The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Edward Muniz of CoreBrand Printing:

Specializing in whosale printing, design consultation, and business brand printing.

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In the American Express OPEN Forum article, Effective Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born by Yvonne DiVita of Windsor Media Enterprises, the author discusses some tips to cultivating what is called “word of mouth marketing.”

Aside from just being a reasonably trendy buzzphrase, word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing tactic designed to maximize the marketing leverage possible by having your customers talk about you and help be evangelists for your goods and services.

Statistically speaking, there is tremendous value to this, since most professional networks are most valuable at their fringes: it’s not your direct connections that offer the most opportunities, it’s actually your connections’ connections that offer the most.  Word-of-mouth marketing is meant to capitalize on that fact.

Yvonne’s post covers some standard practices, particularly when it comes to the social media world.  But her focus is on word-of-mouth value in the online space, and I would argue that in order to be effective, you need much more than just a plan for social media strategy.  In order for word-of-mouth marketing to work as a part of your business development efforts, it needs to be part of the normal process you develop with your clients.

Here are a couple of items that I would add to her original list:

• Make recommendations part of the process

• Include references as part of agreements

• Offer incentives to referral business

These are tactics I use with clients all of the time; and even more importantly, they are approaches that my clients respect and which are highly valuable, particularly in smaller or more tight-knit communities, where personal references are particularly important.

Make recommendations part of the process
When I teach a class or offer a workshop, one of the first slides in my presentation is my word-of-mouth proposition: if, at the end of the class, the participants felt that what I provided them was a valuable use of their time and money, I would like a publishable quote from them to that effect.  In exchange, I offer them an additional or enhanced service as a thank you.  Since I often offer a free half hour of consulting service with the purchase of a workshop, my normal incentive is to add an additional half hour to their follow-up session.

Since the only reason for them to come back to me for one-on-one services is if they feel that what I am providing is of value in the first place, this is a reasonable offer that in no way fosters dishonesty or disingenuous feedback.

And by leaving the format up to the client, they can submit the quote to me on a 3×5 card that I include in their course materials, via email, or post it directly to my Facebook Fan page or my LinkedIn profile.  Either way, this helps to ensure that I am capturing usable feedback from clients, and their expectations are clearly set from the beginning.  Most of my clients are also entrepreneurs, so they are always very aware of why this trade is worthwhile to me, and genuinely supportive of my request.

Include references as part of agreements
While a quote from a client is valuable, there are some clients who are the jackpot.  And for those clients — as good as a quote may be — a direct reference is even better.  And, depending on the brand of the person or firm, this can sometimes be the key that gets you into other doors.  If you have a client who falls into this category, write into the agreement that as long as you hit your deliverables on time and to satisfaction, that they will be willing to provide direct references for you to other potential clients.

Again, this is not a request that business people will typically object to.  It’s just a request that most people forget to make.  Put it out there as part of the normal exchange of goods and services, deliver your end, and then most people are all too happy to deliver their end of the bargain.

Offer incentives to referral business
Again, this is something I always include in the opening remarks of any meeting I have with a client: if they refer a paying client to me, I will offer them something in return.  Depending on my portfolio of work at the time, it could be a free one-on-one consulting session, it could be a new class or workshop I’m teaching, or it could be some other special need that they have.

Whatever it is, the key is in giving them a reason to discuss what you can do with other prospective clients outside of you direct network.  If a client is coming to you for you services to begin with, then that is only because they consider what you have to offer as valuable.  Therefore it is reasonable to expect that discounted access to your expertise is a potentially worthwhile trade off for them.

So, while Yvonne’s list had some good points, keep in mind that the principles behind word-of-mouth marketing are all based on people building relationships and then talking about them with others.  There is nothing about that process that has to happen online, so incorporate some basic practices into your normal client interactions, and see how they take to it.

More often than not, your customers want to see you be successful — if for no other reason, than so that you can stay in business and continue helping them.  Reminding them that you need their help reaching new customers and giving them specifics ways to do that, and then rewarding them for it, is something that most of them will respond to very well.  All it takes to get started is to ask.

With the end of the year fast approaching, it’s time to start thinking about taxes and what you can do to prepare now to make tax-time smoother come January 1st. As a small business owner, you have lots of taxes to keep track of: federal and state estimated and actual income tax, sales & use tax, and 1099s, to name a few. It can be difficult to keep them all straight. WorkingPoint can help make preparing for tax-time less work and less stressful.

Here’s Some Things You Can Do Now to Start Preparing for Tax-Time:

Catch Up on Entering Your Bills and Expenses

With everything you need to do to keep you business running, it’s easy to fall behind on entering your bills and recording receipts for purchases. If you are like a lot of small business owners, you schedule your appointment with your accountant and then you stay up way too late the night before – scrambling and stressing – trying to find receipts and enter them into your bookkeeping system or just so you can turn over your shoe-box of receipts.

But it’s worth it to make time to do it so your records are up-to-date. And now is a great time to get caught up. With WorkingPoint, all the information you enter is translated into easy-to-understand dashboard widgets and reports so you’ll be in a better position to make good decisions for your business today and you’ll have professional, quality reports your accountant can use to do your taxes next Spring.

Consult Your Accountant Now Before They Get Into Full Swing after January 1

Your accountant/bookkeeper knows your business intimately, and they know the current tax law in your state for your industry. Why not schedule a short appointment now to review your question with them before its time to file taxes? Come January 1, tax season will officially kick off which means they’ll be booking up fast and fielding a lot of tax inquiries and their work loads go up dramatically and sometimes their prices right along with it.

Before filing your taxes, review with them any bookkeeping activity you have questions on, like how to categorize a particular expense. You’ll learn how to handle the situation in the future and you’ll be able to make any changes to your current year’s activity before you file.

If you are afraid you’ll forget to consult your accountant on an expense, create a new expense account called “Ask Accountant” and add the questionable expense to this account. From the comfort of your office or theirs, you can log in to your WorkingPoint account and review together all activity in that account with your accountant and based on their recommendation, move the activity to the correct accounts.

Start Tracking Your Contacts for 1099 reporting

Our new 1099 report helps take the work out of tracking payments made to 1099 eligible companies and individuals. We’ve made it super easy to flag companies and individuals and with one-click, run a 1099 report showing how much you’ve paid them so you know who to send a 1099 to.

Before the end of the year, select the contacts you want to track for 1099 reporting so you’re ready to file your 1099s and 1096 reports.

Watch this short video on how to select a contact to be included on the 1099 report and how to run it.

I grew up in a family-owned business.  I remember, back in the early 1980’s, when my mother (the bookkeeper) got her first computer for the business: it was a Data General and it was bigger than our dishwasher.  It had five-and-a-quarter floppy disks; it had virtually no RAM to speak of; and it came with the classic DOS-based single color screen.  It was cutting edge in 1982.

I actually recount that memory quite frequently when I speak with entrepreneurs and technologists.  I love that story, because it illustrates how far technology advances have brought small business capabilities.  Thanks to solutions like WorkingPoint, Google Apps, Basecamp and WordPress, the world of small business is capable of competing in a global economy in ways that my parents could have never envisioned back in the early Reagan Administration.

This is the subject of Ross Dawson‘s post yesterday on My Venture Pad.  Ross highlights six specific ways in which technology is revolutionizing small business:

1. Findability
2. Customer communication
3. Productivity
4. Collaboration
5. Outsourcing
6. Online revenue

Ross’ points are all central elements, and ones that I discuss frequently when working with entrepreneurs, but there are three additional technology-enabled advancements that I routinely see making a huge difference to small businesses and their ability to be as competitive as possible.

Metrics
This one is one of my favorites: the democratization of data in the Information Age has amazing implications to small business.  Once upon a time, it was only the largest companies who had the ability to really dig into any metrics — whether they were numbers about their customers, their sales or their employees, information was expensive, and most small businesses had to do without.

The advertising industry is a great example: how do you calculate whether or not a television commercial or a print ad is worth the money it cost to produce?  That is complicated math that is based on a lot of assumptions (many of which are so baked-in that they are rarely questioned).  On the web, there is no question: if you serve someone an ad that compels them enough to click on it, you know.  Immediately.

Whether it is Google making data findable (as per Ross’ first point) or whether it is new startups like InfoChimps making a business out of building a marketplace for the buying and selling of data, the world now revolves around the flow of information, and that includes figuring out what to measure and how.  And then how to use that data.

Commoditization of Technology
When I first got online, it was 1993.  It was my college’s BBS system.  The vast majority of students could only access it when physically on campus, using a school computer lab.  And it was anything but user-friendly.  While the limitation in functionality was not insignificant, what was a bigger deal was the perception that you had to be super technical to figure out how to use it. People who didn’t view themselves that way couldn’t be coaxed near it.

Those days are gone.  Thanks to the proliferation of user-friendly, web-based technology, it is now possible for entrepreneurs to focus on the business of their business, rather than the technology of their business.  This opens the door to possibilities that, even as little as five years ago, were still too intimidating for the vast majority of non-tech entrepreneurs.

Mobility
Whether it is a satelite wireless card, a laptop or an iPhone, the expectation of mobility is now commonplace.  More and more, businesses that do not leverage the mobile capabilities and expectations of both employees and customers are not only missing opportunities, but are fast falling behind their competition.

In a world where your employees can Skype into a conference call from a coffee shop half a continent away, or where your customers are finding your office on their cell phone using Google Maps, mobility is central to how we both consume and disseminate information, both inside and outside of our businesses.

This is an exciting time for entrepreneuers for all of the reasons listed above — both Ross’ list, as well as my additions.  Never before has it been so easy for small businesses to access the types of goods and services that used to be exclusive to large corporations.  These types of changes make small business ownership possible for more people than ever before.  What could be more exciting than that?

As a small business owner, you share a common problem: How do you grow your business on a limited budget? I have been spending a lot of time and effort lately helping WorkingPoint solve that very problem. Here are a few things I’ve noticed that I thought I’d share with you:

1. Established companies have larger budgets, better press and more momentum than you do.
2. The best product in the world (which we have by the way) won’t overcome a deficiency in marketing.
3. You do not have enough time or resources (meaning money) to buy your way out of this situation.

What’s a small business to do? My answer is that you need to think like a mammal in the time of dinosaurs. Early mammals were unique. They were more agile and could survive in harsher conditions that were marginal for the dinosaurs. But if they had tried to directly compete with the dinosaurs, well you get the picture. Your small business needs to think the same agile, scrappy way.

For an example of a unique offering, John Nese owns Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles. He sells more than 500 varieties of soda pop. Here is a great video in which he describes his unique offering. As John says, “Set yourself apart and delight your customers with something no one else has.”

Why? Because then you can bring your unique offering to market in a cost efficient way. John doesn’t sell Pepsi or Coke because he couldn’t sell it for the same price that the grocery store down the street could. By offering products you can’t get anywhere else (unique) he doesn’t have to compete on price and customers seek him out to get what he has. To put it in marketing speak his customer acquisition cost is lower and his margins and lifetime customer value is even higher.

You don’t have to be unique in all the world. You just have to be unique in your trade area. If that area is one zip code then that’s all you have to unique in.

Did you know that this week is Global Entrepreneurship Week?  Founded by The Kauffman Foundation and Make Your Mark, Global Entrepreneurship Week is an international celebration of the power, innovation and opportunity that is at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit.

And what better way to celebrate, than to kick off the inauguration of a new local entrepreneur’s organization?  TYE (TiE Young Entrepreneurs) is a subgroup of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), which was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by successful entrepreneurs and professionals with roots in the Indus region and is currently the largest non-profit int he world dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship.

TYE was founded as the education arm of TiE, with the objective of helping young and aspiring entrepreneurs make the transition from school into business, without necessarily going into a traditional corporate setting.  TYE‘s objective is, in fact, to help cultivate the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Last night’s event was an interesting one, because there was a wide array of attendees joining the celebration: Venture Capitalists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, professors and students all coming together to talk, ask questions and network.  The evening started with a panel discussion of experts, followed up a series of roundtable discussions, and concluding with some networking.

A number of things struck me during the course of the evening:

• The entire panel and the vast majority of entrepreneurs were white males above the age of about 40.

• The students asked good questions, but often expecting/hoping for very prescriptive answers.

• The question of getting funding was far less central to the conversation than most panels.

• The volume of experienced entrepreneurs looking to be mentors to young ones was very high.

Demographics
As a woman actively involved in the entrepreneurial community, I must admit this is something that I notice at almost all events.  While women-owned businesses are the majority, those numbers are skewed by stay-at-home moms with part-time businesses (ranging across the spectrum: from a home-based daycare to Mary Kay sales).  When it comes to visible, active participants in public entrepreneurial organizations, women are often radically out-numbered by men.  While this makes me shake my head, it’s no longer surprising.

The place where it would have been less novel to see wider diversity was when it came to ethnicity: Asian, Hispanic and African-American businesses are not unusual in my community, and a larger presence on the panel would have more accurately reflected a very diverse student body, comprised of a great many ethnic minorities (and more than a few young women).

Student Questions
The questions that came up were interesting, but reflected something that is a significant hurdle that many students face when transitioning from academia to professional life: academia trains students to think of a one-to-one ratio when it comes to questions and answers. It’s very formulaic: “Ask a question. Get an answer.”  What was fascinating for me to watch was how many times a student asked a question, and the answer they got from the panel started with, “It depends…” followed by a spectrum of possibilities.

The students kept driving questions that they clearly expected had fairly black-and-white answers.  And not once did they get one.  Successful entrepreneurs, and the people who live in this type of world, learn to be comfortable living with uncertainty and ambiguity.  This was something that seemed to make more than a few of the students very uncomfortable.

Funding
Maybe it’s the one good thing that comes out of our economic slump, but this is the first time I’ve seen a room full of entrepreneurs talk about launching a venture without having the question of landing VC funding be a central theme.  This is a pet peeve that I’ve had for years, because far more companies successfully bootstrap their company than get massive external funding, and yet it’s rarely the topic that anyone wants to discuss.

Happily, the discussion last night focused far more on creative ways to develop a good team, take your idea to market, and exploring some of the logistics of setting up a venture than it was on roping a VC to throw a bag full of money at you.

Mentorship
The part of the evening that delighted me most was the sheer volume of eager potential mentors who showed up, wanting to offer help and advice to young entrepreneurs just starting out.  Some of them were career-long entrepreneurs, some were retired entrepreneurs, a couple were even lawyers who’ve made careers out of helping and working with entrepreneurs.  Whatever their background, though, the part that was amazing was how eager they were to help, and how much of a charge they got out of being able to give someone else a hand.

The whole evening was very successful and a great launch to the new local chapter of TYE.  It was very exciting to see how many opportunities exist, and how much enthusiasm young entrepreneurs have for their ventures.  It’s also exciting to see how many are at least curious about the possibility, and are not automatically cruising down the inevitable path of conventional corporate employment.

So, if you had the chance, what is the one piece of advice you’d give a young entrepreneur, just finishing up college and embarking on their first post-acadmic venture?

Reports Tab
In our latest product update, we added a new tab to the navigation menu to help you access the growing number of reports WorkingPoint offers. You’ll see the Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement conveniently located under Financial Reports; a link to the General Journal and Chart of Accounts (our Accounts List) under Bookkeeping Reports; and a new section: Tax Reports, featuring a link to our newest report, the 1099 report (see below for more).  Now you can come to one place for all of your reporting needs.

We’ve also added links to common list views so you can quickly access information you view/print on a regular basis without any additional filtering or sorting – we’ve done all that for you. Check out the links to your AR/AP aging details, customer and vendor contacts lists, inventory stock status report and more.

1099 Reporting

The IRS requires businesses to file information returns to qualified companies and individuals by reporting the money you have paid them for qualifying events during a calendar year (January through December) using IRS Forms 1099 and 1096. The IRS uses these information returns to cross-check the payments you made to the companies and individuals with the income they reported.

Our new 1099 report helps take the work out of tracking payments made to 1099 eligible companies and individuals. We’ve made it super easy to flag companies and individuals and with one-click, run a 1099 report showing how much you’ve paid them so you know who to send a 1099 to.

Watch this 2 minute video on how to select a contact to be included on the 1099 report:

It really is that easy to track 1099 payments. And we’re not done helping you with taxes. We are hard at work building more time-saving tax tools to help make preparing your taxes easier and less stressful.

Yesterday CNNMoney.com published an article on this week’s government report that states, over the past six months, the “22 banks that got the most help from the Treasury’s bailout programs cut their small business loan balances by a collective $10.5 billion.”

The report goes on to highlight that over the past six months that TARP recipients have been required to report their lending activity, “the banks have cut their collective small business lending by 4%.”

It’s impossible not to recall WorkingPoint CEO Tate Holt’s recent blog articles entitled, “Main Street vs. Wall Street,” in which he asked the question, “Rather than making it easier for banks to access funds, why not make it easier for small business owners to access funds?”

It sounds a lot like the “too big to fail” argument, doesn’t it? At best, it’s extreme and reckless hubris. Small business employs 52% of the American workforce, and is routinely responsible for providing the majority of new jobs generated in this country. And yet 3 of the 22 financial institutions that got TARP money do not provide loans to small businesses at all, while the other 19 continue to cut back.

Entrepreneurs are a profoundly important element to our economic recovery. While the large financial institutions continue to try to mitigate their risk by denying small business loans, there are a few things that small businesses can do to help ride out the credit crunch:

1. Use a community bank. (Kelli recently discussed this in her WorkingPoint blog post titled, Managing Your Cash (Pt. 3).) Just like in your small business, a community bank is owned and operated by local people who understand local needs, trends and conditions. Building a relationship with your community banker is the best way to help build in some insurance for yourself, because local banks make decisions locally, instead of across the country where no one knows you, your business or your reputation. If you need an idea of where to start, CNNMoney.com has a list of banks by metro area that have recently made SBA loans.
2. Find (or form) a local entrepreneur or small business network. Networks of entrepreneurs can often help share resources, collectively negotiate rates for goods or services, and offer creative problem solving solutions that you’ve never previously considered. Think of it as local, small-scale crowdsourcing of ideas and services.

Other possibilities to consider:

• Do you have a local college through which you can bring on interns to help supplement your staff or work on special projects? College interns can often help with a lot of the areas outside of your core business functions, such as marketing, advertising, website design and development, etc.
• Have you considered the myraid of online crowdsourcing opportunities? Crowdsourcing is a powerful way to parse out discreet tasks, especially those that you need to get done quickly, but for which you do not have the in-house talent to manage yourself.
• Do you need to rent your own office space, or do you have local co-working facilities or sublet spaces that might be more affordable? Obviously not all businesses can share space, but far more can than do. Is yours one of them?
• Do you have a network of other entrepreneurs with whom you can partner to bid on larger opportunities than you would normally be able to support alone? A couple of bigger clients can make the difference during a downtime; and businesses that do not have the contacts or the requisite formal relationships to get a foot in the door can still partner with someone else to have access to some great opportunities.
• Have you gone back to your existing vendors and attempted to renegotiate your current rates? Everything from your cell phone provider, to the interest rates on your credit card are potentially re-negotiable if you continue to be persistent.
• Do you have a local adult or community education program through which you can teach a course? Often times, this is not only a great opportunity to help supplement your income (a little bit, anyway), but it’s a great marketing opportunity, since community education providers see an increase in attendees when the economy is down.

Finally, get creative. Obviously there are some things for which cash is essential, and there is simply no way around that. But there are a lot of things that may come with more options than you’ve previously considered.

For big businesses, the fourth calendar quarter has a predictable set of priorities.  Because so many companies end their fiscal year in December, this is also the period in which the planning processes for the next year are concluded.

Yes, you read me correctly.  While most of us small business owners are just trying to just get through the holiday season, our big-business counterparts are completing their plans for next year.  They’ve already spent months reconsidering their markets, competitors, and products; have finished their personnel, marketing, and sales commission plans; and are fine-tuning their budgets.

What are your priorities for the final weeks of this year?  What should they be?

There isn’t a single, “correct” answer, but there absolutely is a single correct approach, and it consists of four steps:

1. Be realistic.
2. Look at your entire business.
3. Identify a few of your biggest concerns.
4. Focus on solutions you can implement.

Today, I’ll briefly summarize how this approach works.  Over the next few weeks, my postings will provide more detail on the process and benefits of the individual steps.

Similar to the “bite-sized business plan” I’ve discussed previously, this approach helps you quickly create a game plan for making the most from the six remaining weeks of this year.  Through an honest assessment of your whole business, we’ll identify the handful of changes you can make to have your business succeed.

Two things are certain:

1. The best use of your time right now is to execute your fourth-quarter plan.
2. If you don’t have a year-end plan in place already, there is still time for your business to benefit from one.

If you are like most small business owners, you have a lot on your plate. You are juggling everything from sales and marketing to customer relations and order fulfillment, from purchasing to vendor relations, facilities and equipment maintenance, employee recruiting and hiring, payroll and firing, government compliance…the list goes on and on.  You don’t always have the time to examine your business reports but you still need to make decisions, lots of them and quickly.

Business dashboards take the work out of working the numbers and help you make better decisions for your business faster. They’re called “dashboards” because they are meant to provide you with key information on one page where you can conveniently access it – much like the control panel or dashboard of a car.

Cutting-edge dashboards include moveable mini applications known as widgets, short for “window gadgets.” Widgets mine your activity for data and present it as bite-sized business intelligence – data you can interpret and use the make important decisions.

The WorkingPoint Business Dashboard will help you “drive” your business decisions by keeping important information front and center so you can answer critical questions. Since WorkingPoint is a complete small business management system, you don’t just get a view of pieces of your business, like only invoices or bookkeeping, you get the whole picture. From sales to marketing, banking to bookkeeping, the WorkingPoint dashboard gives you insight into all aspects of your business by taking your data as you enter it and transforming the details into meaningful, concise summaries you can understand.

See how easy it is to customize your WorkingPoint Business Dashboard in this one minute video: