Small Office, Home Office Information

Do you ever need to show somebody the location of your small business or perhaps show someone where certain points of interest are located?

That was something I needed a map for the other day and while I was wondering how I would do it I stumbled across this handy little free tool. You will find it at Quikmaps and it allows you to place markers on a map and then save the map and refer others to it.

We know a family who is moving out from England in a few weeks and we needed to show them where the high schools were in town and where a couple of houses that they were interested in where located. It only took me a few minutes with this tool.

We live in a beautiful town right on the beach in sub-tropical Queensland. Over the years this has become a mecca for tourists and now the developers are moving in and small businesses are beginning to feel the effects.

Obviously small businesses that cater for the tourist industry are going to benefit but there are a lot of small business people here in town who are beginning to suffer.

Those small business people are the ones who cater for the local residents. Computer shops, hair dressers and other small businesses that tourists aren’t interested in are the ones that are being effected here. While the number of customers coming through their doors is remaining constant their rents are skyrocketing.

For some it’s even worse as developers move in and buy up the complex that they have traded from for years. Those complexes are being developed into tourist accommodation and so the small businesses who did trade from those places are having trouble finding new premises to trade from and if they do find new premises the rents have often doubled and even tripled.

If you are looking for some tips on writing for your small business - whether it’s for your website, blog or even a press release - you might find the tips that you will find at 9 + 1 Things Every /Reader Wants from a Writer to be of great assistance.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re sitting in your office working hard at waking up first thing in the morning and your wife appears in the doorway and announces

“Nagging is the repitition of unpalatable truths”

and then departs for the day?

I believe it’s a quote by Baroness Edith Summerskill and I know thatI will never draw my wife’s attention to a book entitled “Women’s Wit and Wisdom” again - I still can’t think of a suitable response to that one.

While all the hassle has been going on with the non-happening site design Toni and I have begun to seriously look at a logo for our small business.

We have had one that has appeared on our rarely used letterhead but that was one of those logos that anyone could use. Now we are beginning to think that we need a logo that’s particularly ‘us’ so we’re letting our minds wander in that direction.

While doing that I’ve come across several interesting logo related posts on a couple of blogs.

Did you ever wonder where Nike got their logo? If you haven’t read the story before you will be amazed. You can read it here in a thread titled ‘The Mysterious Power of Context’.

You will also find an interesting quote in there about logos:

A good logo, according to Paul Rand, provides the “pleasure of recognition and the promise of meaning.” The promise, of course, is only fulfilled over time. “It is only by association with a product, a service, a business, or a corporation that a logo takes on any real meaning,” Rand wrote in 1991. “It derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes.”

Logos - just one more thing for the small business person to think about

It’s now Sunday morning and on Friday morning, while I was writing the last update on this subject Toni was sending them an email pointing out that they had now reached the limit of the time we had allowed for this part of the project and asking them to respond to let her know what was happening.

All that happened was a deathly silence. Monday morning they’re fired

Here is an update on a post I made last Friday titled A Small Business Excursion Into the World of Small Business Web Design.

Just to recap, Toni wants to launch a new website but we don’t have time at the moment to spend designing it so we decided to go to a local web design company and my initial impressions were fairly pessimistic.

A week later and I am even more pessimistic. We did tell them that we wanted to move fairly quickly on this project and so the designs were quite simple. We also explained to them the concept behind the site and the look and feel we wanted for the site.

They did send us the first rough drafts but they were really bad.

So Toni emailed them and made some fairly pointed comments and some suggestions. They didn’t get the email. So we sent it again … they didn’t get the email. So we sent it again to several different addresses and this time they did get the email.

It’s now Friday morning - a week since my last post about this - and we haven’t heard from them.

Sometimes I really get frustrated by people who can walk the walk and talk the talk but can’t produce the goods.

I wonder what they thought we meant when we said that we wanted to move quickly on this?

Updating this story from yesterday.

It does seem that our favourite office supplier does have protocols in place to deal with the situation that arose when Toni paid via bank transfer and they then needed to replace the goods.

It’s just that no-one had bothered to tell the staff that deal with customers what those protocols were. The replacement bookcase will be shipped without any need for a second payment.

Do the staff in your small business know everything that they need to know to provide good customer service?

Does your small business have protocols in place to deal with problems when they arise?

We’ve just found a major office supplier here in our country that doesn’t have one to cover the problem that has arisen with goods that we just purchased.

We ordered a bookcase earlier in the week to be delivered as a flat pack by courier and Toni paid for it by direct deposit into their bank account.

The bookcase arrived and I began to assemble it only to find that one side of the case was damaged and could not be used.

The office supply company promises to replace damaged stock if they are notified of the damage within three days of delivery so we contacted them.

After some uncertainty on their part they decided to ship another flat pack - when it arrives I’m to take out the corresponding part to the damaged one - place the damaged part in the replacement pack and then the courier will return it to the warehouse.

No problem so far - but now they want to charge us for the second flat pack. Of course, they promise to refund the money as soon as the damaged part arrives at their warehouse.

That’s where the problem arises - how can they refund anything when the original payment was via direct deposit? Even they admit that could be a problem and now they have gone away to think about it?

I’m sure I saw steam coming out of Toni’s ears when I went into her office a few minutes ago. She’s threatening to stop dealing with them … and they used to be her favourite office supplier before this happened.

The northern summer has been known for quite some time as a period each year when the Internet seems to slow down. Traffic drops as people spend more time outdoors and away from their computers, sales drop off and online businesses take a vacation.

Of course summer is the time when savvy Internet marketers build for winter and so while business slows for others we are usually rather busy at this time of year. This year it seems that we are being taught a new meaning of the word ‘busy’.

We’re only a few weeks into summer and already we are already beginning to turn work away simply because our people are already stretched to the limit. This week I’ve had two major orders to deal with that have kept me chained to the desk since Sunday.

Fortunately I managed to get one of them finished last night and even though the other one isn’t finished I can come up for some air today.

One of the biggest problems our small business faces is a lack of people who are prepared to actually work. The longer I work in the freelance writing side of the industry the more I think that many people like to claim the mantle of being a freelance writer but few are prepared for the hard work that comes with the title.

This afternoon I’m off to speak to the local Arts Council Writers’ Group - they describe themselves as ’scribes’ while I consider myself a scribbler - it should be an interesting experience

And before I dive back into some work let me leave you with a link to a very very interesting and thoughtful post on the SEOmoz Blog. Many of us who dabble in optimising our sites for search engines have found that, in the past, each of the big three have needed different techniques to get our pages to rank well. But Michael Martinez thinks those times are changing.

‘X-Ranks: The shaping battle of quality methodologies’ makes for some interesting reading.