Conquer the Chaos

Pam Slim, owner of Main Street Learning Lab, once again joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how little marketing actions make it easier to take action in your small business.

Slim recommends that small business owners leverage ecosystem development and partner development to look at ways in which they can understand their bigger systems.

"I call [it] tiny marketing actions, which can definitely be marketing actions where you're planting the seed to get the word out, where you get more visibility, where you connect with customers, but it's also really tiny relationship actions," said Slim.

"There are ways that you're just slowly in little tiny ways connecting with people and connecting people with each other, and it's when you do that, at first it can take a little bit of time to learn the different players, but over time as you start to do that weaving, it begins to generate a certain kind of momentum."

Pam suggests that small business owners ask, "What are tiny little ways that I can start to plant the seed, connect with somebody, reach out, ask a question, make a connection?" and then make it a habit. That's the real key–make that the way you operate on a daily basis, and that's where you'll find a lot of momentum in your marketing.

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Jeremy Ryan Slate, who's the founder of Create Your Own Life podcast, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how your small business can compete with big brands without breaking your budget.

When it comes to building your marketing strategy, Slate recommends thinking of your journey as climbing a flight of stairs. You have to figure out what the bottom stair is so you can start climbing up.

You want to find out which stairs are already getting you there. It's the smaller ones, more niche, more industry related.

"Your PR and your marketing should work together. You can't just have one," said Slate. "Whether you're a small business, medium-sized business, whatever you are, if you learn how to get media the right way, you can really cut the learning curve."

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Foodfight! is the animated feature that is the center of discussion in this episode of Worst Business Ideas in History. The hosts break down what went wrong with the release of the 2012 film produced by Threshold Entertainment and directed by Lawrence Kasanoff that received very low ratings and nothing but negative reviews.

They also tie in how important it is to listen to your business partners when you have an unpopular idea that may cause irreparable damages to your organization in the long run.

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Melody Lewis and Turquoise Devereaux of the IndigenousCC join Small Biz Buzz to discuss the importance of having diversity in your small business.

"Diversity has to be the foundation of your business, that's just it, because naturally, it will impact all these other areas of work–your customer relations, your marketing, all of that," said Melody Lewis. "Diversity, the understanding of it, what it means and how to apply it, that's the tone that will ensure the sustainability of it, because it's part of the way you do things."

Check out their REZponse Roundtable YouTube channel to see how they're revitalizing the indigenous perspective in the workplace.

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In this episode of Worst Business Ideas in History, the hosts break down what went wrong with the release of the Atari Jaguar and what a disappointment it was to its target audience, mainly teenagers.

This product essentially killed Atari as a corporation, as it leveraged its console to bait and switch the audience with false claims that the product was better than those of its competitive counterparts.

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Ronnie and Lamar Tyler of Tyler New Media join Small Biz Buzz to discuss the role of diversity in entrepreneurship and how small business owners can support each other through allyship in their respective communities.

"There's a huge wealth gap, and it's not getting smaller between different groups in this country," said Lamar Tyler. "And right now, African Americans are pulling up the rear, and we want to help close that gap through entrepreneurship."

"We are clear about our mission to uplift, equip, and support the community, to support families in our communities so that we can build strong families, we can close in the wealth gap, and just build up our communities. That's what our mission is," said Ronnie Tyler.

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Don Capparella, the CEO of Quality Travel Solutions, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how he adapted his travel agency through the hardships of COVID-19 when the travel industry took a major hit.

"We're going to save this industry. We're going to save our business and we created five pivots that we had to do to make sure that we were going to survive," said Capparella. "We had to pivot our marketing. We had to pivot our client communications, pivot our offerings and destinations. We had to pivot our own internal process. And then we also had to pivot our mindset, which sometimes was the hardest."

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Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Josh Collins, who works for an agency called Streetsense, is a TEDx alum, a speaker, and an expert in experience architecture. He will be discussing how he helps businesses design and create by leveraging experience as a strategy.

"Essentially what we're talking about is serving our audience from awareness to advocacy, and everywhere in between," said Collins. "Experience design, experience architecture really is about accessing empathy to understand where your audience is, how they experience your brand, your communications, and what they might offer, how they respond."

This leads to the idea of feedback loops, and learning to design intentional feedback loops that allow businesses to understand what those experiences are as quickly as possible. All small businesses intend certain things, but many times, those intentions don't deliver. Without feedback loops, and without really thinking critically about that, small businesses end up talking to themselves more often than not.

"At the end of the day, it is the responsibility of everyone wanting to become a great brand, everyone wanting to grow their business, to make connections that your consumer, your audience never forgets," said Collins. "That's how you get them to advocacy."

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Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Kristin Rowan, the director of marketing and public relations and sales for Square Egg Entertainment, the parent company for Phoenix Fan Fusion, who discusses how to pivot and adjust when a large-scale event suddenly faces an emergency.

In this case, the coronavirus pandemic. When it started getting bad, everything changed when everybody started to realize this didn't look like the seasonal flu, this was different.

Rowan's team started planning early when it became apparent that Phoenix Fan Fusion wasn't happening. For her small, but mighty team of six, they didn't have a team of PR people or lawyers or all of those who can revise what they needed to do. Any revisions, any statements that they made came down to one person and long hours were experienced by all.

"We pivoted from, 'Hey. Here are all the guests we have coming out, and here's all the events we're planning and look at all this fun,' to virtually nothing," said Rowan. "When you're planning an event that gets postponed like that, we don't know which panelists are going to be available. We don't know which rooms we're going to have in the convention center. We don't know what guests are still going to be available. And their filming schedule was stopped the same as our schedule was stopped. So for us, it was not so much a pivot as it was a full stop."

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Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Chris Ducker, a personal branding expert, serial entrepreneur, and successful podcast host, who helps people monetize their expertise and their personal brand through the work he does at his company, Youpreneur.

Ducker stands by the mantra of when you build the business of you, it's future-proof. It can't be copied, plain and simple. Because of your uniqueness and the way that you lean into that uniqueness is what ultimately makes you future-proof.

"Regardless of what crisis you might be going through or what problems you might be facing, or whatever competitor has stolen your product idea, they can have the exact same product with the exact same packaging, but ultimately, people buy from you because you are their favorite," said Ducker. "That's what the personal brand business model is all about. It's about becoming somebody's favorite."

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