Small Office, Home Office Information

Earlier today I wrote about making the buying experience so easy that your prospective customer couldn’t help but buy from you and I mentioned the two shops advertising generators.

Well I’ve now been to the shop that had it’s street address in the advertising brochure and I had an interesting experience.

The shop was a small business and I obviously was speaking to the owner. I told him that I was interested in a generator to power our computers during blackouts and he showed me the range of generators they had on display.

At first he showed me a relatively cheap model that would certainly do the job I wanted it to do but he recommended a much more expensive model. However I was more impressed by the price point for the cheaper model than by anything he was telling me about the more expensive one.

Then he asked me what other things I considered important about the generator I wanted to buy and I told him that it needed to be quiet. I didn’t want to annoy the neighbours.

So we discussed decibels - the unit of measurement for noise - and I asked him to translate decibels into layman’s language. He did better than that, he showed me by starting the cheap model - it was deafening in the confined space of the shop and even outside would have sounded like a lawn mower stuck in overdrive.

Then he started the much more expensive model and while it ran he gave me a rundown on some of its other features. He spoke in a normal voice and even I - with my reduced hearing - could hear him and understand him with no trouble at all.

From that point on he had a sale of a generator that was over twice as much as I had intended to spend.

I’ll let you draw your lessons for your small business from that encounter.

Consumers, clients, customers, prospects … whatever you call the people who walk through the front door of your business to put money in your pocket are fickle. With so many alternatives when it comes to where they do their business they are always just one step away from goodbye as far as you are concerned.

So you need to make every step in the business chain so easy that they just can’t help but do business with you.

Just lately I’ve been noticing a tendency for some businesses to make things a little less than easy.

There’s a computer shop here in town that advertises in the newspaper and displays it’s URL and telephone number but no street address.

1. What about the people who may want to buy their first computer and so can’t access the URL?

2. What about the people who are unable to make phone calls during normal business hours but could race down to the shop during their lunch break?

We’re in the market for a generator and by chance two pieces of junk mail arrived in our letter box advertising generators. One ad was from a well-known national chain of stores and the brochure only gave a phone number. Unfortunately I can’t remember where their store is in town.

The other was from a less well-known store here in town but they brochure listed their street address - guess which store I’m heading for this morning.

Make life easy for people and they will do business with you - put speed humps in their path and they’ll go somewhere else.

Now if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you will have seen me talking about various marketing strategies for small business and home office based businesses. It’s something that Toni and I have been involved in for some time but we’ve never really had a look at the way the big end of town does their marketing.

Well that changed earlier this month when we were invited to the release of McKenna - a new bourbon new to Australia. The marketing company wanted to create some buzz amongst bloggers here in Queensland and another well-known blogger suggested that Toni and I should be among those targeted.

Unfortunately, due to a mix up, we weren’t able to attend the official McKenna release party but we were kept in the loop with promotional material we could use on the site and two gift packs.

The promotional material was delivered via email in a .ppt file. Neither of us have Power Point installed so that was a bit of a waste.

Then the gift packs arrived yesterday. The cap was nice but there was no way it would fit my head (heck even the Army had to hunt around to find a hat big enough for me when I enlisted).

The t-shirt fitted me like a glove but Toni’s … well … at least she was flattered

And then there was the McKenna bourbon and cola … smooth … not overpowering … and didn’t leave a lingering taste in your mouth … and definitely worth buying again.

I guess the lesson here is that the associated fluff can be nice but when you have a great product you have to make sure that it can speak for itself. Toni can’t wait for it to appear in a bottle shop in Hervey Bay.

Thanks to Paul Francis from Zealot and McKenna Bourbon for the chance to peek at the way the big end of town goes about marketing.

It’s hard to believe but south east Queensland is in the grip of a water crisis thanks to a rather nasty drought. It’s hard to believe because this is the part of the country where, when it rains, it just falls out of the sky in large amounts.

Nevertheless, we are in the grip of a water crisis and the government is busy trying to ensure that we make better use of the water we have available. Some of what they have planned is not very popular and building a major dam on a river near here is one of their less popular ideas.

However other plans are proving to be very popular and one of those plans is to pay a subsidy to every home owner who installs water saving devices in their home. One of the devices they want people to instal is a water tank … or two.

Last Sunday the Government extended the range of the subsidy to take in the town where we live and home owners were notified by mail.

Today … just two days later every home owner received a glossy brochure in their mail from a company that makes rain water tanks. The brochure offers a variety of tanks along with some free gifts.

Is your small business able to respond to local opportunities that quickly?

Yeah I know, if you’re not a blogger you’re probably wondering ‘Anil who?’.

But I did … I did … I did get mentioned in the same breath and on the same line as Anil Dash over at Darren Rowse’s Problogger - that’s like a beach bum (me) being invited to some high society party

You can read the post at Essential Books for Bloggers . Ok … I know … Darren probably didn’t have anyone else around at the time on his Skype contact list so he just had to ask me … but it’s still nice to be mentioned with people like Anil Dash.

On a more serious note, if you run a small business or work from a home office then Darren does have a lot to teach you whether you’re interested in blogging or not. Many of his posts each week are definitely worth reading even if you never intend to start a blog because Darren talks a lot about engaging his readers and getting them to respond positively and that is something that every small business needs to learn.

Woo Hoo! I got mentioned on the same line as Anil Dash … /me disappears into the distance doing cartwheels

And an update to the update - it seems that this particular brand of UPS needs to be charged for 18 hours BEFORE connecting the monitors and computers.

I’ve always thought that reading instructions were for 90lb weaklings - but then if I had read the instructions I wouldn’t have been up at 2am this morning scrabbling around under my desk trying to stop the beeping.

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Just an update on the uninterrupted power supplies we’ve installed on all our computers. They are all running fine except for the the first one I hooked up.

At 2am this morning it decided that it was almost fully discharged and it should sound it’s alarm just to warn someone. The only problem was that there had been no power outage nor any period of reduced voltage. The other UPS were all showing 100% capacity.

So I shut down the computers connected to that UPS and unplugged it rather than fiddle with it at that ungodly hour of the day. When I plugged it in this morning it worked fine and is currently recharging it’s batteries.

I’ll certainly be keeping my eye on it throughout the day - electricity is not something to I like to play with

Brisbane is the capital of the state we live in. It’s a typical Australian city with a typical urban sprawl. People get around the city and suburbs by train, bus and car and there are the usual traffic and air quality problems that any large city faces.

Most of the bus services in the city and suburbs are provided by the Brisbane City Council and over the years they have developed an extensive and very popular service. It’s so popular in fact that it’s struggling to keep up with the demand.

Buses are often full and more and more passengers are being left behind because there is simply no more room on the buses. So the City Council asked its bureaucrats to come up with a solution and they did.

The solution was to cut services, reduce routes, leave older buses in service longer and increase fares. The bureaucrats believed that if that was done fewer people would use the buses and overcrowding would just go away.

Now I can understand where those bureaucrats were coming from - it’s a safe approach - it won’t cost money and it will provide a solution to the problem. But it’s not the sort of solution a small business would come up with if it was faced with a similar solution … or is it?

Yep … I’ve decided, I am definitely in the wrong job. I’m wasting my time and my talents in small business. What I should be doing is being another Sol Trujillo.

Who is Sol Trujillo you ask? A lot of Australians asked that a year or so ago when he was appointed as head of Telstra, Australia’s government owned telecommunications giant. A cash cow that the government had decided to privatise.

So the government brings in Sol - who just happened to walk away from his previous role as head of a telecommincations company in the US with a $97 million dollar handshake. And what has Sol done?

Telstra just posted a $1.1 billion dollar loss, share prices for the part of Telstra that has been privatised have fallen from $5.00 to something close to $3.60 and the company’s bottom line has fallen 26%.

Now there is a job I could handle and I’d be prepared to do it for a whole lot less than Sol is doing it for.

Unfortunately it’s unlikely I will get that job anytime soon - you see Sol hasn’t lost his job, he’s still firmly in place despite the fact that the shareholders are calling for his head.

Just as well Sol likes big business because he really couldn’t cut the mustard in small business.

Well at long last the hassles we have been having with the design of a website Toni wants to launch have come to an end. You can find the path to what I’ve written about it in Part 1 of this post.

In that post I recounted how our latest designer produced something very ugly and we doubted that she would ever come back and try again. To our surprise she did and now we have the design that Toni wants.

Here is a screen shot

Now all we have to do is hammer the CSS template into something that looks decent in the smaller screen resolutions that a lot of older women use and we’ll be ready to launch.

Last time I was here I talked about the way a power outage here in town had a affected our favourite Italian restaurant. It caught us too - a half-written email was lost and a large file download had to be re-started so we were quite lucky. It could have been a lot worse.

But it made us realise that power is one of those things we take for granted in our small business. We rely on the power grid to supply uninterrupted power free from spikes and drops in current. We need that so we can keep working and ensure that our fragile computers keep working too.

Of course there are always going to be power outages and Murphy’s Law will always tell you that the outages will occur at the worst possible times so we decided to do something about it.

For the last few days I’ve been sitting here with an MGE Ellipse 750 UPS System under the desk. The UPS stands for uninterrupted power supply and I’m running two monitors and one computer through it.

The UPS consists of a single small box that contains two batteries and some control equipment. The box is plugged into the power socked and the computer and monitors are plugged into the box. If the power goes out or the voltage drops the batteries supply power for up to 15 minutes - more than enough time to shut everything down in an orderly fashion.

The box doesn’t run hot and there have been no glitches at all. A little monitoring icon that sits in the toolbar has shown me though that we’ve had more voltage drops than I would have expected.

For under $200.00 that seems like money well-spent to us and today Toni will be bringing two more back from the computer shop to keep our other two PCs running the next time the power goes out.