Small Office, Home Office Information

Without digging back into the archives I’m not sure if I’ve ever introduced any of our clients to readers of this blog. I must do that over the coming days and to start the ball rolling here’s one client’s website that went live just a few minutes ago.

Burnett River Radio is a small regional radio station operated by a community group in Gayndah. This very simple website is our donation towards their efforts to keep the local community informed and entertained.

Yesterday we discovered that we had lost one of our clients to another web designer here in town. Now some small businesses might take the loss of a client as a disaster but for Toni and I it was a relief because we should never have taken that client on in the first place.

However, back then we were just looking to move into the local market and we gave this client a special deal … we did it cheap … and from then on we were locked into ‘cheap’ for that client for every job we did for them. And that was our mistake.

If you’re at the point where you’re trying to get your small business off the ground don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to start off by offering cheap services just to get some work in the door.

If you do that then you’re simply creating a burden that you never be able to get rid of and you really won’t want the type of client who is looking for ‘cheap’ for they’re the clients who will probably never understand the difference between cheap and value for money.

It’s only a short piece but The Value of Cheap makes for some interesting reading.

Lately Toni and I have been doing a lot of travelling for business and for personal reasons too and since the bottom began to fall out of the world economy we’ve begun to see more and more of these.

In fact in the 500 or so kilometres from Brisbane to Rockhampton we must have seen close 500 of these messages on billboards and there are some very well-positioned billboards that are empty right now along those roads we’ve travelled.

Empty billboards aren’t just restricted to Australia. Empty billboards are appearing in ever increasing numbers in the United States too and some figures I saw last week suggest that US billboard advertising revenue had dropped 15% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

That’s not surprising because the first thing many businesses do when times are tough is to cut back on advertising … and that’s the worst thing they could do. And the damage that they’re doing to their business is compounded when they cut back on billboard advertising because that is one of the most effective forms of advertising there is.

So if you’ve got some spare cash in your advertising budget now is the time to get out there and take advantage of the slump in billboard advertising. The billboard owners are keen to get your advertising on their boards so you can bet that they’re going to cut a deal just to get their inventory filled.

But don’t take just any billboard … make sure that it’s in the driver’s line of site for the longest possible period and make sure that you keep your message short and sweet otherwise you’re just wasting your money.

I received email today from one of my daughters gently chiding me on the fact that I haven’t posted here in more than a month. In my defence I should say that we have been so busy I’ve almost had to make time in my diary each day for sleep.

Seriously that is how busy we currently are and there is more work coming in each and every day. On top of that we’re trying to relocate one of my sons … who has some disabilities … from one state to another and getting through a heap of red tape with several government departments is eating up valuable time too.

However I know my daughter has a point (no Bronwyn you can’t quote me on that) and Toni and I saw something today that’s worth talking about here and it’s especially relevant for small business in these tough financial times. We live in one of the major sugar cane growing regions in Australia and if you didn’t know then let me tell you that sugar cane growers have been doing it tough for some years now.

Costs have been up and prices have been down so some cane growers have been leaving the industry and turning to other crops in the hope of making some money.

Today, on the way back from Rockhampton we were driving along the highway with some very lush cane on one side of the road and some nut trees on the other. It was one of those places where the farmer on one side of the road had stuck to cane growing while the guy on the other side had ripped out his sugar cane and planted acres and acres (hectares here in Australia) of trees that grow a particularly popular variety of nut.

When he put the trees in the demand for those nuts was high and prices were amazing. Sadly for him his trees aren’t even old enough to produce any nuts and the bottom fell out of his market last year and doesn’t look like coming back anytime soon.

In an effort to reduce costs he’s cut back on things like weed control and in some places the weeds are almost as tall as the nut trees and that’s going to have an effect on the way his trees grow. So his return … when he finally gets one … will not only be down because the price per kilogram of nuts is a whole lot less than it was when he planted the trees but it will also be down because his trees are competing for nutrient from the soil with all those weeds.

Meanwhile across the road the guy who stuck with the sugar cane is looking at a bumper crop in a year when prices are set to soar.

Making the right decision about the future of your business can be tough and sometimes it’s wise to stick with what you know.