Small Office, Home Office Information

It’s been a while since I’ve had a spare moment to pop in here and do one of my typical brain dumps but business kicked into overdrive back in June and that’s still continuing, Toni spent some time off earlier this month after a knee operation and about the same time her mother passed away.

It wasn’t a sudden passing … unfortunately she spent about three weeks slowly fading away and we spent a lot of that time at the hospital and that put a heck of a strain on our business. Fortunately all our clients were very understanding and in a couple of instances we were able to pass some of our work … the work that Toni and I usually handle ourselves … over to those who work for us (most of them are already working at 100% capacity just like us) and that somehow got us through.

But how would you and your small business cope if you had to spend a very large chunk out of every day at the hospital as a loved one slowly passed away? If your parents are elderly then it’s something that you should be considering because when it happens you’re going to need some contingency plans in place or your business may pass away as well.

Perhaps that all sounds a little insensitive and the time we spent with Toni’s mum wasn’t time that we felt was wasted in any way … it’s important to support a loved one right up to the time they pass. But the strain it puts on your business can be incredible and it really is something you need to be preparing for because it’s inevitable.

Here’s a question that a number of small business people are going to be asking themselves in this town in the coming months.

What do you do when you run a small business in a tourist town that has just had it’s major tourist attraction hijacked by a number of other towns that are all much closer to your target market?

Whale watching is a big deal in this town and for three to four months each year it’s boom time. Sadly for those small businesses that depend on whale watching for their existence the last few years have seen a major increase in whale watching tours being offered by new operators in places that are much closer to where the tourists live.

With the increased cost of travel people are staying closer to home and for this town the coming whale watching season is not looking good. Fortunately our exposure to businesses that rely on that annual tourist boom is limited.

What would you do if your major market began to shrink?

These days more and more small businesses are taking their business online. Some are even going so far as to shut down their bricks and mortar stores and concentrate solely on selling online.

Actually succeeding online can be quite a challenging task because suddenly you’re not just competing with other businesses in your own city or town. When you take your business online you’re competing with other like businesses spread around the world and if you want to succeed then you had better know what you’re doing and understand the realities of conducting a business online rather than pinning your hopes on the fantasies that so many people peddle.

Something you see less frequently is a small business that is doing well online and now wants to expand into a shopfront out in the real world. However that’s exactly what one of our clients has done in the last couple of weeks.

Fraser Coast Lawn Bowls came to us late last year and asked us to build an online shop for them and we did and right from the start business was good. The owners used our expertise to market their business online and they used their own expertise to market the store offline and business has been very good.

Now they’re taking their business out into the real world with their own shopfront and even in these hard times business is looking good there too.

So don’t limit yourself to running a business online … there are plenty of businesses that should do just as well offline as they do online and maybe your small business is one of them.

“Every thought you have is a road that you can travel down … so where are your thoughts taking you.” (Martin Fritz)

In tough financial times like these there will always be plenty of people looking for a way of earning an income by working from home.

In tough financial times like these there will always be plenty of sharks out there looking to fleece gullible people and pyramid selling schemes are a great way to do just that so be very careful of any get rich quick scheme that you may see advertised.

Just because someone says that what they’re offering isn’t a pyramid selling scheme doesn’t mean it isn’t … and just because you see it advertised in your local paper doesn’t mean that it isn’t a pyramid selling scheme either.

Even if they happen to be a feature article in your local paper doesn’t mean that they aren’t pyramid selling schemes.

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.

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.

Good images and photos can do so much to enhance your small business in the eyes of potential customers. Bad images and photos can turn people off rather than encourage them buy what you’re selling.

When it comes to those images and photographs do you take them yourself or do you use a professional?

Here on our Hervey Bay web design blog is a very a good reason why you should use a professional.

We received some promotional material in the mail last week for a new office block that’s going to be built in town. Construction hasn’t started yet so basically they’re selling off the plan and to encourage potential buyers the developer has had a very nice artist’s impression of what the building will look like drawn up.

It’s quite an impressive drawing too and shows a modern office block set in pleasant surroundings and fronting quite a broad street. If you didn’t know the town you could even look at the drawing and think that there was parking out the front of the office block too.

I’m sure that there are buyers from outside of town who will look at that artist’s impression and think that buying off the plan to get a jump on the competition would be a great idea. Unfortunately the artist’s impression isn’t quite in tune with the reality of the location. T

he street that fronts the new building is very narrow … there is no parking in the street and where the entrance to the building’s carpark is going to be is often blocked by traffic throughout the day by drivers queued up at a nearby set of traffic lights.

So the moral of this story is that if you want to buy or lease office space for your small business off the plan then don’t rely on an artist’s impression … go and have a look at the site before you buy and see if the artist who drew up the impression really was in touch with reality at the time.