Part of getting your small business going involves setting your pricing, after evaluating how your estimated prices compare with your competitor’s pricing.

Whether you will be charging by the product, project or service, or by the hour, sometimes, it may be tempting to discount your prices, dropping your prices just slightly below what your competition is charging, to try to make some sales.  This sounds like a good way to get some work for your new business.  Of course, you would plan to bring your prices back in line with what others in your profession are charging, as soon as you feel you can keep bringing in customers.

The problem is, if you reduce your pricing below what it costs you to do a project, it means you will have to do more work to make the same amount of money that you needed to make for each job.

As an example:

2 hours at $50 / hour = $100

but 2 hours at $40 / hour only = $80, so you have to do MORE WORK to make the $100 to pay your bills.

Taking a loss to get work will just make you work harder.

For more examples to help you plan your pricing, please see Michelle Chance-Sangthong‘s article, “Discounting Yourself Out Of Business”.

A great way to make more social connections and get more customers is to get involved and volunteer to help or sponsor an event in your business community.

Volunteer to sponsor and / or help in a charity event, an environmental clean-up of a community area , or a beautification project, or sponsor a local amateur sports team.   Advertise the event on your business website, donate some of your product, and or some of your services for use as prizes; doing good things like this and giving back to your business community helps with more good publicity about your business.  Whether its your business name and number on the back of young athletes’ t-shirts or links back to your website from your listing on the charity website, the goodness that you’ll give to others, you’ll get it back, and more.

For example, the Shannon Miller Lifestyle Women’s 5K and Children’s Fun Run.  The Women’s 5k, the Children’s Fun Run, the SML Health Fair with FREE screenings and vendor booths – something to benefit the whole family, and it’s all for raising money for the Shannon Miller Foundation, to fight childhood obesity.  You can become a Sponsor for the event, or volunteer to help and share your skills and talent; it’s a WIN – WIN situation.

Think about it for a minute. What can your business do to help your local community, and let more people in your community know about your business?

A good business owner is always looking for ways to improve their business.

1.  Get new ideas is to keep learning; reading articles online and in magazines and books, follow other successful entrepreneurs on Twitter and Facebook, and their website blogs.

2.  Set goals for your changes and improvements, and then make small, manageable, incremental improvements.  You can get to your goal with this approach.

3.  Measure and track your efforts and your results.

• How much did you spend for your advertising last month?
• How many new visitors did your business see as a result of that advertising?   (And ask your visitors which advertisement brought them to you.)
• How many of those visitors made a purchase?   (Did you make a profit from their purchases, or did you pay more for advertising than you made in sales that resulted from that advertising?)

Entrepreneur Michelle Chance-Santhong of Cool Shopping Ideas shares her inspiring progress to improvement, applying some of these concepts in her recent video.

If you have some more suggestions to help small business owners improve their business that you’d like to share, please

• add your Comment below,

• or send us your suggestions to share via our Contact form.

What sort of automated answer message does your business telephone number have?

Does your caller hear a message like:

Hello, this is (your business).  No one is able to come to the telephone now, but if you will please leave your name, telephone number, and a brief message, we’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible.

I was recently surprised to return a missed call and hear:

Hello, if you would like to be removed from our calling list, please press 1.

No business name, no promotional message, but sending a message that sounded to me like their business believed most callers would not want to hear from them again.

When you answer your ‘phone, take a breath and think what kind of impression you want to send to the person who’s calling you, and smile, because people can hear the smile in your voice.

Have you heard some strange automated answering messages?  Please share them with us in a comment.

Another great way to make more social connections and get more customers is to get involved with events and activities in the community around your business.

Help support a children’s softball team, take part in a community area clean-up or beautification project, sponsor a local team walking for a charity; doing good things like this and giving back to your business community helps with more good publicity about your business.  Whether its your business name and number on the back of young athletes’ t-shirts or links back to your website from your listing on the charity website, if you give goodness, you’ll get it back.

For example, Bonnie Arnold of Bonnie’s Floral Designs volunteered to organize this year’s Annual Painting of the PawPrints in Jacksonville, Florida, for our home town Jacksonville Jaguars.  Bonnie is doing something good to help the community, and by giving her business e-mail bonnie@bonniesfloraldesigns.com for volunteers to reply, people can also find out about her Floral Design business.

What can your business do to help your local community, and let more people in your community know about your business?