Small Office, Home Office Information

I was listening to on of Brendon Sinclairs podcasts over on Tailored Podcast a few minutes ago and he was interviewing a web developer who is running a very successfull small business.

His philosophy is:

You will never make a fortune selling your own time but you will make one selling other people’s time”

It’s certainly something to think about isn’t it?

Actually, from a small business or even home office point of view the whole podcast is worth listening to. Follow the link and look for #35 Brendon Sinclair’s Business Mix - 15 May ‘06 - Secrets of a Successful Web Development Business.

If you run a small business or home office how easy is it for your customers to do business with you?

Is the buying process easy or do you make your customers jump through hoops?

Can you customers contact your business or are you hard to find?

Are you out there in the market place or do you hide away and wonder why no one finds you?

One blogger in Melbourne learned some important lessons from an umbrella salesman yesterday.

Every small business could learn something from this umbrella salesman.

Skype is perhaps the best known provider of free Internet based phone calls - a service that I use. Skype has also given users the ability to call ordinary landline and mobile numbers from the computer but there has always been a charge for the cost of those calls.

However, in challenge to their competitors, Skype has now announced that all US and Canadian based Skype users can now make calls to landline and mobile numbers within North America for free until the end of the year.

Have you every lost control of your browser - been taken somewhere you really didn’t want to go on the Net, suddenly been deluged with pop-ups and other garbage that you never asked for?

It’s something that can happen to anyone who uses the Internet and it really doesn’t matter whether you’re a home user or a small business. You can pick up those nasty little programs in lots of places that you might consider as safe to surf.

You can even pick them up on search engines - and in the paid advertising - and Google is one of the least safe search engines if you want to avoid that garbage.

A division of McAfee has produced an interesting report - The Safety of Internet Search Engines - follow the link to read some very interesting findings.

I saw an interesting report today that said that if a pandemic hit the US and people were forced to stay home the Government could continue to function if public servants worked from home. In other words, if public servants were allowed to telecommute the USA could survive.

Unfortunately the US Government is not set up to cope with telecommuting.

We learned an interesting safety lesson today and it’s one that every small business should be aware of.

Here in Australia small business and home office people are allowed a tax deduction for equipment and furnishings used for the business. We’re allowed to replace that equipment every so often so it can be quite economical to regularly replace such things as office chairs and small appliances that get a lot of use.

In fact, because they are tax deductable there really are few valid reasons for keeping them for more than a few years.

Today we learned a lesson about replacing equipment that might not always be visible because equipment doesn’t last forever.

Because we live in an area where there are plenty of thunderstorms and power surges all our computers and monitors are plugged into heavy duty surge protectors. They sit out of site under our desks and it’s easy to forget them - so easy in fact that the ones under my desk were almost three years old.

Today one failed … while we were out. There were no problems with power surges or storms, it just began to malfunction and finally shut down the computers. When we got home we presumed that there had been a power surge and so I started the computers and monitors on my desk as soon as I found that they were off.

They ran for about two minutes and shut down again and wouldn’t restart. So I stuck my head under the desk to make sure there were no loose connections - and that’s when I could smell that something wasn’t right. I could smell quite a distinct burnt smell and I finally traced it back to one of the the surge protectors.

As I write this there are two new surge protectors under the desk and the old ones are out in the garbage. From now on we’ll be replacing our surge protectors every two years - whether they need replacing or not. It wouldn’t have taken much for the faulty protector to go up in flames.

For all you small business and home office people who would love to get out and exercise but can’t leave the phone there is now now excuse.

Nokia has released the Nokia 5500 Sport phone that serves as a phone and a monitor to keep track of your work-out.

You can read more about the Nokia Sports Phone by following the link

We’ve just had a phone call from the Design business that claimed we still owed them money for a job done months ago and they apologiesed. They claimed that their business had grown so much that their book keeping skills hadn’t been able to keep up with the growth.

A nice excuse but we were one of their first customers and excuses are just reasons not to deal with a business.

Am I pissed off - you bet!

Silly me had my mobile phone switched off all day because I forgot to turn it on this morning - a fairly rare occurrence but it does happen.

When I turned back on tonight there were a number of messages including a rather terse:

“Hello this is xxxx from xxxx Design call me about your overdue account.”

So it was my turn to call back and leave a message.

“Hello, this is Stuart, you called me this afternoon about an account you say is overdue. The only business we have done with you was some business cards months ago. Unfortunately we paid cash when we picked up the cards and you subsequently mailed us a receipt so please check your records.

“We were about to order some more work from you but now we won’t. We’ll take our business elsewhere.”

And we we really did intend to order more work including the artwork for a major decal job on a car. And we really do now intend to take our business elsewhere.

In those intervening months between getting the receipt in the mail and getting the phone call we had heard not one peep from them. There were no gentle reminders mailed to us even though they had our mailing address. There were no gentle reminders phoned to us absolutely dead silence until months later they suddenly think we didn’t pay the account so they’re going to get tough.

No small business goes through life without running into a problem with unpaid bills. Sometimes you’re going to run into professional debtors and you will really have to get tough with them to get your money.

Sometimes you will have customers who will genuinely forget to pay and you need to gently remind them.

Sometimes your accounts are going to be screwed up and you are going to demand payment from people who have already paid.

Knowing how to handle the situation in each instance is going to mean the difference between keeping and losing business and when you’re the new kid on the graphic designer block that already has some very established and respected designers and you live and work in a town of just 50,000 souls you’re going to want to keep as many customers as you can.

Grrrrr

Is this just me or do other small business people have the same problem?

I spent the last two and a bit days of last week working on a major project for a client. It was intensive work that was on a tight deadline and, even though the timing was tight, I got the work finished on time. It was also very dull and boring work.

Since then I really haven’t been able to concentrate on much at all. We took most of Saturday off, travelled out of town on Sunday to places like this:

and since then I just can’t seem to settle back into a serious work routine.

If anyone else has had that experience I would love to hear what you did to get yourself back to work.