Archive for April, 2010

Let’s try a semi-interactive experiment.   I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer the question as simply, quickly and concisely as possible.  Are you ready?  Ok, the question is this…

What is it you do?

Now, your response will be one of four possible outcomes:

1. You didn’t actually answer the question, didn’t pause, and just carried on reading.  Shame on you.  Back to the top please and try again.
2. You didn’t understand what I was asking, so I will ask again – what is it you do?
3. You thought this through for quite a while.  Maybe your mind raced, or went blank but you came up with some answer.  If so, I can pretty much guarantee your answer is either too long, or its not really what you do
4. You answered the question in the way required – simply, quickly and concisely, and you did it without having to think too hard.

The point of all of this is that the answer to the question “what is it you do?” is what is called your party or elevator pitch.   When you are out and about, and somebody asks you “what is it you do?” this is your 15 second opportunity to sell yourself and your business.   Any answers starting “I don’t know…” or “I think I do this….” or “erm, err, erm, I erm….” are not the correct answers.

Neither are answers that cannot be written down without a comma or full stop.   These answers are not what you do, they are more of a life summary.  Time to get more concise.

It’s possible that you answered something like “I run a small business”, “I’m an entrepreneur”, or even “I’m an IT freelancer and consultant”.   None of these are the correct answers.  These are what you are, not what you do.   When is the last time you heard anybody saying that they were in a desperate need for the services of a small business owner, entrepreneur or freelancer?

So let me give you my party/elevator pitch:

Q: So what is it you do?
A: I’m a freelance IT specialist working in databases including data warehouse design and business intelligence reporting allowing companies to obtain more value from their existing information

Now my pitch can change, depending on the situation.   Sometimes “what I do” will be something different, it may be software development, or health IT integration specialist.  But (and here is the golden rule), at no time is it more than one thing.  I never reply with “I am an IT specialist dealing with databases and business intelligence, and I also develop software, and I deal with health solutions” – because I would appear as jack of all trades, master of none, and all I would give out is a confused message.

So now that you know what I do, let me ask you again, What is it you do?

Yesterday I shared some of my favourite small business general RSS feeds.  Today, I complete the list with RSS feeds from some great freelancing and contracting resource and blog sites.

Freelance Folder
The Freelance folder provides a news feed which will be useful for IT contractors and freelancers looking for tips on productivity, growing their customer base, working smarter and promoting their business services.

Guerrilla Freelancing
Guerrilla Freelancing is a website news feed dedicated to helping every freelancer still in the trenches, working as hard as they can to build up a solid freelance business. It’s main objective is to be a voice for those who have not “made it” and provide straight to the point advice and tips for the guerrilla freelancer.

FreeLanceSwitch
This is a community of freelance professionals from around the world, spanning all manner of fields.  As well as providing a very good podcast, this news and information feed covers a large range of useful freelancing and contracting tips, which will prove useful for any small business owners working in or around IT.

Contract Calculator
The calculator website is a great resource for working out tax rates, how much to charge customers, day rates, and a host of other contracting tools.  The RSS feed provides finance and tax tips for IT freelancers, contractors and other small business owners.

Life can be complex, but it gets even more difficult when you are running a small business.   As a manager, owner and revenue generator, you can end up wearing so many hats and doing so many things that everything can end up as a big blurred unstructured mess.  Sometimes you can get into a muddle and you need guidance or help in seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Over the years, one resource that I can rely on time and time again is an individual by the name of Jack Canfield.   Jack is an American peak performance guru, but before you close this article and move on, bear with me and I will explain why and how he can help in your small Business.

Amongst the various books, podcasts, audio CDs and other material that Jack Canfield makes available, is a great book called the Success Principles.  There are always 3 or 4 books on my home office desk at arm’s reach that I can dip into when I need them, and the Success Principles is one of these books.

The content is pretty similar to most other self-help guides to high achievement, but it does manage to pack in an awful lot of ideas and advice into fewer than 500 pages. The basic premise of the book is that in order to achieve success in our business and personal lives, it is our persistence in applying positive steps that gets results.

The Success Principles provides 70 tried and tested steps or actions which you can use to generate success.   Some of these are mental shifts to change the way you think about achieving success (such as the realisation that a small setback is not the end of the world, and is just a way of realising your on the wrong track so need to change something to move back into the right direction), and some are practical changes you can make (such as finding a support group to discuss business ideas with).

There are lots of ‘self help’ books available on a wide and vast array of subjects.  However, the Success Principles combines the best parts of multiple sources, provides a massive array of actions you can take to move your life and business forward, and at the price that Amazon are currently charging, this is a wonderful bargain.

I challenge anybody to read this book, follow some of the actions and principles defined, and not see an instant improvement in both their personal lives and business.

A week or so ago, I shared a really great way of reading business RSS feeds on the go by downloading the items to an eBook.  Today I share with you a list of some of the small business RSS feeds which I subscribe to.   I subscribe to many more than are listed here, but I wanted to provide a list of my favourites.  Today I bring you general business RSS feeds, tomorrow it will be more IT freelancer and contractor specific…

ClickNewz! Internet Marketing Blog
This news and advice feed is updated daily with internet marketing strategies, affiliate tips, search marketing tutorials, website traffic ideas and ways to build passive income. You’ll also find product, service and website reviews that relate to internet marketing and online business.

Sitepoint Business Feed
This advice and tips feed covers more topics than any of the other suggestions, and most of them are out of outside of the usual business areas, but very useful none the less.  Topics may cover how to build a virtual team, use of CSS to improve your web site, dealing with spam, web site branding.

Enterprise Nation
This resource is geared more towards people who run a business from their home, but even if you run a business from a business premises or visit customers, the information can be useful to help you start and grow your business.

Ian Brodie
A great blog which deals with small business processes for getting Clients, and in particular, how to Find, Win and Retain Clients

Get Elastic
The Get elastic web site and RSS feed deals with everything a small business needs to know about ecommerce – from promoting your services on the web, through to ecommerce and social networking for more business.

Dumb Little Men Tips
Whilst this suggestion is not technically a business tips feed, Dumb Little Man will provide you weekly tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane

Sales Motivation
The sales motivate blog, website and RSS feed provides some very useful sales techniques and ideas for marketing, useful regardless of whether you are an IT specialist looking to expand your sales pipeline, or a more established business looking at gaining more revenue.

When I started by professional career in the IT sector, it was the late 1980’s and everybody was selling products and software.  Then in the early 1990’s something changed.  Nobody sold products anymore, they sold solutions.  It was the same stuff, written by the same people.  It looked the same, worked in the same way, but now it was a solution.  Even companies started renaming themselves to have the word “Solutions” at the end of their name.

A few weeks ago, unless you were on holiday on the moon or living under a rock, you would have noticed that a certain fruit based company launched a new computer device named the iPAD.  What you didn’t notice is that at the same time, they changed the game from selling solutions, to selling a thing to meet a desire.

I have played with an iPAD for a few minutes at an electronics show, and I have to agree it’s a very smart and stylish device.  But, where is the need?  It’s more expensive that a notebook computer which can do so much more, it cant make phone calls, if you are going to watch movies I suspect most people will actually want a bigger (TV?) screen, and it’s very hard on the eyes for reading eBooks due to the glossy screen.

So I would suggest that it’s a product launched to fill a gap in the market that doesn’t exist.  But no doubt it will be a massive hit, and even as I type this, it’s sold it first half million units.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see it reach 20 million unit sales by the end of 2010.

Where the iPAD works is that it sells to peoples desire rather than to a persons need.  People will buy it with two thoughts in their head… “I want one because it’s so new and sexy”, and “I will find a use for it when I get it”.

Of course, supermarkets, clothes stores and car companies have been selling to desire rather than need for years, but with iPAD, this is moving into the mainstream and will change us as small business owners in the way we must think about obtaining product or service sales in the future.  Microsoft is one IT company who has become really good at this – after all, what was wrong with Windows XP or Office 2003 – did we REALLY need Windows7 or Office 2007/2010?

Note, if you are looking for a Freeagent referral code to save 10% on the freeagent sign-on costs, there is a code at the end of this post.

When it comes to web sites, products and services, there are many different ways of driving traffic and customers to your doorstep, be it virtual or real.  The vast majority will take time, money and an awful lot of effort with differing degrees of success.   As a business supplier, one of the cheapest methods is the referral – customers telling other customers to use your product and service because of how good it is.

There are 3 different ways of getting referrals:

Customer direct referrals – This is where customer A tells customer B how good your product/service is, you have no involvement, and the first you know about it is an email, phone call or visit from customer B.  Great – more business, but how many times has it happened for you?

Customer requested referrals – For this, you need to go cap in hand to customer A (possibly at the end of  a project) and ask if they know of any other companies who could benefit from the same product or service.  If they provide details (and even if they call company B on your behalf) you are only one step ahead of a cold call.

Customer incentive referrals – This type of referral is almost the same as the customer direct referral, with the exception that there is an incentive for customer A to contact customer B.

Let’s take two real world examples of these referrals.

LoveFilm – If you are a member of lovefilm, the online film rental company, as well as sending you your requested DVD or BluRay movies,  every so often you will get cards from them giving new customers a months free subscription for you to pass on to friends to encourage them to join.  This is all fine and good, but the big question is – what do I as an existing customer get out of it?  The answer is nothing.

FreeAgent – Now if you are a user and subscriber of the Freeagent small business online accounting solution, you have a page on your accounts screen for referrals.  Freeagent encourages you to pass on the good word – if somebody takes your advice and signs up to Freeagent, then they as a new user get a 10% discount.  But the difference here is that Freeagent also gives you, the existing customer the same 10% discount.

So in the two examples above, Lovefilm gives me nothing for proving their link above, whereas Freeagent gives me 10% off all my fees in the future if somebody clicks it and signs up.  But it also gives you the same 10% if you sign up.  In the Freeagent system – everybody wins.  My link gives me 10% off my existing account, you get 10% off and freeagent gets a new customer with zero marketing cost.   Everybody wins.

It’s viral marketing at its very best, but in this case you are not forced to watch a video of a computer generated frog, a man painted orange slapping people, or a dog roller-skating.

So that leaves two questions….

1)      Where in your business can you use the Freeagent model to have existing customers pass on your details for a future reward in the form of discount, gift, free days, hours, etc?

2)      If I wasn’t getting the 10% discount from the Freeagent link, would I still recommend it?  The answer is a big YES, even without the 10% referral, it’s the best thing for small business since sliced bread

The referral code is included in the above links.  But if you are looking for direct entry of a Freeagent referal code, use 34o5sqzm

You might have noticed that here in the UK, we are having this election thingy in a couple of weeks.   The 3 main parties will be slugging it out at the ballot boxes, and the leaders of the 3 main parties are all trying to win us over with 3 television debates.  So far, two of the three debates are over, and I am already bored of the whole election thing.

Twitter is full of tweets about how Gordon Brown is losing, or Nick Clegg is a surprise winner or David Cameron is shifty/strong – everybody has an view on who is the best leader.     There is even talk about a hung parliament (no overall control, so all 3 parties have to slug it out on a daily basis for the next 3 or 4 years).

But you know what?  In the end, it doesn’t really matter who wins.   And it’s all a bit silly when you think about it.   After all, who ever wins, whatever the result, we all loose.

For the last 2 years, the UK (and most of the developed world) has been spending money like it’s the end of the world – money that the countries just do not have to spend.   Yes, they may (or may not) have reduced the impact of the recession, but now the spending time has to come to an end.

We are left with a debt so huge, it’s almost impossible to put it into terms.  But let me try:

• In the UK, the national debt is more than the total borrowing of all previous UK governments in all of history combined (including when the country was run by the royals)
• The amount of debt is equal to 1.2million borrowed ever day since the birth of Christ
• The national debt equates to every man, women and child in the UK owing just under £50,000 each
• The interest payments on the national debt current stands at £75bill every year – we pay more on interest on the national debt than on policing, schools and defence combined

Clearly we can’t go on like this.  If this was your own personal responsibility, your own bank account, you would not be going out and spending more money when you owed so much money – you would be sitting down, looking at your finances and working out where you could cut back on spending to pay the interest off.

Whoever wins, however they paint it, they will have to cut spending – public spending, private spending (through raised taxes and higher interest rates), and reduce costs.  Therefore, there will be less money flowing in the economy, and at some point, this will hit small businesses.

Some people are asking the question of small business – what are you planning to do in the post recession world to springboard into more sales.  I would ask a different question – as a small business owner, freelancer or contractor, what are you going to be doing to protect yourself from the hard times which are sure to hit us all in the next few months?

One of the books that I keep near to hand is the Small Business Handbook.  The great thing about this book is that it covers all the elements of a small (IT based) small business, from forming the business through to eventual sale (or closure).  It proves itself to be an excellent starting point for those new to setting up a business and good advice for those who think they know what they are doing. Even if you have had a business off the ground for a few years, only the 1^st chapter would need to be skipped (but I re-read just to make sure everything was covered).

All the business areas are cover by a step by step approach, and comes complete with a CD in the back cover that provides a lot of useful documents and spreadsheets, such as a template partner agreement, business plan, P&L report, work contract, terms and conditions, etc.

It should be noted that some of the documents provided can be a touch distant from the plain english approach, but they are presented as legal rather than lay persons documents, so perhaps understandable.

I use it a lot for the ‘dip in to’ sections, so can be used as a reference as well as workbook. One of the best parts about the book is the end of chapter summaries, tips and actions plans – it gives you a nice todo list for various areas of a small business, such as expanding or re-thinking marketing.

Whilst it is geared towards a general business, it works well for a small (1 man) business as well.   RECOMMENDED!!

I love keeping up to date with what others are doing in terms of technology, IT contracting/freelancing and what techniques are being used for growing their own small businesses.  Of course, information can come in many forms, and whilst I like reading blogs and news sites, podcasts can also be useful as you can listen to these on the move through MP3 players/ipods, or in your car.

I subscribe to a number of podcasts on a variety of different subjects.   The ones that I currently find most useful are listed below.  Don’t forget that these podcasts also have a back-catalogue of episodes covering a wide variety of subjects.

Freelance Switch podcast
A regular American podcast on practical tips and advice for freelancers and contractors working in IT. Topics covered so far include what to do when the work dries up, finding work, advertising, slow paying clients, accounting.  They also talk about tools and techniques for better freelancing.

Freelance Advisor
The podcast is linked to this UK based freelancers discussion site. As above, this podcast covers a whole host of IT contracting and freelancing subjects, but has a UK basis for all discussions.

The Startup Podcast
Again, another American based podcast which is very IT based, geared around freelancers working with Microsoft technologies.  However, every 2nd episode covers other topics such as keeping yourself motivated, finding investment and expanding your business.

SmallBizPod
The host (Alex Bellinger) produces regular UK based podcasts where he interviews a wide range of small business owners and entrepreneurs.  Whilst this provides less practical advise than the other podcasts, it is still worth listening to for the odd snippet on how others have launched businesses, expanded them and in some cases, taken them into the wider business arena.

 BBC Radio4 – The bottom Line
A BBC Radio4 radio broadcast, also available for download as a podcast.   This is a seasonal program.  When it is scheduled to run, Evan Davis hosts the business conversation show with people at the top giving insight into what matters in business.

BBC Radio4 – MoneyBox
A BBC Radio4 radio broadcast, also available for download as a podcast.   This is a seasonal program.  When it is scheduled to run, it provides the latest news from the world of personal finance plus advice for those trying to make the most of their money.  It is worth listening to as it does cover money changes for business.

I have read many blogs and heard many podcasts which talk about having a USP (Unique Selling Point) – or other such terms, and have always struggled with this concept. After all, whatever it is that we do, there will be lots of other people doing the same thing, so trying to find a USP that works, has been difficult.

However, I was re-reading a book called 101 ways to grow your business over lunch at a customer site (whilst I was waiting for a data transfer to run), and noticed that they were speaking to another supplier on the phone, who was treating this customer very badly – supplying products that were not up to spec, treating them badly on the phone, and not behaving in what I would view a professional manner.

Just so happens, in this 101 ways book, there were a few sections about going the extra mile, and providing good service – and I always try to do this, so I have created my USP – my service guarantee.

Have to say, when I created this, printed it up, and put it on my company web site, my wife thought I was mad, but at the end of the day if I provide bad service, people are not going to pay me anyway, and she has now come around to my way of thinking.

So I present to you, my USP – my service guarantee, which (lifted from my web site) is as follows:

Touchstone Systems provides the following guarantee on all its products and services:

• We Guarantee that any deliveries will be on time and within budget as agreed by both parties or we will make up the difference
• All products and services will be of the highest industry standard. If you disagree, we will correct the situation at our own cost.
• If you still feel that the service/product does not meet the agreed specification, we would not expect you to make final payment
• When meetings, appointments or deliveries are scheduled and agreed, if we don’t meet the agreed times, you don’t pay
• We will provide regular status reports (each day for short projects, weekly for longer) on progress of the work by email or where you prefer, by phone.
• If we provide a product and after all of this you still don’t like it, return it within a month and you don’t have to pay

So, what’s your USP?