#3 | Helping To Save Small Businesses

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about opportunities and privilege.  I’ve had the privilege to have a lot of life changing conversations with extraordinary people. I’ve had most of these conversations over coffee. In fact, that’s where the whole idea for Coffee With Kim came from. It was me capturing these ah-ha moments I learned from others and sharing them with you.

With COVID19 still in full effect, all of my coffee meetings have been moved online. Instead of me having all these coffee meetings and sharing with you my favorite ones I’m thinking why not make more room at the table and have us all sit down? There are some fascinating people I would LOVE for you to meet but I also know that sometimes it’s nice to just copy my homework.  I’m more than willing to go out and do the work and bring it to you but it seemed like today at our coffee meeting we had a lot of “yes’s” to the guest question so I’m going to be brainstorming some ideas of who we can have join us soon!

These digital meetings are nice but I won’t lie – I’m missing those cozy coffee shop chocolate croissants! I’m down in Texas right now and we’ve officially moved into phase 3 of reopening.  While lots of places are starting to reopen there are still many wonderful small businesses that need your help to survive. I found a great resource called Help Main Street that you are going to LOVE!  The site aggregates small businesses online and allows you to buy gift cards or order directly from these small business restaurants without going through a third party.

I knew that these delivery services we’ve been using had fees but did you know how much?  These fees go to the service and not the restaurant.  This is the percentage that these services take from your order:

GrubHub – 30-40%

UberEats – 30%

Doordash – 25%

Caviar – 25%

This is why Help Main Street is so great! They just route the traffic so you can order straight from the business taking 0% from the business!  I’ll be using them for my Friday night pizza nights from now on.  You can also follow them on Instagram at @helpmainstreet.

Veronica mentioned helpsmallbusiness.com which I’m going to start using that allows you to purchase gift certificates from small businesses for $15 – $500.  Perfect to stick into a thank you or birthday card!

I know you’ve heard me on this “small business soapbox” plenty of times but I will never get off of it!  Wall Street is going to be fine through all of this but small businesses, we’ve got to band together! I know we talked about bookshop.org a couple weeks ago and this week it’s Help Main Street.

I created my Crisis Course for because of my passion for supporting small businesses.  You can get it for free on LinkedIn Learning or pay $9.95 for it.  I can launch it for free for one day, 24 hours, and I’m still trying to find out when it would be best to do that.  If you didn’t vote on my LinkedIn poll , please do.  I hate the idea of this course not being affordable to some small business that it could help and I want to help in any way I can during this hard time!

Speaking of paying for learning… I have to tell you about a new company that is changing the game for me called Nicklpass.  I try to spend 30-45 minutes a day reading about my industry, business, articles – just LEARNING.  Some times when I’m reading these articles I’ll run into paywalls. I obviously support journalism and I know that they need to make money so I don’t mind paying these fees.

Free news = junk news.

Good content = paywalls.

However, oftentimes, I can’t remember what I’ve subscribed to, what my password or what my username is. Nicklpass is brilliant because you pay them and they source out the payments to all these different platforms.  You have one login and you can read anything! I think they still have a free trial up but if not it’s $12.99 per month and I think it’s totally worth paying for.

I loved Nicklpass so much that I reached out to their founder Sumorwuo Zaza on LinkedIn. Straight up fan mail! I’m not ashamed of sending fan mail! I let him know that I loved his product and was a converted superfan. He replied within 7 minutes letting me know that he had shared it with his team. This entire process took about 5 but it managed to touch not only him but his entire team. So worth my time!

I tend to do this with apps and products but I think I’m going to start doing it with restaurants and places I go to as well.  Right now kind words and support are so needed.  Find a business that you love and send them an email, or a tweet, or slide into their DM’s on Instagram and let them know.  Let’s all try to do this once or twice this week!  Everyone wants to be seen, heard and appreciated.

I did a poll last week asking how everyone was feeling between work, pandemic, protests, EVERYTHING –  over 500+ people took it and the responses were:

Not great – 17%

Just okay – 28%

Good – 35%

Great – 21%

Everyone that answered something other than great means there is room to improve which was 80% of people that took this poll.

How can you play a roll in that improvement?

Can you send some encouraging emails or texts out?

Internally or externally in your company?

I love handwritten notes.  You can even throw in a gift card if you’d like!  Jeffrey mentioned Polk Paper which has custom stationary that I’m now definitely going to use.  Ryan mentioned having 1:1 meetings with your teammates to check in and make sure everyone feels appreciated and encouraged.

I think encouragement is key. For me, I love mentoring and encouraging young people. They are going to change the world! I have the awesome opportunity to partner with Junior Achievement on an interview series next week. The talk is next Wednesday at noon EST I’ll be talking about entrepreneurship and business with Stanley Meytin.  Here’s the link  if you want to pass it along to the young people in your life that are around 15-20 years old whether that’s your kids or nieces and nephews, whoever it might be.

One last thing, generalized emails!  I feel like I’m getting a lot of these during the pandemic. Random emails that say things like “what does your company do?” or “hey, can you help me with this?”. Here are my three suggestions that you can do to avoid sending generalized emails:

1. “Ask three before me” which means ask three people or resources (google, youtube, etc.) before you ask somebody for it.

2. Ask for resources not time. Ask them if there’s a resource you can access which will show you the answer to your question vs a phone call that will take up 30 minutes of their time. Maybe there’s a blog post you missed that would be helpful that they can pass along.

3. What is in it for them? Why would they respond to you? What is your peace offering? There needs to be something in it for them.

When you show people WHY they should care and WHY they should answer you is when they answer the most. It’s been a HUGE key to success for me.

This coffee meeting came at the perfect time this week. A chance to reset, refocus and kick start the race to Friday!

If you’re available, please join me next week by adding our meeting to your calendar!