small business

18 Sep 2009

Employee Share Ownership – Alignment of Goals

By |2017-07-26T21:26:37-06:00September 18th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Dream Teams|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

In my previous post on Strategy and Corporate Governance for Small Business, I talked about aligning Shareholder goals with the running of the company. This applies to employee share ownership as well.

When offering employees ownership you are making them shareholders.

Companies sometimes do this in an attempt to retain employees as the primary motive. However, there are issues:

  1. Shares in a privately held company are not the same as a cash bonus. They are a paper benefit until they can be sold.
  2. The goals of employee shareholders need to be in alignment with majority shareholders. If they are not then it might […]
27 Jul 2009

Marketing Budget Allocation For Results

By |2017-06-06T16:06:43-06:00July 27th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Marketing Budget Allocation - Make Money

As per the last two posts (The Value of a New Customer and Marketing Budget 101) I talked about one way of determining your marketing/sales budget.

If you want a simpler method, allocate a percentage of total revenue.

Now the question is where to spend your money for maximum effect.

There are basically four sources of future sales:

  • Existing customers,
  • Referrals (word of mouth),
  • Prospecting, cold calling and networking, and
  • New leads from marketing.

You will want to allocate funding (or effort) to […]