Small Office, Home Office Information

Today I had to research and write a short piece for another online publication about Mesothelioma. That’s the disease otherwise known as Asbestosis.

One of the scariest things I found about this disease is that it’s not just related to people who have working in the asbestos industry. It can affect you and me too and so I’m re-publishing the piece I wrote here for your information.

Asbestos was a common-as-grass building material not all that long ago so it is probably in the houses and offices across the world and as it degrades it has the potential to affect a huge proportion of the population.

“Mesothelioma is described in Wikipedia as an “uncommon form of cancer”; unfortunately whoever wrote that may soon want to rewrite that brief description because the disease is very definitely on the increase.

The Queensland Asbestos Related Disease Support Society is currently gaining up to 10 new members every week. When the society was first formed in 1992 there were 35 members, today the membership stands at 620 despite the grim fact that around 60 members die every year.

Mesothelioma is a malignant form of cancer that develops in the mesothelium. The mesothelium is the protective lining that covers most of the body’s internal organs and mesothelioma attacks that lining.

The most common points of attack are the outer linings of the lungs and chest cavity all though it may also occur in other parts of the body including the lining of the abdominal cavity and the sac around the heart.

Mesothelioma is caused by the inhalation of asbestos particles that ultimately lodge in the lungs. The effects are usually not immediate and the disease can lay dormant for many years.

Most people who develop mesothelioma have had some prolonged exposure to asbestos. It is extremely common in people who have worked in asbestos mines and in their families. It is also becoming more common in people who have been involved in home renovations where asbestos products such as early forms of fibro and early forms of insulation have been disturbed.

But it is not limited to just those people. Anyone who has any contact with asbestos fibers can succumb to the disease because it takes just one fiber to start the ball rolling. There is even a case here in Queensland of a school teacher contracting the disease from asbestos dust that settled on the desks of her classroom after the school roof began to degrade.

Unfortunately short term exposure to asbestos fibers is no guarantee that the disease won’t develop and more and more relatively young people are beginning to be afflicted by the disease.

Diagnosis of mesothelioma is not easy because the symptoms that many display are similar those produced by a number of other conditions. Ultimately a biopsy is needed to confirm a diagnosis of mesothelioma.

Treatment of mesothelioma is not well advanced and traditional methods used in treating other forms of cancer have proved ineffective. Once the symptoms of mesothelioma manifest themselves the disease quickly develops and long-term survival is not common.

Queensland Workcover chairman, Ian Brusasco, admits that the average life expectancy for a person who develops the disease is 163 days from diagnosis till death.

Fortunately there have been some small developments in treatment therapy recently but the disease is still considered to be incurable.

Perhaps the scariest thing about the disease is that many people are either completely ignorant of the dangers or they simply don’t care. Earlier this year a complete but badly degraded asbestos roof was removed from a house in Cypress Street. Neighbours and the occupants of the house were not warned and the contractor and his crew took no precautionary measures and wore no protective clothing.

There are already several Mesothelioma sufferers here in Hervey Bay and now, thanks to that work, there could be many more in the future.”

Apple have just released their latest desktop computer - the iMac G5. It comes in two versions - 17 inch or 20 inch and what you see is what you get. There’s nothing else to this computer so it’s not going to hog a lot of space on your desk top.

The features of the iMac G5 include:

1.9GHz or 2.1GHz processor

a new PCI-Express ATI Radeon X600 Pro or XY grahics processor

128MB of dedicated video memory

OS X Tiger operating system

pre-installed AirPort Extreme Card for wireless connectivity

It also comes with USB2.0 and Firewall 400 ports, composite and S-video outputs, audio in and out so you can connect almost everything from cameras to extra hard drives to this computer.

You can find more information and have an online demo here

There’s good news for small businesses that work online and rely on instant messaging systems for communication.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that their systems will work together from the second quarter of 2006.

Today Toni and I spent an interesting couple of hours helping a friend prepare for the shooting of a television commercial for his computer business. We tidied up and rearranged. We moved things around in the shop to place more emphasis on certain products and we generally set out to make the place look more appealing. We even adjusted a few things to add some branding for the name of the business.

And then we stood at the entrance customers use and took another critical look at the shop. After that we decided that there was a lot more that could be done to improve the general look and feel of the business.

Now don’t get me wrong, our friend’s business isn’t in trouble. He is a very talented computer technician who has developed a great reputation in town for the quality of his workmanship.

But now, through the television advertising he hopes to attract clients who are looking for more than just computer repairs. He wants to attract people who are looking to buy complete systems and he knows that will put him into direct competition with the big department stores in the district.

That means that he has to start changing the look of his shop from that of a repair shop, where you might expect things to be less tidy, to the more slick presentation that you might expect from a store that sells good quality computer systems.

That look and the immediate impact it has on potential customers starts at the front door and should be increased the further a customer moves into the shop.

So what impression do customers get when they walk into your business?

And what are you doing in your small business to increase your branding potential?

Perhaps you might like to share some of your ideas here.

If you’re reading this you will undoubtedly have heard of Google, that massive search engine that has tentacles reaching out to every part of the globe. Tales of the wealth amassed by the two founders of Google is almost the stuff of legend but just how big is Google in dollar terms?

Well to give you some idea let’s compare Google’s stock market value to that of a country. When we do that we find that, since April, Google has been worth more than the value of all the companies listed on Indonesia’s entire stockmarket.

For some interesting comments by a senior anaylist from Merril Lynch spend a few moments reading this story in Brisbane’s Courier Mail - it certainly puts it all into perspective.

Spending money on marketing and getting value for the money spent can be very hard for any small business. It’s easy to spend a lot on glossy television ads and print ads that can bring in very little in the way of additional business.

But almost every small business has an incredible advertising tool at hand that they constantly over-look. It isn’t big, it isn’t expensive but it can be very powerful and most of us already have them made.

They are our business cards. That little bit of coloured card can be a very powerful tool indeed. Of course handing them out where ever you go or including them in all your correspondence is one way of distributing your business card. You can also do a deal with other businesses to display some of your cards on their shop counters.

That will bring you some business but there are other ways to use them to bring in business. I heard a story some months ago now of one guy who found a different way to use his business card to bring in more business.

When he is out and about he leaves his business card every where. He drops them in elevators, he slips them into the edges of mirrors in washrooms and he leaves one on the seat of any taxi he uses. Every where he goes he drops his card.

At first he was amazed at how much business it brought in and thought that it might have just been a surge in business that would fade away. But he kept up dropping those cards and the business kept on coming.

Will it work for you? I guess you won’t know till you try it and, when you consider how little a box of business cards cost to have designed and printed, it has to be a cheapest forms of advertising that any small business can have.

Where can you leave your business card so that you can get your small business in front of the eyes of people that are likely to buy your product?

Have you ever wondered about trying to ‘brand’ your small business?

It’s certainly important for the big end of town and they spend millions of dollars on achieving brand recognition with consumers but does it work and is it important for small business?

There are some who suggest that it does and I found an interesting piece about 8 reasons for branding here thanks to Martin’s Home Office Voice.

Branding may be important for small business and home based business too but for branding to be really effective it’s still important to factors right first.

Well it certainly seems to be that way here in Australia where Internet job ad growth has continued for the fifth straight month.

The Olivier Internet Job Index shows that there were over 185,000 positions vacant advertisements in the commercial sector in September. The biggest growth was in the engineering and mining sector while the biggest fall was in the transport sector.

Figures like that are a valuable indicator for small business.

How are you feeling right now? Do you feel that your energy levels are high and your full of enthusiasm to tackle the next job on today’s agenda?

Or are you feeling tired, lethargic, overwhelmed with work and struggling with the stress of survival?

Sooner or later every small business person begins to run out of puff and finds that those wonderful feelings of enthusiasm and energy have slipped away. In fact those feelings are something that you can face time and again. Toni and I have certainly faced it and we’re facing it again just now.

And we’re facing it again because we stopped doing something that we once did every day. We have let the pressure of work interfere with those things that can recharge our batteries and help us keep functioning at our peak levels.

No we haven’t stopped eating healthy foods or sleeping for reasonable periods of time each 24 hours. Thankfully we’ve maintained those good habits but we have let our exercise regime slip and we have stopped taking time off for ourselves.

And those things are important in helping us … and you … maintain your enthusiasm and energy levels.

Even though your busy and there is more work pouring in all the time you still have to exercise and take time out. A couple of months ago we would walk every day and we would also take time off on a Monday. But we let the pressure of work get in the way and our personal habits changed. We hardly walk now and we no longer take a day off.

We’re paying the penalty right now and all we can do is urge you to learn from our experience. Exercise daily - even just a walk before you start work can be enough, take time out and get away from work. Shut the door on your office and spend a few hours every week doing something that has no bearing on work at all.

And start doing it now - tomorrow could be too late.

The Dalai Lama once said “I have so much to do today, I will need to meditate twice as long.”

I came across an interesting statistic earlier today. There are now over 750,000 people who make either a full time or part time living from selling on eBay.

I’d really like to try my hand at eBay but what to sell?

I doubt there is much of a market for navel fluff