Make Your Small Business the Next Google

Alright, so perhaps the title is a little grandiose, but small businesses and organizations can definitely learn a thing or two by using some of the methods that successful companies like Google have used to get where they are. Here are the important points:

• Google was once a small business
• Google has come up with lots of innovative new ideas
• Many of those ideas have occurred as a result of their “20 percent time” policy, which encourages its engineers to spend one day a week working on their own projects, unrelated to work – including AdSense – one of their most lucrative products, which brings in a large part of their > $1billion in quarterly revenue
• What could happen in other small businesses if they also paid employees to be creative?

Now, before small business folks get their hackles up, i am well aware that for most small businesses, allowing their employees to spend 20 percent of their time on things that don’t make immediate money is probably not a wise business decision. Joe’s Sports Bar is not Google – it’s an entirely different business model. But there are some similarities. Both have employees who have some creativity in them – even part-timers. Both organizations must innovate to thrive, and should always be looking out for competitive advantages by creating new products, services or experiences. A big similarity between Google and Joe’s is the need for real commitment to employee innovation and involvement. Here’s why:

If Google were to have merely hoped that their engineers would produce the next great new Google product nights and weekends, they probably would not have AdSense today. Similarly, if Joe’s Sports Bar merely hopes that its employees will come up with fresh new food, service or entertainment ideas on their off-shifts, they might be missing out on the next great product or service as well.

Here are some ideas for how small businesses might adapt the Google recipe of commitment to achieve breakthrough results – many of them with the help of BigTreetop.com, which is designed for the efficient generation and voting of new ideas as a community:

• Pay employees to spend 15 minutes per week logging in to BigTreetop.com to share their stories, ideas and votes with the community ($2-5 week?)
• For businesses without employee computers, put a simple used internet-enabled computer ($200) in the employee break room or office and pay employees post an experience or idea at the end of each shift
• Give a cash reward, choice of shift or day off to any employee who has their idea implemented in the business
• Give all employees a small percentage of the profit for a product that they collectively develop and implement

The obvious upsides to this sort of approach are more involved, happier employees, better products, and a more developed ability to adapt to the market - especially when using a platform like BigTreetop to vet ideas with both customers and employees. There is no downside except for a small investment in the form or employee pay or rewards.  Google seemed to think that was worth it, and it’s worked pretty well for them so far..

What do you think? Are these ideas feasible? What are some other ways a small business could achieve similar results? Are any of you using good methods now to innovate your small business?

Customers at the Company Conference Table

Dell and Starbucks are showing serious commitment to online customer involvement a core part of their business—promoting the feature in their stores, on their websites, and through their employees. Starbucks has even added “idea partners”—48 specially trained employees who act as hosts of the discussion. Without them, Bruzzo (Starbuck’s Chief Technology Officer) argues, the conversation could intimidate newcomers. “These are the people at a dinner party who make sure everyone is having a good time.”

Here are a few quotes from a recent BusinessWeek article:

You could say this is nothing but a fancy suggestion box. Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com, which provides the software to Starbucks and Dell) argues no. “The dead-end suggestion box and the auto reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated,” he says. In this age of nonstop, immediate communication in blogs, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube, he says, “your customers are having a conversation about your products and practices. The question every company has to ask is: ‘Do I want to be part of this conversation? Do I want to learn from it? Am I willing to innovate on the basis of it?’ The idea partners also act as advocates for customers’ suggestions back at their departments, so that “customers would have a seat at the table when product decisions are being made,” Bruzzo says. “To close that loop in an authentic way,” he argues, the company must make a commitment to “building those ideas together with customers…. We’re truly going to adopt it into our business process, into product development, experience development, and store design.”"

Bruzzo advises other companies to follow Starbucks’ example in using Ideas. “Don’t underinvest in adopting it into your business process,” he implores. “See it as an important part of how you run your business.” He also says it’s O.K. to make mistakes. “Your community is incredibly forgiving, actually, if you show a real interest in listening and responding.”

A very important takeaway from this article is the commitment Starbucks has made to online social media and customer involvement. For them it is not just a gimmick or a “try and see,” but a new part of their business process. For small businesses, the specifics of the commitment to social media like BigTreetop.com will be different, of course (most small businesses cannot hire full-time “idea partners”), but the importance of that commitment will be the same – or perhaps greater, as they seek to find the unique advantages that they can use to compete with larger organizations. We’ve already seen that, with just a little bit of effort and a platform built for their purposes, small businesses can innovate rapidly and effectively with the help of their customers. I believe that the next generation of really successful small businesses will be the ones that band together to make customer outreach, involvement and innovation both in-person and online as much a part of their business philosophy and process as any other function.

Note: Here is another article about MyStarbucksIdea.com

If You Ask, Customers Will Answer

I’ve been chatting with a lot of small business owners lately about the possibilities of consumer involvement, and just how much people are willing to do for/with a business. Once we launch BigTreetop.com, we’ll have a better answer to this question for small businesses. Obviously the BigTreetop team is confident that with the right mindset and a good set of tools, the answer is going to be very, very positive. We are especially confident that if we all do it right, local businesses can get even more consumer involvement than big chains because of the close proximity of the customer to the actual decisionmakers in the business.

In the interim, here are a few examples of how much people will contribute to big businesses which have little or no real local loyalty:

Kroger “Design a Green Bag” Contest (http://www.designagreenbag.com/)

Details: Started in Spring of 2008. Allows people to submit a design online for a new green grocery bag and vote on other people’s designs. The top-rated idea in the end will be used, and the person who designed it will receive $500

Participation: 32,288 entries as of May 14th, 2008, with the top-voted bag receiving 110,196 votes.

Comments: This site, a one-off design, is probably costing Kroger at least $20-30,000 dollars to implement – not including the advertising to attract people to the contest. They obviously realize the power of customer involvement. The $500 reward may have been a motivator for the first 1000 people who may have felt that they had a chance to win, but for the next 30-something-thousand, the motivation had to be the enjoyment of participation in something public – something bigger than their normal everyday lives.

My Starbucks Idea (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/home/home.jsp)

Details: Started in April 2008. Allows people to submit ideas for Starbucks and vote and comment on other people’s ideas

Participation: 37,400 ideas as of May 14th, 2008 with the top-voted idea receiving 94,120 votes.

Comments: An interesting phenomenon has occurred more often than not, where one customer posted a very anti-Starbucks comment and other customers jumped in to defend the company.

Starbucks Takes Experience Seriously

Starbucks is one of the organizations most credited with starting “The Experience Economy,” where consumers care more about how they feel than how much they pay. After its stock recently fell by 40-something percent, Starbucks decided it was time to

“..close all of our U.S. company-operated stores to teach, educate and share our love of coffee, and the art of espresso. And in doing so, we will begin to elevate the Starbucks Experience for our customers.“

Just to be clear, in order to do this, Starbucks closed all of their U.S. stores today for three hours. Customers pay $3-5 for it in each daily cup of coffee. Starbucks today took a loss of millions for it. Experience is serious business.

http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=833