Let’s face it; most small businesses do the bulk of their business locally. So, the thought of gaining access to Facebook’s 300 trillion users (may be more by now) isn’t that relevant or useful.

However, if those local businesses could use the some of the new powerful online tools and platforms to gain access to the 200-300 social media users in their town, now that might just make some sense.

There are many ways to filter, sort, aggregate and otherwise take advantage of social media tools that can specifically benefit even the smallest neighborhood oriented business.

Below are five things any local business can do to get more business using social media tools

1) Start a Local Group Online

Most social network platforms offer some form of group creation. Any member has the ability to start a group around a niche or pretty much any topic – including a local topic. Sites such as Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slideshare all allow members to create and manage groups.

For example here’s a local independent merchant group in Austin, TX using a Flickr Group to promote it’s “Keep Austin Weird” slogan.

This Boston Networking Group on LinkedIn was founded by Jeff Popin, owner of BostonEventGuide.com. With over 3,000 members, there’s a pretty good bet this group serves as a conduit for Popin’s main business locally.

2) Find and Network with Local Bloggers

Using tools such as Placeblogger, outside.in, Bloglines you can locate bloggers in your community that might have an interest in writing about your business or industry or actively linking to your blog.

Networking with relevant bloggers locally, commenting on their blog posts, and maybe even contributing a post is a great way to create additional local exposure. Don’t forget to seek out and add blogs from traditional media publications locally as well. Most radio, TV and news journalists have been asked to write a blog as part of their job, these can be great local social media contacts if you take the time to build relationships though their blogs.

3) Hold Meetups and Tweetups

Using a social media tool like MeetUp, you create and promote local events and tap the user base of MeetUp to create additional awareness about your seminars, product demonstrations, open houses, and grand openings.

Here a home remodeler in Encinitas, CA is offering a workshop on green remodeling through MeetUP.

TweetUps, a gathering of people in a community using Twitter, have become very popular ways to meet others locally that believe in the power of social media. That alone can be enough common ground to network on. Search locally for the term TweetUp and don’t be surprised to find one schedule in your community.

The online social media network Biznik allows members to join its online platform, but belong to a local community and promote in-person local events on the site.

4) Find local leads

Finding local prospects or potential strategic partners on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is pretty simple through the use of the powerful search interfaces built into all. Simply searching by City is a great way to find other people using social media in your community. A service such as Twellowhood or LocalTweeps may aid in your search to find other businesses in your community using Twitter.

Many smart marketers are also employing some of the advanced features of Twitter Search to find people locally and filter their tweets to turn up leads. An auto body shop might set-up searches for people talking about being in an accident and reach out to them with advice for what to do to get the best quote. A computer network service provider can use advanced search to find people locally complaining about their network being down.

Naked Pizza in New Orleans uses Twitter to publish exclusive offers to followers and attributes a significant rise in business using to this tactic.

Cupcakes on Wheels, a Los Angeles mobile cupcake business, tweets its location throughout the day so followers can find its signature brown vans.

Facebook’s Ad Targeting is also another great way to reach only local prospects on the Facebook platform. One of the targeting criteria is geography, so you can create ads that promote your web site or Facebook Fan page that are only shown to people in the geographic region you choose

5) Enhance Local Search Results

No matter how you put social media to use to create engagement locally, simply creating profiles on dozens of social media sites and linking those sites with local keyword content back to your main web site will help your site do better when people search locally. Creating very brand and local optimized profiles on sites like YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare will help with overall links to your site. Creating and enhancing local profiles on Google Maps, Yahoo and Bing Local will help you show up higher in the local results.

Finally, don’t forget to get active with the social review sites like Yelp! and Insider Pages. Ask, and even teach, your local customers hot to write reviews about your business. Currently Google Maps and Bing Local add these reviews to their local profile database too.

Using the technology and ability to access large groups of social media users locally has become a proven small business marketing tactic and is a great way to further enhance the face-to-face relationship building you already do.

Image credit: gloom

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing.

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Unfortunately most entrepreneurs are told they have the skills to sell.  But they never learn how to get the truth out of prospects on what the problems are that the prospect is having.  Prospects will often lie and tell you everything is ok.  They will often not give you the information you need to close the sale, and you will end up with a ton of prospects that are always “almost ready” to close but never close.

There is only one way around this:   “LEARN SALES” What is Sales? “Sales” is simply solving a problem that a prospect has, with your product or service.

Check out Dan’s Boe’s site   http://bethefire.com/index.html for more information about his courses and the many people who have attended. EastCountyBiz is looking forward to hosting a presentation with Dan early in the new year, we’ll keep you posted. ECB 

HUBZone Program
Mission:
To promote job growth, capital investment, and economic development to historically underutilized business zones, referred to as HUBZones, by providing contracting assistance to small businesses located in these economically distressed communities

Location map showing HUBZone location:
 http://map.sba.gov/hubzone/hzqry.asp?scope=-116956132%7C32793172%7C1.08938174937242%7C0.803828591861328&command=zmout&zoomrect=99%7C133%7C0%7C0&panshift=&mapimage.x=99&mapimage.y=133

SBA site: http://www.sba.gov/hubzone/

Department of Housing and Urban Development site:
http://www.hud.gov/offices/osdbu/about/sbtypes.cfm

http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/california/forming-nonprofit-corporat

ion-california

http://www.hurwitassociates.com/l_s_annual_ca.php

http://www.evansrosen.com/news.html

www.sos.ca.gov/business/corp/pdf/articles/corp_artsnp.pdf

www.ehow.com/how_2218247_start-nonprofit-corporation-california.html

The last 2 are more information oriented and less tied to a money wanting entity

However, at some point you’re going to have to think about a subject that may seem completely foreign to you: What’s the best way to untangle yourself from the company that you’ve spent so much time putting together?

You may already be thinking in this direction for a number of reasons–some good, some bad. Perhaps you’re looking forward to retiring in a more agreeable climate, you’ve gotten a purchase offer you want to consider, or your business has done so well that you want to pass it on to your children. Perhaps you hope to “die in the saddle,” but you want the business to continue beyond your lifetime, and you don’t want the IRS to confiscate your hard-earned gains through estate taxes.

On the other hand, perhaps your business isn’t doing as well as you hoped, or it’s doing well but you’re getting tired of all the time and energy it requires. Other reasons for getting out might include the death of a partner or co-owner, divorce, your realization that the competition is winning out, pressure from family members or employees who think you ought to retire, or your own health.

Don’t wait until one of these events hits you over the head–start thinking about your exit strategy now, whether it will be by selling the business or planning for your succession.

Selling the business. In a perfect world, you’d sell your business when the national economy was humming along toward a peak in the business cycle, when your industry was “hot” among investors, and when your particular business was having a banner year.

However, your decision to sell out will probably have much more to do with your personal circumstances than with what’s happening on Wall Street. The point we’re making is that, everything else being equal, you should aim to sell when things are good, rather than not-so-good or downright ugly.

Regardless of the state of the economy or your industry, there are a number of things you can do to shape up your business to make it more attractive to purchasers. However, this process is likely to take a year or more.

On average, once your business is on the market, it will take another year to find a buyer and complete the deal. If you are planning to sell to family members or key employees, many of the more creative tax-planning methods can take three to five years to put into place.

To develop an exit strategy, you’ll need to give some thought to the following:

Initial issues: How should you time your decision and who should you choose to help you?
Valuation of the business: How does the market put a price on a small business, and what can you do to maximize your own business’s value?
Finding a buyer: What do you need to know about working with a business broker, creating a selling memorandum, and other marketing concerns?
Structuring the deal: What are your options as to terms?
Financing the deal: What should you know about seller financing and third-party financing through leveraged buyouts?
Completing the deal: What are the typical steps you can expect to go through in the sales process?
After the sale: What will your new, unencumbered life be like.
Planning for succession. When a small business is a key component of family wealth, the owner usually has a strong desire to perpetuate it in one form or another. But perpetuating the business through an orderly succession to family members or other insiders is the ultimate management challenge.

Any transition must preserve the continuity of leadership, and it is most important that the succession of ownership and management be perceived as a process rather than an event. Much as some successors might hope otherwise, it’s not a matter of deciding to retire at 4:00 p.m. next Tuesday at which time Junior will take the reins or your partner, Charlie, will become the boss, while you’ll fade into oblivion (or more likely onto the 1st tee).

Succession is a process requiring planning, teamwork and constant re-evaluation. So infrequently is it done successfully that barely 30 percent of family businesses survive into the second generation and fewer than 15 percent of them endure into the third. If the business of succession is not done by process (through planning), it will be done by crisis (a failure to plan), with perhaps disastrous results.

A typical succession plan has two elements, which should be considered separately:

The transfer of power, whereby control over the business’s operation is transferred to those best suited to exercising it
The transfer of assets, whereby the wealth concentrated in the business is transferred to designated family members, who may be a different or larger group than the person or persons who will be assuming power.

How to value your business
For starters, the value of your business should, of course, be greater than the total values of its hard assets. Unfortunately this is often not the case with many small businesses. But for a buyer, the key is typically that an ongoing business has everything necessary–equipment, location, and inventory if applicable, not to mention experienced employees, suppliers, business processes, and a customer list–all in place, in the right amounts for successful operation of the business.

But how do you put a price on this intangible asset, which is frequently referred to as goodwill or going-concern value? Moreover, how do you determine the true market value of the hard assets used in your business? One answer is to hire a professional appraiser. These people have the objectivity and know-how to be able to set a price that is neither unrealistically high nor inaccurately low.

But remember that value is in the mind of the beholder. A professional valuation can tell you the price that an average buyer might pay for your business. However, when it comes to negotiating with an actual buyer, the appraisal is just a starting point.

A particular buyer may have a strong strategic reason for acquiring your company, and may be willing to pay a premium over what the average buyer might offer. Another buyer might simply be looking for certain assets to augment his or her own business, and may not be willing to pay for your company’s going-concern value at all. It’s important that you size up any potential buyer’s reasons for acquiring your business before stating a price.

If you feel a professional valuation would be too expensive, you can try to create your own appraisal of your business’s worth. Let’s start with the basics. Business valuation methods fall into the following categories, depending on what their major focus is. Click on the links to learn more about each method.

business assets, including book value and liquidation value methods
historical earnings, including debt-paying ability, capitalization of earnings or cash flow, gross income multipliers, and dividend-paying ability methods
a combination of assets and earnings, namely, the excess earnings method
the market for similar businesses, including comparable sales, industry rule of thumb, and p/e ratio methods
future earnings, namely, discounted future cash flow or earnings methods (My first choice!)
Interactive Business Valuation Calculator, a tool to determine the value of future cash flow
An excellent tool to help you with this do-it-yourself project would be a copy of a useful book authored by Dr. Stanley Feldman, Dr. Timothy Sullivan and Roger Winsby titled, What Every Business Owner Should Know About Valuing Their Business, and published by McGraw Hill. This up-to-date and inexpensive book can help you document business value to prepare for a sale or for a succession plan or even a divorce proceeding. It has industry-specific case studies as well. The entire book is presented in plain English and is also easily understood by non-math majors.

I believe that once you’ve digested this book you will have learned that a formal valuation, whether homemade or professionally done, will not only help you with a sale or succession plan, but also force you to consider some further ramifications of maintaining this value. A valuation may suggest you need to better insure yourself, your business or even key employees. Or it could even suggest some serious estate planning is called for.

If you get stuck in your efforts to be self-reliant, there are a host of competent business appraisers you can retain to help you. For example, the authors of the above book operate Axiom Valuation Solutions. Or perhaps your lawyer, CPA or banker would be willing to review your homemade appraisal and comment on it before you finalize your strategy for selling (or even buying) a business.

This is a complex topic, but considering how much time, effort and money you’ve invested in your business, knowing how to value it is of critical importance and well worth some serious study and consideration. And if you have any more questions, be sure to Ask Alice!

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important

Income without time has no value

The sure way to completely fail is to try to make everyone happy

Email is everyone else’s agenda for your Day
Contract with distribution teams, not employees

The customer is not always right

The perceived complexity of a task will expand to the time you allot it

Who reads you stuff is more important than how many read your stuff

Multitasking diverts focus from your primary goal

Aug 11, 2009 –
If you’ve read Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week or any number of productivity blogs, you’ll get a sense of the excitement small business owners have for hiring Indian virtual assistants. The hope is to hire an entry-level, college-graduate backoffice employee for around $5 per hour. But it’s not as easy as putting up a flyer at the local community college. Working with someone remotely (ie., not physically in your office), and in another country, presents some unique challenges.
In the end, it’ll cost about $10-15 per hour, but you’ll have an employee that is a college graduate (sometimes with advanced degrees) at around minimum wage. And if you hire a firm, instead of an individual, you can get multiple expertise in “one employee.”

Following are 10 tips for finding, vetting and hiring a virtual assistant.

1. Don’t expect them to be experts.

A VA is not a super-human who can do every task you have to assign. Don’t expect your VA to have specific industry expertise or to be able to accomplish higher level business strategy thinking. For those higher level tasks, you’ll need to hire a specialized consultant or firm.

For project based work, it might make more sense to contract out that project specifically. The benefits of hiring on a project basis include:

a clear end date, so you’re not stuck in a long-term contract with a badly performing employee;
greater expertise because presumably, you’re hiring a firm or freelancer who specializes in that type of work.
Sometimes you have a need for a mix of project and ongoing work. For example, let’s say you need to build a website or ecommerce storefront. It might make more sense to hire a web design firm that specializes in building ecommerce stores (flat project fee), and then sign a retainer contract with them for maintenance work.

To clarify, you can hire all kinds of expertise, from IT gurus to business consultants and everything in between, from India and other popular outsourcing nations. But they aren’t selling their services as “virtual assistants.” They’re specialized service providers, and hiring that group of contractors is not what we’re talking about here.

2. Think of your VA as an entry-level college grad willing to work for minimum wage.

Good tasks to outsource to a VA are ones where the procedure is relatively simple, there aren’t a lot of decision points (if any) in the workflow, and is a repetitive process. For example:

data entry: like entering hundreds of products into your ecommerce store;
blog or website maintenance: blog posting, comment moderation;
research and report: as in doing Internet research and compiling summaries of the data.
3. Make a list of your tasks and categorize them based on the type of work.

Before looking for a VA, spend a week or two writing down all the tasks you may want to outsource. Consider both tasks you need to do but don’t like doing and tasks that you like to do but haven’t found the time. Once you have this list, organize tasks based on the following criteria:

requires domain or industry expertise vs. anyone can do with training;
one-off task vs. ongoing tasks.
Tasks that don’t require domain expertise are better for outsourcing to an offshore VA. First of all, it’s easier to train them to do the task properly. Second, if the task requires specific expertise, you’re better off hiring a specialty consultant and/or a full-time, long-term employee who can grow with your company.

Tasks that are ongoing are better for assigning to a VA because you’ll get a bigger return on the investment of writing up instructions.

4. You’ll save some money, but it’s not going to make or break your business.

Speaking very broadly, the minimum hourly rate of an entry-level, college-educated employee in India starts at about $2 per hour. Here in the U.S., the equivalent rate is around $10 per hour (minimum wage plus benefits and perks).

At first glance, it seems like you will be able to shave 80% off your administrative payroll, but working with someone thousands of miles away adds significant transactional costs. It will take you more time to explain a task and train them to do it. And since hiring an employee (especially one in a different country) can be a big risk, you may be more confident working with a firm. The firm will have overhead, and will need to turn a profit themselves.

In practice, a capable VA that produces good work will cost around $10-15 an hour. For very simple data entry or data compilation (ie., copy-and-paste work), you can find an individual or small firm off Elance for $5 per hour. For tasks more involved than copy-and-paste, and for quality you’d trust for engagement beyond one project, expect to pay around $10-15 per hour for a VA.

5. A firm is better for most small business needs.

VA service providers come in all sizes. Big VA specializing firms include Brickwork India (India), Get Friday (India), and BPOVIA (China). And there are thousands of boutique firms and one-man operations on Elance.

Firms are better if you have diverse tasks. When working with a firm, you’ll be assigned one lead VA, who will be your single point of contact. This VA may do the tasks you assign herself, or she could delegate them to a team of other VAs.

Firms are also good for slowly scaling up the number of hours you outsource. A freelancing individual will be less able to handle swings in contracted hours from month to month.

An individual is good if you’re always assigning the same task. For example, if you want help for managing the product pages on your ecommerce store — and only that specific work — then it might make sense to hire a freelance expert for that task. Without the overhead of a firm, individuals can have a lower hourly rate if you commit to more hours.

6. Interview your potential VA on the phone before hiring them.

Whether you’re hiring a firm or individual, be sure to talk to them on the phone before you hire them.

Have prepared for the interview:

Tasks you want to offload. When talking to a firm, this information helps them assign a VA to you that is qualified for your type of work.
Number of hours you expect to buy. VAs want to know how many hours a week/month you’re committing to so they can plan their own cashflow, client portfolio, and work schedules.
Daily expectations of availability. Do they need to be at work and online at the same time as you?
Typical task schedule. Are you assigning tasks that need immediate resolution or ones that can be worked on at any time over the next few days or weeks?
Ask for this information:

Resume. Check their educational and work experience.
Examples of prior work. Get actual work product, rather than just descriptions of work done, whenever possible.
Non-disclosure agreement. This contract should be standard with any hire.
What are some recent movies they liked? (See tip #11 regarding cultural considerations.)
7. India isn’t your only option.

In fact, there are plenty of remote workers right here in the United States. Even if you hire from the U.S. (onshore outsourcing), there may be significant cost savings based on the different minimum wages imposed by states and the wide ranging costs of living.

Going offshore, India isn’t your only option. Europe, Asia (especially the Philippines), and South Africa are becoming big producers of VA providers themselves. The common thread? They all have large English speaking populations and much lower costs of living (compared to the U.S.).

8. Don’t forget about security.

Another reason to go with a big firm — they tend to have security policies and procedures in place. At a bare minimum, sign a non-disclosure agreement with the service provider. When working with a firm, make sure they also have NDAs with their employees. Also ask the provider what other security measures they take. Some examples:

Do they permanently delete your data once the task or contract is up?
Do they have regular backups of data? Do they store these backups offsite?
How do they secure physical access to your information? Who can get into the building? Who can get into the data center where the servers are kept?
What procedures do they have in place to prevent employees from walking away with sensitive data? (Eg., not allowing USB thumb drives to access work computers, NDA with employees.)
9. Try before you buy.

Try hiring freelancers for one-off projects from Elance first. This will give you some experience in dealing with a remote worker. Plus reading the submitted bids and browsing the providers on Elance will give you a sense of the quality and expertise available out there.

Elance is like eBay for individual freelancers and boutique firms. It’s better than doing a Google search because on Elance, the service provider has at least articulated their expertise in a concise form and have established a reputation based on reviews from past clients.

I’ve hired people on Elance for data entry, writing, video editing, and Internet research. Not surprisingly, the lowest cost providers inevitably produce the lowest quality work. And conversely, the providers with the most number of reviews and past jobs provided the best quality work. Just like in real life, (a) you get what you pay for, and (b) nothing beats previous experience and employer references when evaluating a potential new hire.

You can also try buying blocks of time from outsourcing firms. Brickwork India and Get Friday offer prepaid blocks of time in 10 hour increments. You’ll pay a higher rate (about $15) per hour but it’s a good way to fieldtest a firm.

10. Consider legal, cultural and language issues when working with offshore help.

If you’re hiring offshore, remember that your VA lives and works in a different country.

If you deal with sensitive customer information, consider the legal ramifications before you outsource your entire business to your Indian VA.

Although American culture has been exported worldwide in movies and websites, there are still many cultural differences. Even if the tasks you assign don’t need your VA to deal with customers or other people, it’s still important to consider cultural and language familiarity. This is one reason why a voice interview is so critical before hiring offshore help. It’s an important test for whether or not you’ll be able to communicate (and work with) your VA.

Next week, I’ll have 10 tips for working with your newfound virtual assistant.

Photo credit: iStockphoto