#apwt

Sounds from the Ping River to the Streets of the Old Town… I finally received these wonderful images from my recent collaborative performance in Chiang Mai for APWT2024 (Asia Pacific Writers Translators). Thanks Indyana Horobin (@erik_the_deer) for capturing such great moments from the night. You were so busy the whole event, I only really got to meet you as we waited for our connecting flights…

Ready to hire your very first employee? If so, congratulations! There’s no other business growth milestone quite like it. Prepare yourself for a whole new set of challenges, but if you can learn to manage your first employee effectively, you’ll be in a great position to continue growing your team and your business!

Management doesn’t always come easily, but I maintain that anyone can learn how to do it. In Part 1 of this post(click here to read), I shared 6 tips to help ensure your new employee will actually save you time, rather than becoming needy.

In Part 2, I’ll share my tips for helping your employee grow as a confident, productive member of your team, as well as what to do if you eventually lose them.

Clarify Processes, Policies, & Procedures

The key to success in a growing business is organization. As a solopreneur, you undoubtedly had tons of systems and processes in place to ensure that priorities got tackled, tasks didn’t fall through the cracks, and your time was used efficiently. Now it’s time to scale that up.

Before your employee’s first day, spend some time thinking about your systems and processes. Which ones work really well? Which ones need a revisit? Which ones work well when it’s just you, but will fall apart when more people are added? Do all you can to ensure your processes are air airtight and well-documented.

When your new employee starts, you’ll inevitably find problems with your company processes, but the better-prepared you are, the fewer walls you should hit. Also, if all your processes are well-documented, it’ll be easier to figure out where a problem starts and ends.

Having these processes laid out clearly will also help encourage your employees to document their actions in a day. As a manager, the better your employees’ work is documented, the less time you have to spend getting status updates in one-on-one meetings and the more time you can spend being proactive about growing the business together.

Have employees track their time, even if they aren’t paid hourly. This will help you to understand and better manage where employee time is being spent. We also recommend having your employees document all interactions with customers, progress on tasks, and, of course, any sales they make.

AllProWebTools makes it easy for your employees to leave this kind of documentation, through a tool called theWorkflow Timeline. This live feed of all your business’s updates is ideal for ensuring your employees and your business as a whole are on track, all at a glance. Click here to learn more about the Workflow Timeline.

Plan Their First Successes

Nothing boosts confidence like success, and confident employees are vastly more valuable to a small business than timid ones. Confident employees will be able to direct themselves, make important decisions, and lend charisma to your business. So it’s crucial to give new employees a taste of success as soon as possible.

Have some assignments ready for them that you know they’ll be able to complete on their first day, and devote a significant amount of time to discussing your and their goals for the position. As much as possible, avoid having the first day be a day full of unimportant “busy-work.” Instead, an “engagement-heavy” first day, where your new employee works on meaningful tasks, will instill much more confidence.

I can’t express enough how much AllProWebTools enables this. First of all, the tasking system makes it easy for you to have a number of pre-loaded “success generator” tasks in their console, which they can work on whenever they have time. Second, the system encourages employees to self-learn and self-direct, again boosting confidence.

Unchain From the Office

If you chose your new hire carefully and implement the tips from this blog post, as well as Part 1, you’ll quickly develop a self-sufficient, empowered, confident employee. Once you’ve built some trust, you might be able to get even more productivity out of your employee by allowing them to incorporate some flexibility into their scheduling.

Allowing your employees to work when and where they’re most productive has both short-term and long-term benefits.

·         Take advantage of your employees’ most productive hours, even if those aren’t between 9 and 5

·         Increase your odds of having employees stay with you for the long haul

·         Make your team more resilient against things like flu bugs, snow days, and technical difficulties by making work from home an option on those days

Worried about accountability with work-from-home employees? Try AllProWebTools, which allows you to get insight into what your employees are working on and how long it’s taking them.

Future-Proof the Position

Does this sound familiar? You’ve heard over and over again how valuable networking is to your business, but you can’t shake the feeling that you “aren’t doing it right.” You’re spending a lot of time and effort on your networking, but it’s not bringing you the returns you imagined, and you’re considering giving it up.

I hear these frustrations all the time, and as someone who spends a lot of my time networking, I get a lot of people asking me how I make it worth my while. Luckily, a lot of the things I do to make networking more fun also make networking more effective! I’m happy to share all I know, so you can take your next experience with networking from frustrating to awesome. Let’s get started!

Tip 1: Find Your Turf

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of networking groups, events, seminars, meetups, classes, etc out there? Yeah, there are a ton. But there’s a very good reason why that is. Networking with people who aren’t on your wavelength is a waste of time.

There are so many different groups out there because not everyone is looking for the same kind of thing from a networking opportunity. The bad news is, you might have to try a few that aren’t quite the right fit. The good news is, there’s almost certainly a group out there that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and try out new groups, but also don’t be afraid to cull groups and events that aren’t what you’re looking for. Sometimes it takes going two or three times to meet the right people, but make sure to stay skeptical. Are these people potential customers? Do they know your potential customers? Can these people help you grow your business?

Finding the right group makes all the difference in the world in terms of both the amount of fun you have and how effective you are while you’re having all that fun!

Tip 2: Bring a Posse

This is one of my favorite networking tips, guaranteed to ensure you have a great time, but it’s also great for getting a good ROI on your networking efforts. Bring people to networking events with you! That includes your employees, your partners, your friends, and even your prospects!

Showing up to a networking event with a posse has a few major advantages. First, you immediately look super credible, busy, and important to everyone else in the room, and that makes you a very desirable connection. Second, the event organizer and all the regulars will absolutely love you for bringing in new faces, and they’ll remember you better next time.

Inviting your prospects in particular is a great way to add value to them, and prove you’re more than just a salesperson. You’re looking for ways to help them, whether you make the sale or not. Even if you don’t end up winning their business, they’re likely to refer you to someone else that’s a better fit.

Plus, you get lots of time to interact with them and and show them what you’re about. They’ll hear your elevator pitch, see you interacting with other people that know and like you...all this is a recipe for closing the deal, while also having a great time.

Tip 3: Save the Sell for Later

It might seem counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to increase your ROI from networking events is to focus less on the sell while you’re actually at the event. But ultimately, networking is never about selling to the person you're in front of. It’s about creating relationships that you build on gradually.

Rather, your goal is to prove yourself to be a person worth knowing, talking about, and introducing to others. This will pan out for you later when you follow up and ask each of those connections you made who they can refer you to.

Remember that each person in the room while your networking knows hundreds of people (statistically about 600!), and will continue to meet more. You aren’t selling to the 30 people in the room with you. You’re selling to the hundreds that each of them knows, hoping they’ll think of you when they next hear of someone who has the problem you solve.

To that end, keep your focus on branding and differentiating yourself, rather than on selling yourself. This will lead to more referrals, but it will also make networking feel more like fun and less like work.

Tip 4: Follow Up Like You’re Friends Already

Email marketing is by far one of the most powerful tools in a small business owner’s arsenal. It has the ability to be highly personal, while also being easy to automate and track your results. Technology is improving all the time to make email marketing for small business continually easier and more effective. But how do you choose which email marketing system is right for your business?

While most of the major platforms share a number of common features, they certainly aren’t all created equal. You have to weigh price, credibility, reliability, and of course, effectiveness at helping you improve profitability through email marketing over time. We’ll help you understand what factors matter to you when choosing a service, and which are standard, and help you understand what you’re getting for your money.

Constant Contact and MailChimp are two major players in this space, but don’t count out AllProWebTools. We have a lot to offer small business owners — features that Constant Contact and MailChimp don’t even begin to touch on.

Addressing the most common questions we get ourselves, we hope these answers will help you understand the email marketing options available for your business, and give you some information about an up-and-coming, affordable, but proven and reliable solution you may have questions about.

First, Let’s Talk Price

Constant Contact:

For 500 subscribers or less, offers plans for $20/month. Price increases as you add more subscribers (501-2,500 costs $40/month, 2,501-5000 costs $60/month) with discounts for prepaid contracts.

Many features require their Email Pro plan (see below chart for details), which starts at $45/month for 500 users, plus an additional $20 or so for every additional 2000 subscribers.

MailChimp:

You can get a free account if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, or you can pay for one of their more advanced account types (see below chart for details). Their mid-tier account type starts at $150/month, with $5/month added on per additional subscriber.

For those upgrade features, prices start at $10 per month for 500 subscribers, increasing by $5 per month for each additional 500 subscribers.

AllProWebTools:

Basic Email Marketing from AllProWebTools costs $20/month, which is $10 for your basic AllProWebTools account (we’ll explain what that includes later on) and $10 for the Email Marketing WebTool.

If you need extra customization for your marketing emails and would like Email Marketing to integrate with the AllProWebTools Workflow Timeline, the Email Pro WebTool is an additional $15 per month. Click here to learn more about Email Pro.

With AllProWebTools, you’ll also need a back-end email marketing provider. This is a different service from the company that maintains your email address, and different from the front end where you build your emails and manage campaigns (that’s us).

An email marketing provider is responsible for making sure that when you send out emails to your list, those emails do not end up in spam folders. These providers are tried and tested in the industry, and we’ve built AllProWebTools to integrate with several providers. Click here for the details on pricing with our providers.

What’s “Standard?”

All of these email marketing platforms have some basic features in common:

·         Solid, reliable deliverability of emails

·         Compliant with the Federal Government’s CAN-SPAM regulations, allowing your subscribers to opt-out of emails they don’t want to receive

·         Ability to grow and manage contact list

·         Signup boxes for your website

·         Tracking email open rates, click-throughs, and unsubscribes

·         Ability to build emails from templates or from scratch

·         Image library to store content online

Give Me the Details

Ok, so what sets these plans apart? What’s standard in one plan, but costs extra in another? We’ll break it down for you, based on the features we think are most important to a small business owner’s email marketing success.