Small Office, Home Office Information

Over on Web Worker Daily one of the questions raised in a post about surviving in 2009 is whether or not some clients are really worth the effort.

That’s an interesting question and one that Toni and I are pondering right now as we look at those who are making us money and those who are just a drain on our time and resources.

We’ve actually reached the point where we’re ready to let one of our long-term customers go simply because they have become a drain on our time and they’re not going to like it when we increase the rates we charge them for the work they expect us to do for them.

In many ways it will be sad to see them go but sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to deal with clients who want everything done very cheaply because times are a little tough and then don’t appreciate what you have done for them.

So does your small business have customers that you should really let go or are you going to put up with them for another year?

… acknowledge your customers’ uncertainty.

In a world where our actions in the present influence the future, uncertainty is opportunity (Paul Saffo).

If you want your small business to survive these uncertain times then talk to your customers in terms that they understand and terms that have relevance to where they’re at right now.

Maybe it’s time to completely change your marketing strategy!

A lot of small businesses these days have remote workers … people that you’re never going to see in the office but who still need to work closely when they’re collaborating on a project.

Right now we have staff in Adelaide, Melbourne and here in Hervey Bay working on a project and soon we may have to pull in one or two of our writers in the United States as well. Fortunately for me Toni’s co-ordinating that job and no two people are currently working on exactly the same part of the project.

When the writers become involved this new and interesting tool from Textflow may be something that we’ll be looking at. If your small business is distributed like ours and depends on remote workers then you might have a use for this tool too.

Textflow allows parallel word processing and if you’re not quite sure what that means then visit the site and watch the video presentation because it explains it much better than I can.

And just let me say that we have absolutely no connection with the developers of this software and we haven’t even used it yet … we just think that it looks interesting and you may find it useful.