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If you are implementing any marketing at your business, have you ever had a problem deciding how you were going to track it?  After all, you don’t just want to blindly throw money where you cannot track an ROI, do you?  A lot of times this is what marketers are doing…casting a huge net to see if they can catch anything.  Tracking and targeting is a lot more cost-effective and gets your message to the correct audience.

When you own a small business, you wear so many hats that you can’t see straight most days. The amount of responsibilities seems endless. With handling all of the marketing, accounting, payroll, inventory, scheduling, customer service and ordering, among other things, it can be difficult to manage it all. Below are three must-have technologies that will make running your business much easier.

For the majority of my life, I have been a shoot from the hip kind of a guy. Don’t get me wrong, I like plans and to know where things are going and how we will get there. But, sometimes the details didn’t interest me. This is great if you can get away with it. For many years it worked out well. As our company has evolved, we have had to take a different approach and really dig in to see where we could gain efficiencies.

In the last couple of years, I have been tasked with new responsibilities where detail and process are imperative. At first, I will admit it was a struggle to try and understand the “why” behind digging into the details. But now that we are a couple of years into this new normal, I get it.

So much of what we all do every day is too complex. We use processes that have naturally evolved without being thought out. Don’t get me wrong, changing processes and asking people to do things in a different way isn’t easy. Nobody likes someone else looking at how they do their job. It is scary to think something is going to be taken away from you. However, if you are going to grow your business or product, speed and efficiency is the only way in a hyper-competitive 24x7 kind of world. The only way to become efficient is to remove as many wasteful steps, systems and people from the process.

The byproduct of removing waste is simple… Scale!

Recently, I flew out of Wichita Eisenhower Airport which is a great experience if you haven’t tried it.  Close parking, quick check in, fast security and you are quickly at your gate.  For this trip, I was flying Southwest Airlines which is known for their amazing culture and this trip did not disappoint. 

Electronic payments are so stress-free, right?  This technology makes shopping at a store much more convenient versus pulling out cash and counting out coins…or worse, getting coins back to weigh down your purse, or pocket, whichever you prefer.  As far as check-writing…that’s gone by the wayside.  Checks are much larger to transport and take longer to complete versus that sleek card with a 4-digit PIN.

As I sit at my desk closing out the year, I like to reflect on what went well, what could have gone better, and how I can improve next year.  One of the first areas I thought about was how well I planned and how well I executed that plan.  At the beginning of the year, it was easy to plan ahead and to set goals for where I wanted to be by the end of the year both professionally and personally.  Through the first six months, things were going well and it was easy to stick to the plan and measure progress towards my goals.  Then it happened.  A couple of unexpected twists and turns and I found myself just trying to keep up instead of following my plan.

It is that time of year where you sit down and review 2016 and evaluate how it went.  Overall, I had a successful year.  From growing as a leader to gaining new skills, it was very productive.  Where I missed the mark is fun.   The question I began to ask myself is can you have a successful year if you didn’t have fun?  I believe the answer is No.

I will never forget the time I searched for a Disney vacation to surprise my family. I mean, how could I forget it? After I went to their website and had a mild heart attack about the fortune I was about to spend, their ads were lurking around every corner I turned. I logged into Facebook and there it was, a Disney ad. While looking for a new pair of shoes on Amazon, a Disney ad was staring me right in the face. It seemed like every website I visited they were waiting for me saying, “Click me, I dare you. You know you want to.”

I have a black lab named Underdog. He is probably the best dog of all time, just behind Lassie, Old Yeller, and maybe Spuds McKenzie. I also realize that every dog owner thinks their dog is the best, and they are all entitled to their opinions. Underdog has never been on TV and he has never saved anyone stuck in a well, but he has taught me some important lessons, most of which I already knew, but sometimes fail to practice.

Nex-Tech’s Annual Vendor Meeting was held last month with some of our key business partners as we prepare to close out this year and plan for next year.  With this being our 8^th year, it’s always nice to see some familiar faces at the table, but it was great to see a lot of new faces from some strategic partnerships that were made in the last 12 months.  As we all get together, it’s easy to identify a common theme of how can we serve our customer’s better in the next 12 months.