Small Office, Home Office Information

It’s another beautiful and crisp winter’s morning here in Hervey Bay. The sun’s shining, the birds are singing and I’ve got some the Concerto for 2 Horns by Telemann playing while I wrestle with some HTML for a client.

At the moment it’s getting the better of me so I thought I would take a break and share this article with you. There’s a very important lesson for any small business tucked away in there. While many small business people seem to think that to succeed they need to be passionate about making money perhaps it’s more important to be passionate about the product they produce.

So what are you really passionate about?

I think I lost a potential client just a little while ago. He knows that his small business website has some major problems … it’s four years old and only has one page indexed in Google. I put together a 9 step programme that would cure all the sites ills but all he wanted was a quick fix.

I didn’t seem to be able to help him see beyond that quick fix and help him understand that it would only cure one of the problems and still wouldn’t guarantee that his site would hit the front page of Google for the terms he was aiming for.

I should have found a better way to explain the problems and the solutions. How good are you at helping your small business clients see beyond the quick fix?

Some competitors are close … round the corner … down the street … up the road … maybe even next door. They’re close geographically speaking … but they may be so far behind you that you’re not even close to them.

On the other hand some competitors are far away … in the next state … across the country … on the other side of the planet. Geographically speaking they’re a long way from you … but they could be right up there with you.

Whether they’re near or far they have things to teach you … to remind you of … to help you with and that’s what this competitor of ours did for us today. He might be a long way from us but he’s quite close in other ways and he reminded us today that “past performance is indicative of future behaviour”

Every small business has something to teach other small businesses whether they’re near or far. Thanks John for reminding us of something Toni and I knew but were on the verge of forgetting.

Friends can be great fun to be around. They can be supportive, encouraging, caring out of business time … but don’t always expect them to be that way when they’re engaging your small business.

You may just find that your best friends are going to be your worst customers and can do the most damage to your business.

by Stuart and Toni Livesey 

This morning we went to see our accountant - it’s one of the four times each year here in Australia when small businesses have to lodge various returns with the Taxation Department - the Australian version of the IRS.

It’s also a good time to take the temperature and judge the health of a small business and what better and more objective person to do that than your accountant. Today, after looking at our business it was nice to hear our accountant tell us that our small business is in very good shape. Our turnover has increased every quarter for the last six … and next quarter is looking pretty good too.

So how did we manage to reach this point? Well we wish we could say that all we had to do was wave a magic wand but success for a small business … and especially ones that start their business from a home office … never comes that easy and some of our early quarters were downright dismal.

So what did we do?

1. We never gave up - even when we were both ill and very short on money we just never gave up.

2. We set out to provide the best possible service for our customers and we made sure that “the best possible service” was a hell of a lot better than ANY of our competitors were providing.

3. We kept … and still keep … our overheads screwed right down. We don’t drive a flashy car … we don’t go on expensive holidays … and we don’t play the game of keeping up with the Joneses.

4. We spend some money on promotion … in the right places but we rely on word of mouth from very satisfied customers. We spend lots of time talking to people and showing them that we really are the most experienced people in our field, both here in town, and on the Net. A considerable amount of our income still comes from clients that are overseas

5. We listen to what our clients want and we provide what they need. We don’t spend their money on things that they really don’t need. We  go to them rather than expecting them to come to us.

6. We work at times when our clients want us to work … if they contact us on a Saturday with urgent work then we do it … we don’t put them off till the weekend is over. Sure that sucks when the weather is perfect and beach is just 10 minutes away but what do you want? Do you want a nice day at the beach and a so-so business or do you really want your business to survive and grow?

Every client has our mobile phone numbers and they know that they can call us day or night.

6. And we don’t play at running a business … we just go ahead and do it.

That’s what has helped us achieve what we have so far. As you can see, there really is no magic wand in there … just a lot of hard work. If you can match what we do then the chances are that you will succeed in whatever industry you’re working in and your small business will grow.

That’s our manifesto for success in small business put in the hard yards and you will succeed

by Stuart Livesey 

Now that’s an old saying that’s probably been round for many centuries and it’s certainly one that’s always stuck in my mind. My maternal grandparents were wheat farmers back in the day when horses pulled the equipment so I’m sure that saying was firmly embedded in their minds too and it’s a saying that should be etched into the minds of every small business person today.

 And if you don’t understand that saying then let me suggest that it’s all about working hard when the work is there whether it’s on a day you would normally work or not.

The weekend that’s just gone was a long weekend here in Queensland and in a tourist centre like Hervey Bay, where we live, that means three days with plenty of tourists about. Now here in Hervey Bay most tourist related businesses - especially the cafes - have been doing it tough for the last nine months. The weather hasn’t been the best, interest rates and increases in petrol costs have all combined to keep tourists away but last weekend the weather was incredible and the tourists came in quite decent numbers.

On Monday every cafe along the tourist strip was packed with customers all day … that’s every cafe but two. Two of the smaller cafes … cafes that have been a little short on customers lately … remained closed and missed out on that bonanza.

Of course, they’ll be open today when all the tourists are long gone .

I guess the lesson for all small businesses is that we need to be prepared to work when the work’s there.

Toni and I worked right through the weekend too; we had planned on taking a couple of days off but early on Saturday morning one of our overseas clients contacted us with some urgent work and we wanted to make hay while the sun was shining … so we worked.

Yuck … I have a nasty head cold and I feel like crap and when I’m like that bears with sore heads are much better company than I am so fortunately Toni was able to deal with  what happened yesterday and handle it much more diplomatically than I might done.

A couple of weeks ago the people behind a typical online Mom and Pop business that they run from their home here in town approached us and asked us to redevelop their site. Sales were very poor and they had built the original site themselves.

Throughout the redevelopment we had kept in touch with them and, as we do with all our customers, at the midway point we showed them what the new site looked like. Apart from a couple of very minor changes they seemed quite happy with the new look.

Yesterday, with the redeveloped site just two days away from going live, one of them rang the office and spoke to Toni. They weren’t happy, they thought we had missed the point when it came to marketing what they were selling and they suggested that we didn’t have any experience in selling anything online. They even pointed to a site we had built for another customer and suggested that it was way “too cold” to sell anything.

I suppose we could have suggested that they call the owner of that website and find out just how successful the site has been. We could have pointed to our car and told them how it had been paid for by the online sales we have made and continue to make via affiliate marketing and our own online shops. But in the end if a client suddenly loses faith in your ability to produce what they’re paying for then there’s only thing you can do … and that’s what we did.

The client was invited to come into the office today and pick up a full refund.

You win some and you lose some but as long as you learn from your loses things haven’t been a total waste of time.

One of the benefits of having customers who are satisfied with the service your small business provides is that it’s cheaper and easier to sell them than it is to sell to a brand-new customer. In fact, sometimes you don’t even have to go looking for them, they’ll come to you.

Late last year we built a website for Hervey Bay Jetski. Due to various circumstances the the site had to be fairly compact but it was always the intention of the owners to expand the site at some time in the future.

Last week that “some time in the future” came around and when Toni and I stopped by to say hello Daniel and Rosie raised the question of expanding the site - they already knew what they wanted and all we had to do was assure them that we could fit their job into a timeframe that suited them.

They had been so happy with the way the site was developed and the leads and sales the site had generated that they had decided that the time to expand it had arrived. Now the site is to be upgraded over the coming months with new models and new pages and we’ll be doing it because Daniel and Rosie trust us to produce exactly what they want at a price that is fair to all concerned.

That has got to be the easiest ’sell’ we’ve ever done

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