10 Strategies for Surviving a Cash Flow Slump

Maybe you haven’t had the earnings you projected you would this year. Maybe some key invoices are still unpaid and you’re getting panicky.

Fear not â€" you’re not alone.

To learn how to navigate a cash-flow slump, we asked 10 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:

“What’s one strategy you used successfully this year to get through a cash flow slump?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. Stay Motivated

“You need to be at your best when times are tough. Odds are that a solution to your problem will require a lot of creativity, communication and encouragement. Staying motivated while still being honest is a must if you’re trying to get to greener pastures. “ ~ Tyler Arnold, SimplySocial Inc.

2. Defer Founders’ Compensation

“In the past year, we had to ramp up our team, office and many other aspects of our business prior to landing the accounts that would pay for these costly improvements. My business partner and I gave up our compensation temporarily to make this easier on the company. We knew that the company would more than pay us back in the long run.” ~ Brennan White, Watchtower

3. Offer Annual Discounts

“If you’re struggling with cash flow and you charge customers monthly, try offering a one-month discount for them to pay a year in advance. This will give you a huge cash inflow today rather than spacing out your cash flow during the full year.” ~ Wade Foster, Zapier

4. Get Credit

“Get a line of credit when you don’t need one so that you have it when you do. The best move we made with my former company was to get a line of credit when cash flow was good. The rate on a line is low prime plus one or two, and it’s as good as cash, which is crucial when it comes to paying employees or contractors who won’t take payment via credit card.” ~ Enrico Palmerino, SmartBooks

5. Eliminate Unnecessary Expenses

“How many $9.99 per month subscriptions do you have for technology products that also offer free versions? Comb through the bank statements, identify the reoccurring expenses that don’t drive value and eliminate them. Doing away with the cash flow negatives can help give a slump a much-needed positive. “ ~ Brett Farmiloe, Internet Marketing Company

6. Re-Engage Customers

“Believe it or not, 75 percent or so of your customers don’t stop doing business with you because they are unhappy with your product or service. Rather, they stop because you have inadvertently ignored them. By simply reaching out to your disengaged customer base with an engaging marketing letter, three-step sequence and compelling offer, you should see an instant surge in sales and cash flow.” ~ Charles Gaudet, Predictable Profits

7. Consolidate Vendors

“We earned considerable discounts by consolidating all of our steel purchases through a single vendor and buying at higher volume. We now look to bundle whenever possible and not just for bread-and-butter items (we’ve even bought headsets in bulk).” ~ Sam Saxton, Salter Spiral Stair and Mylen Stairs

8. Restructure Salaries

“If your startup is experiencing a cash flow slump, consider restructuring salaries to be a lower base with a higher bonus or commission payout. By making bonuses attractive at a profitable company, you will incentivize your employees to meet goals, focus on the company’s success and decrease your expenses.” ~ Adam Root, Hiplogiq

9. Include Side Projects

“I’m not a big fan of deterring focus, but I found that we had an easier time picking up occasional side projects for extra cash than pitching investors. Our company is generating revenue, so these small amounts of extra revenue made a big difference and enabled us to get through tough periods without layoffs.” ~ Carlo Cisco, FoodFan

10. Ask for Up-Front Payments

“We used to require our customers to pay in full after we completed our party rental services. Then one day, someone suggested that since our products were so popular, we ask for the full payment up front. We barely noticed a difference in orders coming in and now have a steady flow of cash to invest in new products.” ~ Robert De Los Santos, Sky High Party Rentals

Money Problems Photo via Shutterstock

Japan Tops U.S. with Sales on Google Play

If you serve a niche market, remember that the U.S. may not always be the most lucrative place to find customers.

Consider a recent report that suggests Japan for the first time is leading the U.S. in both app spending and app revenue.

Also unusual is the fact that the majority of these sales are coming from Google Play instead of the Apple Store. Most of these apps are games for the smartphone or tablet, but there’s a reason the trend is important to small businesses too.

Here is the Breakdown of the Report

Data collected mostly by app tracker site AppAnnie reveals that:

• Japanese users spent 10 percent more than U.S. consumers this year. The stat is all the more surprising when you realize that just last year Japanese consumers were spending 40 percent less than their U.S. counterparts, the Wall Street Journal says.
• Most of those sales come from Google Play. Japan is the only major market where Google Play is competing successfully with the Apple Store for total revenue.
• Growth of the market is predicted to continue. Apparently 62 percent of Japan’s mobile phones are expected to be smartphones by 2014 while only 50 percent of those in the US will be. This probably means more customers interested in downloading apps.
• Japanese spending is disproportionately large. Japanese consumers are spending more on game apps even though the number of game players in the Japanese market is a third of that in the U.S.

What This Means to Small Business Owners

Again, yes, most of these apps seem to be games, not accounting or other tools likely to be downloaded by small business owners.

But the point here is that markets around the world may have very different characteristics. And thus demands for products and services and the distribution routes to deliver them may vary greatly.

Reports suggest Japanese app publishers are already looking for partners to help them break into the U.S. app market.

Consider looking for opportunities in markets outside the U.S. and for partners that might be able to help you overcome cultural and other barriers in those markets. Digital communications has made it so much easier to find these partners and cheaper to distribute some products and services.

A product or service only moderately successful in the U.S. market, may be a big hit in other markets, if you know where and when to introduce it.

Image: Google Play

5 Points to Remember About Mobile SEO

As anyone doing business on the Web today knows, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical. It’s the only way to make your online business presence stand out from the hundreds or even thousands of competitors in your niche.

Worse yet, the parameters for making your Web presence stand out to the search engines is ever changing, as algorithms are tweaked and tweaked some more and as user habits change in the process.

One huge change has been the adoption of mobile. It’s a change your business can’t afford to ignore.

1. It’s An Absolute Necessity

Guess what? It doesn’t really matter whether you think mobile is important or not. Search engines have recognized mobile content as critical. They are already working on ways to search that content more effectively.

By failing to create content that is optimized for mobile, your Web presence effectively falls behind others who are working to get their content recognized by search engines like Google.

In a post on the official Google Webmaster Cental Blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far explains:

“Every day more and more smartphones get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content. Since we last talked about how to build mobile-friendly websites, we’ve been working hard on improving Google’s support for smartphone-optimized content. As part of this effort, we launched Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones back in December 2011, which is specifically tasked with identifying such content.”

So creating content that is optimized for mobile search provides one more way for Google to find your website. Is it an opportunity you can afford to pass up?

2. Using Proper Redirect is Key

Redirecting users to the version of your site best suited for their device, be it lap top or mobile, is an important part of optimizing these days. It’s important both because it affects user experience and because it impacts how Google sees your site.

On the customer side, a recent research study on the official Google Think Insights Blog reports:

• More than 96% of consumers visited sites through their mobile phones only to realize that these websites weren’t designed for mobile.
• More than 48% of these consumers reported frustration.
• More than 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly site.
• About 74% of them are likely to return to the site if it’s mobile friendly.
• At least 67% of these users are likely to buy from the site if it’s mobile-optimized.

Now, let’s look at how Google sees things.

Redirects help Google understand how your various Web properties are interlinked together. The result is that redirects and user-agent detection are now a part of basic setup for mobile renditions and SEO.

The official Google Developers section has these instructions:

“When a website is configured to serve desktop and mobile browsers using different URLs, webmasters may want to automatically redirect users to the URL that best serves them. If your website uses automatic redirection, be sure to treat Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile just like any other user-agent and redirect them appropriately.”

The search engine supports both HTTP and JavaScript redirects.

3. Responsive Design is a Good Solution

When it comes to your mobile SEO strategy and optimizing your website for mobile, one good solution is responsive design. Basically, a responsive Web design is one that “responds to” and resizes itself based on the device of the user.

There are a few reasons why Google recommends this approach and why you should consider taking this route:

Performance: Responsive design approach is the fastest way to go. Redirects can be slow and in the world where nanoseconds count for conversions you should consider avoiding redirects.

Easy sharing: It’s not complicated to share a single URL in social media.

A single URL: One URL is good for SEO.

4. Ironing Out the Kinks is Imperative

An important aspect of mobile SEO is the experience visitors have when visiting your site via a mobile device.

The official Google Developers site has this list of common problems:

• Slow page speeds: Slow loading time is especially an issue with smartphones given the characteristics of mobile data networks. Google has some suggestions to get your mobile site to load faster.
• Irrelevant cross-linking: If your site serves visitors on a separate mobile URL and links to the desktop-optimized version of your site, be sure not to link your smartphone page to something irrelevant like your desktop version’s landing page, for example.
• Interstitials for app downloads: Be careful how you promote apps on your website and make sure it doesn’t affect how the mobile version of your site is being indexed.
• Faulty redirects: If you redirect users from your desktop optimized site to your mobile site, be sure you aren’t sending users to an irrelevant or incorrect page.

5. Maximize Visibility of Mobile Content

If you have separate Web and mobile versions of your site, don’t keep it a secret thinking search engines might label it duplicate content and penalize you.

Instead, in a guest post on Search Engine Media, Bryson Meunier, director of content solutions at Resolution Media suggests:

“If you want maximum visibility for your mobile content, and to be truly optimized for mobile search, the best practice is to make it clear to the engines that you have a mobile site, optimize it for mobile queries and make it essential to mobile users, and then trust the engines to return it when they think it’s relevant. Don’t block the mobile site from being returned in desktop or smartphone results, as it’s relevant to more than just the search engine’s mobile index.”

As with all other aspects of mobile SEO discussed here, consult your Web developer to see how these suggestions can best be put in place on your website.

Conclusion

Bottom line: As mobile devices become more and more popular, failure to create a mobile SEO strategy and optimize your site for mobile will put you at a greater and greater disadvantage.

Be sure your content is easy to access on every kind of device a visitor might be using. You’ll help improve both traffic and customer conversion in the process by bringing more potential customers to you online.

Mobile User Photo via Shutterstock

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Microsoft Acquisition of Nokia Approved by Feds

A multibillion dollar deal allowing Microsoft to acquire Nokia, one of the largest makers of Windows Phone devices, is a step closer to reality.

The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have OK’d the deal, worth an estimated $7.2 billion.

All that remains is for European Union regulators to clear the agreement for Microsoft to buy the Finland-based Nokia’s Devices and Services Unit.

That approval too is expected to go off without much of a hitch, reports The Verge.

Good News for Windows Phone Users

The acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft could be good news for Windows users, among them many small business owners. The move should lead to greater availability of devices running on Windows Phone.

Over the past year, Nokia has introduced the Lumia 625, its largest-screened smartphone to date. Other devices have included the Lumia 1520, possibly the largest Windows phablet, and even a Windows tablet, the Lumia 2520 with 10.1 inch screen.

Nokia Shareholders Approve Deal

Nokia shareholders approved the acquisition late last month at its “Extraordinary General Meeting” in Finland. In an official release at the time posted on the company’s website, Nokia Board Chairman and interim CEO Risto Siilasmaa said:

“Today’s vote brings us closer to completing a transaction which will mark the beginning of the next chapter in Nokia’s near 150-year history, offering the potential of greater value for shareholders.”

The acquisition may be a real boost for Microsoft’s tablet ambitions as well. Disappointing sales for both the Surface RT and Surface Pro caused the company to drop the prices of both. Nokia’s track record with mobile devices and its distribution network may prove huge assets moving forward.

Image: Nokia

Do Entrepreneurs Really Need Nannies?

The Obama Administration thinks so. The President’s policies towards those in business for themselves displays a clear pattern: Restrict their choices so that entrepreneurs make “better” decisions.

Unfortunately, this economic paternalism meshes poorly with the laissez-faire attitudes of most small business owners, who would rather have limited government intervention, even if it means making mistakes that they will later regret.

Consider the President’s approach to two different types of decisions that small business owners make:

• What type of health insurance coverage to obtain.
• How to finance their business operations.

Both of these display a “we-know-better-than-you” attitude toward entrepreneurial decision-making.

Many Americans purchase health insurance on the individual market. Some of them have tended to choose low cost-low coverage insurance policies after carefully evaluating the options. Now, many of those health care plans are being terminated because they don’t provide “enough” coverage in the eyes of the experts. As a result, the buyers of those plans are being told to spend more and buy what the White House says is “better coverage.”

Many of these people facing this health insurance coverage decision do-over are micro-business owners. Self-employed Americans comprise roughly 40 percent of buyers of health insurance on the individual market. Therefore, those in business for themselves make up a sizable fraction of the roughly 5.5 million individual market health insurance purchasers whose plans do not offer enough coverage to meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act and are having their health insurance terminated.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) new regulation on qualified mortgages provides another example of how the Obama Administration’s paternalism conflicts with small business owners’ efforts to exercise their own judgment. Under the new “ability-to-repay rule” for home mortgages, borrowers seeking qualified loans cannot have a debt to income ratio of higher than 43 percent. The goal of this policy is to prevent Americans from “foolishly” taking on more mortgage debt than they can handle.

Among the Americans that have been willing to take on what the government has decided is “too much” mortgage debt are a number of small business owners who use home equity to finance their businesses.

Sorry business owners, even if you are willing to risk the loss of your home by borrowing heavily to finance your business, the federal government has decided you shouldn’t be allowed to make this choice. It’s too risky for you.

The Obama Administration’s economic paternalism is a problem for many business owners because it conflicts with their efforts to exercise personal freedom. The freedom to choose, rightly or wrongly, is the central reason why people go into business for themselves.

A survey (PDF) conducted by TNS Custom Research in the second half of last year asked a sample of just over 3,000 American adults why they wanted to be self-employed. More than half said to have “personal independence” and “self-fulfillment,” while another third said it was to have the “freedom to choose place and time of working.”

For those of you who think it’s wise for the government to protect entrepreneurs from their own bad decisions, I ask you where economic paternalism should stop?

As I have pointed out before, the typical outcome for a startup is business failure. If the majority of company founders fail, then paternalistic policy makers must believe that we should stop most entrepreneurs before they head down the road to failure. That way, potential business owners would be protected from going bankrupt, using up their savings, losing their homes and experiencing the stress of shuttering unsuccessful businesses.

But taking away business owners’ freedom to choose what’s best for themselves to protect them from their own bad decisions is a dangerous and slippery slope.

Toddler Photo via Shutterstock