Private equity investors face unique challenges in sub-Saharan Africa

Adopted From  How we Made it in Africa              

Sub-Saharan Africa excluding the region’s biggest and most advanced economy, South Africa, poses unique challenges for private equity investors as acquisition targets on the continent tend to be cash hungry and often require additional capital injections to boost growth, according to Standard Bank.
“The strategy of the private equity investor in sub-Saharan Africa tends to be more focused on deploying expansion capital as the companies on the continent tend to be in a growth phase, which means their cash flow is often constrained. This poses challenges for traditional cash flow based lending structures,” says Brian Marshall, co-head of debt products at Standard Bank’s corporate investment banking unit.
“In contrast, South African private equity investing tends to be more similar to developed markets, in which private equity investors focus their energies on driving efficiencies within acquisition targets that are fairly mature and well-established in their line of business.”
Marshall says lenders such as Standard Bank need to apply a completely different mindset when financing private equity transactions in sub-Saharan Africa, as deals are often financed in completely bespoke structures.
The tendency for less-mature, fast-growing companies in sub-Saharan Africa to absorb large portions of cash generated by the entity in question, means that the entire purchase price of such businesses must usually be funded completely by equity. Leveraged financing provided by banks is then either used against the value of the equity stake or, once the business matures, refinanced against stable, bankable cash flows.
Marshall says the challenges of structuring leveraged finance deals in sub-Saharan Africa are further complicated by the fact that each country in the region has different regulatory, tax and foreign exchange regimes. This can be particularly tricky when the target entity has operations in several African nations making debt push down difficult to achieve, he adds.
“You can’t simply use a one-size-fits-all approach in Africa,” says Marshall. “Every country is different, as are their regulatory and financial landscapes. We have spent a great deal of time understanding these environments for our own banking group and are happy sharing what we have learnt with our own customers, private equity or otherwise, looking to raise financing in multi-jurisdictional structures.”
On the strategy for servicing local markets Marshall says: “Any top tier private equity investor will tell you the importance of understanding the local nuance when investing regionally. This can only be obtained by having local people on the ground tapped into the local environment. Banking and lending are no different. As a result, we have regional product teams in Nairobi serving East Africa; Lagos for western Africa; Johannesburg for South and Central Africa; and London for investment into Africa. These teams consist of returnees from the African diaspora, many of whom have experience working for large banking institutions in Europe and North America, which then allows them to apply international best practice to local situations.”
Marshall says banks tend to look at three main criteria when considering whether or not to finance a private equity deal. Firstly, the strength of the management team; secondly, the strength and reputation of the equity sponsor; and thirdly, the strength of the target entity, with countercyclical businesses in the top quartile of their market being favoured.

Top 3 Reasons You Need To Actively Market Your Business Online

To have a successful website that attracts people to your site, converts readers and online users to buyers, and keeps them coming back you have to actively work at your campaign using a variety of different tools.

Having a website is a given for most companies and businesses regardless of their size. However, just having a website is not an effective use of your time, effort and money.
Since online marketing is not the same as traditional types of marketing campaigns it is well worth investing in the services of professional marketing agencies that specializes in online management. There are some terrific companies out there and finding the top company should be your first order of business. I recommend that you +25673449003 WE provide a comprehensive list of services AND willing to work with any size of business. The three most important reasons for many businesses include their ability to provide high value content, their understanding of social media in marketing and their ability to create amazing websites that look great on any device.
High Value Content
Content has always been important, but the way that content is provided for consumers is more and more important in today’s fast paced online world. Customers don’t want to read through pages and pages of details, they want to quickly evaluate your product and service and decide if it is right for them or if they are going on to another site. Most consumers will spend less than 20 seconds on a website before deciding if they are clicking off or going deeper, so you have to capture their attention and create interest in moving on to the next page.
Social Media in Marketing
Knowing how to direct traffic from social media sites to your business website is both an art and a science. A top online marketing company will be able to provide social media conversion that will create interest in your products and services and will turn followers and fans into loyal customers that stick with your brand.
This doesn’t happen by accident; it takes carefully crafted and managed advertising campaigns. Pay Per Click or PPC marketing is a great option to consider and will allow social media and search engines to direct customers your way while you only have to pay for advertising to those that visit your site.
Amazing Websites that go Mobile
Increasingly people are using alternative devices such as smartphones and tablets to stay connected online. Having a website that looks great on these smaller screens is not only possible but it is imperative to keep up with today’s online consumer. Designing mobile websites that capture information about your product and make online shopping easy from smaller screens and devices is a must for any business.
Taking the initiative to market your business online with Orangesoda will make a difference in hits on your website. They will be there to help you each step of the way and will keep you website current, interesting and generating a constant stream of new viewers that will soon become new customers.

Twitter and Small Business: Waste of Time or a Powerful Asset?

Twitter For Business
Twitter is one of the largest social network sites available with over a hundred million users making, on average, between two to three tweets a day each. There has been a lot of interest in recent years in whether social network sites such as Twitter can be beneficial for businesses and small business selling everything from photocopiers to sandwiches have been trying to make Twitter work for their business model. Many people say that Twitter can be used to increase sales through promoting your business services, improve brand loyalty and carry out market research. Others argue that the benefits of Twitter have been over stated and it is not as cost effective a marketing medium as it first seems.


Advantages of Twitter
One of the initial draws of Twitter for businesses is that it is free and very simple to set up a Twitter account and begin interacting with customers straight away. Once you have set up your account you need to encourage people to start following you which you can do in a number of different ways, including giving away free gifts such as ebooks or you can offer advice or tips on your area of expertise.
The number of followers you have may just be the tip of the iceberg as many of your tweets can be embedded in other places or picked up by search engines. Research suggests that over twenty per cent of consumers read tweets each month even if they are not on Twitter. Twitter users are also very influential and they are three of four times more likely to write a product review, which means you are engaging some of your most vocal customers. A further advantage of a business having a Twitter account is that research has shown that for customers Twitter is the preferred way to learn about businesses and interact with them, as opposed to Facebook or email.


Disadvantages of Twitter
Businesses must carefully control their Twitter brand strategy as, if they get it wrong, this can very quickly damage the brand as a mistake in a tweet will be shared with thousands of potential customers. Even large brands such as Samsung and Chrysler have suffered huge embarrassment due to ill-advised tweets now and again.
Tweeting without a strategy can be a poor use of employee’s time compared to other activities and it can be very difficult to measure its impact. Twitter can also be very addictive and people can spend more time on it that is proportionate given its value, which can seriously affect the employee’s productivity.
Twitter is not necessarily useful for everyone and some companies do not have customers who are particularly well represented on Twitter, in which case your efforts will not be rewarded. One way of checking if Twitter might be useful for your business is by seeing if your competitors are using it, and if so, are they achieving a lot of interest in their tweets?

How to Use Twitter Effectively
To maximise the potential of Twitter, make sure you have considered your online strategy and make sure you schedule time to update the content every day or so. To save time, these tweets can be pre-written on software which will release them at set points using applications such as Buffer and Hootsuite.

Example

Equity Bank Kenya ‏@KeEquityBank 6 Jan

@sntedward Hi, kindly confirm the mode of transfer used by the remitter and share your account details on DM for us to check and confirm.

Sending a few tweets a day is enough, otherwise your messages could be perceived as spam. Including photos and links to your website helps make your brand seem more personal which can improve your relationship with your followers and make you a more interesting and attractive account to follow. Make sure you have someone monitoring tweets to you each day, so they can be responded to promptly as this will also increase customer satisfaction. This is especially important in cases of customer complaints as research suggests people who complain on Twitter have already tried to resolve their problems in a different way. If complaints are dealt with in a timely and constructive manner there is every chance that this negative opinion can be quickly transformed in to a shining beacon of good customer service!

How to Profit from “Lean Advertising”

 By Thales Teixeira 

The footwear industry has traditionally been a hotbed of memorable advertising, with brands such as Nike and Reebok spending millions to sign athlete-endorsers and hire ad agencies that create spectacular TV campaigns. But the approach taken by DC Shoes, which makes footwear for skateboarders, couldn’t be more different. In 2009 the company began shooting videos featuring its cofounder Ken Block driving a tricked-out race car around closed-off airports, theme parks, and even the port of San Francisco. The videos last up to nine minutes and have almost no talking; the stunt driving is interspersed with glamour shots of footwear. Instead of buying expensive TV time, DC Shoes uploads the videos to YouTube. Over the past four years they have gotten more than 180 million views—and in 2011 alone, sales jumped 15%. One was YouTube’s most-shared video of 2011; another garnered a million views in its first 24 hours. Paying online media for this type of exposure would cost upward of $5 million. Using “lean advertising,” DC Shoes achieved it for a tiny fraction of that amount.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDN2bCIyus  
 
Many other companies would like to mimic this approach. In my research, I use eye-tracking technology, facial-expression analysis, and lab experiments to better understand why people choose to view online videos, what narrative techniques keep them watching, and what features prompt them to share videos with friends. Since writing about this work in HBR last year (see “The New Science of Viral Ads,” March 2012), I’ve received a steady stream of requests from companies asking: How can we put that research to use? As a result, I’ve been studying how companies create and distribute online video advertisements, and I’ve examined some of the new firms that specialize in helping them do so. I’ve found many examples of companies that have produced effective campaigns for 10% or even 1% of what they would have spent on traditional ad agencies and paid mass media.
Lower cost isn’t the only reason to consider online video. Because of channel surfing, DVRs, and the growing use of “second screens” (mainly smartphones and tablets), fewer people watch TV commercials than in the past. And online video is becoming more popular each year: In 2011, 83% of U.S. internet users regularly watched online videos, and the research company comScore estimated that 12% of the clips viewed were ads. Moreover, because viewers actively choose online videos, they tend to watch them more attentively than they watch TV ads. According to a 2010 survey by the research firm Vision Critical, 48% of those who watched an online ad at any point subsequently visited the brand’s website, 11% shared the video with a friend, and 22% made a purchase.

Step Aside, Mad Men

Create It Yourself or Find Outside Talent? Developing an ad campaign involves two main tasks: Creating content and distributing it. A traditional agency typically charges $100,000 to $1 million to produce a 30-second TV spot, and networks charge $14,000 to $545,000 each time a spot airs. Companies looking to cut those costs can take a do-it-yourself approach or outsource one or both of those tasks to lower-cost firms. Let’s look at content creation first.
DIY content. As you’d expect, the do-it-yourself approach is the cheapest—and sometimes it works remarkably well. In the most celebrated example, in 2007 the kitchen appliance company Blendtec created a series of videos in which the founder, Tom Dickson, demonstrated the power of its products by blending such items as marbles, a rake handle, hockey pucks, and iPods. The videos went viral on YouTube, landing Dickson on the Tonight Show and the Today Show, and sales took off. The Blendtec videos have been viewed nearly 240 million times to date. But the odds of replicating that success are low: Just 3% of YouTube films are viewed more than 25,000 times. Inside the ad industry, relying on YouTube alone to get a message out is derided as “post it and pray.”
Outsourced content. Many companies, including Duck Tape, Lego, Duracell, and Braun, have turned to Tongal, a four-year-old firm that, for a fee, posts specs for a project and matches it with freelance creative talent willing to work for relatively low pay. For instance, a company might want 90-second videos that mention the brand name at least twice and show the logo for two seconds. Tongal members submit 250-word proposals that meet those specs, and the brand company pays $500, on average, for the rights to the ideas it likes. Members then create clips based on the winning ideas, with those who produce the best ones typically receiving $5,000 to $20,000. Because Tongal draws on the skill sets of many professionals and competent amateurs, the ads tend to be of high quality.
Companies pay $10,000 to $50,000, on average, for ads from Tongal, and the most successful Tongal contributors have earned more than $150,000 from their work on dozens of projects. Companies generally use the ads online, but some go further: For example, Speed Stick paid $17,000 for a Tongal-produced ad and laid out $4 million to air it during the 2013 Super Bowl, whose viewers ranked it higher than conventionally produced ads for Coke, Pepsi, Subway, Lincoln, and Anheuser-Busch.
Engineered to Go Viral High-quality content is not the only requirement for successful lean advertising; effective distribution matters, too. Companies can again choose to do it themselves or to contract outside

10 Tips for Successful Business Networking

Guest Post Author Tom Demers

The ability to network has always been important in order to run a successful business. This has never been more true than it is today. Technology has made it possible for word of mouth to travel faster than the speed of advertising. Understanding how to leverage these new tools is a skill that will separate tomorrow’s winners from yesterday’s. These tips should get your off to a good start.
1. Know Who to Talk to - All people may be created equal, but that doesn’t mean they have equal influence. This isn’t to say that it’s a “waste of time” to use social networks to talk to everyday people. In fact, this is an important part of the process and you should spend roughly half of your social networking time communicating with your general audience.
The part that too many entrepreneurs miss, however, is communicating with influential people. Who do you spot an influential person? Do they have more followers on Twitter than they follow back? Does the same go for Facebook, their blogs, and their other social presences? Use some common sense as well, because sometimes numbers can be faked.
2. Know How to Talk - Pedantic? Maybe. Important? Definitely.
By far the most common mistake entrepreneurs, bloggers, and marketers make when they jump on social media is to get too promotional. We’re all so overexposed to marketing messages that we don’t hear them anymore. Unless you have something entertaining or interesting to say, nobody will be listening.
To make the most of your network, you need to address them as human beings and, most importantly, listen. Offer some genuine value by helping somebody out, striking up a discussion, or making them laugh.
3. Know When to Leverage - Knowing how and when to capitalize on your relationships is key. Some are too eager, trying to suck as much value out of a relationship as possible. These are the least likely to achieve their goals.
Others are too soft, afraid to jeopardize the relationships they’ve built by trying to leverage them. These people are more likely to possess the necessary relationship building skills, but they must learn to act and take these emotional risks. Most of the people you are networking with “get it.”
As long as you offer some value in return, you shouldn’t have too many problems. Also, be aware that you don’t need to “win” every time to achieve what you’re aiming for.
4. Pick Up the Phone - Dust it off and get ready to do some dialing. Social networks are great for finding influential people, but they are limited resources for making an impression. Sometimes the best way to really get somebody to listen is to talk to them over the phone. This will take practice to perfect, but it’s well worth the payoff.
5. Listen - There’s a reason companies pay thousands of dollars for focus groups and surveys. They need to understand how their customers think in order to make sure they are investing in the right products, services, and marketing strategies.
Use social networks to listen to your customers, and your potential customers as well. This is an excellent way to discover corners of the market that haven’t been capitalized on. Criticism should be welcomed, because having the chance to respond directly to somebody is far preferable to the customer who never says anything, and simply stops buying your products, perhaps privately telling all of their friends to do the same. It can also be a source of ideas for improvement.
6. Have Something to Say - There’s plenty of noise in modern life, and people will only take the time to listen to people who actually have something to say. If they’ve heard it all before, odds are they won’t be willing to spend a great deal of time listening. This means that some creativity, spontaneity, and research are a must.
7. Be Personal - Yes, obviously their are limits here. You don’t want to get TOO personal, but the more polished and produced you get, the less serious people will take you. People want to know that you’re a professional, but they also want to know that you’re human. The most effective business relationships are actually real relationships first. They are casual relationships, not too formal, not too intimate, but real.
8. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone - Spend some time talking to people who push the limits of your field. Maybe their customers who would typically only have tangential interest in your products. Maybe their experts from an industry or field of study that’s not quite the same as yours.
Research has shown that most breakthroughs occur when people from different walks of life communicate. Networks that have just the right balance of young and old, novice and expert, and mixed perspectives tend to come up with the most creative ideas. What good is a network that repeatedly tells you what you already know?
9. Be Persistent - No, we’re not saying you should keep pestering somebody who has said they want to be left alone. We’re saying that you should keep practicing your networking skills as often as possible. Keep talking to people on the phone. Keep experimenting with social networks. Keep pushing your comfort limits. Very few people learn these skills easily. It takes practice, and you can’t learn it all by reading about it.
10. Failure Doesn’t Exist - Eliminate the idea of failure from your mind. Instead, think of every situation as a learning opportunity. Your networking skills won’t emerge overnight, but you will notice steady improvement over time. Stick to your guns and keep at it. The only way to fail is to stop trying.

About the Guest Post Author
Tom Demers writes for Zintro, a marketplace of experts in various fields that helps connect investors, lawyers, analysts, entrepreneurs, and more with experts and consultants in various niches like biochemistry consultants.

How to Be a Better Negotiator in 2014.

Absolutely. No doubt about it. You can be a more effective negotiator this coming year provided you do one thing differently. Do it faithfully and you’ll:

• Make deals that could otherwise slip through your fingers;
• Create—and capture—more value in the agreements that you reach; and
• Resolve small differences before they escalate into costly disputes.

But there is a catch. This isn’t like those “weird little tricks” with bogus advice about losing belly fat or improving your credit score. This requires some work on your part. Not a lot, but you’ll have to keep at it. Given the upside, the return on your effort will be high.
The assignment is simple: keep a journal tracking every negotiation you undertake in 2014, large or small. It could be securing a promotion, dealing with a difficult customer, or saving a few bucks on your cable service.
Start your entry before you go to the bargaining table. Lay out your strategy. Consider best and worst case scenarios. Reckon your walk away. Try to figure out what might be acceptable to the other side. Document the whole process from how you prepare, what unfolds in the back-and-forth, the outcome, and finally, of course, what lessons you learn along the way.
Keeping a real-time journal is essential. Memories are imperfect. Telling details can get lost. If you reconstruct the story after the fact, the outcome may seem inevitable. Brief notes, taken along the way, will illuminate points where you might have taken things in a different direction.
You don’t have to write a treatise. For simple transactions, an outline will do. But putting your plan down on paper pays off three ways:

1. An explicit plan forces you to weigh tradeoffs in advance. Negotiating a new position, you’ll have to figure out how much salary you’d give up in return for stock options. That could be a tough choice. Analyzing pros and cons beforehand is a whole lot better than making a heat-of-the-moment decision.
2. Imagining different scenarios enhances your creativity. It’s like limbering up before a tennis match. You get your head in the game and become more agile.
3. Planning also a healthy reminder of what you don’t know about the other side’s interests and intentions. Negotiation is an exploratory process. Be ready for surprises, pleasant and otherwise. Don’t treat your assumptions as hard facts

The more complex the transaction, the more detailed your journal entry should be. But get started now. Making quick notes as you negotiate is far better than nothing. Over the course of the year you’ll gather data that will reveal strengths to build on, as well as weaknesses that you’d better address.

Long-term learning. Think about it: judging performance in any arena requires a baseline. For your annual physical, the doctor compares your latest cholesterol numbers with last year’s results to see if they’re headed in the right direction. You likewise look for trends and patterns over time in weighing investments. The same kind of tracking pays dividends for negotiators. But the only way to learn from experience is having an honest record of your performance.
I’m talking about doing more than calculating your bargaining batting average, where you’d compare the number of agreements made to deals attempted. For one thing, that’s a poor measure of success. As  noted, if you always come to agreement, there are two explanations and both are bad. Either you’re being too agreeable and saying yes to terms you should refuse. Or you’re being too cautious only going after sure-thing opportunities.
So don’t just look at outcomes. Go back to your notes and evaluate how you well you strategized at the outset. Did your negotiations generally play out as you expected? If you tend to be overly optimistic (or pessimistic), that’s something that you can fix. Likewise you may see that you’re better at certain kinds of negotiations than others (value-creating opportunities, for example, rather than haggles over price). Again, you can work on that going forward.
You can help yourselves now by enlisting a friend to keep a journal of his or her experience. Compare your notes regularly. By coaching one another, you’ll sharpen your strategy going into a negotiation. And by debriefing together, you’ll have twice as many cases to learn from.
So, yes you certainly can be a better negotiator in 2014. Yes, some work is involved, so you might be tempted to slack off. To keep you going here’s a carrot and a stick:

• If you’re diligent, you’ll make more and better deals. You’ll finish the year with a sense of accomplishment and greater confidence in your ability.
• If you fail to make this small effort, but negotiate with people who are serious about enhancing their skills . . . well, best of luck.

*****
Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler is the author of The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World (Simon & Schuster).
He has been a key figure at the renowned Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School since its founding 30 years ago. During the 2013-14 academic year, he continues to teach in executive programs at HBS and PON, and is also a visiting professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Kenya: Rules On Work Permits Tighten

By Ibrahim Oruko, 19 December 2013

An aerial view shows the Nairobi city center in Kenya

Work permits will now only be issued for a two-year, non-renewable period, according to Director of Immigration Jane Waikenda.
Employers will have to include the name of an understudy before the work permit is issued. The plan is to ensure the understudy takes over the job when the foreigner's work permit expires.
"This is to ensure that Kenyans get the opportunity to acquire the foreign employee's skills and take over. There will be no renewal of the any foreign worker's permit after two years," said Waikenda.
Waikenda said those with active work permits will be allowed to complete their terms but renewal will be conditional on identifying Kenyans to understudy.
She denied that the new regulations were specifically targeting residence permits for citizens of the UK, US and France.
She said the new regulations apply to all foreigners seeking to live and work in Kenya.
The review was in line with the pre-election pledge by the Jubilee Alliance to prioritise job creation, she said.
"It is not as if we don't want foreigners. We cannot refuse them an opportunity to work here but the priority must be given to Kenyans. The Jubilee government promised to create jobs to Kenyans and this is one of the areas being considered," she said.
Government has decided that strict measures are needed to ensure that only deserving foreigners get work permits who offer specialised services.
Residence and work permits are needed by any foreigner wanting to stay in Kenya, whether in gainful employment or not.
Some foreigners with pending applications have complained to the Star that they were being referred to the Office of the Director.
However Waikenda said that she was not directly involved in issuing work permits and a committee deals with applications.
Government is also tightening up on foreign investors. They will now have to show proof that they have Sh50 million in their accounts to get a Class G work permit as opposed to the $100,000 (Sh8.7 million) required by the constitution. Existing investors will be asked to top up their balances
Waikenda says this is necessary to avoid to ensure that that briefcase investors are not licenced.
The revelations come after a British citizen moved to court to avert possible deportation after the government refused to renew her work permit.
With activist Maina Kiai, Lucy Hannan runs InformAction, an NGO that screens human rights films in rural areas and holds community discussions on justice and governance.
She came to Kenya in 1988 and has worked as a journalist, human rights author and film maker. She has set up companies, built a home and started a family in Kenya. She also has a son with Kamukunji MP Yusuf Hassan.

Is Your Business Stuck In Neutral? 3 Tips To Get it Moving Again!

No one ever said running a business was easy, but when you are moving into month 2, 3 or 4 of feeling utterly and completely hopeless and unmotivated, it is easy to feel like giving up.
The good news is that sometimes all it takes to give your business (and yourself!) a much-needed boost is taking a few simple, proactive steps. By making sure you have the support you need, setting actionable goals for both the short and long term, and moving your focus back onto your customers, you stand a great chance of moving your business back into the fast lane!
1.     Surround yourself with a support team.
Particularly if you run an at-home business, it’s easy to feel isolated and alone. When the only contact you have throughout the day is with your dog and the mailman, it’s easy to start losing your motivation and entertain thoughts of giving up.
Take steps to surround yourself with positive and helpful people who you respect, and who inspire you. There are a number of ways you can do this;

• Attend local networking events or meetups to connect with other entrepreneurs
• Join an online discussion board in your niche or industry
• Work with a coach who can help you set goals, offer feedback and act as a sounding board
• Establish a formal email, phone or in-person support relationship with someone in your field. Planning regular meetings can be great for having some accountability, getting motivated and sharing the ups and downs of running a business.

2. Set specific short and long-term goals.

Feeling like you’re in a rut can sometimes be caused by a lack of direction and planning with respect to your business goals. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of your business; but simply going through the motions without any thought to specific goals will leave you feeling aimless and purposeless.
To get back on track, try setting some specific and realistic goals for your business, both in the short term and long term.
Short-term, specific goals may include:

• Gaining 3 new clients this month by attending local networking events
• Writing and promoting 3 blog posts each week this month
• Increasing website sales by $500 this month through a targeted email campaign

Specific long-term goals may include:

• Bringing in $100,000 of revenue this fiscal year
• Increasing your social media ROI by 50% over the next 2 years
• Working at improving customer satisfaction levels through prompt and respectful responses on social media

It’s also helpful to look at how your short and long-term goals can work together to be more effective. For instance, if your goal is to increase website traffic by 50% over the next 3 years, a complimentary short-term goal may be to actively promote your blog posts via social media and email at least once each week.
3. Think less about yourself, and more about your customers.
One of the most common reasons why business owners get restless, disillusioned or burnt out is that their focus has become more about themselves, and less about their customers or clients.
So how do you know if this is the case? Try asking yourself these simple questions:

• Am I providing content that my target market needs, wants and is asking for?
• How am I doing in terms of customer service? Am I too concerned about making those sales dollars up front, and less about ensuring an excellent customer experience?
• Do I know the pain points of my audience? Does my product or service help alleviate that pain?

Answering these questions can give you a good indication of where your focus is, and what you need to do to reinvigorate yourself and your business.
It is also helpful to look at how you are feeling emotionally: When you are putting your customers first, you will tend to feel positive, hopeful and energized. When you’re putting yourself first, you’ll tend to feel tired, unmotivated and stressed-out.

Why Small business (startup) Should Take a Big-Brand Approach to Marketing

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

BY Jim Joseph | March 20, 2013|

The following is the first in the series "Marketing Like the Big Brands," running every other week in which marketing expert Jim Joseph shows entrepreneurs on a small-business budget how to apply marketing strategies used by big brands.

Whether or not you realized it before, if you're a small business owner, you're also a marketer. Maybe you were never trained, but you are in fact marketing your business. While lots of people have different perceptions about what marketing should be, for me, good marketing is all about creating a powerful and compelling brand experience for customers.
It takes a special kind of person to run a small business. You wear many hats. Entrepreneurs don't often have a clearly defined role within a well-oiled machine, nor can they generally count on multiple resources to complete projects. There's no marketing team to do the heavy lifting.
We also expect marketing to be a never-ending job. The minute we have our plan in place, something changes -- a competitor enters the market, legislation changes the rules or a technological advance requires a rethink.
This is true of big businesses and it's certainly true of small ones. Many entrepreneurs look longingly at the big brands, wishing they could replicate their activities and generate their impact. I believe that in small business, you can get the same kind of results as the big brands, just on a different scale.

Related: The Secrets of What Makes a Product Go Viral

The methodology needed to create an amazing brand experience remains the same whether you're Nike, a local restaurant, BMW or a consultant. It's the same process regardless of the size of the business. Sure, the budgets may be different, but how you get there is essentially the same.
To start, small businesses can learn a lot from how big brands create experiences that connect with customers, creating sharing and loyalty.
It's a matter of knowing what you want to accomplish and following proven best practices that work on any size business. It's a matter of turning your business into a brand by creating an experience tailored to your specific customer. Small businesses can often do that even better than big ones.
Brands should be inspiring. That should be your ultimate goal. As an entrepreneur, you may not think you can be inspirational, but you couldn't be more wrong. It comes with the entrepreneurial territory. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and way of life. You can add more value to people's lives than most large corporations. Innovation and creativity doesn't necessarily come from the towers of big business. It comes from the breakthrough, on-the-ground thinking of small businesses.
Every two weeks I will explore a different aspect of small business marketing, using principles I've seen from the big brands. We'll investigate how to act like a brand, identify your target customer, position your business and map out touch points -- all with the goal of helping you create a comprehensive marketing plan that builds toward a compelling brand experience.

Related:Branding's Cardinal Sins: 3 Common Mistakes to Avoid 

The author is an Entrepreneur contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Jim Joseph

Jim Joseph is the North American president of New York-based communications agency Cohn & Wolfe, part of the media company WPP Group PLC. He is the author of three books, including the latest, The Personal Experience Effect (Happy About 2013). Joseph also teaches marketing at New York University and blogs at JimJosephExp.com.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226155#ixzz2pPyF3t7k

Nigeria Shows Off Its First Drone

NIgeria's GULMA Drone

Vanguard

Behold the GULMA. Unveiled by Nigerian President Jonathan Goodluck on Monday, the GULMA is the country's first locally designed drone. The drone bears a passing resemblance to the Falco ES used by the United Nations, and it should function in much the same way: as a flying eyeball to help a conventional military fight criminal and guerilla groups. This is the face of drone proliferation, and as arms races go, it's pretty mundane.
According to Nigerian Air Marshal Alex Badeh, the name GULMA comes from a word in the Hausa language that means "gossip." It's a clever name the drone is a tool of reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence gathering. It's less fly-on-the-wall and more whispers-in-the-wind.
And gossip GULMA must. Nigeria faces several conflicts within its borders where drones would be very useful. In the north, Nigeria is wrestling with the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency, which operates in a rural area with mountains and forests sometimes offering shelter. In the south, armed militants hide out in the largely impenetrable and difficult-to-patrol swamps of the Niger Delta. Both groups have threatened the stability of Nigeria over the past decade. Boko Haram remains a persistent threat, and violence by militants in the delta could flare up for the upcoming 2015 elections.
Military drones are at their most useful fighting against insurgencies and armed militants in otherwise difficult-to-patrol places. Faced with internal threats, it makes sense that Nigeria is trying to build its own tools for defense. The GULMA is directly inspired by three Aerostar drones, which operated in Nigeria until they were grounded by problems getting spare parts. According to Badeh, the total cost of developing the GULMA, as well as training 15 pilots, was less than $3.5 million.
[Vanguard]