Small Office, Home Office Information

I had an article I submitted to an article site rejected today due to spelling errors.

Oh the shame, me, a professional writer rejected because I couldn’t spell!

Initially I couldn’t believe what I was reading because I really had gone over the article carefully. It was something that I was submitting to an article site so that my writing could get more exposure and so I wanted it to be as near perfect as I could get it.

Then I read beyond the initial comment about the spelling errors and noticed that the site only takes submissions if American spelling is used.

At first I was angry, then I was incredulous; they were getting my article for free, to use in any way they wanted and yet they had problems with my spelling?

Now I’m just laughing at the stupidity of whoever decided that only articles written in American english would be accepted. I’m laughing because it doesn’t reflect on my writing or my ability to spell, it actually reflects on their inability to accept the fact that they are dealing with the world and the world is a far bigger place than the United States.

You see, there are more Internet users in the rest of the world than there are in just the United States. From memory there are something like 100 million more Internet users in the rest of the world than there are in the United States.

There are more people on high speed Internet connections in the rest of the world than there are in the United States and people in the rest of the world are just as likely to read my articles as people in the United States.

But here we have someone who is presenting their site to the world but they are uncomfortable with anything that is not written in American english and they want the rest of the world to conform to their view of the world.

People, if you want to take your business to the world by having a website that deals with people around the world then you have to be prepared to take your clients as they are and not as you want to make them.

Why should little things such as the way we spell words like favour (the English english spelling of the word) get in the way of doing business - especially where it is a business deal where we are giving you more than you are giving us?

Well I’ve really slacked off in here over the weekend … or so it may seem. But what has actually been happening is that we’re regaining our focus. The Army might call it regrouping before the next offensive and personally I like that analogy.

If you’ve been with us over the last few days you would have seen the challenges that we were facing and you would have seen our determination not to go under or go backwards. I’m going to talk about that more through this coming week because it’s vitally important and it is something that nearly every small business is going to be confronted with. How you face that challenge will determine whether or not you survive, burn out or even implode.

But until I can take a break from what we’re doing let me ask you just one quick question: Do you really want your business to grow?

And if you haven’t read it before then you really should read The E-Myth Revisited before your business gets to be too much for you to handle anymore.

Even if you don’t use our link to get there you really must go to Amazon (or any other bookstore) and buy and read this book. It really is that important to the survival of your business.

If, like me, you use Skype then you should be warned there has been some critical flaws uncovered in a recent version of the programme. They actually came to light yesterday and were quickly fixed.

So perhaps you should pop along to the official website and see if you are one of those that needs to download the security patches.
small business

Back on Wednesday I talked about the point that we had reached with our business and admitted that we had realised that the business was running us and not us running the business. You will find that post here.

In that post I mentioned that we were going to sit down and have a business meeting to work out some ways of reclaiming what we felt we had lost and we had that business meeting over several cups of coffee yesterday.

We divided a page in a notebook into four sections and labelled the sections:

What/Who We Want to Keep

What/Who We Want to Ditch

What We Want to Change

What We Want to Add

The meeting went really well and was quite productive but perhaps not quite in the way we wanted.

By the time we had finished the ‘keep’ section contained most of the names of the people/things we already do.

What we want to ditch listed just one name of a business we no longer want to work for - and we had actually stopped working for them several weeks ago.

What we want to add now lists quite a few new things that we want to do and what we wanted to change also holds a few entries.

When you think about it what we ended up with was not quite what we set out to achieve - in fact we’re not quite sure where all those new ideas came from … but that is often the way our business meetings go. We did decide to think about it some more and have another business meeting over coffee on Saturday.

This time though I’m not going to take the ‘What We Want to Add’ list with me. If I did that who knows how much more we could add to it.

But, looking back on yesterday, I was quite interested to note that by dinner time last night we had both achieved a whole lot more than we had in any other day this week and we had both cleaned up some old jobs that had been hanging around and were really getting us down.

small business

Well it’s almost 9am here in the office and I’m getting down to some serious work. Not that I haven’t been working already but that was just some reading and a business meeting down at our favourite cafe.

Now I’m down to the serious part of the day. I’ve got articles to write, a resume to put together for a friend who wants to change his employment, and a website to finish work on as well. And of course, I’m doing all that here in sub-tropical Queensland where the weather beautifully warm.

Because I’m self employed I can sit here with the window open, the breeze coming in and I don’t have to wear anything but a pair of shorts.

It all sounds like heaven doesn’t it?

But of course, if you read yesterday’s post you will know that heaven kind of slipped away from us and the business has been running us rather than us running the business.

So today I want to ask you, why did you start a small business?

Michael Gerber in his book - The E-myth Revisited - suggestst that:

The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

“The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before. So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life.”

How does that fit with where you’re at in the life of your small business?

small business

Early yesterday morning I stood at the back door of our house and watched a major electrical storm slowly move across the town. At times like that we usually shut the computers down and unplug them from the power sockets and work on our laptops.

But yesterday I just couldn’t bring myself to fire up the laptop - I seriously had lost my enthusiasm.

Toni wandered out of her office to see what I was doing and saw me standing there and asked her usual question:

“Watcha thinking?

“I’m just standing here composing my letter of resignation.” And I was … seriously.

I was standing there mentally writing a letter to myself explaining why I wanted to resign.

You see, over the last few months there has been a subtle shift in our business. We are no longer running our business - our business is running us and it is an absolute mongrel of a taskmaster.

By sheer coincidence a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and the day before yesterday I actually got as far as reading the Introduction and I began to see that what has happened to our business … and the way I was feeling was not unique. Lots of people come to the same point that I had reached - and Toni had reached it too.

We had reached that point, not in the way that many small businesses do, but because several key writers had decided to quite and left us with unfinished projects that we have to complete. But regardless of why we had reached that point there was no doubt that we were on the brink of closing up shop.

We were sick of working long long hours every day of every week with very little light at the end of the tunnel.

Funnily enough, we had always known that this point could arise but several months back we had thought that we had managed to avoid that situation. We had begun to take weekends off and life looked pretty good. Unfortunately the wheel fell off and we got stuck.

However, that letter of resignation I was writing - and Toni was thinking about - got trashed yesterday morning. We’ve been down before and we’re damned if we are going to be beaten.

We decided to spend a couple of days thinking about where we want the business to go and how we want it to get there. We’re going to look at ways of reducing our dependence on outside writers (I can tell you that it’s a bit like herding cats) and at the same time increase our cash flow.

We’re going to actually look at doing something that we never ever thought we would do - and that’s dismiss some clients. There are a couple of regulars that have begun to let their accounts go unpaid and that’s affecting our ability to pay our accounts.

And tomorrow we’re going to sit down and over a coffee at our favourite cafe and have a brainstorming session. We want to recover that enthusiasm that we had for our business when we began and we’re not going to accept our resignations.

We’re a big fan of the old pop group - The Doors - and baby … no one gets out of our business alive!

As Toni said yesterday in a column she writes for another place - “I think we just declared war on ourselves”

And if you’re in a similar situation to us then stay tuned and get your own copy of The E-Myth Revisited - you might find it as much help as we are finding it.

Many small businesses tend to be afraid of dealing with professionals when it comes to developing a strategy to promote their businesses.

Many seem to think that an advertising campaign on the television is all that is necessary or perhaps a website will get things moving. Maybe a few ads in the local newspaper will bring in some business.

And all those options can work and you can achieve your goal of getting more customers coming through the front door of your business but it would be a bad mistake to assume that any of those options work well as a stand-alone approach.

Television advertising is fine but it needs to be followed up or augmented with other forms of promotional activities too. Last Saturday I talked about Going Beyond Advertising and mentioned that Toni and I were having breakfast with a friend to help him look at ways he could augment a small television advertising campaign that will soon be happening.

That get-together certainly gave him things to think about but one thing that was very obvious was that getting something up and running to operate in conjunction with those television ads is not going to be easy. He didn’t plan for them, he looked at the television ads as being a stand-alone option and didn’t realise that, for the best impact, he needed to have other options in play at the same time.

And that is the key to what I am trying to say here. If you want to advertise and promote your small business you need to have an approach that includes a variety of advertising and promotional tools. Of course the local television station is only going to talk to you about advertising on television, it isn’t interested in advertising in the paper or anywhere else.

But you need to be aware of those other options and you need to have a strategy in place that will involve those other options and you need to allow time to get all those options in place and ready for use.

It’s no use signing up for some television ads and then suddenly wondering about what else you can do when the televison ads are going to air in just a few days. You need to plan well in advance and allow plenty of time to get everything ready.

You might even need to have someone write a creative brief for you. Now don’t be scared by a term like that. Instead wander over to Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings and read what he has to say about the subject.

You will find that what he has to say is very informative and it will certainly demystify the whole process for you. Pay particular attention to this part of what he says because it really is the key to launching an effective advertsising campaign.

The first draft is never the best draft. Nor the second. As a result, copywriters need to be given sufficient warning of an upcoming job and be provided with enough time to do the job well.

As a copywriter who seldom gets enough time or enough information to do the job correctly all I can say to that is:

‘Hell Yeah!’

small business

It’s easy to sit here and right the pieces for this blog. Even though I’m writing about things that Toni and I have experienced there is a certain disconnect … the things I’m writing about are in the past … they’re over and done with … we have faced the challenges, dealth with them, come to a conclusion and have moved on.

But now I find myself wanting to write about something that is current … it’s happening now … we’re wrestling with the problem now … we don’t have a position on it … and it is something that we are very uncomfortable with.

Let me try and explain. There is another small business here in town that is involved in providing computers for its clients. The clients are always under the impression that the computers are built by this small business but in fact they are not. Instead they are built by another small business here in town that belongs to a friend of ours.

Our friend builds the machines and charges the other business the same figure he would charge if he were selling the machine to a private individual. The other business then adds on as much as 50% and that is the amount their customer pays for the computer.

Well … that may not bother you but it doesn’t sit well with me even though it is free enterprise and all that stuff. Up to this point Toni and I are not involved but now one of the clients of that small business wants quite an extensive web site developed and the small business has come to us.

They want to operate under the same conditions as they do with our friend. They want to appear as though it is them building the site even though it would be us doing the work. They want us to keep the price down so that they can add on a sizeable amount for themselves.

They want us to remain in the background and have no contact with the client.

Now of course, when you’re building a website the very first person you want to talk to is the client. You need to get inside his head and find out what he is thinking and where he wants the site to go - so not talking to the client is not an option.

And we have been quite clear about that. No contact with the client means we don’t want the job but even if we do get access to the client there are still other ethical questions that we need to deal with.

Perhaps I’ve just been thinking out aloud here but if you want to add your thoughts please feel free to do so.

small business

In case you didn’t get the memo - or you suffer from mushroom syndrome (you’re always kept in the dark and everyone feeds you a load of cow manure) - let me tell you that email turned 34 this month.

And if you want to read more about it - along with a whole pile of propoganda for Gmail (something that I use and have no hassle endorsing) then you can read the story here

I’ve just been reading a very interesting piece about bank fraud and how it almost brought the British banking system to it’s knees. If you want to read something really scary you will find it here.

While the article didn’t have a lot to do directly with small business and home based business survival I did find an interesting reference buried in it that does have a lot of relevance for us.

What is your MTBU?

What is your maximum time to belly up?

That is a term that was coined Donn Parker of the Stanford Research Institute. He found that a business that relied on computers for their cash flow fell into catastrophic collapse if those computers were unavailabe or unusable for a period of time.

But it seems to me that any small business or home based business is vulnerable in many areas and it would be prudent for us to be able to identify those areas tat affect our particualr and establish a MTBU.

Why do we need to do that?

Because when something goes wrong we then know just how important that particular problem is to our business and hopefully we will have some contingency plans in place to deal with that problem.

Those problems don’t only apply to computers either. What’s you’re MTBU if several of your clients fail to pay you on time? What’s you’re MTBU if you should fall ill? What’s your MTBU if a major piece of equipment should fail?

Those are just a few of the things that you should be looking at.