Small Office, Home Office Information

Everywhere you look lately the talk is about recession. Interest rates are going up, spending is going down and there’s gloom and doom breaking out all over. So what does a small business do in a situation like this?

Do you batten the hatches, shorten the sail and try to ride out the storm? Or is it time for striking a valiant pose, clenching your pipe between your teeth and declaring that it’s “full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!”?

Well small business in definitely not for the faint hearted and while everyone else is running for cover now is the time to be out there telling the world that your open and ready for business. Now is the time to increase your marketing, now’s the time to tackle new projects and do what others are either too short-sighted or too scared to do.

And if you think that’s nothing but rhetoric on our part then let me outline what we’ve done in the last couple of weeks.

• that we’ve just taken on a new writer to work in a very specialised area so that Toni gets some extra time to work on other things
• we’re in the process of expanding our web design business into an area that few web designers are prepared to tackle
• we’re about to launch several online stores that are targeting a growing trend in shopping here in Australia and
• we’re revamping another little store that we built as a training exercise several years ago and were suprised to find that we’d stumbled on an interesting sales niche.

At the same time we’ve still got more work coming in than most other web designers in this town and we’re working on increasing that too.

Are we insane? No, it might look like we’re striking a valiant pose and daring fate but we’re not. Some of these projects are things that we’ve been sitting on for a year or more and now, even though the economic climage might be a little bleak, the time is right to launch them and take advantage of the fact that most competitors are trying to weather the storm by cutting back on their marketing.

As for striking a valiant pose … well it’s 30C (86F) outside and I’m sitting here in a pair of old shorts. It’s not a very pretty sight let alone a valiant one (Stop laughing Bronwyn - one of our daughters regularly reads this to see what her old fogies are up to)

So Toni’s and my challenge to you is to think of these rough economic times as a time to grow your business instead of cutting back on it. Certainly, there are things that you should cut back on at this time but promoting and growing your business aren’t among them.

Your response to genuine complaints … and even some frivolous ones … can have a very serious impact on your small business as one Brisbane restaurant found out when their response to a legitimate complaint went worldwide.

You can read the full story here

Don’t let your small business get locked in by service providers 
by Stuart Livesey

Oh boy, last time it was over two weeks since I last posted. This time it’s nearly three weeks since I posted. The deafening silence hasn’t been because we haven’t had anything to say, it’s just been because we haven’t had time to say it. Work has simply been non-stop for weeks now and, in these current economic conditions, that’s very pleasing.

And it doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon. In the last few days we’ve been asked to provide so many quotes and proposals that March looks like being just as busy as February has been so far.

Two of those requests for proposals have come from small businesses here in town who are facing a real problem. Both businesses want us to redevelop existing websites for them . One couple recently bought a business and thought that the website the previous owners had a local company build for the business came with the sale.

Unfortunately they now find that the previous owners of the business did not own the domain name … instead the local media company that designed the site bought the domain name and never transferred it to their clients and the media company is also claiming ownership of the website.

The second couple had the foresight to demand that they be the copyright holders of all the material that they paid for when they had a different design business here in town build their website. Unfortunately they didn’t realise that the web designer at that business was going to use a content management script to build their site that no other web designer has access to.

Now that should not be all that much of a problem except for the fact that the script this designer used does not produce good code. Sure the browsers that have to read that code and display the site on your monitor can handle it but it’s so poor that many designers … including me … would have problems deciphering it so making additions and alterations to the site is going to be costly.

So, even though I’ve said it several times here on this site, it’s worth saying again. When your small business does business with service providers such as web designers, marketers etc. make sure that you own the copyright for all the material that you pay for and make sure that there is nothing that ties you to that service provider.

We all like to keep our clients but the ethical way to do that is by providing an unbeatable service. Any service provider who wants to keep their customers by making it too expensive to move to another provider isn’t worth doing business with.

Wow … my how time flies when you’re busy. It’s been over two weeks since either Toni or I have had a chance to come in and do a brain dump.

One of the hardest things for many small businesses … especially those that operate from home … is to advertise their services. The usual advertising channels are both expensive and not all that effective anymore but here is one way of advertsing your business that is both cheap and often gives you the chance to respond to enquiries instantly.

Toni had this embroidered on some shirts for our web design and hosting business in Hervey Bay a few months ago and ever since then they have been doing a great job of advertising our services. Any time I head out of the office - and remember, I work from home while Toni works from our office downtown - I slip one of these shirts on.

I can be going to the bank, the post office, the supermarket or even just to pick up our car from the mechanic - wherever I’m going I wear the shirt and it attracts leads. A couple of days ago I was picking the car up from the mechanic after some major repairs and the office assistant asked about a website for her small part-time business.

Standing in line at the bank or even sitting with Toni in a cafe and having coffee are all places where we’ve picked up leads from advertising on our shirts. It’s cheap and very effective and if you’re not using it to get your business out there in front of potential customers then you’re missing out.