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Small Business Lessons 2

The Internet has brought some incredible benefits to everybody on the planet and I'm sure it has already gone beyond the wildest dreams of the people who first brought it into existence.

Unfortunately one less than beneficial thing that it has done, that most people never thought about, was to make it so easy for people with absolutely no ability to pass themselves off as being skilled providers of all manner of services to online businesses.

If you are genuinely in the business of providing a service - especially to the online entrepreneur - it won't be long before you come across others who think they have the required abilities but don't.

Some of them have no skills what so ever and they know it. These people are out and out scam artists who will take a client's money and disappear without providing anything.

Others have skills in the area that they claim as their own but their skills are not sufficient to keep up with their ambitions. Anyone who takes them on to do a job eventually finds that they have paid money for a very inferior product.

I came across one of those people just yesterday on a small business message board. This person appeared on the board and, in a low-key fashion, began to tout his web design services. There was nothing wrong with that at all, a lot of service providers do that and I see it as a perfectly valid way of obtaining work.

I'm always interested in finding new graphic designers so I toddled off to his site to have a look. I got no further than his index page and I didn't want to waste valuable minutes of my life while I waited for it to load so I left.

I then went back to the board and made a comment about the fact that no-one really wanted to wait while a flash presentation loaded and loud music played. There are a number of reasons why that is the very last thing any business - even a graphic designer - should have on the index page of their site.

But our friend didn't see it that way. Instead he suggested that I needed to get a faster Internet connection and, while he owned a design company I obviously didn't know what I was talking about.

I had to laugh at that because when anyone responds in that fashion you just know that their abilities are not up to their ambitions ...but they don't want to admit it to themselves.

Others came in to agree with me and hopefully that web designer has picked up some valuable information about the importance of fast loading index pages and that may help him to further develop his skills.

But that isn't the only lesson to learn from that short encounter on a message board. You may think that you have the ability to provide a service to other businesses but, before you start touting for work, measure your ability against what other established businesses are doing.

If you don't you may find that you're called on it one day and that could be embarrassing and even costly.

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