South Lake Union on Evening Magazine

South Lake Union was featured in several segments on Wednesday's Evening Magazine. We've put them all here, in one handy place for you.

This segment takes you aboard the Virginia V  during the Lake Union Floating Market. Then they stop by Kakao Coffee.



This segment highlights some of the great finds at South Lake Union's Goodwill Store:



This segment has additional highlights from Goodwill:



This segment talks about an animal-inspired workout at Elite Performance Center, and then looks at the delicious food at The Berliner.

Welcome, Josh Watts!

Today's guest blog post is an introduction letter from the SLU Chamber's new part-time administrative assistant, Josh Watts. Welcome, Josh!

Dear SLU Chamber members and friends,

I have just joined the South Lake Union Chamber of Commerce team as a part-time administrative assistant, and I am so excited to be on board! 

I’ve served as an administrative assistant for the Belltown Business Association for the past two years. Applying the skills I’ve gained while helping to promote business and community in Belltown makes me a natural fit for my new position with the SLU Chamber.

I hail all the way from Alabama, finding out that I was born and raised in the Deep South always seems to surprise many!  I attended college in Missouri where one of my majors was Creative Arts including Marketing and Design.  I worked for a educational organization that was very involved in the local Chamber, and I was able to experience from a business perspective, how beneficial that involvement was.

A college friend of mine asked if I would be willing to invest my design and marketing skills, passion for music and natural knack for connecting with people into helping him form a nonprofit. I agreed, and moved to Seattle in 2011, where we formed a church on Capitol Hill. I quickly realized how living in a city suits my personality much better than the Midwest or South! 

I am enthusiastic about serving on the SLU Chamber team, and I’m certain my experience will help to bring an even greater level of effectiveness, focus, and efficiency to our mission.  I’ve already had the privilege of meeting some of our members, and I am looking forward to meeting all of you when I am out and about in South Lake Union.

Cheers,

Josh Watts

SLU Faces & Places - Cuoco

Celebrated restaurateur Tom Douglas has brought the authentic flavors of Northern Italy to South Lake Union with Cuoco.  "Cuoco" translates to "cook" and the dishes on this menu are sure to fire up your appetite. From handmade pastas and artisanal cheeses to gelato and tiramisu, Cuoco is a great stop for a full dinner or simply to satisfy a sweet tooth.

Cuoco also offers intimate pasta making classes where you can learn the art of making fresh, delectable pasta.  You can learn more about those opportunities here.

Prefer to stay out of the kitchen?  Then check out Sunday Suppers Family Style.  Just twenty five dollars per person for a full-on lasagna dinner– what a great deal!  

As things heat up this summer, make sure to sip a prosecco in their outdoor courtyard. Happy hour is 2 - 6 PM,  Monday through Friday and 4:30 - 6:00 PM Saturday and Sunday.

Salute Cuoco!

Using my experience to help save business owners a headache or two.

If you value your business, you should value your business

Steve Parrish, Contributor

At this year’s Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett made a key point all business owners should pay attention to: “If business schools could offer just one course, it would not be on stock trading, the efficient market hypothesis or modern portfolio theory. Rather, B-schools should be encouraging students to learn the boring, but critically important, discipline of business valuation.”

If you already own a business, why would you need this skill? You’d need it only if any of the following apply:

• You may someday retire, sell, or leave your business.
• You might die or become disabled.
• You have key employees or partners whom you’re trying to motivate to be more efficient, productive or otherwise profitable.
• Creditors, predators, or soon-to-be ex-spouses may someday want a piece of your business.

If none of these applies, carry on with your business … after you seek psychological counseling. If some of these do apply, however, consider having your business valued. And, as the Oracle of Omaha stated, learn something about the process yourself. Just because your lawyer drafts your will doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know something about wills, and even though your accountant does your books, you still need to understand financial principles. The same applies to the valuing of your firm. Business valuation is a process done by professionals, but it’s a product the business owner needs to understand.

Valuing a privately held business can be complex, but the overall process can be simply explained. A standard — what I’ll call “baseline” — business valuation seeks to address three basic questions:

1. What is the value of the business’s assets?

2. What is the value to an outside party of the firm’s ongoing business (for example: revenues, profits or brand)?

3. What does the current market look like for similar businesses (comparable sales, what banks are lending on, etc.)?

A business valuation is an amalgam of answers to the above questions. And the valuation will typically be unique to each business, sector and industry.  Consider three simple examples: a farm, a dental practice, and an online retailer.
With a farm, the assets are a primary consideration. How many acres, what farm machinery is in the operation, and what loans are there? Because the end product — the crop — is a commodity, differentiation between one farm and another is difficult to achieve.  So a valuation would look at the hard assets, see what other acreage in the area is selling for, and from these answers, a baseline valuation could be created.

A dental practice involves a combination of earnings and assets intrinsic in the valuation. The practice includes hard assets like chairs and x-ray machines, but it also has a customer base that religiously returns every six months for a cleaning. So a valuation would hone in on the historical profit of the practice and try to project forward how large and loyal the customer base is. The valuation would seek to answer the question: how many months or years of profits could a purchasing dental firm expect to yield from the practice? A look at comparable dental practices in the geographic region would help further refine the process. Add in the value of the hard assets, and — voila! — you have a baseline valuation.

The valuation of an online retailer may be more challenging, but manageable.  Beyond any inventory the retailer owns, the hard assets may be few.  But there are likely two other asset types that need to be considered. One is the kind that goes home at night: the employees who buy, market, and service the accounts. The other asset is the online brand the company has created.

Would an independent buyer find value in leveraging the business’s online presence and reputation?  Finding comparable businesses that sell in cyberspace offers fewer historical examples than farms or dental practices, but a positive feature is that the value of an online business is less likely to be geographically affected. The baseline valuation for an online retailer will probably include the inventory and a capitalization of earnings, revenues, and whatever other key metric is used to value such a business. For example, the business’s growth trend is likely to be a key measure in this kind of industry.

Taking this baseline valuation and massaging it to recognize the unique features of the business, the reason for the valuation, and the timing may that apply is a topic for future articles. But the message is still simple: A business owner should have the business valued, and should understand the principles of the valuation. It seems to have worked well for Warren.

Article provided courtesy of Joe Sievers
Registered Representative
Principal Financial - Washington Business Center
520 Pike St., Ste. 1400
Seattle, WA 98101
206-682-3737 ext. 129
Sievers.Joe@principal.com
Principal.com/Washington

8 Ways to Stay Productive Wearing Multiple Hats

As a small business owner are you constantly in a balancing act juggling activities, tasks, and events each day? Do you ever get to the end of your day and wonder where the time went? Having good time management skills will not only lower your stress level, but also allow you to efficiently and effectively accomplish the tasks associated with the multiple hats you wear as a small business owner.
 
Here are 8 ways to make sure you make the most of your precious time:

1. Start your day by spending 15 minutes planning your to-do list. A to-do list serves as a reference that allows you to stay on task, so you spend more time getting things done instead of trying to recall what you need to do.

 2. Organize your business cards and make it easy to reach out and follow-up with your contacts. Implement a CRM tool if you do not have one yet and it will be even easier to keep track of important details and reminders connected to your contacts.

 3. Follow the “2 minute rule.” If you have a task that can be accomplished in 2 minutes or less (like answering an email or paying a bill), do it right away, rather than put it off for later.

 4. Create an efficient workspace to ensure you can find what you need, when you need it. If items you use often are within easy reach, it will cut down on the time you spend walking back and forth to retrieve supplies.

 5. Schedule blocks of time to return phone calls, read and respond to emails, and be available to your employees. Investing the time to respond and interact allows you to be proactive with your time, rather than reactive and constantly interrupted.

 6. Make the most of apps. Think about a challenge or situation that leads to a loss of your productive time. If you spend a great deal of your time on the road, consider a traffic app that will help you avoid back-ups and delays. Does trying to remember passwords take up your time? Use a password manager app. With a little research you’ll find, “there’s an app for that.”

 7. Manage your social media efficiently by using apps like Hootsuite to provide an easy dashboard-like view of your social media conversations throughout the day. Tools like this enable quick management of your various accounts from a single source. You will be amazed by how much time you save now that you won’t have to log into six different sites each day to see your messages, news, etc.

 8. When possible, delegate tasks or responsibilities that someone else can handle. We can’t always do it all ourselves, so when you need to, ask for assistance.

 

 

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Bowman, President and Productivity Consultant of Innovatively Organized.  She blogs about improving productivity for individuals and businesses at InnovativelyOrganized.com.  If you want Elizabeth to share her tips with you, subscribe to receive her monthly newsletter.

Small business marketing starts with these four steps

Those who manage small businesses (entrepreneurs, Realtors, financial consultants, etc.) don’t have a lot of time for marketing. They have less time for marketing that’s off the mark, inconsistent with their goals, or ineffective at driving results.

And yet, too many small businesses start their marketing with execution. They go right to questions about email newsletters, and social media, and referral groups, and so on. Problem is, without putting these tactics in context, they might not be what you actually need to spend your time doing to deliver sales and customer growth.

Effective small business marketing doesn’t start with the tactics, it starts with purpose and systems. Here are four fundamental up-front requirements that will help any small business accelerate marketing results more quickly.

1. Start with a spreadsheet
How much money do you want to make? How much revenue do you need to get there? How many sales do you need, how many customers, to hit that revenue goal? Then, how big of a pipeline and how many leads do you need to achieve that sales goal?

The start of your marketing plan is a spreadsheet that answers these questions. For a small business owner, it’s metrics-based and income-based. Focus on the outcome, what you want to make this year, and build up the numbers that will get you there. With a very clear picture of what that means, you can move to the next step.

2. Define your target market
If you’re a Realtor, your target market isn’t potential home sellers. It’s probably more specific than just a neighborhood. There are way too many other Realtors out there who are looking for customers in that same neighborhood. How are you different? Is it based on a specific target group (parents, seniors, new home buyers, etc.)? It is based on a specific approach you take (i.e. the Condo King, farm properties, waterfront homes, etc.)?

If you can, quantify this target market. Understand what the universe of prospective customers looks like, and make sure an initially-small market share of those targets (as your customers) will successfully feed your spreadsheet-based income plan.

3. Create upstream offers & value You aren’t going to attract enough prospects by pitching what you sell. You need to translate your understanding of the target market into offers and content that reaches them upstream, well before they’re actively in the market. This is where you can begin to build trust, credibility and preference before any competition is in play.

These offers take many forms. Blog content, buying guides, downloads, videos, anything to attract your prospects to you.

4. Use systems to scale & automate your execution
Invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce.com or Zoho CRM. Get an email marketing system to automate delivery and tracking of your email communication. Create processes for what you’ll do with new leads, old leads, business cards you pick up at events. Determine where your time is best spent and what’s more appropriately outsourced to someone less expensive.

Systems include technology as well as processes, checklists, anything that automates and makes faster/easier the things you need to do daily to operate your business, follow-up with prospects, and move more prospects through he pipeline to closed business.

These steps, of course, are just the beginning. But that’s my point. Before you can execute, before you take anything to market, be prepared. Know why, how much you need, what you’re doing to say, and what you’ll do when they respond.

Then you’re ready.

Today's guest blog post comes from Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing.  Matt Heinz brings more than 15 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations, vertical industries and company sizes. His career has focused on delivering measurable results for his employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty. In 2007, Matt began Heinz Marketing to help clients focus their business on market and customer opportunities, then execute a plan to scale revenue and customer growth. Matt lives in Kirkland, Washington with his wife, Beth, two children and a menagerie of animals (a dog, cat, and six chickens). You can read more from Matt on his blog, Matt on Marketing, follow him on Twitter, or check out his books on Amazon.com.  

SLU Faces & Places: Ryan Crosby

Get to know Ryan Crosby, Community Relations Manager, at the Pan Pacific Hotel, Seattle.   From behavioral therapy with autistic children to retail merchandising, to his current career in hospitality, his professional expertise covers alot of ground.

Tell us something we may not know about the Pan Pacific Hotel?

We participate in the 'Clean the World' program, which collects the partially consumed bars of soap from our guest rooms to be re-sanitized and sent to areas in need. This is great because it keeps this waste from the landfill and also provides a service to underprivileged communities.

Tell us an early SLU memory you have, or how you've witnessed this neighborhood change?

I remember starting at Pan Pacific in September 2008. At that point, the streetcar seemingly served no purpose and there wasn't nearly the same neighborhood feel that you can sense now. The transformation has been rapid and so thorough!

What's your favorite Happy Hour spot in SLU?

Happy Hour at Brave Horse is so fun. Two words: Shuffle board!

SPONSOR A KAYAK and Cleanup SLU on July 5th after the SeaFair Fireworks Show

On the day following the July 4^th Fireworks with SeaFair, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance will be cleaning up the lake, removing firework debris and any other debris we find in partnership with SeaFair.

Did you know that Puget Soundkeeper’s volunteers are out on Lake Union every week?  Soundkeeper cleans your neighborhood more than any other.  We are in kayaks weekly cleaning Lake Union every Wednesday, leaving from Northwest Outdoors Center with a team of volunteers. 

Thank you for your support of our mission to protect and preserve Puget Sound by monitoring, cleaning up, and preventing pollutants from entering its waters.

www.pugetsoundkeeper.org

****DEADLINE TO SPONSOR:  June 25^th, 2013 *****

Time of event 8AM-12PM on July 5, 2013

*You do not need to participate to help us out.  Soundkeeper  volunteers are available to fill any kayaks you sponsor, if you let us know in advance!  Or bring 4 of your employees and have a blast helping your neighborhood.

Sponsor a Kayak! $250

Benefits:

o   Your logo on our sign on July 5^th at Northwest Outdoors Center

o   Link to your website from Soundkeeper website

o   Recognition in our E-Newsletter

o   4 spots kayaking in double kayaks or on a support boat assisting the kayaks.

o   Special invitation to our Virginia V Jazz Cruise in December