A big chunk of entrepreneurs using Facebook, Twitter and so on belong to the small business industry. It should be noted, however, that even the Fortune 500 companies are also taking advantage of these sites.

Apart from the real time communication that the sites offer, it’s absolutely free to promote a business and keep in touch with customers. One does not need to have technical skills to be able to manage a social media account and this ease of using the sites is what primarily attracts business owners to use them.

Below we share an infographic design from Infographic Labs showing the latest studies and surveys on how businesses are using and benefiting from the top social networking sites. Recent figures tell only one thing – entrepreneurs regardless of the field they’re in will continue to tap social media for their marketing campaigns.

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It’s a generally accepted fact that the two places in the universe where the most time gets sucked into a netherworld of oblivion are the event horizon surrounding supermassive black holes, and the offices of a small business. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A few small steps away from the event horizon is all it really takes to give the average business significantly more time to focus on real work, and prevent themselves from being crushed to a non-dimensional point of nothingness by the competition. Here are 10 efficiency hacks to give small businesses a big boost in productivity.

A Little Technical Expertise Goes a Long Way

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Your company doesn’t need to be filled with super nerds in order to run smoothly; odds are, your business has little or nothing to do with computers and they’re simply a means to an end. That said, they’re the most pervasive and useful means in the world today. So as much as you or your employees might view them as glitchy machines, learning enough to avoid expensive mistakes can save a lot of time. A few examples of these might be:

- Save your work all the time. You can even save it to servers that are not on your computer for added security.

- Look, Dave, deleting the short cut doesn’t delete the program. You have to uninstall it. No I’m not going to show you how to do that.

- As far as you are concerned, there are two types of files: “.exe” and everything else. Do not allow .exe files anywhere near your computer, let IT handle that.

- If an e-mail promises something good but vague, it is a scam. If it promises something bad unless you do something like “simply clicking on this link here”, it is a scam. If you have to give your name and password, it is a scam. If you have to ask yourself if it might be a scam, it is a scam.
Better yet, explaining the basic inner workings of computers during a short seminar to the less-than-savvy in a firm can free up resources to deal with real problems, instead of showing Dave how to log in for the third time today. 


Templates, Templates, Templates

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Every office has that document they have to send out 3-4 times a week, if not 3-4 times a day. The contract to a vendor, the contract to a client, the legal filings with the state, county, city and Federal Governments. There is no reason this document should be re-written each time unless you hate money and happy employees. If you find yourself typing up a document partially or wholly from scratch more than three times, take the time to make a template that will speed up the process in the future.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, it’s still a wonder how rare a well-organized, shared folder of templates is in many offices. Another area that often needs templates that frequently gets overlooked is e-mails. Now, obviously, important emails to clients or those that need a personal touch and finesse shouldn’t be replaced. What we’re talking about here is documents such as meeting schedules, agendas, work priority, etc… In other words, those emails you send multiple times each week that all have the same basic form, should be sitting as a permanent draft on your email client.
The important thing to remember here is re-read the template from top-to-bottom before sending. Otherwise embarrassing details such as a date from last year, or a reference to another company can make the end product look shoddy and unprofessional.

Review and Automate

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Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first. There’s really no reason you should be taking time to physically mail your bills each month. Pretty much everything from your power to your phones can be paid online, or even better, set up for an automatic deduction each month. Aside from software such as Quickbooks which will keep track of most of this information, (you’re in trouble if you aren’t using at least some sort of simple accounting software), here’s a quick-and-dirty tutorial on how to set up an excel spreadsheet to automatically calculate just about anything else.

On top of this, a lot of small businesses have trouble backing up, protecting, and keeping track of their data. Thankfully there are cheap, easy solutions to that problem. A simple RAID set up will automatically back up your data to a separate hard drive, ensuring that no data will be lost short of the office burning down. Even better, there are several companies that offer cheap or free back up to the cloud — making your data essentially loss-proof as long as you remember sync. They can even give you added storage space and processing power that will save on the long term in hardware costs. These provide the added bonus of allowing employees to quickly access important files if their computer breaks or if they’re off-site.

While simple, it’s amazing how often some of these quick fixes slip through the cracks, especially in small businesses. A regular review of all processes to determine which can be automated may seem time consuming at the outset, but will more than yield returns over the long term. All of these require a certain amount of tech expertise to set up and configure, but once they’re online, you can rest easy and use the time you’ve saved to focus on more important things.

E-Sign

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Almost everyone in a small business, or who deals with small businesses, is familiar with some version of a laborious process that goes like this:

Client: “I’m faxing over the document. Please sign it, fax it back over, and then we’ll countersign and fax you a copy for your records.”
You: “We don’t have a fax machine because it’s not 1997.”
Client: “So print it, sign it, scan it, email it, we’ll print it, scan it, and send it back to you.”
You: “I have just wasted my entire day getting a few drops of ink onto a piece of paper.”

This is one of those things that you always thought there should be a solution to, and it turns out there has been one for some time. E-sign basically allows you to send a document through a third-party provider to everyone who needs to sign off on it. Simply by clicking a button, everyone digitally “signs” the document, and everyone is sent a final, signed copy.

While this may not seem like the most secure way to obtain signatures, keep in mind that a signature is little more than a few quick pen movements on a page. If there is an issue with the signature, there are few ways to question or verify it beyond bringing in a hand-writing specialist. An e-signature, on the other hand, will have a trail of who it was sent to, who viewed it and when, what computer, what account, and what password were used in signing off on it. And according to law, it is just as legally binding as a physical signature. A good client to use for this service is Adobe EchoSign, partly for their history as an established company, and partly because they are one of the few companies that offers a service like this that you can guarantee almost every partner, vendor and client will have heard of.

That Thing On Your Desk is Called a Phone

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While email has become the beating heart of just about every company (who could live without Joyce’s adorable Friday Cat Pictures?), it is still lacking in speed. Sure, you can send a multiple-page complaint about someone drinking the last of the coffee and not making another pot (that cretin) and have it delivered in milliseconds. But there’s still the most error-prone part of the computer to deal with: that space between the screen and the user’s brain. There is no way to guarantee that someone will read your email, there is no way to get an immediate response unless you attach one of those annoying “confirm that you have read” tags. Most importantly, there is no way to guarantee the recipient has the time to respond in depth.

This creates to concurrent issues which, surprisingly, don’t seem to be generational. One group will send important time-sensitive emails and hope and pray that the other person happens to hit “refresh” in time. The other group will obsessively refresh their inboxes, waiting for the crisis of the day to appear (these groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive). There is also that third group of annoying management that is used to rapt, instant responses in ever other area of office life, and gets frustrated when employees don’t respond immediately.

Here’s a huge time saver to both ends: if it can wait a few hours, send an e-mail. This will allow the person on the other end to take note and properly prioritize their work flow. If it cannot wait, that thing on your desk is called a phone. Pick it up and have a conversation — you’d be amazed how many problems it can solve.

If Someone Can Do It Faster, Let Them

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In a rough economy where an unemployed job search is only slightly preferable to being dragged over hot coals, everyone in the company is going to go out of their way to show how invaluable they are. It’s a natural response that can have some positive effects, such as employees working harder or seeking out extra training. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really lead to the best allocation of resources. That is to say, people will often take on tasks they are terrible at for the sake of seeming that much more valuable to a company.

While admirable, this is probably one of the biggest sources of lost time outside of meetings where a committee is tasked with designing something. The worst offenders here surprisingly aren’t lower-level employees. Many of them (to simplify vastly) are only performing the tasks given to them by their superiors. The real problem, and where one should look to improve efficiency, is tasks that managers are guarding when they can and should delegate. 


Invasive in Planning, Hands-Off in Execution

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A good employee hates an invasive boss because they get in the way of that employee’s frenzied-yet-focused efforts to finish a project on-time and under-budget. A bad employee hates an invasive boss because they get in the way of that employee’s frenzied-yet-focused efforts to play Farmville and write the next great American novel. Assuming an otherwise well-functioning company, a good manager is faced with a dilemma: interfere too much and you stifle creativity and slow the process. Interfere too little and a whole heck of a lot of time can be wasted on frivolous pursuits.

The maxim “measure twice, cut once” comes to mind here. A good manager should make sure a project has the proper resources and staffing to meet its goals on time, and should monitor them in the early stages to ensure everything is on track. Any well-laid plan will inevitably make fools of everyone involved, but a poor plan, or no plan at all will make unemployed fools out of an entire small company. This is all to say that a team should work collaboratively to lay an effective an realistic plan and stick to it (obviously allowing for change given shifting parameters, but this should be built into the original plan). This will require more time up-front, but it will save untold amounts of time over the duration of the project.

One Step Back Equals Two Steps Forward

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We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we are not actively working, we are losing valuable time and man-hours. While this is true, especially for sectors such as food service, today’s creative workforce is cutthroat. One good idea can mean the difference between lucrative success and unprofitable mediocrity. Studies show that workers often become tired, disinterested and distracted after 8-10 hours of work (hence the 40-hour work week).

While this is not an absolute rule, and is sometimes hilariously unrealistic given the short time frames many small companies face, it raises an important point. Namely, taking a short break, sleeping on it, or letting it simmer over the weekend might be better in the long-term for the time-savings of a company. Each individual manager would need to determine when the best time to let zombified workers sleep, but a holistic approach to an employee’s productivity can prevent costly and time-consuming mistakes, as well as encourage creative, energetic approaches that come from plenty of needed rest and time to ruminate.

Overestimate Everything

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Despite the fact that everyone “knows” that a project will always take much, much longer than you think it will, pressure from clients or managers can make it nearly impossible to ask for more than you think you will need. But time and time again, the rush to meet unrealistic deadlines with far too few resources ends up wasting more time and resources than a generous estimate would have come near to. Even worse, you might be laying the foundation for future time-consuming failures.

One of the best examples of this comes from software design. To illustrate, say a client demands a piece of custom software, in what you know is an unrealistic time frame. However, as a small business, you don’t have much room to negotiate terms or turn down clients. Even if you get the project done on time, the internal architecture of the software will likely be haphazard and slapped-together out of necessity. Any future business from that client will be built on this shaky foundation, just waiting for an expensive and time-consuming collapse. Would you have been better off demanding a more generous time frame or turning down the business altogether? That is a question each business has to look at its balance sheet and answer itself. But just as they should over-estimate the overall cost of a project, they should likewise over-estimate the downstream costs that will inevitably result. 


You Cannot Multitask

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“Multitask” is one of those buzz words that employers use to describe the employee they want and job-searchers plaster all over their resume. After all, why would you want someone who can do one thing, when you could have someone who can do three things? While it would be nice if we could all hire or be a group of super-talented multitaskers working three projects successfully at once, the hard truth is you cannot multitask. Not only that, but attempting to multitask is actually proven to reduce your net productivity.

This is unfortunate for the small business because, being a small business, everyone has to wear multiple hats. Your head accountant might also be your lead project manager, or your chief of engineering might also have to be your director of client services. The solution here is not to throw up your hands and resign yourself to a world of slightly-less productive employees since all these tasks are essential to business function. You should instead focus on ordering and prioritizing tasks such that you or your employees aren’t forced to juggle multiple balls at once. Properly managed, this can lead to a situation where the increased productivity that results from focusing on a single task is leveraged to ensure that everything gets done according to its order and priority. A failure to do this leads to more dropped balls than a 16-clown-pileup, but doing one thing at a time is conducive to clarity and efficiency.

Travel through 26 states. 15,089 Twitter followers. 9,726 Facebook fans. Dozens of major business goals knocked off. That’s what the 10 finalists in the Fairfield Small Business Road to Success Challenge accomplished during the three months of the contest.

But only one small business could take the $20,000 cake, and that was ecycler, the recycling business run by Tim Laurent and Craig Robertson. Ecycler registered more than 100 new collectors to their website, won two social media contests (and two iPads), blogged every day, and came up with new concepts to grow their business further.

I caught up with founders Tim Laurent and Craig Robertson to talk more about how winning has affected their business, and what they’re going to do with that sweet $20,000 prize.

What was the hardest part of winning the challenge?

Tim: Our whole challenge from the beginning was consistent blogging as well as focusing on social media, Twitter and Facebook. Because we made that commitment to do one blog post a day, following up with that post via Facebook and Twitter, then onto writing a new blog post for the next day…this was the hardest part.

The second hardest part had to do with our goals. We set a number of them, like bringing on a number of new collectors and discarders. Keeping up with those goals was difficult, but blogging was the most difficult part, along with posting to Facebook, uploading YouTube videos, and updates to other social media channels. By putting up a posting each day, we felt that was one way to keep people interested and entice them to keep coming back.

Craig: It was very open-ended. We had a stretch goal from the beginning. We talked about that, how are we going to reach the goal, and then we had to keep up with blog posts. Like Tim said, our goal was to put one out every day if we could.

What was the biggest step forward that ecycler took during the challenge?

Tim: We learned quite a bit about ecycler and about the approach to business. What that means is that we now have a packagable toolbox. When we go to businesses now, we know exactly what questions they will ask, what we need to convey as a message about ecycler and deliver any supporting documentation. Our biggest win was understanding how businesses work in the recycling world even more so than we did at the beginning of the challenge.

Craig: Prior to the challenge, we were focused around residential-anyway the site was focused around that idea, giving curbside services to those who don’t have it. Then we started expanding that out to businesses. We found a lot of businesses either don’t recycle or they have to pay to recycle. The way we’re set up right now, we can actually give them a free option for some of their recycling, even cans and bottles.

What are you going to do with the $20,000 that you won?

Tim: A couple of things. One, we are building mobile apps for the iPad and iPhone platforms. We have a couple of different applications we’re working on, and that’s pretty much where the bulk of the money goes. Secondarily, we are going to host our own contest. Lastly, as Craig mentioned, we are building out some of the additional material types that we are offering to be recycled via ecycler.com, starting in Canada. Once it’s successful in Canada, then we’ll bring it down stateside.

Craig: We already gave away an iPad. We won two iPads during the challenge, and we turned around and gave away one of them as part of our own contest.

In our new contest, we want people from various communities to enter and give us the best recycling bin design using materials from the Home Depot or Lowe’s or their local building supply store. A high-quality recycling bin typically costs a couple of hundred dollars. It’s heavy to ship. We want to see if people can come up with a creative way to build recycling bins locally, and then send them off to business, or their homes or offices.

What are people going to win?

We haven’t come to the amount of money yet, but it’s going to be a nice chunk of change.

What strategy did you use to win the Facebook challenge?

We have two college-age interns that have been working with us. They know Facebook extremely well, so we basically gave them free reign to develop a strategy for getting additional followers.

The first thing we came up with was a way to tap into our existing network. We gave away our reports that we normally charge $120 about the bike industry for free to anyone who liked our Facebook page. We sent that to our newsletter list of thousands of people from transportation departments all around the world, and then got an amazing response. It didn’t cost us anything to do that campaign, but we got a huge response.

Since then, we’ve been leveraging the Facebook profiles that we have, and have been marketing directly to the people that have an interest.

How many hours did you put into that Facebook campaign?

The interns pretty much worked 20 hours a week each on that. They spent a good amount of timing building it, and we saw massive results in a short period of time.

How powerful a tool has Facebook been in growing your business?

Our strategy has been–instead of just having people like our business, what we’ve done is branded the generic bike sharing information portal. When people look bike sharing information, they find our information page and ultimately come to our website. It’s been a great tool that’s brought in a significant amount of traffic, 20-30% increase in traffic through our website. A lot of that was coming through Facebook.

We keep a pretty extensive blog on the industry. If you search for anything bike sharing related, our blog comes up first. Having this on Facebook, actually pushing it out to people who see the news feed, has gotten us a much better response from our existing followers. A lot of people who come to our website for the first time come through our blog, but if they like us on Facebook, they’re getting a constant reminder that we keep it up to date.

Can you give entrepreneurs any advice on expanding their businesses using Facebook?

This competition was kind of a kick in the ass, we really needed it to push this strategy forward. Everyone pops up a Twitter account and Facebook page, but very few people really go out there and create a campaign to generate followers, and then ultimately follow up to turn it into revenue. You’re better off not putting up a Facebook account unless you’re going to really go out there and create a campaign to make it worthwhile for your business.

We had 100 followers beforehand, which was nothing, and now we have something we can actually leverage.

How many followers do you have now?

4,301. We went from 100 to that. I think we were a little higher before–naturally some people dropped off after they got the free report–but kept the majority of people, which we’re really happy about. We’ve integrated our Facebook account with our email campaigns, Twitter and our blog, so literally Facebook is the portal where all of our social media directions come together in one feed. That makes it pretty attractive.

*At time of writing.

Odds are, your answer to this question is yes. The real question is “do you tweet well“? Do you engage your followers, find new leads and clients using Twitter, and have a solid reputation on the medium?

That second question is harder to say yes to. But Brian Searl, who won the Fairfield Small Business Challenge’s Twitter contest by earning the most Twitter followers in three weeks, has figured out how to harness Twitter like a champ. Searl gained about 4,000 Twitter followers during the Small Business Challenge, for a grand total of 9,000 followers. That gives his company, Insider Perks, a handy leg up on the competition. I caught up with Searl to find out how he did it.

What strategy did you use to win the Twitter challenge?

A lot of people in the contest assumed we used some kind of automated software tool, and we actually didn’t. When the Twitter challenge started, I only followed 300-400 people on my Twitter account, people I wanted to see headlines from and retweeted constantly. I didn’t have a large base that I followed to begin with. I had about 4,000-5,000 when it was all finished.

I had created about 8-10 lists extensive Twitter lists attached to my own account for the public to use. For example, a hotel list that had 500 hotel twitter handles in it. Those lists are still active on my account. They cover hotels, restaurants, cruise lines, travel bloggers, etc. For the contest, I just went through those lists and followed everybody that I didn’t follow already. That amounted to probably about 5,000 people.

Doing that is actually where most of my followers came from. The ones that weren’t following me followed me back. It’s a lot more simple than most people think it is.

Beyond that, I took the approach of following people outside of my industry. For example, I followed some people related to small business, some people related to the finance industry who may end up writing about budget travel. I normally wouldn’t have followed those people, but I guess I was lucky and they followed me back.

I tend to have a good reputation on Twitter, so I think they’ll help me out with what I’m doing, plus that fact that I have about 9,000 followers. Many people base their follow decisions off the number of followers you already have, as an indication of trust. Already having 5,000 followers before the contest started helped me win, in my estimation.

How powerful do you think Twitter has been in growing your business?

Honestly, that’s a toss-up, because I’m a small business, so I don’t have access to all those huge metric analyzers that a lot of big businesses use. Some of those services are upwards of $1,000 per month, and we don’t do that kind of tracking for budgetary reasons.

The main results I’ve seen from Twitter have come on an individual, case-by-case basis. Sure, if I tweet out a link, I’m going to get 100-200 hits on my website. But the biggest benefits for me have been the connections and relationships I’ve made. For example, we’re going to expand into cruise coverage in 2011. That’s something that never would have happened without Twitter, because the partner I’m doing that with, I met through Twitter. That’s just one example. I could name 10-15 of those specific examples that have happened because of Twitter, because of social media in general.

What advice can you give other entrepreneurs who want to expand their small businesses through Twitter?

Just be engaging. Especially in the travel industry, you see so many hotels that decide to just have a brand presence on Twitter, and then they never tweet anything. Or all they do is set up a bot to announce their latest deals, and they don’t engage their customers, they don’t talk.

The other end of the spectrum are those who engage, but only talk about problems or customer service. There are brands that set up Twitter accounts, and you never realize who’s tweeting. They don’t tell you the names of the people who are tweeting in their bios, so they come across as just a faceless brand that is trying to sell something. Some big brands like that have a lot of followers because everyone knows who they are, but you just can’t tell who’s tweeting, and they don’t engage or anything.

My biggest point is just engage. Talk to your people, jump into a conversation about your business. In my industry, for example, if you see that somebody is planning a vacation somewhere, ask them how you can help. I know that sounds oversimplified, but really, it’s social. If you can’t be social, there’s no point in being there.

1. Involvement

Customers want to feel like you care about their needs, and that you’re emotionally invested in helping them solve their problems. It’s a little easier to convey this message in a brick and mortar setting, but online survey software can let your e-commerce customers know that you’re completely involved in meeting their needs, too.

2. Speed

If you can deliver your product faster than your competition, your customers will be more than satisfied, they will be happy!

3. Availability

Today’s customer has had enough of voicemail and automated responses. They want to know that a real person is available when they have a question or need help. Offer multiple ways for them to contact a knowledgeable representative including phone, email, fax, and live chat. If the customer is important to you, give them your home or cell phone numbers, too.

4. Courtesy

How much money would you spend if the salesperson was rude every time you visited their store? In most cases, not very much. Customers don’t expect you to put on a song and dance for them, but they do expect you to be polite and respectful.

5. Honesty

If you fail to live up to your promises, not only will you have an unsatisfied customer on your hands, but they will spread the news of your broken promise to anyone that will listen. The best practice is to underpromise and overdeliver. A customer who is pleasantly surprised will be just as anxious to tell everyone about their positive experience.

6. Satisfaction

Most people aren’t shopping for a product, they’re looking for a solution to their problems. If you can solve their issue and provide satisfaction, you’ll have a customer for life!

7. Can-do Attitude

Your customer doesn’t want to hear any excuses – even if they are valid. They don’t want to hear the shipment is delayed, the computer is down, or your technician didn’t show up for work yesterday. They want to hear that you can get the job done. Forget about excuses and problems, and begin focusing on solutions.

8. Skilled Service

Consumers look to you for expert, up-to-date knowledge in your industry. They feel like its part of what they’re paying for.

9. The Little Extras

Customers expect the “little extras” at no extra charge. If you nickel and dime them for every little thing, they’ll quickly decide that you’re only interested in taking their money. By adding value to the product at no additional cost to your customer, you could find your competitive edge and increase your customer base.

10. Appreciation

Who wants to spend their hard-earned money with someone who doesn’t appreciate their business? Make sure that you offer a sincere “thank you” frequently and offer special promotions or discounts to your regular customers.

If you can give your customer what they want, your success is virtually guaranteed!

“Snail mail” still has a valuable place in customer service, satisfaction and feedback. Online feedback forms, however, are quickly becoming the chosen method for gathering customer opinions. By using any of the eight following methods, you can provide ways for your customers to give you their honest feedback.

1. “Snail mail” – Using the postal service to deliver surveys, feedback cards and polls is a classic method of getting customer opinions. This method provides a personal touch because you can add a handwritten note to each form, encouraging customers to be honest.

2. GetSatisfaction – This unique feedback program utilizes a knowledge base created by your company and customers. Customers can quickly search other questions, ask their own question, make suggestions, and even offer praise. GetSatisfaction features an easy setup interface and a free trial.

3. KISSinsights – This exceptional online survey software operates differently than other survey software. A small widget slides up from the bottom of the screen, asking customers no more than two questions. Customers can quickly enter their honest answers with minimal effort. KISSinsights includes a free plan with ready-made questions or you can create your own questions with the affordable premium plan.

4. Zoomerang – This survey software features embedded surveys for your website, detailed reports and easy-to-read graphs for analyzing results. Tutorials and guides help even the inexperienced user to create a useful and detailed survey. Zoomerang offers a free plan that allows you to create surveys containing up to twelve questions. Two annual plans offer unlimited questions.

5. Usabilla – Usabilla is a program that allows you to test your website at any stage of development. Simply create your test, invite your customers to participate and review the results. This program includes a free plan and makes it easy to see what people like about your website and which areas need improvement.

6. QHub – This easy-to-use program takes the guesswork out of creating a question and answer form. With a fifteen-day free trial, you can quickly create a simple question and answer website for your business. Users can ask their own questions, search other questions, answer questions, and leave feedback.

7. IdeaScale – This simple interface allows customers to leave their ideas and feedback for your website. They can then vote on ideas and the ones with the most votes rise to the top of the list. This makes it easy for you to see which ideas concern customers the most. IdeaScale has three pricing plans, including a free option.

8. CrowdSound – This interactive software encourages feedback from customers and lets them track your responses. CrowdSound is available as a separate website or as a widget and comes with a free plan.

Although “snail mail” surveys and feedback cards are still useful, especially for the personal touch, online feedback forms are more convenient.

By utilizing one of the many ways to gather customer feedback, you can encourage your customers to participate, build relationships with customers and improve your website and business.

Social networking for small business took off about 6 years ago. If you’re like me, and you didn’t know that, then welcome to SaleSpider. This all-encompassing, small biz-specific social network touts its ability to make you money instead of–or in addition to–just friends.

SaleSpider helps you find leads, jobs, contracts, hundreds of thousands of other members, and most of the other kinds of contacts that you’d need as a small business owner. I caught up with CEO Russell Rothstein to learn more about what SaleSpider does, who uses it, and how it is evolving.

BP: How fast has SaleSpider grown?

We grow pretty much steady. At this point, we get 5,000 to 7,000 new members a week, and that’s been steady for years now. We are non-venture capitalist, so we did not try step on the gas and spend $20 million at all costs. We actually grew with the concept of let’s be profitable the entire time. We were a real business if you will. So we’ve had steady growth at 25,000 new members a month.

BP: You sound like kind of a rarity in being an online business that is making steady money and has been without venture capital. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you monetize so effectively?

I had a previous background in finance and in being an entrepreneur. I decided not to take venture capital money. I was offered it in the Valley four years ago by a number of different well-known venture capitalists. I turned them down because I saw their term sheets, and it seemed too diluted.

What we did is we tried to monetize as much as we could while balancing our two main stakeholders: the members and the advertising clients. The concept was simple. Large companies and enterprises want to reach small business owners. They are a very difficult group to reach, they are complex, there are multiple verticals. There’s many of them, and they want to be treated like large companies, given customized service. But they are like small companies, consumers, in that there are so many of them.

What we did to monetize is we really went after the advertising model . We did not just offer display advertising, we had newsletters, we had text notifications. Every time I send you a social message on SaleSpider, you’ll be notified “Russell has just sent you this message.” It will say at the bottom “Brought to you by Campaigner.“

We monetized through links, text messages and advertising. That has driven the growth of the company and allows us to be profitable.

We’re also very focused on automation. Every time we’ve taken on a project to make the site better, we constantly add value to the users to make it better without costing the users money. That’s been a philosophy. For example, as opposed to having 50 people in the corner collecting government opportunities, writing them down, and entering them into a database, we actually have an automated library system that we’ve built.

We’re really a bunch of engineers who have automated as much as we could. It means a lot of development, but once you finished the development of it, it’s very much a maintenance game. That’s really how we’ve monetized it.

It’s been good. Growth is always something we’re looking at. We are taking more and more steps. We just released mobile a couple months of go, we’re looking at going out of North America in January. We’re increasing our growth to get the market share.

BP: You mentioned that small businesses are notoriously hard to reach. Could you tell me more about that? You said big enterprises want to get in touch with small businesses but it’s hard to do. Why is that besides there’s so many?

Have you heard of Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado?

BP: I haven’t.

His first book came out 15 to 17 years ago. I attended his keynote presentation at a Sales 2.0 event a few years ago, and I think he really nailed it. There’s always been two types of models in sales in North America generally. One was the grocery chain model where you walked into a grocery chain, you pulled out the cereal, and it was self-served completely. That was targeted towards consumers, meaning no one is going to sell you cereal boxes, you’re going to have to choose your own and they pull you in the store by commercials.

Then you have the other model, which is the older model, where you have expensive sales reps whose job it was to go target large companies and enterprises and sell them multimillion dollar solutions. They have to be multimillion dollars in order to justify the resources resources–the sales reps, engineers, and sales engineers involved in customizing the solution to an enterprise.

The problem is the small business owner is in between. So what if he or she wants to receive the personal handheld holding to say “well I know you’re running a company with 7 or 18 people, I know you need an accounting system and a CRM system, here’s how we can tweak it for you, here’s how we can specialize it for you. By the way, it’s going to be $1800 or $100 or $1,200 a month, but we’re not going to be able to fly someone in to meet with you.”

That’s why we’re so challenged. The costs were too expensive to have direct sales, but the market was so large that it was the most untapped market in the United States.

The enterprise market became fatigued with purchasing. They were public companies and they had to cut down their numbers and were expensive. When this happened, the small business market became the most open and lucrative available that had not been tapped.

BP: If I’m a small business owner and I go onto SaleSpider, can I just put up a profile and will people find me? Or do I have to be more proactive and engage with the site?

If you join SaleSpider, you have to put up your profile. If you don’t put up your picture, or who you are, then you’re a silhouette with a blank and obviously no one is going to try and contact you. But if you put up your profile, upload your resume, your company profile–it takes 20 minutes–I bet you that within 4-5 hours you’ll have messages and connections

It’s a very active community. Small business owners are active. They are looking to connect and leverage relationships. When you’re a large company you may be able to afford to have offices in 25 different cities, but when you’re a small company you’re looking to leverage partnerships in order to compete.

In order to make it easier for people, we put a keyword search in where you could put your keyword in, whatever word it is, you could say iron, or widget, you could set your location, state, multiple states, whatever you want, and you press go and within half a second you’re connected to opportunities which have those keywords in it.

That includes thing like 35,000 government open contracts which are those open contracts anywhere in the states, Canada, or the European Union. That included 730,000 members and their profiles, that includes classified ads for probably 70,000 classified ads, and about 500,000 job opportunities—instantly.

It’s like a Google Alerts when it arrives. Same kind of popup feel as that.

In a survey we recently handed out, we found that 3/4 of small businesses told us that they are going to be putting more effort into social networking as a way of marketing their business. It’s low cost, they’re able to do it, it’s easy, and that’s where the customers are also.

The question is how to do it. If you’re a local business or restaurant, I imagine you may be interested in having a Facebook Ad, although it’s tough to know whether people would use Facebook to choose their restaurants.

If you’re a small business, you’re going to want to be able to vet for some social networking and connect. That’s why we have this keyword search and opportunity matching, because you’re going to want an easier way to connecting. The whole idea of that keyword search is just to make it easier for people.

We copied the Google bar, if it’s just a search term, and you press go, it makes life so much easier. Our mobile app is completely based on that search. Put your keyword in, press go.

BP: That’s a very convenient way of using social networking.

We learned it the hard way. We constantly learn the same things over and over again. You listen to your users, your members, ask them the questions, they tell you what to do, and you deliver it.

It took a lot of engineering to make it fast enough. The biggest challenge of our keyword search was the speed issue because you’re searching three quarters of a million members profiles, 35,000 government RFPs and open contracts, hundreds of thousands of classified ads, and 500,000 jobs, and it’s just a lot to search and you do it by keyword. So there was a lot of engineering that went on to that. It took us eight months of testing.

BP: What kinds of opportunities could you find on SaleSpider easily that you couldn’t easily find elsewhere? Or is it kind of a mix?

It is a mix. Let me give you an example. Most of the information we’re getting is public information but it is scattered in thousands and thousands of sites. Some of the most convoluted sites you can imagine.

For example, California opportunities and Colorado opportunities, in terms of government opportunities, are completely distributed differently. Every state does a completely different job of how they are going to show their open contracts.

We take this information, we scrub it, and we make it available and complete for every member. That includes ever state, the Canadian provinces, the federal government, and the European nations. That’s a perfect example that you can’t get anywhere else. We have a patent pending on that.

Another example is just our membership. With 730,000 small business owners and being able to instantly connect with them by keyword, that’s just unique, because you can’t do that otherwise. I mean, LinkedIn has six degrees of separation, and you’re looking by a company name. LinkedIn is more a resume place. To be frank I use it a lot. I was just with the CMO of LinkedIn and their business model is based primarily on recruiters and HR people.

Facebook is more for my eleven-year-old or my sixteen-year-old, who are on it all the time.

BP: I know plenty of 40-somethings who are also on it all the time.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? There’s no business to be done. Just a lot of just idle chatter. It’s fun to listen to a little bit but you can’t go on it every day.

The one thing you’re going to remember is that if you’re in your office, you’ve got SaleSpider on, and your boss walks by and sees you, he’s going to know that you’re driving business. He doesn’t want to see you on Facebook.

BP: Is there anything else that you’d like to share?

Really, it’s exciting times, because with the economy it way it is, people want opportunities. The truth is, we’re so much cheaper than a trade show. It will cost you $5,000 for a show, you walk through, you get a hotel, you meet 500 people and 30 would be good, now you can do it online and that’s a big thing.

Honestly, our biggest challenge is unless we want to raise $20 million dollars in venture capital, we just want to get people to try it. Go to the site. Put a keyword in. There’s no cost. Press go and see if it gives you value. It’s free, and you’ll get leads and opportunities, and be connected every day.

Official bio: Russell Rothstein is the President and Founder of Sales Spider. A business social network, Sales Spider was launched in March 2006. Prior to the development of Sales Spider, Rothstein was the President and Founder of NorthPath, a Sales Outsourcing company offering lead generation and field sales outsourcing to leading technology companies. Previous to NorthPath, Rothstein served in numerous sales and application capacities for Oracle. Before Oracle, Russell was the Managing Partner and Founder of Bizware, a software supply chain for retail petroleum and major convenience stores. He successfully built Bizware into the industry market leader before selling to a Nasdaq listed public company in 1995.

This is the tenth interview in our Fairfield Small Business Challenge series.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. This adage fits well into the world of recycling. The cans you throw away could be part of a recycling collector’s daily income. Tim Laurent, who started collecting recyclables as a Boy Scout, has been on both sides of the recycling fence. He co-founded ecycler, which matches people discarding recyclables to those collecting them, to make collecting, disposing of, and cashing in on recycling easy.

BP: How did you get into recycling?

It started in the Boy Scouts years and years ago. One thing my partner and I did to help bring in money to the troop for summer camps, equipment and whatnot, was to go around and have recycling drives. It was back when newspapers and bottles and aluminum cans were the fundamental recycling products. And they had real value. My partner Craig Robertson said that he had a similar experience, picking up cans. His first computer was purchased with aluminum cans.

BP: That’s impressive.

It was. This was decades ago, but we both had this idea. People tended to have this greater sense of community on their minds, back then, where curbside recycling pickup didn’t exist.

So that’s really the foundation of our going into ecycler. We built a place, an exchange, where people can put up their recyclables, whether it’s aluminum cans or glass bottles or plastic, on the website, and people sign up as collectors and pick that stuff up for free.

BP: What if I decided I was tired of sitting in front of the computer and just wanted to make a living by recycling. How much money do you think I could make?

Let’s frame it up with some real numbers. It depends on whether you’re in a bottle bill state or a non-bottle bill state.

Basically, a bottle bill state is a state with legislation that dictates whether a container or vessel is worth a certain amount of money. Of course, you pay that money when you buy the drink or whatnot, then that container is redeemable for a certain amount of cash.

There are currently ten bottle bill states, including California, Vermont and Maine. On top of cans and bottles, you can see the state abbreviations; they receive a state initiative for recycling.

So, for example, in California, cans and bottles are worth a nickel, 5 cents, because that’s dictated by the state of California. If I lived in California, if I were to go out and pick up bags of aluminum cans every day, five days a week, on a normal work schedule, then get two weeks off for vacation and holidays, I could easily make $30,000.

BP: Really?

Really, and that’s only twelve bags of aluminum cans a day. If you were to go to 24 bags a day, that’s $60,000. So, it’s real money to be had.

And then in Michigan, where a can is worth 10 cents, an aluminum can, and some bottles, you only need six bags a day to get to the $30,000.

Then, of course, there are the non-bottle bill states. There are forty of them, like Illinois, where our company is founded. In a non-bottle bill state, the government isn’t dictating that a can is worth 5 cents and a plastic bottle is worth 5 cents. You only get the intrinsic value of the metal in the can or the materials in the plastic. So in non-bottle bill states, an aluminum can is worth about a penny. And it’s a commodity, so every day, every minute of every day, that price is changing, like gold or silver changes.

What that means is, back to the California example, you can recycle crushed aluminum in a normal garbage bag. In Illinois, of course, you still get 200 cans per bag. They’re worth five cents a can for California, so 5 cents times 200 is approximately $10 for the bag. Now in Illinois, you’re getting about a penny, times 200. So that’s approximately $2.00 per bag. So, about a fifth of the value.

In non-bottle bill states, getting to the $30,000 level would mean five times as many bags per day or work on the weekends. The numbers aren’t as exciting. Nevertheless, there is real money to be had.

BP: Yeah, that’s really not bad. What about plastic bottles? I’ve heard various things about whether it’s worth it to recycle plastic bottles or not. What’s your take on that?

There are so many views behind it. If you could take just the fact that society is going to use plastic bottles, whether they’re green or not, our society is using plastic bottles. Let’s do something about it, because a plastic bottle that’s shredded and baled and made into say, a picnic table is much better off than a plastic bottle sitting in a landfill.

My partner Craig and I are 100% behind the effort of recycling plastics. Ideally, there wouldn’t be plastic bottles, but the way it is now, it is expensive to recycle plastic. Especially in small volume.

Now, when you have the major waste carriers like Waste Management collecting tons of plastics, there is money to be made in tons of plastics. Unlike aluminum cans, like I said, a can is worth about a penny, one plastic bottle is worth nothing, you have to get a ton of bottles to make them worth something.

With plastic, we have to adjust our thinking and use a bifurcated approach. You must educate the public on why not to use the plastic bag or the plastic bottle. The other side of it is let’s innovate and create technology to recycle those plastics at a reasonable cost. And that’s happening.

BP: Do you have any demographic information from your website of who tends to pick up your recycling, who puts it out, who’s involved?

Definitely. Let me give some “for examples,” and I can give you general percentages after that.

We have people that are owners, business owners of recycling centers. And they’ve set up a site on ecycler. We also have professional recyclers, whether they’re the homeless guys with a cart or the guys driving around the neighborhood with trucks to just recycle, that’s what they do.

We also have teachers that have signed up who want cash for their pets and for animals in the classroom. We’ve had a gentleman sign up to furnish money for his Cub Scout pack so they could go to summer camp. And those are real people, and there are clubs besides. We’ve had a couple of schools and different church groups sign up to also try to earn extra money for their cause.

Now, the percentages: It’s about 60-65% recycling centers and professional recyclers, the guys who go around with trucks and make a living out of just recycling. Together, we target groups and the people who want to earn just some extra money, as a supplemental income. Whether it’s for them personally or family or for their group. That’s really the power of the site, enabling local entrepreneurs/local people to come on board and make money–and make the world a greener place.

Follow Tim’s Fairfield Small Business Challenge travels and progress on his Fairfield blog.

Bike sharing programs have proliferated in recent years. Renting a bike at one location, riding it around, and dropping it off somewhere else is, it turns out, just what many city dwellers need.

When a city or organization wants to set up a bike share program, they call CityRyde, a company that helps people set up and manage successful bike sharing programs. Timothy Ericson co-founded CityRyde after witnessing the world’s biggest bike share program launch in Paris. CityRyde I caught up with Timothy to learn more about bike sharing around the world–and got an impromptu lesson on carbon credits along the way.

BP: Can you tell me a little bit about your background with bikes?

My business partner and I started this company back in 2007. We were both actually living in London at the time, and had traveled to Paris for the weekend.

We just happened to be in Paris for the launch of the world’s largest bike share at the time. We said we needed to bring this here to the States because no one was doing it at the time. That’s how we got started.

So, we love the concept. I’ve been riding a bike since I was a little kid and, you know, wanted to see this happen in Philadelphia. It was our original passion for starting this, because that’s where we were coming back to. Now, we’re a world-wide company and grown to be the world’s largest bike sharing company in the world.

BP: Was Philadelphia the first bike sharing city in the States then?

No, actually. This is kind of funny. Philadelphia did not have one. The first one was in Washington D.C.

BP: What’s the deal with Philadelphia?

Philadelphia just notoriously moves slowly on anything progressive. So right now they’ve launched a feasibility study and are in the process of looking at impacts to the system.

BP: How big is bike sharing around the world?

Basically, every European country has a bike sharing deployment, and then it is the fastest growing form of transportation worldwide. And right now there are over 300 deployments worldwide.

BP: Are they mostly in Europe and America, or are they in other countries as well?

It all started in Europe. It’s mainly in Europe now, but a lot of the Asian countries, actually the largest bike share is in Hangzhou, China. Over 50,000 bikes are spread throughout the city. It’s massive out there. It is growing in the United States, in North America. Basically every North American city is looking into it in some capacity.

There’s about five or six launching just this year, including Boston. Washington D.C. just revamped and upgraded from 100 bikes to 1,000 bikes. Minneapolis launched like 2,000 bikes. It’s really starting to pick up here in the States. Next year is going to be a really, really big year. Some of the other major cities are in the planning stages now.

BP: That’s encouraging to hear. What’s the biggest challenge you face in your job?

I think the biggest challenge for us right now is raising the money to put together this software package that we’re developing. (Ed.: CityRyde has closed two rounds of financing.) We are developing the only software package in the world that’s able to turn bike rides into cash. So our expertise is actually tracking the amount of carbon being reduced by taking a bicycle instead of your car. And those savings can be tracked, monitored and sold in the carbon credit market.

BP: Which doesn’t exist yet, to my knowledge.

Actually, it’s the fastest growing commodity market in the world. It’s about $140 billion today. Just the United States isn’t in the compliance market today. Basically, every other country except for the US, China and Australia are in the carbon credit market.

It’s called the compliance market, where companies polluting are requiring to purchase space. However, there is a voluntary market in the United States right now that exceeding $200 million today.

BP: That’s interesting. Is that market something that the public can get access to?

Yes, about 80% of the carbon credits sold in the US are from businesses, so places like Google who offset their entire worldwide carbon emissions purchase them. 20% are from individuals. There are a couple places to buy them from.

But these companies are purchasing these carbon credits is really for three reasons. One is the marketing value. The second is that it is a commodity and can be resold at a premium. And the third, and most important, is that most businesses anticipate the US moving toward a cap and trade, some sort of carbon regulation, in the next ten years. They’re purchasing these carbon credits at a discount now, and having them grandfathered in. So the organization we work with to certify these carbon credits is the organization, the Voluntary Carbon Standard, that will run whatever legislation that ends up getting passed in the States.

Follow Timothy’s travels and contest progress at his Fairfield Challenge blog.