Small Business Musings

There are a great many small business owners and employees reading the CNC Cookbook. I correspond regularly with a number of you, and appreciate your ideas and insights. By way of giving something back, I’m going to start writing from time to time about some things I think will be helpful to the business side. I’m not giving up any of the machining articles, fear not, this is just a little something extra I’ll be adding. There’s a lot more of this kind of thing over on my other blog, which is called Smoothspan. You’re welcome to get connected with Smoothspan. I may repeat some of its content here, but my intent is to try to provide information that’s more directly relevant to small machining and manufacturing businesses whereas Smoothspan is all about Silicon Valley High Tech Startups and the Software Industry.

I’ve founded 3 businesses from scratch and joined 2 others that were pretty small to start. I’m a software engineer by training, but along the way I’ve learned a lot about the business side and made a study of it. I’ve also been pretty successful (e.g. “Lucky”, LOL), so I suspect some of this stuff really works. When you’re part of a small business, “Who you gonna call?” That’s right, you’re the “go to” guy who has to figure it out, because there is no one else to call. As such, we all wear lots of hats and we all have to be Starters to git ‘er done.

So, even if you’re not the one in your small business who is directly responsible for some of these things, keep your ears open. You never know when that could change because the business needs more help, or because its time for you to start your own small business.

Okay, here is my first installment along these lines:

Blogs for Business Matters

If you’re reading the CNCCookbook, I assume you like to find interesting content on the web. I read a bunch of blogs to keep myself informed. They’re like my morning paper, and in fact, I read them pretty religiously each morning. As I am writing this, I have subscribed to 183 different blogs. That’s a ridiculous amount of information, and that’s fine by me. Each morning I leaf through the headlines and only read the ones that are of interest. The rest are deleted–there will be plenty more where they came from! It’s kind of like trying to keep up with all the posts on CNCZone, Practical Machinist, and all the rest of the machinist boards I follow. Over time you get a sense of what interests you have and it’s easy to skip the rest.

To kick us off, let me suggest three blogs that I think might be particularly helpful to small machining and manufacturing businesses:

Signal vs. Noise

These guys run a company called 37Signals, which is a great bootstrapped software company. Bootstrapped means they took no Venture Capital, which is how most small businesses in this country start. They’re written a couple of wonderful books on how they go about starting and building businesses which are bestsellers and quick and easy reads. I’m just finishing up their latest, which is called “Rework.” It’s very much worth your time to check it out. A typical current post on the blog is “Accentuate the Positive“, which tells how to deliver essentially bad news to a customer (“No, I am not going to lower my price”) in a very upbeat way that is much better.

Duct Tape Marketing

How can a machinist go wrong with a title like that? You can do anything with duct tape, right? This is John Jantsch’s blog, and is squarely aimed at helping small businesses to market and sell. There’s a ton of good advice in his writings, and he has a new book coming out that I was asked to preview. It’s called The Referral Engine, and it is excellent. I’ll publish the review of it next week, but a little preview can be had here.

Seth’s Blog

Seth Godin is one of my favorite reads. First, he is a very very smart man, one of the top 5 marketers I’ve encountered, and he is totally focused on marketing for small businesses. Second, he takes almost no time to read. His posts are short and sweet, and they nearly always give you something to think about for your own business. As a guy who you know from reading this blog is probably too long-winded, I’ll provide his post, “All the news that fits“, as a good place to start with Seth. Check him out.

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