Unfortunately the cost of fuel is affecting small businesses wherever they might be located. Qually unfortunately there is no quick fix for the problem but there are survival strategies and you might find the suggestion you need right here
There are many small business people who are involved in online marketing. Of all the huge range of things a small business could be involved in online marketing would have to be one of the hardest and it is becoming harder and harder all the time.
The amount of competition that people who market online is just one of the factors involved here. There are many others and most of them are almost beyond the control of the small business online marketer.
So it’s no surprise that, when one well-known person in this part of the small business world becomes excited about a product and writes about in genuinely glowing terms, that a lot people will rush to jump on the bandwagon without taking time to read the fine print.
Of course, the fine print is more than just the fine print on the contract. The fine print also includes things like how the product will fit with what the small business is already doing and whether or not the new product is well established or still in beta mode.
Ultimately, if the product doesn’t work for you then if someone needs to be blamed for that failure the blame should start with you and not with the person who suggested the product in the first place.
Toni and I have been watching as a very genuine and responsible online marketer has been trashed by people who blindly rushed in to take advantage of something that was working for him.
Nobody forced them to follow his lead, no one held a gun to their head and made them take on the product he found that worked for him. Instead, they rushed in without understanding the fine print and some of them have not made the money that the expected to.
Instead of blaming themselves they’ve blamed him for the inability to make the product work for them. Right now they are making life hard for him but in a few days it will have all blown over as they rush off to follow some other great idea that probably won’t work for them either.
If you want to seriously make your small business work then don’t be a lemming – don’t rush from one good idea to the next till you are worn out. Take the time to read the fine print and see how the product will fit with your business and only then should you take some tentative steps to see if it will work for you.
If it doesn’t work and you are committed to the product them improvise adapt and over come instead of standing around crying and blaming someone else.
Over the last day or so I’ve been asking you to think about how much help you get from small business boards. There are certainly plenty of them around the net but are they really much help to you when it comes to developing your business?
In fact finding real help can be difficult but here in Australia there are a number of small business incubators springing up around the country. Basically the concept is that a number of small businesses are brought together under the one roof. They operate independently but they share expensive resources that they might otherwise not be able to afford.
You can read about one in incubator that operates in Sydney’s southern suburbs right here
As I’ve said here before, all too often small business people – and especially those who work from a home office – never get away from work. It’s always there and it’s hard to take a break. But that is something that you really have to discipline yourself to do – especially when times are tough.
At those times especially you need to be able to escape and recharge your batteries before diving back into the fray again. Sometimes the escape can just be in your mind. When I need a short break I’ll dive into an online game for ten minutes just to clear my mind.
At other times though you need to get right away from it all – even if it’s just for an hour. One of those times came for us yesterday and this is what we found.
Sunset on the beach last night. It was just us, a lone fisherman and that stunning sky.
Back on Wednesday I talked about the point that we had reached with our business and admitted that we had realised that the business was running us and not us running the business. You will find that post here.
In that post I mentioned that we were going to sit down and have a business meeting to work out some ways of reclaiming what we felt we had lost and we had that business meeting over several cups of coffee yesterday.
We divided a page in a notebook into four sections and labelled the sections:
What/Who We Want to Ditch
What We Want to Change
What We Want to Add
The meeting went really well and was quite productive but perhaps not quite in the way we wanted.
By the time we had finished the ‘keep’ section contained most of the names of the people/things we already do.
What we want to ditch listed just one name of a business we no longer want to work for – and we had actually stopped working for them several weeks ago.
What we want to add now lists quite a few new things that we want to do and what we wanted to change also holds a few entries.
When you think about it what we ended up with was not quite what we set out to achieve – in fact we’re not quite sure where all those new ideas came from … but that is often the way our business meetings go. We did decide to think about it some more and have another business meeting over coffee on Saturday.
This time though I’m not going to take the ‘What We Want to Add’ list with me. If I did that who knows how much more we could add to it.
But, looking back on yesterday, I was quite interested to note that by dinner time last night we had both achieved a whole lot more than we had in any other day this week and we had both cleaned up some old jobs that had been hanging around and were really getting us down.
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?
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.
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.
Today I had to research and write a short piece for another online publication about Mesothelioma. That’s the disease otherwise known as Asbestosis.
One of the scariest things I found about this disease is that it’s not just related to people who have working in the asbestos industry. It can affect you and me too and so I’m re-publishing the piece I wrote here for your information.
Asbestos was a common-as-grass building material not all that long ago so it is probably in the houses and offices across the world and as it degrades it has the potential to affect a huge proportion of the population.
“Mesothelioma is described in Wikipedia as an “uncommon form of cancerâ€; unfortunately whoever wrote that may soon want to rewrite that brief description because the disease is very definitely on the increase.
The Queensland Asbestos Related Disease Support Society is currently gaining up to 10 new members every week. When the society was first formed in 1992 there were 35 members, today the membership stands at 620 despite the grim fact that around 60 members die every year.
Mesothelioma is a malignant form of cancer that develops in the mesothelium. The mesothelium is the protective lining that covers most of the body’s internal organs and mesothelioma attacks that lining.
The most common points of attack are the outer linings of the lungs and chest cavity all though it may also occur in other parts of the body including the lining of the abdominal cavity and the sac around the heart.
Mesothelioma is caused by the inhalation of asbestos particles that ultimately lodge in the lungs. The effects are usually not immediate and the disease can lay dormant for many years.
Most people who develop mesothelioma have had some prolonged exposure to asbestos. It is extremely common in people who have worked in asbestos mines and in their families. It is also becoming more common in people who have been involved in home renovations where asbestos products such as early forms of fibro and early forms of insulation have been disturbed.
But it is not limited to just those people. Anyone who has any contact with asbestos fibers can succumb to the disease because it takes just one fiber to start the ball rolling. There is even a case here in Queensland of a school teacher contracting the disease from asbestos dust that settled on the desks of her classroom after the school roof began to degrade.
Unfortunately short term exposure to asbestos fibers is no guarantee that the disease won’t develop and more and more relatively young people are beginning to be afflicted by the disease.
Diagnosis of mesothelioma is not easy because the symptoms that many display are similar those produced by a number of other conditions. Ultimately a biopsy is needed to confirm a diagnosis of mesothelioma.
Treatment of mesothelioma is not well advanced and traditional methods used in treating other forms of cancer have proved ineffective. Once the symptoms of mesothelioma manifest themselves the disease quickly develops and long-term survival is not common.
Queensland Workcover chairman, Ian Brusasco, admits that the average life expectancy for a person who develops the disease is 163 days from diagnosis till death.
Fortunately there have been some small developments in treatment therapy recently but the disease is still considered to be incurable.
Perhaps the scariest thing about the disease is that many people are either completely ignorant of the dangers or they simply don’t care. Earlier this year a complete but badly degraded asbestos roof was removed from a house in Cypress Street. Neighbours and the occupants of the house were not warned and the contractor and his crew took no precautionary measures and wore no protective clothing.
There are already several Mesothelioma sufferers here in Hervey Bay and now, thanks to that work, there could be many more in the future.”
How are you feeling right now? Do you feel that your energy levels are high and your full of enthusiasm to tackle the next job on today’s agenda?
Or are you feeling tired, lethargic, overwhelmed with work and struggling with the stress of survival?
Sooner or later every small business person begins to run out of puff and finds that those wonderful feelings of enthusiasm and energy have slipped away. In fact those feelings are something that you can face time and again. Toni and I have certainly faced it and we’re facing it again just now.
And we’re facing it again because we stopped doing something that we once did every day. We have let the pressure of work interfere with those things that can recharge our batteries and help us keep functioning at our peak levels.
No we haven’t stopped eating healthy foods or sleeping for reasonable periods of time each 24 hours. Thankfully we’ve maintained those good habits but we have let our exercise regime slip and we have stopped taking time off for ourselves.
And those things are important in helping us … and you … maintain your enthusiasm and energy levels.
Even though your busy and there is more work pouring in all the time you still have to exercise and take time out. A couple of months ago we would walk every day and we would also take time off on a Monday. But we let the pressure of work get in the way and our personal habits changed. We hardly walk now and we no longer take a day off.
We’re paying the penalty right now and all we can do is urge you to learn from our experience. Exercise daily – even just a walk before you start work can be enough, take time out and get away from work. Shut the door on your office and spend a few hours every week doing something that has no bearing on work at all.
And start doing it now – tomorrow could be too late.
The Dalai Lama once said “I have so much to do today, I will need to meditate twice as long.”