or entrepreneur knows the feeling of having several large projects that need immediate attention and completion, the ones that are vital to the survival of your commerce.

A new business plan, doing taxes, maintaining your creative content, and going over invoices are part of the vital stream of tasks to stay afloat daily. Then you will have others like business-to-business phone calls, reading articles and other content to stay up on important trends, and looking for applications and software to streamline your process down the road.

At the beginning of the year is when you are always going to plan what you really want to make happen, and it can feel daunting. But there are a few ways to at least break all of these large goals into smaller pieces.

Initial Brainstorming: plugging in early

When you know you are going to have enough tasks to keep you busy for a while, one thing that will help off the bat is utilizing time increments or sessions to narrow down the work it will take for the finished product. One very good rule of thumb during this process is to take the list of things that need to be done and write just a short sentence about it, such as: “This is such an important part of my marketing process because it involves learning code like Java.”

Then, you have the very important tree of information written down that involves what you have to do, even if it’s broken down into 20 steps. These little “micro tasks” can be as quick as jotting down important updates, to going back over things you have already completed to see if there are any comments or additional updates on them. This type of brainstorming really helps because it can take place over a long period of time and does not threaten your fixed regimen.

The Periodic Process Review

When you have different things to do that seem to be the mountain too hard to climb, there’s one great thing you can do that at least may keep you in perspective and have you re-evaluate how hard you need to work. Whether it’s over your micro tasks or the entire final product, it’s more than just checking things off that are done. You really can stand back, take a look at how your overall progress is going, and make room for more growth.

It’s almost like having one tab open, opening another and zooming out a bit, but can be done. Beyond just what tasks did you accomplish, you are really sizing up what the next week or so may have in store. And most importantly, don’t get discouraged over the things that you didn’t complete; you’ll be motivated to get an extra strong cappuccino and knock it all out soon.

Truly Envisioning your Success: The Finish Line

One of the hardest parts about breaking your large-scale projects down to size is the sense that you’ll never get everything done. You absolutely WILL, and it can all come down to one beautiful, discerning moment on the finish line. Completing the hard tasks always seems like it may not be worthwhile while you’re doing them, but they will be. While doing extensive market research, you can come across a lot of dead ends.

Many stories and facts just link back to each other with no real worth, and everyone’s trying to replicate the same success. The new year is the absolute best time to line up your priorities and size up the items that will make you the most successful. The projects and finished goal of perhaps being featured by someone you admire or emulating their success will keep you permanently fixated; 2015 would be stellar to really knock it out of the park in terms of goals.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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How to Handle Irate Customers; a Necessary Evil of Some Entrepreneur Startups

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angry There are some forms of startup businesses where you have next to no customer service obligations. Those are the kinds in which perhaps you just sell one product, and it is such a simple, straightforward product that when the customer whips out their debit card, they know exactly what they are getting, and can simply return it for a refund if they don’t like it. You can streamline and automate these types of product sales, and also outsource customer service.

For a fee there are many companies that’ll answer the calls for you, and hear complaints or suggestions. This would be ideal, but the reason we’re writing today’s article is that in the early stages or with certain other services, the irate customer may find his way… TO YOU!

Sometimes it is after they ‘ve talked to everyone else. Sometimes if you are a restaurant owner, it is face to face, after a bad dining experience. And if you are someone like an artist or blog writer, you may get someone who all of a sudden has time on their hands to give you bad reviews and spread mean stories of the worst kind. If you encounter a dissatisfied customer on the phone, there are a couple of things you can do. Assuming that you are at the top of the chain, the best approach is to apologize once or twice and then offer a solution. If you are not in a position where you are forced to bend over backwards, believe it or not, we are going to go against corporate mantra here. Offer to provide a re-shipment or refund.

When you are working for someone else, they may want you to bend over backwards and listen to long stories of why someone doesn’t like your product. In this situation, as a new business owner you must be willing to compromise. If the customer does not respond to your solution and keeps going on and on about why they did not like the product, steer them in another direction by saying, “Yes, I understand how should we fix this?”

By being your own boss, you should want to give stellar customer service, but the customer on the line really should not be allowed to belittle you. Remember, you went into business for yourself to choose who you wanted to do business with. If at that point the customer accuses you of being unsympathetic, remind them you apologized and ask once again how to fix it. I know it sounds a little curt, but it works.

When face to face, like a restaurant, surf shop, or ice cream store, what really stinks is that the customer can really use the element of surprise to their advantage. When you are working along and in your groove, it is really bad to just have someone sneak up on you with a bellowing, unhappy voice. There is one thing to do here that half of business owners never achieve, and it is because it is very difficult. That is to immediately smile. It is really waging warfare against the customer; it is very hard to keep raising your voice when someone is swearing at you. Some people will, but it gets you a little advantage and points right out of the gate. At that point, you are using the same strategy as on the phone, assuming you are all the way up the chain of command.

Then of course folks can write bad reviews your business or service. This can sometimes take a lot of time to fix. A lot of forums give you as the proprietor the chance to come and defend yourself. Always be graceful, and to the point. The biggest mistake business owners make is long winded, explanations of how the customer was the worst they encountered, etc. what you can do is be very simple and say, “Sorry you had a bad experience, in this line of business we do get a mix of satisfaction levels and always strive to receive the highest”. You will feel like it is not much of recourse, but at that point, you have to let the internet wars take their toll, and some will come to your business, some won’t. Some religiously read these reviews, and some don’t. Amazon has large sections and there are competitors who may even hire people to write bad reviews about your company.

At this point, the only thing to do is focus on the quality of service or craftsmanship and cross your fingers. Even though it is sometimes a monopoly, keep in mind your local cable company probably gets a lot of complaints and customers find their way to the sign-up form! Win some and lose some; these are at least some tips to help you keep your cool… while running your brand new baby startup.

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