Small Office, Home Office Information

If knowledge is power how much knowledge is too much?

It’s pretty easy for a small business to become bogged down with statistics. Analysing your cash flow and your income and expenses is very important and having some idea of who your customers are is also important.

But sometimes we go way too far in trying to know everything we can about our customers. Not only do we run the risk of alienating customers who might find our data collection methods to be intrusive but we also waste time analysing information that is simply not important.

Some experts suggest that the only information we need to know about our clients is that which tells us how we can communicate directly with the clients and and that which helps us understand what the clients are thinking about.

A lesson about shipping data

After three weeks of working through a huge order for just one client the job is done. Unfortunately there really is no rest for the wicked and we have two more clients in the cue who want a similar amount of work done.

I’d be working my fingers to the bone on one of those jobs right now but the client shipped the data without giving it much thought. All the data I need is contained on four DVDs and they sent them to us from the US by post.

The DVDs were just bundled together with no separation and stuffed into a packet. Each DVD had been labelled with a thick black marker.

By the time the DVDs reached us the ink on each label had been transferred to the readable face of the DVD above it and the one DVD that had no ink on it was scratched (all of the others were scratched too).

The end result is that I have four completely unreadable DVDs and now the client is facing a considerable delay while they ship a fresh set.

And the lesson is that if you are sending data through the post make sure that it’s carefully packed and each disk is separated from the others. For an extra couple of cents the DVDs could have been packed in protective sleeves.

How to Lose Customers Really Quickly

Last week I posted a piece about something that made me angry and involved a local web design company. You can find the story here.

The same site and the same company continue to give me something to talk about here. The site that the original screen grab came from is a small retailer here in town and what the company provided was a major ecommerce site that allows people from just about anywhere in Australia to buy what this shop sells.

The only problem with that is that it’s faster and probably more convenient for almost everyone to buy locally - and off line - what this shop is trying to sell online.

Apart from that there are two problems in this site that really do stand out. The first one is that the shopping cart is not easy to complete and large numbers of potential customers tend to abandon their shopping cars if the the checkout process is not quick and simple.

The second problem is that to even get to the shopping cart you have to register and to register you have to complete a form that requires a considerable amount of information. The problem with forms is that more people abandon forms than abandon shopping carts and some research puts the figure as high as 90% abandonment rate.

I guess this design company has yet to learn how important simple shopping carts and simple forms are for the success of an ecommerce website.

Well this week has definitely been one I would prefer to forget. I’ve put in some long long hours on the most tedious and annoying of jobs and it’s not over yet.

On top of that our two biggest customers put in orders for work at the same time and wanted delivery on the same day. For once we had to tell that we simply could not get the work done at such short notice. Something tells me that they are finally beginning to understand that we do have other clients and drop what we’re doing to fill their orders.

So before I disappear for the weekend here are some interesting links for your small business:

101 Fabulous Freebies - everybody loves a freebie and PC World have put together this list of 101 useful freebies. Small business and home office people should find some of these quite useful.

How to Permanently Wipe All Data from a Hard Drive - really this is only something you need to think about doing if you’re disposing of your computer and you need to do it because simply deleting the file in Explorer does not actually delete the file … if that makes sense.

Flash Tutorials - if you simply must use Flash on y0ur small business website and you can’t afford to pay someone to compile it for you here are a whole bunch of tutorials for Flash related projects. Personally I would suggest that unless you have an extremely compelling reason for including Flash on your site (’because I like it’ is not a compelling reason) then you avoid Flash like the plague

And that’s it from me this week.

That’s not something I had ever thought about until just a few minutes ago and it’s probably something that will never happen to any small business that I’m involved in.

But it has happened to a small business that somebody I know is involved in. B5 Media - a small blog network that was started just 12 months ago by five very savvy bloggers has just been given a cool $2 million dollars in venture capital.

I’m sure that they already know precisely what they intend to do with the money and so it will be interesting to see the way these guys go about expanding their business.

But what would you do with your small business if it received an injection of $2 million dollars? Now there’s something to think about over the weekend

And as a footnote I have to say that I’m surprised that a venture capital firm would invest such a sum in a blog network. Blogs do not have that great a reach on the Net and if you stopped anyone in the street and asked them what a blog was most people would not have a clue.

Should a small business even make excuses for failures?

Toni has been trying to deal with a small company two states away. They market an interesting little piece of equipment that’s ideal for small businesses and takes the drudgery out of washing up the coffee cups. It’s also very hygenic, easy to use and not all that expensive either.

However, she’s getting the wrong message from this company. It took them over a week to send out the brochure that she initially requested and when they did they emailed her to tell her that the sales manager would call sometime during the next week.

He never did - instead Toni got another email offering her the product at a reduced price. Toni replied that she was still waiting for the promised phone call and today she finally got it. The sales manager was pushy and made excuses about missing the first phone call.

End result: she hates pushy salesmen with a passion and the sale is dead. Besides that, excuses are really only reasons not to deal with the company that’s making them.

So do you make excuses or do you admit to stuffing up?

As you may or may not know we sometimes dabble in web design and promotion for some clients. That part of Toni’s business normally focuses on local clients so we’re always interested in what the local competition is doing.

You’ve probably seen me grump about the competition here before. They all walk the walk and talk the talk but their level of expertise leaves something to be desired and the latest example of that came to light over the weekend.

We saw an ad for a local small business that displayed a URL so we decided to have a look at the website. We actually know this small business quite well and we know that they have never mentioned a website in any of their advertising before.

So we were surprised to see this tucked away at the bottom of their site:

Notice the number of visitors the site claims to have had since May 2005?

Not a bad number for a site that is so new that you won’t find it in Google and Alexa has no listing for it at all. It’s also so new that web.archive.org has no listing for it either.

I wonder why web design companies have to resort to things like this to try and impress potential customers? Research shows that potential buyers are often impressed by other factors on a website other than this little bit of propoganda.

It’s also apparent that the designers may not be aware of the latest research about shopping carts - the more steps between identifying the items a surfer wants to purchase and the actual checkout point there are the greater the number of potential purchasers who fail to complete the purchase.

Ah well - one day we might be called on to rescue this website too - it seems to be a growing part of our business.

Thtat’s me but is it you too?

Yep, I have to admit that I am continually plagued with self-doubt. Can I do it? Can I produce the product this customer wants, needs and has paid good money for? Am I really worth what Toni charges for my services?

A lot of the people we deal with come to us because of our experience. Together Toni and I now have over 16 years of experience in the area that Toni’s small business services.

Quite often we wonder whether or not a client has really thought through what they want to do and so, if someone wants to spend a lot of money with us, we will often question them about their plans and whether or not the understand the risks involved.

We did that on Saturday when we sat down to price a job that a new client wanted us to work on. After working out the initial figure we decided that we really needed to find out if the client had thought things through or not so we sent off quite a lengthy email.

The reply that came back certainly answered all our questions and we now feel confident that he really does understand what is involved in getting a decent return on his investment.

He also made a comment that went some way to dismiss my doubt in myself - although I’m sure it will return.

I am very impressed at the thoroughness in your approach to this project, I like surrounding myself with people that are very good at there job, that’s how you make money by listening to experts … so please keep questioning me and suggesting ideas

Maybe you and I really do have the ability to produce what our customers want and pay for