Southern Hospitality Archives - Page 2 of 4

Find Your Tribe: How Connecting with Others Can Help Your Company Thrive

If your small business is growing more slowly than you’d like, it might be time to jumpstart things with a healthy dose of old-fashioned small-town networking. While online connections are helpful for most businesses in the modern age, taking time to build real-world relationships is just as important for long-term success.

Two of the easiest ways to connect with potential clients in your community are to join a civic club or your local chamber of commerce.

Tom Egelhoff, an independent business consultant and author of “How To Market, Advertise and Promote Your Business Or Service In A Small Town,” is a big fan of the power of civic clubs to help business leaders to develop connections. Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions Club offer the opportunity to have a positive impact on your community while simultaneously expanding your personal and professional network.

Egelhoff suggests exploring the various groups available in your community to see which ones match up best with your interests and values. “Once you get to know people, you can ask them for referrals because they know you in a non-business setting,” he says. “Once they know you and the kind of person you are they are a lot more receptive to recommending you to their friends and colleagues.”

Your local chamber of commerce is another opportunity to create connections. In addition to lobbying for business-friendly public policies, these organizations hold regular events that facilitate connections between companies — and they can help you develop powerful relationships that are often difficult to cultivate on your own.

When you join, make sure you get a copy of the Chamber Directory; take a moment to review it and identify those companies or people you feel are your highest-value targets. “This will help you focus your attention and efforts on the right members, accelerating your chances to maximize your attendance at chamber functions,” says Chassity McComack, executive director of the River Region Chamber of Commerce.

Terry Dugas, marketing and public relations manager for the Greater Iberia Chamber of Commerce, says chamber membership can be a key component in an overall strategy to build stronger ties with the community, especially if it’s combined with a wider plan to connect with other business owners and residents. “The main thing is making yourself accessible to the people you want to patronize your business,” Dugas says. “That means getting involved in your community — not only when it benefits you financially — as a way to get your face out there. It always benefits you to just get out there and start shaking hands.”

For more tips on how to strengthen your businesses’ connections to your community, download our ebook, How Small-Town Values Can Transform Your Networking Skills.

Giving Thanks to Vendors

Large or small, no business venture is an island. A host of other companies supplies goods, machinery, services, advice and expertise that allow you to serve your customers and grow your business. No matter the industry — whether you specialize in power and energy, telecommunications, precious metals, biotechnology or wedding planning — you operate within a complicated networking interplay of skilled individuals, providers and suppliers several levels deep. Business consultants and CEOs all agree: Businesses literally live and die by their vendors. Contemplate your ability to prosper without them, and the picture turns quite grim.

Business-Vendor, Vendor-Business — Perspectives

A number of studies have attempted to quantify the value of vendors to a business. While statistics for customer satisfaction, retention and impact are easily calculated based on repeat purchases and customer surveys, the business-vendor relationship is far more complex. Vendors operate as part of your business, but they aren’t employees. You are their client, but you’re a large-scale client, most likely one of many others. If your vendors are experienced, specialized and top-of-the-line in their field, it is likely that their services are in high demand, and they may even have to turn work away. Before you think that you can simply replace them, consider the true value of a top-notch supplier or service provider. In a trillion-dollar arena of million-dollar specialization, you may not be able to afford losing them. Continue reading Giving Thanks to Vendors

Southern Mindfulness – Gifting as a Part of Southern Culture

Everything’s a little slower in the South, but it isn’t due to the heat, and it isn’t laziness, either. What it is is a kind of mindfulness, an awareness of the proper Southern way things should be done and the importance of the manners instilled by family and community. It isn’t something reserved for special occasions. Southern Mindfulness is a daily ritual equally intrinsic to family, community and business. It’s a way of being.

Those ma’ams and sirs are genuine — as essential to a Southerner as sunshine and sweet tea. Hospitality and grace under fire are keynotes of the Southern experience, and the expression of respect even a simple gift conveys speaks volumes about the giver. In the South, the gift is often food, and food is far more than sustenance: It’s the language of the South.

Foundations of Tradition, Family and Community

Forget today’s bustling, high-rise metropolitan cities, like banking giant Charlotte, N.C., jazz capital New Orleans, La., or capital city and industrial-technological hub Baton Rouge. At the turn of the twentieth century, life in the South was a rural existence of long months of unrelenting heat, roving sickness and fever, endless agricultural labor and often loneliness and isolation. Harsh conditions meant large tracts of land were necessary to support farms and plantations. Those acreages to the horizon, however, also made visiting family and friends a social event anticipated for weeks – sometimes, all year. Family meant community, and community was family. Continue reading Southern Mindfulness – Gifting as a Part of Southern Culture

Corporate Gifting for Community Banks

Community Banks Community-Based

Despite the growth of megabanks, community banks still provide 60 percent of all loans made to small businesses. Your customers count on you to provide full services and keep costs low. You take pride in helping your community thrive, and your clients rest assured that the financial decision makers are locally vested individuals who appreciate what they’re trying to achieve. Within a national bank, a customer may go unnoticed in the $100-billion pool of assets, but at a community bank, every client counts. Corporate gift giving is a perfect way to show them they do.

Customer Retention Equals Profitability

A Forbes article for entrepreneurs stresses that businesses should never underestimate the value of client retention:

A mere 5-percent increase in customer retention can expand a company’s profitability by at least 25 percent, often more.
A full 80 percent of a company’s future revenue will come from just 20 percent of its existing customers.

The article highlighted that companies often find customer additions exciting but that “ignoring customer attrition could eventually spell their downfall.” High costs associated with customer acquisition mean that the early years of a business relationship are significantly less profitable than later ones, when established trust earns greater sales volumes. The optimal trick is to acquire new clients while keeping current clients happy.

Customer Satisfaction Versus Client Retention

Surprisingly, customer satisfaction does not automatically equal client retention, especially within business-to-business relationships:

Repeated studies demonstrate that even though customer satisfaction percentages may rank in the 80s and even 90s, businesses retain less than half of those clients.
The key determinant for customer retention was the customers’ position within their business hierarchy. When clients were decision makers, customer retention was much more likely.

Your bankers know those vital people making decisions. Your community bank has a much better chance than a megabank or many other giant businesses of earning customer loyalty and maintaining long-term relationships that will prove profitable for all parties for years – hopefully decades – to come. Continue reading Corporate Gifting for Community Banks

The Art of Corporate Gifting – Meaningful, Ethical Tokens of Appreciation

Different Sectors,
Different Rules

Showing heartfelt appreciation to people who deserve thanks is vital to a company’s continued success. It can also be a bit like walking on nutshells. You want to build professional bridges with employees, clients and colleagues, especially around holidays or other milestone occasions. Regardless of industry or sector, however, rules and etiquette have become the watchwords of the day, part of a balancing act between ethical behavior and compliance with the law. Legal, ethical corporate gift giving hinges on:

Federal, state, and local laws.
Professional industry association guidelines.
Individual company policies.

Most industries have either laws controlling gifting in the workplace or guidelines and accompanying company policies to ensure gifting remains ethical. In general, a gift must be a gift, and modest is best.

What Is a Gift?

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidelines define a gift as “the transfer of property (including money), or the use of or income from property without expecting to receive something of at least equal value in return.” In simpler terms, the giver must truly be giving a gift – sans strings, future influence or control. The higher the value of the gift, the greater the perceived expectation will be of owing something in return.

Gift Taxes and Value Continue reading The Art of Corporate Gifting – Meaningful, Ethical Tokens of Appreciation

How to Keep Your Clients During Economic Downturns

Tough economic times hit businesses hard. Budgets, staff and programs get cut, leaving minimal resources to allocate for additional spending, including client retention. Executives are forced to make difficult decisions on where to spend company funds, and budgets that are perceived as being extraneous are some of the first to be cut.

However, an economic downturn is no time to scale back on maintaining and building relationships with your clients. Abandoning your client retention strategy will cause your brand to lose ground and make it difficult to bounce back when conditions improve. As a business owner, you should be looking to invest more in ways to draw in and retain customers. While the competition is busy scaling back, you can move in and stake your claim with a core group of clients who will remain loyal to your business no matter what the economic atmosphere.

The Importance of Customer Retention

Business owners agree: customer loyalty rates are falling. Competition is fierce and economic hardships hit everyone from individuals to corporations. Company executives are keeping a closer eye than ever on the bottom line and becoming more discerning about where they spend their money. When budget cuts loom, the hunt is on for cheaper options and opportunities to slash spending wherever possible. Continue reading How to Keep Your Clients During Economic Downturns

How to Store Pecans without Ruining Them

00010020_1 There’s nothing worse than opening a container of pecans you stored months earlier to find them rotten or rancid. If you picked all those pecans, all of your hard work would seem pointless. Fortunately, there are a few principles to storing pecans that will ensure your hard work or money spent was not wasted.

Do Not Store in Moist Places

Regardless if the pecans are shelled or unshelled, storing them in a moist room will promote mold growth and may cause the pecans to decrease in quality. Make sure the pecans have an opportunity to dry out after the harvest to remove moisture. Do this by placing the pecans on a screen or hanging them in small ventilated bags for approximately two weeks. Also, keep the pecans in dry, dark places.

Store in Vacuum-Sealed Containers/Bags

Always store pecans in airtight containers or bags. If you do not have a vacuum-sealer, Ziploc bags work perfectly fine. Make sure all air is removed from the bag and that it is completely sealed so moisture does not form. The method of storage does not matter nearly as much as ensuring they are properly sealed. Continue reading How to Store Pecans without Ruining Them

Stock Up! Why You Should Buy Pecans in Bulk

043crp2 Pecans should not appear just around the holidays as a treat or in a warm pecan pie. They should appear all year, in all kinds of food, because they are incredibly nutritious and can add just the right amount of flavor and crunch to a dish. How do you make sure you have pecans to last all year? Stock up! Here are the reasons why:

Excellent Snack

Sometimes, we forget about snacking on nuts because it can be easier to grab that bag of chips. However, pecans are a great alternative to less-healthy options. They are filled with essential vitamins, fiber, and protein (nutritional content here).

Delicious Garnish

Pecans act as an excellent garnish and can accompany many dishes, such as salads, fish or desserts. If you have pecans stocked up, then you never have to worry whether or not your dish could be improved by their presence. Be adventurous with your cooking! Continue reading Stock Up! Why You Should Buy Pecans in Bulk

How to Keep Your New Year Resolutions in 2015

feet-on-scale We are all familiar with the desire to make proactive changes to our lives and relationships. We make grand promises with ourselves about how we are going to change and get that body we always wanted. But truth is, we are also oh-so-familiar with the feeling of failure from not achieving what we were so pumped about at the end of the previous year. What are the solutions to this perpetual problem?

Create a Plan

Create a map or outline of how you plan to achieve your resolution. While creating this outline, think about how you are going to handle temptation. Once you start to deviate from your goal, remind yourself what you intended to do with your goal. This moment of intentional reflection could be the difference between falling off the wagon or sticking to your resolution.

Be Realistic

It is unrealistic to attempt to completely change a behavior that has been a part of your identity for the larger part of your life in a matter of a few months or a year. Take small steps first. Continue reading How to Keep Your New Year Resolutions in 2015

Don’t Do These Four Things When Making a New Year’s Resolution

firework_bokeh_explosion — Firework Stars by christmasstockimages.com is licensed under CC by 3.0

Many people view the New Year as a time to wipe the slate clean and begin a journey of self-improvement. However, for many, resolutions eventually become failures a few months into the year and not maintaining and attaining the goal can do more harm than good to the psyche. In order to get the most out of a resolution steer clear of these four things when making that commitment:

Forgetting about the Small Goals

If you are committing to large goals that are changes in behavior, it is quite unrealistic to believe you can quickly change that behavior that may have been a part of your life for many years (smoking, over-eating, over-working, combativeness). Instead of quitting the habit all at once, begin by establishing small goals such as allowing yourself junk food one or two days a week. By accomplishing smaller goals over time, it is more likely the resolution will be achieved.

Not Having a Plan

With any resolution, you need to have an explicit plan for attaining it. If you decide to lose weight, you need to have a well-defined plan of action. Remember to start with small goals such as cutting out junk food or steering clear of as much processed food as possible. Also, remember diets rarely work in the long run. Make a plan for healthier lifestyle changes such as regular exercise and a well-balanced diet. Continue reading Don’t Do These Four Things When Making a New Year’s Resolution