Many small business owners complain about their disadvantages – difficulty financing capital expenses, the challenges of trying to do it all themselves, how hard it is to be the one in charge without anyone senior to bounce ideas off of.

It’s funny that they frequently overlook the advantages of small business! Most small business owners have their thumb on the pulse of the business the way larger corporations can only dream of. If the business is still operating in the small space, the owner can still encompass the whole company and its future with their mind, instead of just one part of the company. The small business owner is agile, flexible, and personable in ways that big businesses wish they could be.

One of the nice things about being a small business owner is that you have a direct connection to your clients. And never is there a better time to seize on that advantage than during the holiday season.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not talking about making your big Black Friday sales and watching the revenue roll in (although that’s obviously a big bonus for e-tailers). I’m talking about using the festive spirit to your advantage to cultivate richer relationships with your primary clients. Some tips for small businesses during the holiday season:

1) Make it personal. Chances are, you know you’re the names of your biggest clients. More importantly – they probably know yours! Take the time to send them personalized holiday messages. Instead of sending them a generic corporate greeting card (“Warmest Holiday Wishes from the Staff at Company Co”), send them a personalized one (“Thinking of you this holiday season and wishing the best for your business in 2011. Keep in touch, [Company Owner]”

2) Make it important. The holiday season puts everyone in a shopping mode, and that doesn’t end just because your clients are in the office. If you’ve been toying all year with the idea of a ridiculous promotional offer, now’s the time! Whether the client is just looking to bleed away a bit of year-end profit in a new venture, or they’re setting to launch into the new year with a bang, now’s the time to give them the best, can’t-afford-to-turn-it-down deal of the year.

3) Make it fun. If you have an online presence (and who doesn’t), spend a bit of money to impart some holiday charm into your channels. Host a holiday giveaway on your Facebook page. Change your Twitter avatar to a festive greeting. Photoshop Santa hats onto your logo on your homepage. Write a blog about how you gave up your Friday afternoon to go volunteer with the Salvation Army. In short, do the little things that will make your client smile the next time they interact with you online and show them that you, just like them, are celebrating the holiday season.

With Black Friday just around the corner, it’s easy to get caught up in the drive to build bigger and better sales. Instead, look at this as the launch weekend for the best client-celebratory season of your company and build for bigger business in 2011!

Last week I was invited to attend a conference for business owners in North Carolina. Now, it’s a bit of a jaunt from my office in Burlington, Ontario but I discovered my little sister Kate didn’t have anything planned and we decided to make a road trip of it.

12 hours of driving, even interspersed with regular pitstops at Starbucks, is still a loooong drive. It was, however, absolutely gorgeous going through the wilds of the northern US.

The best vista outlook was around Mount Airy in Virginia. I was enjoying a truly breathtaking view of North Carolina across the state line. I was faced with 1.000 square miles of unspoiled, unpopulated, and untouched forest, when I turned to my sister and “I can’t believe people complain about overcrowding in the United States”.

Obviously, it’s not the residents of the Appalachian Mountains complaining about overcrowding. It’s generally the folks living in highly compressed urban areas around New York City, Los Angeles, or Atlanta, complaining that they can’t claim more than a postage-stamp-sized lot due to overcrowding.

Someone said to me this week “I want to get into writing articles, but isn’t the space already full of content?” To that question, I’d say it’s just like the population density in America. Yes, if you want to live in the big common areas (How to Make Money Online, Real Estate Selling, Weight Loss Tips, etc) you’ll have to expect to be jostling cheek by elbow for space and attention. But if you look for the undiscovered peaks and valleys of content, you can be a pioneer of new areas and run wild. Use articles and your own unique voice to found a new outpost of information, and draw people into your little village of content for a visit.

This week, I'm attending a small business conference in North Carolina, and one of today's subjects was discussing outsourcing work to specialists. (The irony being that I'm an outsourced specialist myself!) One of the common problems that was shared by almost all the small business owners is an attempt to do everything themselves.

The small-to-medium business model, with its flat hierarchy and limited resources tends to force owners to take on tasks outside of their range of experience and skills. When confronted with an activity that the owner doesn’t like , doesn’t have the proficiency for, and doesn’t have the internal resource for, the owner will still tackle it. He or she will typically defend this investment of time by saying “Well, someone has to do it.”

My case in point today is a small manufacturing operation, working in a sub-market in the sports industry. The owner is a 50-year old man with a background in woodworking, who found (quite by accident) that the croquet industry was underserved and stepped in to fill the niche with quality products. Although his products were outstanding, he consistently struggled with the online marketing for his business, and ended up building his own e-commerce website.

Not to put to fine a point on it – the website was horrible. The only people who bought from it were those who were already avid fans of his business, and who were willing to muddle through pages of poor design to get their products. As an e-commerce platform for new purchasers and as a representation of the high-quality, high-cache products he was selling, the site failed terribly. More importantly, each time I talked to the owner, he spent a great deal of time expressing frustration over how much energy and effort the website was taking.

His problem was solved with a simple question: “What else could you have been doing with that time?” When brought up, he thought of a hundred things that he could have been doing – glad-handing the large clients, developing a better product mix for the upcoming season, attending events that would raise the profile of the business in the industry, or creating a sales strategy for the busy season.

The concept of Opportunity Cost cannot be stressed enough in small business. In a flat hierarchical environment, the owner’s time must be spent doing only those things that he or she can do. Although this small business owner was leery to pay for outside help when he could do the job himself (however poorly), he had to recognize that aside from the tangible costs of paying someone to do his website, there was an opportunity cost for things he couldn’t get done while he was worrying about the website.

With this in mind, the croquet e-store hired out a complete redesign at a reasonable cost, and the small business owner generated sufficient business to cover the investment by focusing on the tasks that only he could do.

Last month, in a fit of boredom and desperate for anything that would stop my mind from grinding to a stop with cerebral rush, I signed up for www.Elance.com as a provider.

If you're not familiar with the site, it lets employers post gigs or ongoing jobs and lets providers of service bid on the jobs to win them. The largest section is (not surprisingly) Web Design and Software Development, but I dipped into the Writing and Admin side of things.

I'm loving it. I've been kept non-stop busy, met a lot of great small business owners, and I have a steady stream of different stuff to work on so I never get bored.

One of the interesting and sometimes challenging things about working with a variety of clients is adapting to their personal working habits.

Some people create lists, starting each day with a list of "to-do" items to check off. I've tried this but found that its inflexible for the ever-changing needs of the day and creates a plodding nature of grinding through the list.

Some people take the opposite approach, flying by the seat of their pants throughout the day and knocking off things as they come up. My concern with this is that it leads to a "fire fighters" mentality - it doesn't put things in their proper place and you end up creating more work as you bounce from crisis to crisis.

I am a "work to my inbox" kind of worker. Anyone who has ever reported to me knows that I'll say "Email me or it'll never happen" when asked for help. That's not to say that I don't remember conversations or take notes during meetings, but I use my email to focus my attention and prioritize work.

Additionally, this helps me keep track of the timeliness AND importance of tasks. If someone doesn't email me quickly, I assume its not important to them. If an email has been sitting in my inbox for more than 2 days without action, it becomes an itch to get it done.

One of the best tools I've seen is the matrix of "Important/Not Important, Urgent/Not Urgent". Important and Urgent is clearly the area to focus on, while Not Important and Not Urgent items are a waste of your time. I lay this strategy over top of my penchant for working to my inbox, and find that my time wasters have melted away.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in Canada and it seems an appropriate time to talk about being thankful.

Canadians are often accused of being over-polite (I didn't know there WAS such a thing, but then, I'm Canadian myself). When I go to Tim Hortons in the morning, the conversation goes something like this:

Service Rep: Thank you for choosing Tim Hortons. Can I take your order?
Me: A large double double, please.
SR: Thank you. Will that be all?
Me: Yes, thank you.
SR: That's $1.52.
Me: (taking coffee) Thank you.
SR: Your change is $.48. Thank you.
Me: Thank you.

SIX "thank you"s in under 60 seconds. That's probably 6X the number of thanks that we give to other, more frequent participants in our daily lives!

Some of the best thank yous I've gotten over the years are stacked up on my desk right now. They include a Christmas card from a former boss thanking me for a year of hard work, a card from one of my teams thanking me for being a fun boss before I changed departments, and a thank you card from a potential hire who (although she didn't get the job) thanked me for making her hiring process enjoyable.

A well-timed thank you is an amazing motivator.... and here's the secret: there's no time when its not appropriate! Its the ultimate win-win - you're making someone feel great for recognizing their contribution, and you feel more positive just by expressing gratitude (don't believe me, try it sometime).

Make it a point to thank one person, specifically and genuinely IN WRITING every week. I'll do my own challenge right now:

- Thank you to Helen D. for taking the time to tell me all about your business, and for being open to new ideas.
- Thank you to Charlie B. for being so enthusiastic - its really infectious!
- Thank you to Jesse K. for being so easy to work with.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

I was thrilled to see Roy Halladay pitch his no-hitter last night in the playoffs! I'm tickled because as a long-time Toronto Blue Jays fan, I've been watching Doc Halladay mow down batters for years, and even though he's left the city, I love knowing he has a chance to finally win the big prize this year.

This is only the 2nd time a pitcher has thrown a no-hitter in baseball history (the first was a perfect game back in 1956). Pretty long odds, huh? And yet, this is the SECOND amazing achievement for Doc this year - he pitched a perfect game back in May. Was it luck?

Yes, it was luck. But it was the luck that comes from decades of hard work, and tens of thousands of hours of practice. Think about that - TENS OF THOUSANDS.

Back in the wee 90's, Doc was looking pretty rough and he was sent down to AAA to completely relearn his pitching motion. It would be akin to me learning a completely new way of typing after 15 years of the QWERTY keyboard. Doc accepted the decision, went to Triple A for a few months and came back a mega star.

If you want to make your own luck: look at new ways to do something you've always taken for granted, work hard, and practice, practice, practice.

Alright, this is kind of a frivolous blog post (or is that redundant?) but I've shaken hands with about 20 people this week and maybe 2 of them were any good. Maaaaybe.

Some folks went in too far so I was shaking their wrist, some too little so I was squeezing the tips of their fingers. Some tried to crush my hand Hulk-like, and some could barely be bothered to twitch their hands enough to be felt. Almost no one met my eye, and I had to initiate most of the handshakes, even when they were introducing themselves to me instead of vice versa.

So, my internal process for shaking someone's hand:

1) Whomever's name is said first, that's the first person to stick out their hand.

eg. 'John, meet Sharron.' - John holds out his hand first.
or "Hi, I'm Sharron Jones.' - Sharron holds out her hand first.

However, when in doubt, hold out your hand. Almost no one refuses a handshake (although in flu season yes, it does happen).

2) Keep your hand vertical (not palm down, which forces them to come at you palm up), and go in until the webs of your thumb and pointer finger match up solidly.

3) Squeeze firmly, but not like you're doing a police grip test. What's 'firmly'? About as much force as you would use pushing your cat away from the bowl of ice cream you're trying to eat - not aggressively, but with purpose.

4) Pump ONCE then release. Don't continue shaking hands while you carry on conversation, unless you're a politician and someone is trying to take your picture - its awkward. A single shake up and down suffices.

5) The most important part! Meet the other person's eyes. Look directly at them as though it's the most important thing in the world at that moment that you're greeting them. Give them the impression that even if a nuclear bomb went off outside, you still would be more interested in meeting them.

Not difficult, but it's amazing how rarely people do this well. And yet, its often your first impression, so its important to get it right.

I have a very odd ability, and one that never comes up on my resume, but which gives me no end of satisfaction. I have Parking Karma.

99% of the time that I drive into a parking lot, a great parking spot close to the door opens up for me. Even during Christmas shopping season. I can't explain it, but when I'm hauling 6 bags of groceries and a 5-year old, I don't question the powers-that-be.

Someone suggested "Well, its because you always LOOK for the great parking spots", and there's some truth to that. I firmly believe that when you look for opportunity, it looks for you, too.

Twice this morning I've gotten referred for some great freelance work. I didn't do anything but let the referrers know that I was really enjoying the freelance work I'm doing on Elance.com - and they thought of me the next time something came up.

Perhaps I'm also developing Freelance Karma?

I know a few people who are unhappy in their jobs, and one of the questions I always ask them is "Is it that you don't like your job, or your don't like your employer?" Employer can be either your direct manager, or it could be the office environment, or it could be the corporate culture as a whole.

I'll tell you, almost all of them say they don't like their employer. "The work is fine, but..."

With the right employer, you can always create an action plan for a promotion, a lateral move to a more interesting position, or simply come clean with your boss and say you're looking for a career move.

With the wrong employer, no matter how much you love WHAT you do, HOW you do it is always going to be a problem.

I've been lucky in that twice now I've landed a job that I wasn't 100% keen on, but were I really loved my employer and found that other opportunities cropped up.

It makes me wonder if we don't tend to go about hiring the wrong way. Instead of finding the right job, we should find the right employer, and look for how you can contribute to the satisfaction of both parties.

Somehow, I've managed to come to the end of my week before coming to the end of my work.

Friday snuck up on me this week. Its been busy - several excellent leads and a lot more free-lance contract work. I'm certainly not complaining! Freelance work keeps my mind going and shakes out the rust.

I love learning about new businesses, too - its exciting for me every time I talk to a business owner and hear his/her story about how the company started out.

Cheers and here's to a great weekend for everyone!

As mentioned previously, I live in Burlington. Its a lovely city and truly the best place I've ever lived. However, when shopping for my house here, I couldn't help but notice that every... EVERY... house in Burlington has wood paneling. I HATE wood paneling, and as a result, bought a house with as little of it as possible (since "zero" clearly wasn't an option).

Today, I'm happy to say I've finally painted out and eradicated the last of this horrible, 70's inspired decorative wall treatment from my home.

That's an odd post for a work-related blog, you may think. But here's the thing - at one point this morning, after 3 days of painting, I threw up my hands and said "Argh! Good enough!". I was sore, covered with paint (including my hair), and fed up with the fumes, the painters tape, and my cat hiding.

30 minutes later, you know what? I was back at painting. I knew from past experience that I would sit in my office and stare at the walls and wish I'd just spent another hour on one more coat and really done the job right.

Good enough isn't good enough. Not in painting, not in work.

Someone mentioned to me this week that I should check out Elance.com. If you've never heard of it, its a site to bring together employers and virtual employees. The jobs range anywhere from computer programming and applications development through to virtual assistants typing correspondence and doing transcriptions. What a brilliant idea!

One of the skills I have that my employers have most appreciated is advanced Microsoft Excel - pivot tables, data analysis, reports and charts, etc. It appears to be a rare thing and most companies can't afford to hire a data analyst solely to run monthly reports. However, for a couple hundred dollars a month, using Elance.com the same company can outsource the work to a virtual employee who takes raw data and shoots back a report the same day.

Within 4 hours of signing up, the very first employer project that I responded to immediately picked up my bid and I've got a half week of work on an interesting subject that's right up my alley. I'm learning a new business, keeping my skills sharp, making new contacts and (oh yeah) making a bit of income while continuing to look for a full-time career option. Huh - brilliant.

My other favorite Dirty Jobs slogan from this week is "Don't Follow Your Passion - Bring It With You".

There are several things I'm passionate about - e-marketing, data mining, gardening, process development, renovating historic homes, cooking, Microsoft Excel, small business - to name a few. These are things that I love to do or learn as much as I can about. And I've been fortunate that with my employers, at least some of those have been passions that I can bring with me to help the company succeed.

Data mining and Microsoft Excel are easy transferable skill - drawing on my tech background, I've enjoyed spending hours defining customer profiles for marketing or reviewing vendor spending and product trends to maximize profits.

But my other passions are just as portable. I've started a company patio garden so the employees could add fresh foods to their staff lunches. I've organized pot lucks to bring the company together for some inter-department lunches. I've worked in 4 successful small businesses (4-50 employees) and learned what it takes to build a company from the ground up (the answer - the right people, right product and a LOT of hard work).

Until I find that elusive small data-centric renovation/catering company with an organic gardening product line, I'll bring my passions with me to every company I join.

One of my favorite shows is Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. I never fail to appreciate the really tough, filthy jobs that people do... and to appreciate that I'm not the one doing them. When I come home thinking "Wow, that was a rough day. I didn't get that report finished, or so-and-so is difficult to work with, or my boss isn't noticing my great new idea.", its soothing to think "Well, at least I'm not castrating sheep, or cleaning out sewage lines, or wrangling alpacas for a living."

This week, Dirty Jobs had a recap episode in which Mike Rowe reflected on his season of dirty jobs and (tongue in cheek) produced some motivational posters meant to inspire. One resonated really well with me - "Work Smart AND Hard".

The best person I know for this is my Dad. With limited advantages (education being just one), he built a successful niche business that now allows him to work from home, takes him around the world to beautiful locations to showcase his products, and brings him in contact with affluent and interesting people who appreciate his work.

He's always worked hard - when I was little I remember him leaving home at 6am and getting back at 8pm every night, and working most weekends. Then he chose to work smart by recognizing a market that was untapped. He still worked hard to make it happen, though. He took those same crazy hours he worked for someone else, became his own boss and opened the shop at home. Through a lot of sacrifice and long hours, he built a great work/family balance AND a great business.

My Dad is the most successful person I know.

The other day I worked out that I spent 40 to 50 hours a week at work, and about 50 to 60 waking hours a week at home.I spend almost as much time with my coworkers as I do with my family, and substantially more than I do with my friends. No wonder fit is so important!

Corporate culture means a lot of things to different businesses. In a small company, it can simply be an unspoken 'have fun/work hard' attitude, while in large organizations it may be part of the company's formal vision statement, carefully researched by HR and approved by the executive team.

Corporate culture is demonstrated in many different ways: how often managers are comfortable asking for overtime from workers, whether the guy in Finance can wear his best Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, whether inter-department meetings are co-operative or frustrating power struggles, how many people hoover lunch at their desks rather than taking a break, whether company events include family, etc etc

For the employer, it's important to find someone who fits the corporate culture so that the transition goes smoothly, the employee is engaged with the company immediately, and turnover is minimized. For the employee, finding the right fit can be the difference between a job you love and a job you barely want to get out of bed for.

Given that it's so important, its strange that corporate culture rarely comes up in interviews. Most managers rely on a gut instinct to tell them if a candidate would be a good fit, rather than discussing examples of their corporate culture and looking for signs of buy-in. And yet, if you have 3 equally qualified candidates who can do the job (more and more likely in a market with so many great people out of work), fit may be the most critical factor in choosing the right hire.

My suggestion: next time you're asked in an interview if you have any questions, start off by asking the manager to describe the corporate culture. It shows that you're invested in being one of the team, and its sufficiently different enough a question to make the managers sit up and take notice.

I have a great deal of respect for people who do their jobs well, regardless of what the job is.

This week I was seated for a few minutes in the lobby of a staffing agency and had a chance to watch a great receptionist in action. The woman was bombarded with multiple demands on her attention, from clients, employers and associates, in person or on the phone. She was invariably friendly, professional, attentive and unflustered. In her same position, I'm not sure I could have been as tranquil. It was clear that the office operated smoothly thanks in large part to her skill at her job.

Earlier this week, I had lunch at The Rude Native - one of favorite bistros in Burlington - and the waitress there not was not only wonderfully friendly and welcoming but also remembered my drink and food order from my last visit (more than a month ago).

In both cases I walked away thinking 'I hope the management at that company appreciates what they've got'.

Its been a while since I trolled for jobs on the job boards, and I can't help but think that I'm seeing a lot more marketing jobs than there used to be. Am I wrong?

In my experience, marketing positions are some of the first on the chopping block when the economy takes a downturn. Its hard to justify the spend on marketing when each customer acquisition gets harder (ie more expensive), and volume decreases year over year.

I think its short-sighted of businesses to shed marketing jobs for two reasons.

1) Lost Momentum - during a downturn, advertising and marketing costs are driven down and you can get more bang for your buck than ever before. Turning off that spigot during a downturn means you're that much further behind when business does start to pick back up.

2) Turnover - if you were happy with your marketing team before, shedding marketing talent means you're dropping talented workers that you'll have to replace when things pick back up. It costs at least $10K each time you do a hire (don't believe me? email me) and you'd be better off investing that money into retraining incumbent employees (who are subsequently more loyal as a result) and coming out ahead with a stronger workforce.

The increase in marketing jobs, especially in the communications/digital marketing areas, is encouraging and I think its a precursor for a stronger economy in 2011.

I love this question, because it can be answered in a 'story-telling' format that I think it so appealing in interviews. I'll give you my top 3:

3) Helping Build a Successful Business - While I was with my last employer, it won the Ernest and Young Entrepreneur Award, and twice placed on the Profit Magazine's list of Top 40 Hottest Businesses in Canada. No, I'm not taking personal credit, but it felt great contributing to the success of this company.

2) Streamlining Billing - About 5 months into my tenure with Simply Audiobooks, I discovered a billing procedure error that was (conservatively) costing the company $60'000 a year. Easy to fix, HUGE payoff. It was simply a matter of looking at data that no one else bothered with, and I discovered it on my lunch break. See my resume for other 'direct ROI' accomplishments.

1) Retail Development - Perhaps not my most profitable accomplishment, but personally the one I love bragging about. My former CEO tasked me with implementing a retail location in Oakville... in less than 8 weeks... for under $10'000. Crazy, I know. And yet, I managed to open the location 2 week ahead of schedule for $7'500 - fixtures, fittings, POS system, staffing AND marketing launch included. It involved a lot of late nights and thinking out of the box, but it got done.

Cheers to companies that celebrate great accomplishments.