Small Office, Home Office Information

Yesterday I asked if small business boards on the Internet were really much help at all to small business people and those who work from home.

While that post has certainly attracted its fair share of readers no one has commented and that really doesn’t surprise me. Anyone who says that they agree with me will then have problems going back to any board that they may spend time on.

Anyone who disagrees would be challenged to show us why they think those small business boards are useful. And justifying some of those boards can be difficult.

So if most of the small business boards don’t scratch where many of us itch then what are we to do and who are we to turn to for help?

For some small business help is waiting for them in business incubators - now that sounds a little scary but we’ll talk more about those tomorrow.

Some years ago in Webmaster circles my nickname was becoming well known for being contentious and rather abrasive. That wasn’t really a persona - I didn’t set out to make a name for myself by being abusive and nasty.

However I was, and still am, rather blunt and tend to call a spade a spade and I don’t handle fools very well.

And I’m telling you that because I’m really not trying to stir up trouble when I ask the question - how much help are small business boards really?

I’m asking it as an introduction to a series of posts I will be making over this week and I want you to think seriously about the question.

Are they any help to you really?

I have to say that most of the small business boards I have seen have been very light in genuine help for serious problems and rather heavy in people who want to troll the boards for business … or to scam. Undoubtedly part of that problem arises from the fact that most people who hang out on those boards are fairly new.

But there are others who want to be seen as legends - they have an opinion about everything and quite often their opinion is not based on their own experience but on what they have read somewhere.

So are boards like that much help is there some other way to get the help and support you need to get your business going?

I would be really interested to hear your experiences and feel free to mention any board that you find gives you genuine advice and support and isn’t just a bunch of people saying hello to every newcomer that arrives.

I’m sure most small business owners think that, unlike big business, we can respond quickly to change. I’m certainly one who would subscribe to that idea but, just lately that has not been our experience.

Back at the end of October I made a post about the challenges that were confronting Toni and me and I said that I would share our experience as we faced that challenge. You will find that post here.

Of course, since then, I’ve hardly said a word about it. That’s because we can see the changes that we need to make but actually getting to the point where we can make those challenges is not that easy.

For several months Toni has been unwell - in fact, thanks to a GP who really had no clue, she was becoming severely malnourished - and in that time a huge amount of work backed up. Now that a specialist is in control her health is improving and we are catching up on that backlog but until we do get caught up we won’t be in a position to really start implementing those changes.

However, we are taking small steps along the way towards achieving our aims but talking about it while we’re in the middle of it all is not that easy.

So I thought I should let you know that I haven’t forgotten my promise to post about those changes - I certainly will do it but not just yet.

For many people who run a successful small business the thought of taking their business online seems fairly simple - just build a website and put it up on the Net. Business will then start rolling in through the cyber door just as it does through the real door of their real shop.

In a few rare cases it can be that simple but that is not how it is for most people who want to take their small business online. And I’ve just put up an interesting case study about one successful store in the real world who found that taking their store online did not result in an increase in business … at least not to begin with.

You will find that article here

Here in Australia there are a few worrying signs beginning to appear on the economic horizon.

A well-known home-loan lender announced on Friday that he considered the real estate boom to have finished and house prices were beginning to fall. His advice was that if you were thinking of selling then now was the time to do it because the decline could continue for some years to come.

A new survey shows that the number of jobs in New South Wales that are advertised on the Internet has fallen for the first time in six months. The number of jobs advertising in October in New South Wales fell by 3,200 wikth the worst hit areas being accounting, administration and information technology.

The ANZ suggests that there has been a further modest incrtease in newspaper employment advertising around Australia but experts suggest that the figures indicate a slowdown in job growth is coming.

The Reserve Bank of Australia sees a greater risk of inflation increasing and suggests that the likelihood of a rise in the official interest rate has increased.

Similar trends seem to be occurring in the United States so the economy is somthing to watch at the moment.

Well I’ve really slacked off in here over the weekend … or so it may seem. But what has actually been happening is that we’re regaining our focus. The Army might call it regrouping before the next offensive and personally I like that analogy.

If you’ve been with us over the last few days you would have seen the challenges that we were facing and you would have seen our determination not to go under or go backwards. I’m going to talk about that more through this coming week because it’s vitally important and it is something that nearly every small business is going to be confronted with. How you face that challenge will determine whether or not you survive, burn out or even implode.

But until I can take a break from what we’re doing let me ask you just one quick question: Do you really want your business to grow?

And if you haven’t read it before then you really should read The E-Myth Revisited before your business gets to be too much for you to handle anymore.

Even if you don’t use our link to get there you really must go to Amazon (or any other bookstore) and buy and read this book. It really is that important to the survival of your business.

Well it’s almost 9am here in the office and I’m getting down to some serious work. Not that I haven’t been working already but that was just some reading and a business meeting down at our favourite cafe.

Now I’m down to the serious part of the day. I’ve got articles to write, a resume to put together for a friend who wants to change his employment, and a website to finish work on as well. And of course, I’m doing all that here in sub-tropical Queensland where the weather beautifully warm.

Because I’m self employed I can sit here with the window open, the breeze coming in and I don’t have to wear anything but a pair of shorts.

It all sounds like heaven doesn’t it?

But of course, if you read yesterday’s post you will know that heaven kind of slipped away from us and the business has been running us rather than us running the business.

So today I want to ask you, why did you start a small business?

Michael Gerber in his book - The E-myth Revisited - suggestst that:

The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

“The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before. So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life.”

How does that fit with where you’re at in the life of your small business?

small business

Early yesterday morning I stood at the back door of our house and watched a major electrical storm slowly move across the town. At times like that we usually shut the computers down and unplug them from the power sockets and work on our laptops.

But yesterday I just couldn’t bring myself to fire up the laptop - I seriously had lost my enthusiasm.

Toni wandered out of her office to see what I was doing and saw me standing there and asked her usual question:

“Watcha thinking?

“I’m just standing here composing my letter of resignation.” And I was … seriously.

I was standing there mentally writing a letter to myself explaining why I wanted to resign.

You see, over the last few months there has been a subtle shift in our business. We are no longer running our business - our business is running us and it is an absolute mongrel of a taskmaster.

By sheer coincidence a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and the day before yesterday I actually got as far as reading the Introduction and I began to see that what has happened to our business … and the way I was feeling was not unique. Lots of people come to the same point that I had reached - and Toni had reached it too.

We had reached that point, not in the way that many small businesses do, but because several key writers had decided to quite and left us with unfinished projects that we have to complete. But regardless of why we had reached that point there was no doubt that we were on the brink of closing up shop.

We were sick of working long long hours every day of every week with very little light at the end of the tunnel.

Funnily enough, we had always known that this point could arise but several months back we had thought that we had managed to avoid that situation. We had begun to take weekends off and life looked pretty good. Unfortunately the wheel fell off and we got stuck.

However, that letter of resignation I was writing - and Toni was thinking about - got trashed yesterday morning. We’ve been down before and we’re damned if we are going to be beaten.

We decided to spend a couple of days thinking about where we want the business to go and how we want it to get there. We’re going to look at ways of reducing our dependence on outside writers (I can tell you that it’s a bit like herding cats) and at the same time increase our cash flow.

We’re going to actually look at doing something that we never ever thought we would do - and that’s dismiss some clients. There are a couple of regulars that have begun to let their accounts go unpaid and that’s affecting our ability to pay our accounts.

And tomorrow we’re going to sit down and over a coffee at our favourite cafe and have a brainstorming session. We want to recover that enthusiasm that we had for our business when we began and we’re not going to accept our resignations.

We’re a big fan of the old pop group - The Doors - and baby … no one gets out of our business alive!

As Toni said yesterday in a column she writes for another place - “I think we just declared war on ourselves”

And if you’re in a similar situation to us then stay tuned and get your own copy of The E-Myth Revisited - you might find it as much help as we are finding it.

It’s easy to sit here and right the pieces for this blog. Even though I’m writing about things that Toni and I have experienced there is a certain disconnect … the things I’m writing about are in the past … they’re over and done with … we have faced the challenges, dealth with them, come to a conclusion and have moved on.

But now I find myself wanting to write about something that is current … it’s happening now … we’re wrestling with the problem now … we don’t have a position on it … and it is something that we are very uncomfortable with.

Let me try and explain. There is another small business here in town that is involved in providing computers for its clients. The clients are always under the impression that the computers are built by this small business but in fact they are not. Instead they are built by another small business here in town that belongs to a friend of ours.

Our friend builds the machines and charges the other business the same figure he would charge if he were selling the machine to a private individual. The other business then adds on as much as 50% and that is the amount their customer pays for the computer.

Well … that may not bother you but it doesn’t sit well with me even though it is free enterprise and all that stuff. Up to this point Toni and I are not involved but now one of the clients of that small business wants quite an extensive web site developed and the small business has come to us.

They want to operate under the same conditions as they do with our friend. They want to appear as though it is them building the site even though it would be us doing the work. They want us to keep the price down so that they can add on a sizeable amount for themselves.

They want us to remain in the background and have no contact with the client.

Now of course, when you’re building a website the very first person you want to talk to is the client. You need to get inside his head and find out what he is thinking and where he wants the site to go - so not talking to the client is not an option.

And we have been quite clear about that. No contact with the client means we don’t want the job but even if we do get access to the client there are still other ethical questions that we need to deal with.

Perhaps I’ve just been thinking out aloud here but if you want to add your thoughts please feel free to do so.

small business

I’ve just been reading a very interesting piece about bank fraud and how it almost brought the British banking system to it’s knees. If you want to read something really scary you will find it here.

While the article didn’t have a lot to do directly with small business and home based business survival I did find an interesting reference buried in it that does have a lot of relevance for us.

What is your MTBU?

What is your maximum time to belly up?

That is a term that was coined Donn Parker of the Stanford Research Institute. He found that a business that relied on computers for their cash flow fell into catastrophic collapse if those computers were unavailabe or unusable for a period of time.

But it seems to me that any small business or home based business is vulnerable in many areas and it would be prudent for us to be able to identify those areas tat affect our particualr and establish a MTBU.

Why do we need to do that?

Because when something goes wrong we then know just how important that particular problem is to our business and hopefully we will have some contingency plans in place to deal with that problem.

Those problems don’t only apply to computers either. What’s you’re MTBU if several of your clients fail to pay you on time? What’s you’re MTBU if you should fall ill? What’s your MTBU if a major piece of equipment should fail?

Those are just a few of the things that you should be looking at.