Grant City Business Forum Held

The Grant City Business Forum was held Friday, sponsored by the Northwest Missouri Enterprise Facilitation. Annette Weeks of the Facilitation talked about her work in helping businesses to succeed in Northwest Missouri to area businesses and prospective businesses. She said that there were three aspects of management that determined whether or not businesses succeeded; product, marketing, and financial management. She led audience participants in evaluating their own businesses on how well they were doing in those categories.

Along the way, she talked about challenges facing some of the businesses she has worked with. She said that one problem she saw was the fact that there were always things out there that people intended to do but were not getting done because of staffing. She said that marketing was important even for government entities.

Participants rated themselves on a scale of 1 to 100. But there was a catch; for instance, she said that if a business marked themselves as a 100 in marketing, then that meant that they had all the customers that they needed. She encouraged people to focus on their target audiences; she said that with the rise of the Internet, many businesses were able to find their target audience over the Internet.

She said that the main stumbling block for businesses that she found was trying to do everything at once, meaning that some stuff didn't get done. For instance, if a business creates a Facebook page, but it doesn't get updated regularly, people could conclude that you didn't have the time or energy to run the business. But she said that low-tech was still effective; for instance, she said that she used ground signs and billboards for her business successfully.

Out of product, marketing, and financial management, Weeks said that the area that the businesses she worked with had the most trouble with was financial management. She said that some of her clients were simply putting their personal savings into the business. She encouraged participants to make a budget and decide if particular investments were worth it. She said that most of her clients used Quickbooks or Excel, but that one business was successfully using simply paper and pencil. Another aspect that businesses were having trouble was being able to look backwards at their trends. For instance, she had one business who thought that their sales were going up every year but that was constantly having cash flow problems. They had no records by which they could look backwards. However, when they finally were able to reconstruct sales figures, they found that their sales had gone down 50% over the last five years. She said that the lesson was that what people assume and what was on paper could be two different things.

The biggest area of strength for businesses that she worked with was the time and energy that they put into their product, said Weeks. She said that every client was different; some need help finding resources to help them succeed while others need help putting their best foot forward to customers who walked in the door. She doesn't have an office; she spends her time going out and helping clients in the six-county area that she serves, including Worth County. Everything is free of charge and confidential; businesses are given the freedom to make their own decisions. Weeks is helped by 74 board members in the six county area that they serve.