Eastern Shore Entrepreneur

11/11/2024

Thank you to all those who have served our country 🇺🇸

02/28/2022

02/19/2020

Do you train new employees or simply throw them in the deep end and leave it up to them to learn to swim or sink? If you train them, is your idea of training to put them with a senior employee who wasn't trained when they were hired and will pass on their idea of how the job should be done and not yours, bad habits an all? Not properly training employees, no matter their position within your business, is a wonderful way for both them and your business to fail.

01/30/2020

Sometimes the best place to be is exactly where you are. A salute to family owned small businesses.

A father, a son, and the bakery they run that continues to bring them closer together. Watch the Vistaprint commercial that celebrates moments that matter mo...

01/01/2020

Happy New Year and welcome to a new decade. Is your business still partying like it's 1999? Unless your business is producing the income stream you imagine it could and would when you opened it, the new year is a good time to make resolutions for the success of your business.

This new year, commit to taking your small business to the next level. Here are the resolutions you’ll need to make to build a better, more successful business in 2020.

12/23/2019

Are you paying employees to sabotage the success of your business? Just last week I went into two local businesses. One store was a hardware store. It’s not one of the big box stores, but a small one. While I was looking for the wall hanging hardware I came in for, four staff members stood around the “customer service” desk holding an impromptu convention. Not one of the four broke clear to greet me or ask if I could use some assistance (I could have). When I checked out, I asked the cashier to look at the four still gabbing away. She shook her head and said they are on camera. A few days later I went into one of the stores that has the word dollar in their name. When I checked out, the young lady never greeted me. Soon after she started ringing up my items, she received a phone call on her personal cell phone and engaged in a personal, social conversation. She even treated me to a wide mouth yawn during her phone call. When I paid with my debit card, nothing close to thank you left her mouth. When I walked out the door she was still on her call.

If a company spends money on marketing itself, poor customer service is making the money spent on that marketing worthless. Facts support that poor service either causes a business to underperform or perform at such a poor level that it’s forced to close. So if you allow poor customer service to reside within your business, you are in effect paying your own employees to kill your business.

How expensive is bad customer support? This infographic provides the answer. Plus, we explore the 11 most costly customer service traits to avoid.

10/19/2019

Own a business and find it's not as profitable as you think it should be? Maybe it's the caliber of employee you are hiring or possibly those employees have not been properly trained. Unhappy employees, or employees that lack customer service skills, are probably hurting, not helping, your business's reputation and bottomline.

06/24/2019

Whether you need to grow your personal or professional brand, video is a great way to get started.

02/27/2019

I used to be associated with a company that taught individuals how to become better managers. Many people are hired or promoted to the position of manager without being taught, and then practicing, the skill set necessary to be effective managers and motivators of people. How important are managers to the stability, and thus the profitability, of your business? A Gallup poll of more 1 million employed U.S. workers concluded that the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs is a bad boss or immediate supervisor. 75% of workers who voluntarily left their jobs did so because of their bosses and not the position itself. Employees don't leave jobs, they leave managers. Many times managers stifle the growth and productivity of the employees they supervise by their words and actions.

If you gave your manager(s) the position because they were friends or family, because they had seniority in the company, or because they demonstrated proficiency in the specific job they were hired to do so you thought they'd make a good manager of the entire department (e.g. good mechanic to service manager) or business, you may be unwittingly sabotaging the success of your own business.