The Up and to the Right | Small Business | Practical, Actionable, Sustainable Improvements

M&A or mergers & acquisitions might not be on the tip of your tongue as a small business owner but as we plan for retirement or other transitions, acquisition begins to find its way into our world.

Hi, I’m Stephen Krausse with Beyond 50 Percent and it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work with another episode of the Up and to the Right Podcast.

Over the course of the last twenty years I’ve been involved in four acquisitions and each time I had a different role to play. 

• In 2000 I was part of the management team that sold a small business to a publicly traded firm. 
• A few years later I put an offer together to purchase a local sports shop – that one didn’t work out.
• In 2017 a large company bought our parent company.
• Finally, in 2018 I worked with our new parent company to purchase Directed Energy and return our company to private ownership.

This week I thought I would share one lesson from each of those experiences.

You can subscribe to the Up and to the Right podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn and now there’s even a playlist on the Beyond 50 Percent youtube channel!

Visit https://beyond50percent.com to listen there and find out more about the Up and to the Right podcast and about Beyond 50 Percent.

http://b50p.info/uattr021

On February 13, 2017 I published Episode 13 of Up and to the Right… I should have known that the 13th episode published on the 13th day of the month was a bad omen.

Anyway, after Episode 13 I started planning...

and stopped producing...

...and it took over a year for me to get back on track!

In episode 21 of up and to the right we’ll:

put off talking about Plancrastination! We’ll avoid talking about what it is. We’ll mindlessly scroll through our social media feed instead of discussing why we plancrastinate. Finally, we’ll do a lot of online research enabling us to sidestep what we can do to avoid it. 

What is Plancrastination?

Reasons we Plancrastinate

Fear Loathing Distraction The Momentum of Inaction 

Breaking the Cycle

ID the Roadblock Give Yourself a Time Limit (not a deadline) ID the Next Logical Step 

http://b50p.info/uattr020 Show Notes 

I have three places I really push organization

my electronic files my backpack my office/podcast production desk 

I could do better but these are my major work areas so while I have piles of office supplies or old records that could definitely use a good purge… they don’t effect my day to day work.

In episode 20 of up and to the right we’ll talk about why and how to get organized. It’s not as hard as you think and we’ll get some great help along the way!

Show Notes: http://b50p.info/uattr019

Do you have customer service skeletons in your closet? Does the skeleton of your patronage linger in the closet of a business that just plain blew it? For me, sadly… both are true.

Episode 019 of Up and to the Right we’ll take a look at some moldering bones in my own customer service closet along with two examples that made an impression on me as a customer.

The good news is that by acknowledging problems, listening to customers and treating customers with thoughtful respect you can prevent and resolve most customer issues.

Guest Expert Ron Sherwood, Envistia

We also have our first special segment this week with Ron Sherwood of Envistia - who will be talking with me about Customer Relationship Management or CRM.

http://b50p.info/uattr018

If you put all the clever marketing campaigns aside does it really matter if you’re Mac or Windows?

Episode 018 of Up and to the Right is about my journey from Windows to Mac; how and why it matters to business owners and what you need to think about when it comes to deciding on a technology platform for your business.

Spoiler alert: if you’ve already chosen... you made the right choice... and even if you feel you didn’t the costs to change are lower than ever.

For most businesses, choosing a computing platform has become easier. As Windows has become more stable Apple has made choices that reduce it's competitive advantage in the professional market. Many applications are now allowing download as either Mac OS or Windows. The end result? With a few exceptions you can adopt any number of computing platforms to successfully run your business.

 http://b50p.info/uattr017

Do you use social media to promote your product, service or business? Did you know that there or over 300 social media websites and that number is growing?!

Whether your a social media luddite like yours truly... or a social media maven there's simply no ignoring the power and impact of social media. In episode 17 of Up and to the Right we'll see if we can surf the social media channels and keep our entrepreneurial sanity at the same time!

We'll talk about how to answer these four basic questions:

Do you really NEED to be on social media after all (spoiler alert... that's a definite probably but...)?

How do you choose which social media networks that make the most sense for your business niche?

What should you post?

When should you post?

I dropped a number of links I think will help you make sense of all the noise and hopefully help you make some sensible social media planning decisions!

It’s unanimous… according to article after article service providers should have pricing listed on their websites. Funny thing though… if you start looking at many professional service provider’s websites there is a distinct lack of transparent public pricing.

In episode 16 of Up and to the Right we’ll explore this apparent conflict and I’ll share my own journey that started when I decided to cover this topic.

About 58 years ago Edmund Jerome McCarthy introduced us to the ‘four P’s of marketing’. It could be argued that a lot has changed since then. In this episode of Up and to the Right we’ll adapt this easy to remember marketing tool to our modern mar