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Be still

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My favorite Christmas carol is Still, Still, Still, which originally comes from an Austrian folk song.

Whether you’re celebrating Christmas today or not, I wish you the peace, love, and quiet joy of the season.

We tend to get focused on rushing around all the time, trying to get our to-do lists done, learning the latest social tactics, and sweating about pushing content. I hope you get some time this week to step back, breathe, and enjoy some stillness.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

The Business of Properly Billing Clients

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abill

If your business isn’t on top of the billing process, then there’s a good chance it’s missing out on precious income.

Whether you’re in the retail, medical, service industry, or other, you need to make sure your clients are billed properly.

When it comes to income, here are just a few reasons why billing is so important to your business:

 

Too Many Claims = Lost Revenue

There’s a difference between a few outstanding balances and multiple claims that completely disrupt the revenue process.

When your business has more claims than payments, it can seriously damage your income to the point where your business has trouble covering its costs.

Claims have a snowball effect, especially for a billing department that isn’t prepared for the collections process. It’s important for your business to have a plan in place for anytime an outstanding balance does enter the claims cycle.

Outstanding Balances Are Difficult to Track

Customers who pay their balances on time make owning a business a pleasure.

However, every business experiences customers who allow their outstanding balances to grow beyond what is acceptable. In cases such as this, the numbers become difficult to track.

A bill that’s paid on time is considered an asset in the eyes of accounts receivable. When that same bill becomes an outstanding balance, it puts your business’s collections in the red.

In addition, the outstanding balance costs your business more money every day it’s not paid because it takes your billing department more time and energy to track it.

Whether your business collects interest on unpaid bills or not outstanding balances are bad news for both your business and its customers.

Revenue Software

For medical practices in particular, claims and unpaid balances can seriously damage revenue over time. Because medical practices have such a high volume of patient turnover, hospital and clinic billing departments oftentimes become overwhelmed.

As the following article asks, Where does your practice fall on the medical billing risk matrix?

Well, if you are in the medical industry, Revenue Cycle Management software, or RCM, can help you get your billing under control. With RCM software, your practice can automatically track balances, claims, and insurance coverage considerations from one payment cycle to the next.

Collections Agencies Are a Headache

Collections agencies are an unneeded stress that no business should have to deal with.

Unfortunately, there are clients who don’t pay their bills and some businesses have no choice but to use outside resources to collect on outstanding balances.

To avoid the hassle and headache of collections agencies, there are some things your business can do to improve its billing process.

Billing Tips

There are clients who are negligent with their payments, but in most cases, clients simply forget a bill is due. Sending helpful email reminders to your customers a few days before their bill is due will help avoid unpaid bills.

If an unpaid balance does go beyond one or two billing cycles, then your billing department should call the customer directly.

Explaining the payment situation to the customer and coming up with a new payment plan is the best way to reach a payment resolution.

By keeping in mind the pointers above, your business will keep its income stream flowing without issue

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Adam Groff is a freelance writer and creator of content. He writes on a variety of topics including small business and finance.

A Mission Bigger Than You Are For The New Year

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By Lindsey Tolino

Blake Mycoskie’s TOMS is an amazing business feat, no?

It’s a business set up with enough profit margin that a pair of shoes can be given away for each pair purchased. Even more notably, it’s a business that sells itself because customers have an immediate role in the mission through a simple purchase.

It’s amazing how much time and money people donate to organizations they want to support. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 62.2 million people volunteered through or for an organization from Sept 2012 to Sept 2013. Additionally, Americans gave away $335.17 billion in 2013, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.

Why would people give away this much time and money?

It may be as simple as this – for a chance to make a difference.

blue sky

Maybe people do it to feel better about themselves, maybe to become who they want to be, maybe they want to spend time with others who are volunteering, or maybe it’s guilt-motivated. But all of that pales in comparison with the motivation of feeling like you’re making a difference. We all have lofty thoughts and ideas of how we’d like to change the world, but we have limited resources and time. Consequently, we are happy to give to organizations that are changing the world in a way that we’d like to do.

We want to have a role in a mission that is greater than ourselves, that has an impact bigger than ourselves and that benefits more people than just ourselves.

What does this have to do with your business?

When you have a mission statement that your business can accomplish on its own and that benefits only your business, you create no space for customers to play a role in a greater mission. You limit their role to only profiting your business, rather than to being able to change the world with their dollars.

Selling great products with quality service is admirable. But if that is your mission, then it limits your business, your impact and your customers’ buy-in. An internal-profiting, able-to-accomplish-on-your-own-effort-mission is not really a mission, it’s a business goal.

However, if your grand mission is to change the ethical standards of developing world suppliers by the way you do business — how much more motivated are customers to support you?

A mission that is seemingly unattainable and requires support and action from multiple parties creates a clear role for customers to play. When it is clear that you need customers to accomplish your mission (like TOMS’ one for one – no shoes could be given unless they were purchased), customers can see their role and assume it. Where there is no obvious need for customers to get involved, they won’t.

I’m not telling you to create a manipulative business model with a mission that cons customers into buying in. It should be genuine. People can, and are often looking to, sniff out fake promises.

Yet, at the end of the day, do you really want your business to have been all about your own profit? Or do you want it to have made some bigger impact in the world? If it’s the latter, simply say that. Make it your mission. You can’t do it alone. When you create room for others to help, those who want the same world impact will buy in. They’ll support the business and market it with more credibility than you can. You’ll be in it together. Only then will you make a difference in the world beyond your own profit.

The upcoming new year is reminder that the future is a chance to make a change. If your business’s main mission is self-profit, 2015 holds the hope to make it about a bigger purpose.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is a young creative who helps make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Image info: Royalty-free image by Ryan McGuire from http://www.gratisography.com/

Evaluate your visual branding with this quick project

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Grab a cup of egg nog, some masking tape, and a Sharpie. It’s about to get old-school in here.

It’s the end of the year, and you’re hopefully knee-deep in planning your budget and strategy for 2015. You’re evaluating how your 2014 plans went (fistbump).

Here’s one quick branding project that you can do in about 30 minutes, and will help you spot any weaknesses in your branding picture.

Step One – Make a List of Online Outposts

Compile a list of every place your business has a presence online. Include social networks (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), review sites, your own web site.

Step Two – Fire up the Printer

Print at least the first page (anything above the fold) from each place on the list. If you send out corporate emails, print one of those too. If you placed any ads online, print them.

Step Three – Deck the Halls

Tape all of the items you printed on one wall. Tape up any pre-printed items too, if you have them. Include business cards, corporate brochure, direct mail pieces, a picture of your trade show booth, go nuts.

Step Four – Stand Back and Soak it In

As you step back from the wall, and sip some egg nog, what do you see? Is it a jumbled mess? What are the messages you’re sending? Are they the ones you want to send?

Step Five – Sharpie It Up

Use the Sharpie to circle and make notes where you see weaknesses. Do you need to add a cover image on LinkedIn (what, you haven’t done that yet?), do you have an outdated profile blurb on SlideShare, is your old logo showing up on that product’s Twitter page?

Step Six – Take Action

You can use the last week of the year to update and tweak these branding issues, consider hiring a branding expert to sort it out, or add action items to your 2015 plan.

You’ll be starting the next year with a crystal clear picture of your visual brand, and a plan to move forward!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

How Do We Get More Social in 2015?

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global-social-media-concept-10084871Are you a business owner who is afraid of social media? If the answer is yes, why is that?

When you stop and think about it, there really are no downsides to being socially active when running a company.

Among the advantages of having a steady and solid social presence are:

  • Increased opportunities for sales;
  • Being seen as an expert in your respective industry;
  • Interaction with current and potential customers;
  • Ability to stay up to speed on industry trends and discussions by seeing what others are sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more.

Must Give 100 Percent

In order to successfully use social media going forward, keep in mind that you can’t give a half-hearted effort to the cause.

When you stop and look at some company’s social sites, do you ever stop and wonder why they do social media in the first place?

Too often you will come across social pages that are sporadically updated, do not share useful information for consumers, and almost never respond to consumer inquiries. Basically, these pages exist just to have a social presence, something that at the end of the day is not all that beneficial for the company or the consumer.

If you’re thinking that 2015 might be the year you and your business fully invest in social media, consider the following:

  • Who is in charge? – First and foremost, who is in charge of your social media outreach? Your two basic options are doing it in-house or outsourcing it. Either way, there needs to be a command structure in place so that there are no communication issues;
  • What are the goals? – It is also important that you set social media goals and stick to them as much as possible. If your main goal is to provide useful info through shares and retweets, follow that plan. If your goal is to interact with consumers, do that. Ideally, you will be doing a little of both and have a well-rounded social media plan;
  • Who speaks for the company? – Lastly, you need to have it understood by all employees of who is allowed to represent the company when it comes to tweets, shares, pins etc. While you may want to encourage your employees that have social accounts to retweet and share stuff, you almost certainly do not want them speaking to customers (current and potential) regarding issues of concern. For example, if a customer sends a nasty message via Facebook or Twitter, you don’t want one of your employees engaging in a conversation that puts a bad light on the business. Have a social plan in writing that details who can speak for the company socially.

As 2015 nears, make it your goal to be the most socially active business going.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of arztsamui at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Miguel Salcido has been a professional search marketing consultant for over 11 years. He is the founder and CEO of Organic Media Group, a content driven SEO agency. He also likes to blog at OrganicSEOConsultant.com and share insights into advanced SEO. 

Blog (a verb)

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By Lisa D. Jenkins

“Others may be talking about the same thing, but they aren’t talking about it with your voice.”

How many times have you heard this when people are encouraging you to blog?

A lot? If you’re like me, it’s a lot.

Here’s how it happens in my head:

  • I have a thought about something timely.
  • My brain takes a walk along that thought path and reaches a conclusion.
  • I consider blogging about it and then I think there’s no need to write what everyone else has already published.

Why clutter up the internet, right?

fly with a tiny microphone

Now, the Husband doesn’t do work that’s remotely related to mine. In fact, his sole concession to getting anywhere near what I do for a living was to open a Facebook account six months ago – and we’ve been together for almost 8 years.

So you can imagine my surprise when he was sitting next to me last week and started asking informed questions about big data, segmenting, conversions and other magical things that make my nerd heart sing.

He was reading a blog – a blog I love. He continued to read through that blog for a number of days. Clicking ever deeper into the content and looking at me every so often like I was a supernatural being because these were things I not only knew but used. He asked questions, I answered and that went on for a while, so I pointed him toward three more blogs that feature similar content. These blogs are also on my not-to-be-missed roll.

Aaaaand here’s how the lesson of the opening statement from this post was driven almost painfully home for me.

He read a couple of posts from each of the new blogs and dove right back into the first one. Why? Because the voice, style and format of the first blog made the content easier for him to consume and relate to.

Hmmmm.

It’s almost like all those people who’ve come before me – those people I look to for guidance and advice – know a little something about this world of online business. Weird.

Now, I’m open about not blogging for myself. But I don’t for a second advocate that strategy for you – partly because I don’t know you and your business. And partly because it’s almost a given that the people who will love what you do need to hear what you do, and why you do it, from you. In your voice.

So lay it out there. Write what you’re thinking. Write about what you do. Write about the tools you use. Write about how you solve people’s problems. Let people read you. Blog.

Author’s Bio: Lisa D. Jenkins is a Public Relations professional specializing in Social and Digital Communications for businesses. She has over a decade of experience and work most often with destination organizations or businesses in the travel and tourism industry in the Pacific Northwest. Connect with her on Google+
Photo Credit: Adam N. Ward via Compfight cc