By Mallory Edens
Many seniors own and run their own businesses in retirement. In a way, if you are doing what you love, are you really retired? Most small businesses are actually owned by those 55 or older, called encore entrepreneurs.
According to SCORE, a nonprofit organization of over 10,000 small business mentors funded by grants from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), “even though 21% of the U.S. population is over age 55, encore entrepreneurs represent more than half (50.9%) of all U.S. business owners.” The study also shows that encore entrepreneurs are less likely to seek financial help or seek loans, but when they did, they were 62% more likely to receive aid on more favorable terms than others (pages 38-40).
Small business owners still report confidence in their businesses and the future. The headlines, however, are filled with stories of inflation: customers have less money to spend, and small businesses face the problems of retaining vital employees to keep their businesses vital (the Great Resignation, anybody?)
Now is a great time to see a crisis as an opportunity, or as Napoleon Hill aptly puts it, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
Here are several ways to thrive rather than gripe, keeping the inflation monster from eating your small business. To thrive, you either need to cut costs or increase revenue, or both.
Who are your customers and how can you make their lives better?
Identify who your business serves: Who are your customers? What do they like most about your business? Collecting this type of data and making your business more customer-focused have many advantages. What does the journey of your customers to your business involve: How did they find out about you? What is their impression upon entering your store or visiting your website? Do they feel your employees are empathic and address their needs in a quick and efficient manner? All this data can help you tweak the areas of customer service or delivery, making customer service easier and more profitable for your business.
How can you make your customers’ lives better?
Many people have heard about Pareto’s Principle, which states that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. This 80-20 principle can help you identify who are the 20% of your customers who supply most of your revenue. Once you identify the 20%, ask them about problems they are having in their businesses. Now, can your company or products help minimize or lessen these problems?
People don’t buy products, they buy solutions.
If you can identify what characterizes this 20% of customers, you can also create customer profiles and develop marketing strategies to target more of those types of customers.
The 80-20 principle can also apply to you or your workforce. If you are a solo entrepreneur, what 20% of your activities bring in 80% of your results. If you have salespeople or clerks, 20% of them bring in 80% of your sales. Can you closely identify what they are doing (with their help and a possible increase in their salaries) and have this 20% systematically teach the other 80% how to make better sales.
The 80-20 principle also can help you be more human. You don’t have to be manipulative in order to sell; if you know the needs of your customer, you might do more educating than selling.
Martin England was a white, Southern insurance salesman who feared that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not have any life insurance. England followed Dr. King around, finally convincing him he needed one million in life insurance. Within a year after acquiring the policy, Dr. King was assassinated, and that policy allowed his family to live in dignity. Tony Campolo relates this story in his book, Let Me Tell You a Story: Life Lessons from Unexpected Places and Unlikely People, and in other books.
Utilize low-cost marketing to spread the word
Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective. There are many methods by which you can target your respective audience. Here is where the earlier research into your audience pays off. Where do they hang out–online and offline? In your market research, ask where your customers like to hang out or the places they use online: TikTok, Facebook, newsletter, and Google.
There are so many free and inexpensive ways to market online. The clue is to not be overwhelmed. If you are used to one platform, like Facebook, then establish a page for your business. Spend a little money on Facebook ads, but not overly much. On Google, what keywords may people use to search for your kind of business, even if you are a brick-and-mortar store? You may want to include how to find you prominently so people find it easy to find you. If you are not familiar with how to do this, pay attention to Kristen McCormick’s blog post, “The 30 Best Ways to Promote Your Business–With or Without Money.”
Choose employees who may have an interest in learning how to market online; with input from you and other employees, create marketing campaigns that allow your USP (unique selling proposition) to be known. Your USP is a simple sentence or two that allows your customers to know what is unique about your company and how you can help them. A common way to develop this strategy is to use the question-answer format. For example, “Do you know how people are confused by so many choices that they can’t move forward? At Binary Solutions Coaching, we help people find solutions by clarifying more of what they are truly looking for and eliminating choices to a more accessible and reasonable two or three viable options.”
While marketing online is essential, don’t neglect more traditional marketing methods. Could you hand out flyers at an outdoor event or places where your customers would hang out, or even post them at local shops? Instead of hiring someone to create a flyer, using a free online flyer maker allows you to access thousands of professionally designed templates that you can customize to your needs. Flyer templates allow you to add text, change the font or colors, and even add your own photos.
Using this holistic process of accessing your customers, developing and targeting solutions to customers’ problems, and marketing those solutions to increase business and revenue, you can beat the inflation monster and keep your business thriving and viable well beyond the current inflationary period.
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