Rules are there to keep us safe, to prevent harm to other people, because society demands them and for a host of other reasons, but if you never question the rules you could be missing out.

Two recent examples come to mind. Well, actually I guess I’ve been sitting on this topic for too long. My first example has to do with income tax, so it’s not too recent! If you do your own tax using a program to do the heavy lifting for you, you’ll be familiar with the function where the program offers to optimize some entry for you, to minimize the overall family tax. If I remember rightly, it was medical expenses that I was dealing with.

The program was saying that together, the good lady and I owed $X. It offered to optimize Medical Expenses, and after doing so, we owed more than $X. Optimal? My big toe, it was optimal! For whom, the government? I suppose the rule applied by the tax program was: “the party with the lowest income should take the medical expenses”. For whatever reason, that did not apply in our case. The point of this long overly-complicated example is not that one should never trust a computer ever again, but that occasionally, doing a quick test is a good idea. The cost of doing a test was small, and the benefit was tangible. Testing, and then breaking the “rule” made sense, so I did.

The other example was building a desk. “Everybody” knows that a business person should spend their time doing the things which make money for the business, and hire someone who knows what they are doing for the other necessary things. Well, I decided to make a built-in desk in one corner of my office. By myself, with wood and such. Just about everything that could possibly go wrong (and a couple of things that I thought could not possibly go wrong) - did. The oak veneer splintered, the wheeled computer cart did not fit under the desk until I raised the whole thing by half an inch, and of course, the walls were not straight, so the desk didn’t fit into the corner properly. If I had billed for my time, I could retire (again!) on that job alone. On the other hand, it is exactly what I wanted. It fits the space in a way that only a custom build could achieve, and every day I look at it and smile. It may be a mess, but it’s a mess that I built. And probably, only I can see the faults. Well, apparently my wife can as well. Best of all, it seems that it impressed the heck out of my 18 year old son. That’s worth a lot, and I’m glad I realized that not all benefits are financial.

My advice is, find out what the rules are for your business, because they’re probably the result of a lot of experience. They make sense. Then dig until you understand what they mean. Test the rules where you can do so. (You know I’m not suggesting that you test the rule that says don’t put your fingers in the machinery, don’t you!) The better you understand the rules, the better you’ll understand your business, and you’ll know when it’s OK to break a couple, here and there.

From my desk to yours…

I would think that this title pretty much sums up one of the major dilemmas for someone trying to run a small business. Actually it’s not so easy even in the corporate world. It always seemed to me that busy times at work always coincided with busy times at home, and times when it was pretty laid back at work… no, wait, that never happened. At any rate, the problem facing many of us is balancing a pile of things that have to get done with a pile of things that you want to do.

Back in March, I wrote about To Do lists, and one item was “realise that you need different strategies to handle lists of mandatory tasks and lists of optional tasks”. I’d like to expand on that thought today.

For a long time, I thought that the thing to do was to have a single list with everything on it in priority order, and work my way through it. Fairly soon, I realised that priorities were not that easy to assign; they kept changing and different stakeholders had different opinions. For instance, my wife and my boss often had different opinions regarding what I should be doing. Just becoming your own boss doesn’t get rid of this problem, it just puts a different spin on it.

It doesn’t matter whether you assign priorities with a complicated algorithm which assigns weighted values captured from your goals and objectives, the political clout of the various sponsors, the ROI on the project and the phase of the moon, or if you just put things under “must do”, “want to do” and “nice to do” - in my experience, “Organise a ski trip with friends” and “Increase profits 10% by November” just can’t coexist on the same list.

My conclusion - or at least my conclusion for this month - is that if you want to be fairly sure you are making the “best” use of your time right now, and if you are the “list type” then you need different types of lists. Some of the lists that I like are:

• The Outlook “To Do’ Bar: great for dated lists - Back up the PC, water the lawn, buy a new transit pass, write a forum article…
• Checklists: for things which have many details and don’t get done that often, like packing for a vacation
• Goals, Objectives and related Tasks: sorting this out is a whole project unto itself, and probably something which each individual tackles differently, and
• “My Projects” which are the things that I want to do

Isn’t it funny that that “My Stuff” comes at the end of the list of lists? Pretty typical, too, I’d imagine. I’m still not the greatest at working this part, but some of the essential parts seem to be - have a list, written; find a way of organising it so that at any time you have some spare time, you can select a doable, relevant and important task, so that you’re not just frittering the moment away; and update it often, because just like your other lists, priorities change. A neat idea which encompasses some of these ideals, one I found at www.blackandwhiteparrot.com, is an iPhone applet called Spinning Plates. It doesn’t nag at you with deadlines; it just reminds you when you haven’t made any progress on a given item in the time frame you set, by changing its background colour on the list from a nice healthy green through a number of steps until its glowing fiery red. As long as you keep “feeding” your items with attention, two things happen: they stay green on the list and they get closer to becoming a reality. These days, maybe that’s the best we can hope for - making sure the good things don’t get lost in the chaos, and continued progress towards your goal of a balanced life. Don’t spin your wheels; just keep spinning those plates.

In the last couple of weeks I had an occasion to witness extremes of communication between a customer and a business. It certainly hammered home the point that customer service and communication are critical.

Example #1: my wife phoned for service on a microwave which did everything except actually heat food. Admittedly, it was after hours, but she went through six levels of: “If you want this, press that” until finally getting to “our hours of business are Monday to Friday, 9-4:30”, please try our website. To cap it off, the website was down.

Example #2: I went to buy some software online. At the checkout for item A, I was offered a suite for the same price as item A, and I’d get A, B and C. As I was interested in C, but not to the point of paying an extra $400, I said yes. Now my checkout cart said: suite, download protection, and media kit. As the download was around a gigabyte, and I wasn’t in a hurry, I cancelled the download protection and said yes to the media kit, and even paid the extra $2 for next day delivery. Well, it turns out that next day delivery from Thursday evening was actually Tuesday, but that was the least of my problems. The DVD did not have item “C” on it; it was not the media kit for the suite. I emailed the address from the confirmation email. I had a reply saying they didn’t do refunds. I said I didn’t want a refund, I wanted the correct item. I got a “call customer service”. They said I got what I ordered. Two escalations later, I found I’d been talking to a software distributor, not the manufacturer. Two more calls got me to the manufacturer, and finally, an offer to refund my $25 so I could order the correct item. What about the $19 shipping? They don’t refund shipping. Period. Now, we’re talking about a $1 DVD in a 70 cent DVD case here. Couldn’t they just ship me the right DVD - it would cost them less than the $25. NO. NO. NO. I took the $25 and downloaded on a spare PC and burned myself a disk.

Example #3: bought a fancy phone on e-bay. After the deal was settled, I e-mailed and asked if the seller knew how to set the parameters to get internet on a pay as you go account. He answered within hours with a page of detailed instructions, and also warned me that at 15 cents a KB, I could go through my balance quickly. I bought on Saturday, the seller shipped the phone on Sunday, and the phone arrived on Tuesday.

The big companies showed contempt for their customer, the little guy did it right. Sometime in the future, when it comes to upgrading the development software I’ve been faithful to since the 1990’s, I’m going to think twice (it wasn’t Microsoft, by the way). If someone sees my phone and wants to know where I got it, I’ll go the extra mile and refer them to my seller, who also got a glowing feedback.

Some takeaways:

• Don’t let just anyone program your phone response system, use someone with training
• Phone in yourself from time to time - see if it makes sense, at all times of the day
• If you come up with a marketing idea, make sure the distribution system and web site programming can handle it. Don’t, for instance, leave the SKU for an accessory the same when you change the main item!
• Be clear in your communications who you are. If you outsource some aspect of your operation, be sure that their policy and communication match yours, and where appropriate they identify themselves properly
• Make sure your customer service arm (even if outsourced) knows about your special sales, so customers don’t have to explain it over and over
• When it’s necessary, especially if a mistake has been made, be flexible

The nice thing about this is that for a small business, all of this is easy. It’s much harder for a large conglomerate. Small business owners, this is your huge advantage. Don’t blow it!

The other day, I answered the front door to find a pleasant young man who wanted to clean my windows. When I answered that I clean my own windows, he said, with a note of amazement in his voice, “Why?”

I don’t recall exactly what I answered - I probably sidetracked the question as politely as I could - but it got me started on a line of thought. Why indeed? Part of the answer was that I have invested in about $100 of quality window washing tools. Part was that (especially with the right tools) it’s a pleasant summertime job. But did it make financial sense?

Which, right after tax season, led me to consider marginal tax. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, marginal tax is the tax you pay on the last dollar you earn. Putting it another way, as a business owner, if I take on another job or client, how much of the money they give me do I pay back in tax? If you do your own taxes with a tax program, it may show you this information. If not, just add $100 to your income (temporarily!) and watch how much your tax goes up. For instance, if it goes up $47, your marginal tax rate is 47%. (If your income is in a corporation, it’s more complicated, but eventually the money will come out of the corporation and into your taxable income.)

It turns out that my post-retirement income is now healthy enough to burst free of the mitigating factors of dividend income, pension splitting, medical costs and donations, and now attracts almost 50 cents on the dollar. It’s nice to make money, but it’s a bit of a drag to consider that after a certain point in the year, I get to work for half price.

There is a big difference between working for a living and working for pleasure. When there is a mortgage to be paid and children to educate (wait - I do still have children to educate!) it’s still worth getting a raise or working extra hours, even for only 50 cents on the dollar. Somehow, it feels different when it’s optional. If you are in a similar position - working after retirement for pleasure or for hobby-money - you should consider your marginal tax rates for different income scenarios. When I set my hourly rate, it was based on a number of factors, but the after-tax value of my time was not one of them. My marginal tax back then was truly marginal, and I failed to plan for success.

My revised business plan is to leverage my time more. I’ll be looking for ways to do one hour’s work and harvest more than one hour’s income. There’s more risk involved, but now I can see more clearly what the benefit is, so it’s easier to justify.

So back to the window washer. Turns out that as long as I can wash my windows in less than three hours, I’m in the money. Doing it on a nice lazy, summer day? Priceless.

Some people spend their entire working lives looking for the perfect system for keeping track of things which have to be done. OK. I’ve spent my whole working life looking. First the good news, you can stop looking. There is no perfect system. Well, not until I write the code, there won’t be. In the meanwhile, I do have some hints and tips:

• Decide what kind of person you are, and choose techniques which suit you - ignore others.
• If you like checking off “done” items, don’t have a single item for a multi-part task. Separate them so you can tick them off individually and not be frustrated because one part isn’t done and you can’t tick anything off yet.
• Having too long a list is discouraging. Find a way to hide later items, and maybe items that can’t be done until a pre-requisite is finished.
• Distinguish between important and urgent. Develop a strategy to get to important - urgent tasks done soon and trivial - anytime tasks done never (or at least not until your boss asks about it).
• Distinguish between items which are higher on the list because they are more important or urgent, and those which are higher because they are a pre-requisite for items below. For instance, don’t move “publish new web site” above “beta test new web site” just because it seems more important.
• Realise that you need different strategies to handle lists of mandatory tasks and lists of optional tasks.
• Decide (or ask your wife) what constitutes mandatory.
• Today’s priorities are not tomorrow’s priorities. Adjust as often as necessary.
• Know why you’re doing each task, and for whom. Or stop doing it.
• Have a model, at least in your head, for relating goals, objectives, projects, jobs and tasks. Most likely, you shouldn’t mix these in one list.
• All of these words mean different things to different people, but most people agree that big things need to be broken down into smaller things until the meaning of each thing is fully comprehended by the person doing it. What you call the big things and the small things is up to you or your organisation. Just be sure everyone you deal with has the same meaning in mind.
• At any given time, you can probably only address one task, or maybe a sub-task, depending on how comfortable you are with the subject matter.
• If you share a list with others, make sure that what you mean by “complete” is the same as what they mean.
• If a task list has worked well, update it soon afterwards to make it better, and save it for next time.

All of this came about because my Outlook task list popped up “Write Forum Article” just before my vacation, and as we have a well-honed “Things to do before we go away” list, I was able to relax, basking in the knowledge that everything was well in hand; so well in hand that I could even begin this article instead of rushing around looking for things we’d forgotten. So the subject was a natural.

Unfortunately, my teenage daughter decided that this would be a fine time to download new DRM-protected tracks for her mp3 player, which of course needed Dad for the techie bits and more importantly, entering the credit card number. Even more unfortunately, while there are many things I can do, successfully getting wma files to download and play is not one of them, at least, not without major hair loss. Mercifully, the Vista parental control cut short my frustrations at 10pm and I was able to use the episode as a object lesson in planning ahead - for my daughter.

As for me, I’m going to add “Download music” to the vacation list - preferably around departure minus 7 days.

And that’s why this is late.

I often advise clients who are thinking about getting a website to register their favourite domain name right away, because you never know how long it will stay available. Some of them get carried away in the process and start snapping up multiple domain names because it’s so much fun and relatively cheap. The question is: is this a good idea?

I suppose the real question is, what are you going to do with them all? Let’s examine the reasons to register multiples.

• To stop your competitors from getting them
• Because you can
• Just in case you need them later
• To provide multiple pathways to your web site
• To have an e-mail address different than your web site name (maybe a lot shorter)

The first three only require that you register the domain name. You don’t need to actually have them “go” anywhere. If you want to provide multiple paths (e.g. mywonderfulidea.com and mywonderfulidea.ca both “go” to the same site) then you need to have your hosted site associated with both of these, and that’s where things get a little more complicated, because your hosting plan may not provide that facility. Probably the worst idea is to host each one separately, because then you have to keep them both in sync, and search engines will think you’re trying to pull a fast one on them. Just don’t go there.

So if you are actually going to use multiple domains, you have some planning to do, before you sign your hosting agreement. Talk to your site developer and explain what you want to achieve, so he or she can work out the technical details. From personal experience - I got it wrong the first time! - if you prefer one of the domain names for your e-mail address, that domain should be the one you host as the primary. The hosting company I use most often makes it simple to add extra domain names pointing to a single site, but only the “primary” domain can be used for e-mail. It’s one of those techie things, I guess.

Does any of this make business sense? I’m not sure. If you only have mywonderfulidea.ca and someone types in mywonderfulidea.com, the affect on your business depends on whether mywonderfulidea.com exists and if they are in the same business as you are. If it doesn’t exist, the person will probably find you on their next try. If it does, and the .com site is not in the same business as you, same thing, only a little less likely. Worst case is if they wanted you, and ended buying from the .com instead. So you have to ask yourself, will my (potential) customers find me by a web search or by typing in my domain name, and if the latter, what are the chances they will mistype or misremember and end up not getting to me?

My personal experience is that I type in a domain name in a browser maybe 5% of the time. Mostly, I click on a link or a bookmark, or I click on a search result. If I want to buy cardboard boxes, I certainly don’t start by typing “cardboardboxes.com” into a browser. I have no idea how typical my behaviour is, but my personal thinking is to get one good memorable name with under ten characters in it and stick with that.

But then, I don’t sell cardboard boxes, and as they say, your mileage may vary!

A question that comes up quite often shows that there is some considerable confusion regarding all of the parties which need to be involved in setting up a web site, or, come to that, even getting access to the Internet and having an e-mail address.

Just to dismiss the easy part: in order to access the Internet, you need to have a contract with an ISP or Internet Service Provider. Having “wireless” on your PC doesn’t provide access, unless you spend all of your time at the coffee shop or “borrowing” access from your neighbour who doesn’t know how to secure his router. And while your ISP usually provides you with one free e-mail address, you don’t have to use it.

When you get to wanting a web site, there are two parties involved: a domain registrar, who takes a fee to register your choice of domain name with the national registry (e.g. CIRA for .ca domains) and a hosting company, which rents access to servers (fancy name for big computers) where your web pages (and maybe programs) are stored and sent out to anyone who clicks on a link to them. The major misconception is that if someone has already obtained a domain, then they need to host with the company that registered their domain. Not so.

While it may be administratively simpler to deal with only one company, technically, there is no reason to do so. You may find that a hosting company has a special deal with a “free” domain for the first year. If you are starting from scratch, this may be the way to go. However, when it comes time to renew, you might find that domain renewal is far more expensive at the hosting company than at other places. By that time it may be a bit of a hassle to switch.

My take on this is that domain registration is pretty much a commodity item, and I tend to go on price as the main criterion. When choosing the hosting company, the things I look for are functions offered, service and then price. For instance, if you want to include a mailing list service, then the package you sign up for should include support for a programming language and a database. More specifically, if your web guy is already familiar with a package, then you might need a particular language - maybe a particular version, too - and a particular database. For instance it may need PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x. It’s also possible that a hosting company already has provision for very simply installing that mailing package, which would score points with me. If service is important to you - how much hand-holding do you need? - then it’s a good idea to try calling or e-mailing during a money-back period to see how responsive they are. As a web developer, I have a preference for the devil I know, because at least what I have learned from setting up a site for client A can be applied to client B.

The bottom line to all of this is that if want to try doing your own web development, then take heed of what I’m saying here. If you contract with someone else to do it, listen to their advice, because they know what you will need, and how hosting companies match that need. They may get a commission by steering you to a particular host, but they probably also have a good idea of the service and functionality, and few commissions are good enough to overcome the hassles of poor hosting.

I also wanted to cover the issues of having multiple domains pointing to one web site (mywonderfulidea.com and mywonderfulidea.ca) but that will have to wait for another article.

There is a very special time of year when people contact friends from years ago and exchange news of the past year; some people exchange gifts, strangers might even smile at each other as they struggle onto a bus or GO train laden with packages. Music and songs that bring back childhood memories play on the TV, radio and in stores. Movies that you’d never sit down and watch at any other time of year get replayed and enjoyed. Parents show off how many verses they remember of a long piece of writing which has something to do with mice not stirring. Whole streets light up the trees and houses with multicoloured lights. To some extent, we even welcome that white stuff on the ground that we swear at for the rest of the Winter.

In our house, we called this time of year Christmas.

For most of my life, I blithely went around at this time of year wishing people “Merry Christmas” with scarcely a second thought. Even when I worked in a local municipality, I would wonder at policy that forbade mention of the word “Christmas” and yet we had a Carol Service in the foyer each year.

Now I have a small business, and I like to send out a greeting each year. So, the question is, how should that greeting be worded? Do I say “Merry Christmas” because that is what I was taught to say, or keep a database of clients preferences and customise, or wimp out and go with “Festive Season” or “Happy Holidays”? For fairly obvious reasons, the database idea is out. I think that most years, I said to myself, to heck with it, it’s my card, I’m going to use my name for it.

Something in the Toronto Star ethics column caught my eye a week or so back. It was about a store clerk, a Christian, who wanted to say “Merry Christmas”, but had been instructed to say, as I recall, “Happy Holidays”. The part of the reply that resonated with me was, “you wouldn’t wish someone “Happy Birthday” in February if you knew their birthday was in November, so why wish someone “Merry Christmas” if their equivalent celebration was not called Christmas or even in December? Not a bad point.

My issue is that many people celebrate some festivity in December, even if it’s not Christmas. And I have no idea what their preference is. I would be upset if someone asked me what my religious beliefs were, so I certainly don’t ask others. Besides, to me, it’s not about religion. I enjoy listening to Christmas Carols, but that’s only because I associate them with this time of year, and of happy childhood experiences. But it’s still a good point.

So this year I went with “Season’s Greetings” and “All the best of the season” on a photo I took myself after one of last year’s snow storms. In one way I wimped out, and in another, I’m glad that I’m avoiding the possibility that I might offend someone who wouldn’t know about all the thought that went into the choice of greeting. I would not have been asking anyone to endorse any perceived preference for a particular religion, just expressing my pleasure of sharing a generally happy time of year. But putting all of that into an electronic card would be a real downer, so “Season’s Greetings” it is.

But now that you know that what I mean is strictly non-denominational and merely traditional, I can feel free to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to start plans for developing and marketing a line of “Winter Solstice” cards and novelties. Any use of the colours red and green, or images of reindeer, fat men with white beards, sacks of presents, sleigh bells, holly and mistletoe will be strictly coincidental. And non-denominational.

One thing that Small Business owners can’t get enough of, is time; so anything that makes us more productive is generally a good thing. Back when I was an IT Manager, I pushed for bigger monitors, and established a standard that made a 17” monitor the minimum. Things have changed since then, and now that my clients tend not to work in cramped corporate cubicles, I can recommend larger monitors, especially if they are flat panels.

For my own work, and for those who use computers to make their money, I go further, and recommend dual monitors. I gather Bill Gates uses triple monitors, and I could happily live with that!

So is this just “boys and their toys”? Well, there’s always an element of that, but the productivity comes from how much of a situation you can see at one time. About a hundred years ago, as a mainframe programmer, I expressed the thought that a program subroutine would be more understandable if all of the code was brought together on one or two pages - what a programmer could see in one go on fan-fold computer printout. By having all of the elements of a concept visible at one time, it was easier to follow the logic, understand it and change it. One of my colleagues back then, Kirk Hansen, called this the Powell Principle and to this day he reminds me of this at each staff re-union!

In today’s world, the Powell Principle still makes sense. The more screen real estate is available, the more one can see of a problem or a solution. You can have the application open and see the “Help” entry at the same time. Open an attachment and read what the e-mail says about it. See a large preview of a photo as well as a bunch of thumbnails from the same photo shoot. Open two versions of a document and compare them, or cut and paste from one to the other with both in view. Or finally have enough room for all the palettes in your photo editor. In all of these cases, by seeing more of the job in hand, it makes it simpler to work on it.

While a single large monitor is better than a small one, two medium monitors seems to allow me to organise windows better, is probably cheaper per square inch of screen, and gives me backup if one should fail.

Many PCs, and most laptops, already support two monitors (or the laptop screen plus an extra). Get some advice before you go out and buy a second monitor, to ensure it will work. You may need a new, or second, video card. Two things to watch out for: often the built-in video card (integrated on the mother board) will not work at the same time as a separate video card, so while you may see two video outlets, that is not an option. Second, some video cards have one DVI outlet and one VGA outlet. These will probably allow you to run two monitors, just make sure that the monitors accept the right inputs (for instance, two DVI-only monitors would not both connect to such a video card).

So give it a shot; the first time you drag a window from one monitor to the next you’ll wonder how you ever worked without multiple monitors. It’s like magic!

In my volunteer business advisory role, I often see or hear of small businesses where little or no planning is taking place, and the primary reasons seem to be the difficulty of doing something, or the time it takes. While “proper” planning can be complicated and time-consuming any planning is better than none, and decent planning can be done fairly easily and quickly.

Keeping It Simple is the answer to getting it done when you have no time.

The first thing to tie down is your goal. At the end of your planning period, what, specifically, do you want to have achieved? Write this down clearly, with no weasel words like “if” or “try”. Include measurable parameters and time frames. “From now until 31 Dec 2009 I will generate $120,000 in gross sales” is a good example. At this point, this is a target only, because you don’t know if it’s possible.

Now write down all of the things (or projects) which would have to happen to achieve your target. Do you need to increase manufacturing capacity, do more marketing, get more credit to buy supplies, hire staff, or what?

Time for a reality check: is your list reasonable? There are many ways of doing this, but my favourite is categorise and sort. Think up some positive and negative categories which apply to your type of business. You might have just two, or quite a few. However, remember we’re trying to keep it simple, so not too many categories. For each project on your list, rate it on each category. (Putting them all in an Excel sheet and having one column per category is one way to go, with a numerical rating system.) By sorting on different categories you will hopefully see some patterns. For instance, suppose your categories are “value in achieving the goal” and “risk level”. It’s pretty obvious that the low-risk, high-value projects are the ones you should do for sure, and some high-risk, low-value ones should get dropped! The others need some more analysis to see if they can be modified to reduce the risk, combined to increase the value, or just prioritised.

Other things influence your list as well. Money and resource allocation are prime examples. Also, some projects will depend on other projects, or external factors, such as the date of a Trade Show. You may need a special skill or machine. These extra factors can be added as extra columns to your spreadsheet or just used as a reality checklist. A good way to sort out scheduling and dependency issues is to put each project on a sticky note and move them around on a whiteboard, with lines joining projects which depend on other projects.

What you want to end up with is a workable list of things you have to do, with dates for when you have to do them, and a really good idea of what resources you will need to get each one done. You should be able to check that no two projects need a unique resource at the same time and that your cash flow or line of credit will pay for each one as it starts up. You will know why you are doing each one, and which projects you can drop or delay when you hit that inevitable snag. Don’t necessarily get married to your original goal, either. This process may have made it clear that it’s not realistic, and you may have to change it. The important thing is to have a goal, and a plan for achieving it. Then work your plan!

While I can’t tell that this approach will make your fortune, I can pretty much guarantee that no planning will eventually lose your business for you. By keeping it simple, you will at least have made a start.

Continuing with my theme that telling you how to solve a real-world problem is better than listing what each menu item does, here are three tips that I’ve discovered where OneNote solves a problem better than other methods I’ve tried.

Creating “How-To” Documents for PC procedures

A picture is worth 1K words (as we computer types like to say) and explaining a complicated set of steps is helped enormously by showing intermediate results so the reader can verify that he’s following along successfully. I used to do this with the print screen button, pasting into an image editor, cropping and finally inserting into the Word document. With One Note, the Clip function allows you to select only the area you want, so the cropping step is eliminated. If you want, the entire document can be created in OneNote, or the screen shots can be copied into other programs. The image captured is immediately placed at the cursor location in OneNote, but is also in the clipboard, so you can paste it into whichever program you want to assemble the pictures in. Other uses for this are capturing error messages, logs or other data to report program bugs or clipping part of a website to send to someone, without having to send the whole page.

Providing Design choices to a client

A slightly different use for the Clip is to take repeated snapshots of a design (like a logo, for instance) to present a client with a number of choices. Rather than print a copy of each variation, I now “clip” multiple times, after changing to different fonts or colours or element placement. I can arrange the small clips in a OneNote document and annotate each with the font name or the colour choice so that I can reproduce it later. Finally I print to a PDF straight from OneNote and send it off to my client. An alternative would be to save the OneNote document to a Word document and send that. Sometimes, I clip a representation of the colour palette as well to show what colours are being used overall. Taking snapshots of the work in progress is a lot faster than reproducing multiple “finished” versions. Just be sure to “clip” the image without any selection markers present in the part you want to show.

Changing the order of elements

I don’t know about you, but when I’m free-thinking or brainstorming, I never get the ideas down in my draft in the right order first time! Moving lines around to get them in the right order has always been a pain. I’ve done things like add a column in Excel and sort on that, but in OneNote, you can drag and drop to your heart’s content until the things are in the right order. Cut and paste between Excel and One-Note is well designed, so you can move data to OneNote, get them in the right order and copy and paste them back with no problems. I recently created a web-site development estimating template in Excel, changing the order of tasks in OneNote until they made the most sense. When the work starts, I copy a section back to OneNote to keep track of the actual hours spent, using the timestamp method I described last month.

Meanwhile, I’ve tried to get the two high school students in our household to use One Note for their essay or other homework research, where OneNote’s practice of annotating each web-site clip with the URL makes life so very easy, but without any luck. Isn’t it the old fogies who are supposed to be beyond learning new tricks?

In many program, the formal documentation or help tells how to use each menu item, but there is no proper explanation of how, given a real world business problem, your new, wonderful software can be persuaded to solve it.

To give OneNote its due, it does come with a number of tailored pages and templates to give you some ideas of what to enter to be useful. Even so, I went through the initial free trial period without coming to the conclusion that it could become indispensible. This is all a long prelude to say that some programs need to be played with for an extended period before one finds where it can be used. OneNote was this way for me and only after I had made a commitment to it did I find some really useful ways to use it which have now entered my regular workflow; here’s one.

How I use it is still evolving, but I tend to create a separate notebook for each major client, plus a general notebook for the rest of the clients. Within these, I use sections and pages as required. When I’m starting a new task for which I need to track billable time then, somewhere on one of the client pages, I set up a four column table (Table menu | Insert Table). It doesn’t need many rows, just enough for any items which need to be recorded immediately, because typing ctrl-Enter creates a new row under the cursor, so it’s really easy to add more.

I put the task name (i.e. a short description) in the next empty table row, first column, and then in column two I use the shortcut which makes timekeeping a breeze: alt-shift-F. This puts the current date and time in that column as a start time. When I’m done, or get interrupted, I put the stop time in column three, using the shortcut again. If I restart the same task, I can add a row beneath and put in an extra start and stop time. This way, as long as I remember to punch my time clock in and out, I can come back later and work out all of the time I have spent on each task, even if the task was interrupted multiple times. I work out the calculated task times in the fourth column. One nice by-product of this method is that if I forget to clock out of Task A and clock into task B, at least the total for A and B will be accurate.

If there are multiple tasks, I pre-plan them in the table, and punch in times or add extra rows for interruptions as I go. For unplanned tasks like a phone call, I might add a row in an existing table, or create a new table.

Finally at invoice time, depending on how complicated it is, I can either copy the table and paste it into Excel, or just do some mental arithmetic. Of course, once in Excel, I can categorise, summarise, sort and sum to my heart’s content.

All of which begs the question: why not just have Excel up all the time? That was the conclusion I came to at first. I thought: OneNote doesn’t do anything I can’t already do in other programs I already own. What I found is that OneNote brings enough of the basics from other programs into one program, which starts almost instantly and doesn’t seem to bog down my PC if I leave it running while I do other things. It just makes things so darn convenient!

Next time: documenting “How-To’s” from your PC with OneNote.

In previous articles, I’ve alluded to needing to stay in control of your web site property. If you’re not technically inclined, or if you’re too busy to stay on top of everything, it’s easy to leave the details to someone else, but in the wrong set of circumstances, you can get burned. Imagine buying a house and years later when you go to sell it, you find it’s registered in the name of a real estate agent or a lawyer, or maybe it’s in your partner’s name. Unlikely? Probably. What if you found your domain name doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the developer who set up your web site, and that developer refuses to transfer control to someone else?

If this has happened to you already then you may need legal advice specific to your situation. Whether you decide to fight or fold depends a lot on your tolerance for a whole lot of hassle, because however right you think you are, it’s possible that, legally, you’re wrong. The purpose of this article is to save some of you from that hassle in the future. Here are some of the points you would be wise to consider:

1. Get the domain name registered in your own name. Probably the easiest way to ensure this is to do it yourself. It’s very easy to do. For a .ca registration, the important thing is that the administrative contact e-mail address is one you control. Then if anyone else tries to change details of your account, that e-mail address will get an e-mail from CIRA (the Canadian registration authority) asking if this is OK. Unless you respond positively, nothing happens. (This means it’s very important that CIRA has an up-to-date e-mail address. Don’t cancel this address without changing CIRA’s contact point first, or you’ll find yourself in a catch-22 situation!) For more information about protecting your .ca domain registration, click here.
2. Know where your site is hosted and what the administration password is. For .ca domains, you can find out the first part from CIRA, by logging in and looking at your account. Any responsible hosting company should provide access to your site once you prove you are the owner. They might do this by e-mailing the information to the Administrative contact. Your developer has to have access to the host server to make changes to your site, but should not change the password without your approval.
3. Make sure you know which content is yours. Sounds obvious? Maybe not. Suppose the developer provides a photo from a stock photography company. Does he have the rights, or do you? Or, maybe the developer included some fancy code to protect your e-mail address from being “scraped” by a web-bot. If you move to another developer, can you still use that code? The moral and logical answer is of course, “yes” — the developer should provide you a licence to continue to use all of the content provided in your website regardless of who maintains it, but I’ve heard of cases where there has been conflict. (Of course, you should not take that developer-supplied code and re-use it in a totally different site unless it was developed specially for you.) I can hardly perceive a context in which the design and words would not be yours to take away, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a problem some day.

As a consultant to small businesses, I’ve had to take over maintenance of existing sites on several occasions, and usually the relationship is extremely professional and even cordial. However, it appears that I have a potential client whose developer is making life very difficult, and from what I hear is refusing to allow the site to be relocated. In effect, this site is being held hostage and that’s what inspired this article — wish me luck!

The marginal cost of taking a digital photo is essentially zero. There are very few such bargains to be had in today’s business world, yet I wonder how many of us take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

When I was in the corporate world, one item that stayed in my briefcase (or, when I was toting a laptop, my backpack) all of the time was a small 4MP digital camera. When I brought it, 4MP wasn’t a bad size, but it turns out that it’s plenty for most of the tasks I’m going to describe, because the print or screen size doesn’t need to be that big. Just about every week I found a use for it, and once word got around (a tactical mistake on my part, perhaps!) it was often borrowed by fellow managers.

Here are some of the uses I put it to:

• Recording the state of something before a change. Take a picture before you pull all of the connecting wires out of that piece of equipment so you can put it back together later on.
• Evidence of shipping damage. A picture can be worth a thousand words, and can be e-mailed quickly, and save time in resolving a situation. You might also need it one day in your car if you get into an accident.
• Portable photocopier. A photo can be easier than arranging small receipts on the bed of a copier if you want a record of expense receipts just until they are approved, or need a quick document copy away from your office. Just be sure to preview the image and zoom in to make sure the focus was OK, while you have the chance to take another if necessary.
• Produce better documentation. I remember one time we had to arrange for every branch office to switch their old router out and connect a new one which had been shipped to them. A few close up photos of the back of the same models, before and after, with arrows and labels edited into the image made the instructions super simple.
• Staff photos. When your staff talk daily on the phone to out-of -town clients (internal or external) and especially if they are in a support position where tempers can flare, it helps immensely when their clients know them as people, not just a voice on the phone. Another use is to stick photos on vinyl magnets and use them as signposts outside offices or cubicles. It might be corny, but my staff loved the surprise and recognition, and in an otherwise nameless organisation, it often proved useful for navigation.
• In an emergency, with the USB cord, a camera can often serve as a portable flash memory drive.
• Inventory and record keeping. A photo of someone’s office can record the major items such as chairs, desk and filing cabinets. Digital photos have a built–in date as well. It’s a lot easier to snap a close-up of a serial number and transcribe it from a zoomed-in, rotated image on your screen than to peer into dark corners and try to read numbers upside-down. You can also record product keys for your software in case the original packaging goes missing and you need to re-install.

So that’s a flavour of the kinds of things you can do when a camera is readily available. Makes you think your cell phone camera might have some use after all, doesn’t it?

Best of all, I came up with enough ideas for this article that I didn’t have to mention the possibilities when you get candid snaps of your boss at the Christmas party!

Happy snapping!

First, a little history lesson. In the beginning, there was DOS, and green monitors. Well, there were earlier beginnings, but that’s as far back as we need to go today. When things got a bit more graphical, programs began to try to reproduce on the screen what the output would look like on paper, and the acronym WYSIWYG – “whizzy wig”, or what you see is what you get – was adopted. These days, computer users tend to take that for granted, but back then, it was quite something.

Fast forward to today, when everyone and their dog professes to be a web-site developer, and guess what? WYSINNWTG. Not necessarily what they get. From the view in the development program the designer uses to the end users’ browser, there are a number of factors which make changes to the look of the final display.

• Older browsers may not support all of the functionality that the designer may build in
• Even a new browser may be used by a user who has chosen not to download a particular plug-in, like a Flash viewer
• Browsers from different makers and different versions of browsers interpret the same HTML and CSS in different ways, sometimes with hugely different results
• The size of the viewer’s monitor will affect the largest window the browser can run in, and the size the viewer decides to make the browser window will affect the layout of the page
• The fonts installed on the viewer’s machine may not include a specific font used in the web design; the browser will substitute something similar, but still different.
• Users with very slow connections will get a very different experience than users with broadband connections.
• At a more esoteric level, the viewer may decide to set up the browser with a different size of character display, or even provide an overriding set of CSS. Options to not display images, or Flash output, or to run JavaScript are all available. Users with poor or no eyesight rely on hardware or software which translates text to speech and “reads” it to them. Text in images will not be part of the output.

A web site designer tries to balance these and other considerations to provide a web site that conveys a positive image to as much of the audience as possible, but there will be hundreds of minor variations in what people experience. In many cases, the KISS principle works well, because the more complex the design, the more options there will be to manage.

For the small business person who is getting a new web site, or changes to an existing one, the important take-away from this article is that part of the web-designer’s job is to make sure the client’s web site looks and works as intended on the majority of popular platforms and secondly, that what you see in a demo is not necessarily what your customers will see. Try to involve a number of people in testing the site, and take the time to view it yourself in several different browsers; most importantly, view it on a large monitor using a variety of smaller window sizes—as the window changes shape, what happens to your content? Is that what you expected?

Remember, this is the way the whole thing is designed to work. The site designer describes the content using a markup language, and the browser decides on the “best” way to display the content to the viewer. It’s just that when you want to sell an idea, one feels the need to have better control. Get used to the idea that you can’t control everything, but make sure the design works for the majority of your potential clients. And give thanks that these days you don’t have to worry about too many customers looking at your new masterpiece on monochrome green monitors!

As it turned out, most of the work I have done since leaving the Corporate fold has been for organizations whose staff are volunteers. As pretty much everything was new to me when I started out, some characteristics that these organizations shared didn’t really strike me for quite a long time, so I’m passing on some revelations to help others who have similar clients.

Time doesn’t run at the same rate for a volunteer. In the corporate world, if someone asks you to do something, and you send them the results, then you can expect them to take a look at it and get back to you. Maybe not the same day, but soonish. Usually. I recall creating a database application for a client which appeared to be eagerly anticipated. Finally the product was ready and I sent it off. (One nice thing about creating things on a computer is that shipping is not a major issue!) Then I waited. And waited. I began to imagine that there were terrible problems and my client was agonising over how to break the bad news. I waited some more. They even paid my invoice, and still there was no feedback. Finally, I heard back — almost everything was fine. What I hadn’t realized was that while the project was important to my client, it wasn’t as important as his own business. Making your living comes first, and your volunteer responsibilities — especially if they can wait for a while — come second. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was just that other things took priority for a while.

Volunteers look after their organizations’ money. Recently, a new client asked me to take over some work which another consultant had been doing. We talked and corresponded; we hit it off and eventually got down to talking about money. Apparently, my rate was higher than the previous person’s and furthermore, they had had a discount for non-profit. So I expounded on my virtues, years of experience and so on, and said my rate was my rate. I got back an e-mail saying I was hired with a “sort-of” apology for being careful with the money, but he had a responsibility to spend the money wisely. He still is careful with the money — to this day, this is one client where I never have any doubts as to what the budget is for each task, and actually, I find that useful; I know when to stop perfecting something. At least, I know when to stop billing.

Volunteers come to life on weekends and evenings. Think about it. They have day jobs! This means that if you need a decision from your volunteer client which involves her reading the 20-page analysis you prepared, then you’d better think about delivering it on Thursday or Friday, because she’ll be reading it on the weekend. By the same token, if you need to discuss something, 10 am Monday isn’t going to be a preferred time. Prepare to keep your schedule flexible to accommodate theirs, or your projects are going to run forever!

No doubt I’ll have further insights into volunteer clients as time goes on, but one misconception I might have had has been thoroughly dispelled. If you think that office politics has no part in a volunteer-based organization, or if you think I’m going to illustrate that with some juicy tales —you’re wrong! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with the volunteers in my client organizations; I hope these few insights will help you to do the same.

In this world of electronic communications, many small businesses never meet some of their clients. Some might keep in touch only by e-mail so the entire client file is (somewhere) on your PC. In a way, those documents are your clients, and being able to find the right one in a timely fashion can determine how successful your relationship becomes.

The system I use is always evolving, but revolves around three things, folders, naming and search tools.

Folders: When I first used personal computers, about a hundred years ago, I and everyone I knew used to populate folders with a certain type of file. All of my spreadsheets were in a folder called Spreadsheets, or maybe I called it Excel. That came about because the open dialogue defaulted to one place, and there was one place to save. Today, I recommend project folders: every file related to a project, be it a Word document, an Excel document or a bunch of jpg pictures is filed in a project folder. That doesn’t mean it can’t be subdivided in sub folders, and maybe all those pictures should be in a folder, just to keep them tidy, but only the pictures relating to that project would be there.

I have a business folder, with client folders within that, and project folders inside them. If a project needs some files from another project, I copy them in, and edit them to remove extra information that doesn’t relate to the new project. If there’s some data which is common to many projects, I might set up a “Common” folder, or put shortcuts in the new folder pointing back to an original.

In Outlook, I store e-mails in a similar structure. If an attachment will only be used for a couple of days, I tend to leave it in Outlook. If it’s more permanent, I do a “Save Attachments” or a “Save As” and copy the file to the project folder.

Naming: I will name (or re-name, if it came from elsewhere) a file or an e-mail (in Outlook 2007, change the subject line and save) so that I can tell what the content is. If several versions will exist, I include a revision number. I try not to call something “Final” because it never is! As everything will be in a folder belonging to a client and a project, I don’t need to put this information in the file name, although if the file is going to travel, I might do so. Depending on the files you’re collecting, it might make sense to consider naming them so that similar files names sort together, or maybe you should use a sub folder. (It’s possible to overdo the sub-folder thing, to the point where it takes 5 minutes to click down to the file you want, so give it some thought!)

Search Tools: Even with the best conventions, a document or e-mail sometimes decides to hide. When this happens, there are many ways to dig it out. Windows Explorer can search for partial file names or text in the document. It can also sort files by filename, type or date, so if you’re looking for a spreadsheet you changed in February for a particular client, you can narrow it down quickly. However, more and more, I find myself using a local content search tool which works like an Internet search on your hard drive. Choose a unique set of words and you should find your document in the results page.

So, that’s the basics. On some projects, at a milestone, I send all of the files to a compressed folder, name the zip file with a date, and write the file to a CD which I file in the paper folder. While I also do full backups to a USB drive, that don’t keep past versions, and sometimes having a previous version has saved my bacon.

This is a question that I get all of the time. My usual answer is “How long is a piece of string?” followed by some explanations. As there’s no real answer to the first question, and as the usual sub-text is: “How little can I pay and still get a decent site?” what I’ll try to address today is what you can do to keep costs to a minimum:

Do your own domain name search and registration. This can be quite time consuming and therefore expensive. It’s also a good idea to put dibs on your preferred domain name before someone else snaps it up. To start, do an internet search on “domain registration”. Almost every company will have a simple method of entering a prospective domain name and letting you know whether it is available. When you find one that you like and is available, it is simple to register online. Doing this also has the advantage that you know the name is registered to you personally, and under your control. Typically this will cost less than $25/year for a .ca, and can be a lot cheaper for .com — if you can find one!

Get an idea of web hosting costs. While it’s probably better to take the web designer’s recommendation for your first web hosting service, you can get an idea of costs for a basic site from the same outfits you found looking for registration. $8-$12 a month is a starting point for an uncomplicated site.

Know what you want before you call. You don’t want to pay someone to help you decide what you want! Look at your competitors’ sites and get an idea of what you want to say, and create a simple document (no formatting). As long as it does the job and makes sense, keep the number of pages to a minimum. Typically, you’ll have a home page which introduces the site and has links to other pages; a Contact us page with addresses, maps, phone numbers and the subject pages for each major topic.

Determine the “Look and Feel” for your site. Creating this can be a major time commitment for a designer. Having examples can help, but even better, you can provide your designer an actual template! Search on “web site templates” and you’ll find thousands of mostly free designs that a web designer can use and modify. If a small contribution is requested, pay up, it’s a real deal! A typical design will set the fonts, colours and patterns for a website, so that every page looks like it’s a part of the whole. Point your designer to a favourite template to work from, or let them use it as a starting point.

At the very least, if you do these things you will have given the designer a very good idea of what you want and allow him to give you a pretty exact estimate.

While you’re at it, think ahead to making changes. Are you going to go back to the designer and pay him to make basic textual changes, or will you do it yourself? Decide which pages you want to make frequent changes to and ask the designer to create it in such a way that the words can be easily edited by a non-expert, without special software, and uploaded without help.

Life isn’t all one sided, and while saving costs is important to you, creating a good relationship with an IT or graphics expert is also important. You’ll want to work well with the professionals who can help you on your way to becoming rich and successful, so explain where you are coming from in a cooperative, not confrontational, mode and the good guys will understand. If one declines your business on these terms, listen to his reasons and make your decision accordingly.

A website doesn’t automatically market your business, you have to market the website. Like many of the other activities that I wrote about in the earlier articles, this can be surprisingly time consuming.

To recap quickly, my assertion is that a web site per se doesn’t bring in a single new client unless that client was actively looking for your product. Once a visitor reaches your site, your content can help market your product, but the hard work is getting them there. So, how do you go about getting more people to your web site?

Just like the real world, one way is through advertising. Don’t overlook the “free” options: everything you produce should have your website address (URL) printed on it. This includes your business card, your e-mail signature, any brochures you print, an instruction sheet, your invoices—anything that goes to the public. If they already have something you produced, they are a far better prospect than any hundred random members of humanity, so don’t leave them wondering how to find you! Some directories will include your contact details for no cost; phone directories typically charge, and charge more to include a website address. Regular advertising (print, TV, radio, flyers, billboards) can also include your URL without a large increase in cost. To my mind, adding a URL is like getting almost free, unlimited extra space attached!

Unique to the internet is pay-per-click advertising. You’ll need to do your homework before signing up, and have a respectable initial budget allocated to trying out different schemes to see how they work. I am not an expert on this subject—my point is that as well as money, you’ll need to allocate someone’s time to monitor this and keep tuning it to get the results you want; otherwise you’re probably throwing the money away.

The web equivalent of word of mouth might well be links from other web sites. Links do two things. They bring visitors from sites which have already attracted people with associated interests, and they raise your profile in most search engines. However, getting other sites to add a link to you takes time and effort. Even if you indulge in “you add my link and I’ll add yours” you have to spend some time changing your website, and checking from time to time that all your links are still live.

On-line directories are a mystery to me. Except for the well known few, who uses them? Although many of the small ones are free, there is a cost associated with finding all of your entries should you ever need to move or change your phone number. But it does add to your link count.

Probably the most tried and true way to drive people to a site is to have exciting, fresh, readable content. Visitors might bookmark your site and keep coming back; the really big players aim for you to make their site your homepage! With the right content, you may persuade people to add your RSS data to their reader. More usually, for small businesses, a monthly e-mail to an established audience has a teaser with a link to your web-site for more information. All of these methods require a steady stream of new content.

Lastly, there is our old friend, Search Engine Optimisation. This is not a make it and leave it deal. If SEO is to be done well, it must be done continually. One book title, “Search Engine Optimisation: an hour a day” tells the whole story. Maybe you can afford to spend less time, but this task is another resource hog. Just when you think you have it made, the competition changes something, and you’re no longer in the first results page.

Just like marketing in the “real” world, marketing a web site takes time, and costs money!

(With apologies to Robert Fulgham)

While dealing with the first snow of the season recently I got to thinking how many business principles would apply to moving snow. With best wishes for the holiday season, here’s my light-hearted list, which might even help with the next snowfall:

1. Location, location, location: having a driveway that faces the sun most of the day is at least half of the battle.
2. Any colour you like as long as it’s black: asphalt is wonderful for capturing energy and melting snow. The blacker, the better!
3. Choose the right tool for the job: snow pushers work fast in light snow; snow shovels require more effort but are the only thing that works on heavy snow
4. Look after your tools and they will look after you: a quick spray of silicone lubricant or WD40 will stop snow sticking to your shovel.
5. Don’t let a small problem turn into a bigger one: clearing an inch of snow three times can be easier than doing it all at once. You get the “black” melting effect three times, and you can probably use pushers, not lifters.
6. Dress for success: success in this case is keeping the snow from drifting down your back and into your socks.
7. Know your competition and note their direction: don’t pile your snow on the left of your driveway; the snow plough will pile it all back.
8. Plan ahead and avoid having to redo things: if you’re moving snow to the right side, start shovelling on the left.
9. Smooth out the bumps as you go-avoid nasty surprises later: have you ever left a small piece of ice which partially melted and refroze as an immovable bump? You really don’t want to hit one of those at full speed with a snow pusher-especially if the handle is in front of your body!
10. Automate when the payback exceeds the costs: a snow blower probably costs less than a full course of chiropractic sessions.
11. Know when to outsource: paying the neighbourhood kid is sometimes the best option!

And of course:

12. The customer is always right: especially when the customer is your wife and she’s telling you to get the snow off the drive so she can go out and shop for Christmas!

Next month, I’ll get back to the last part of the series on the hidden costs of having a website.

In the last article, I asked: “Why do you need a web site?”. This time, I’m asking: “If you start one, can you afford to keep it running?” Most people understand the two basic ongoing costs, domain registration and hosting, and probably have a vague idea that paying someone to design and create the thing may cost a penny or two. However, in my experience, what comes as a shock to many is the time and effort that needs to be expended to maintain web site content after it’s up.

If your site is intended to stop at providing basic information to your clients, then not too much needs to be done. If you move, change a phone number or your opening hours, then update the relevant page and that’s it. If you go a bit further and keep the specifications of your products, then depending on the volatility of your line, you will have some extra regular maintenance to do. However, this category of sites is manageable, and suits many small businesses, clubs and non-profits. Just don’t have a page that says “Current Events” filled with ancient offerings!

Are you looking to create some advertising revenue as well? The good news is that you can set it up and watch the income trickle in. The bad news is that if you want to maximise that flow, you need to attend to many more details. However, bringing customers to your site tends to increase advertising revenue, so looking after your own good will typically do the job, so long as the advertising doesn’t get in the way of letting your clients buy from you.

Supporting Sales needs a bit more work. Typically, you will need to keep up with changes in prices, new models, shipping costs, taxes and a host of other details if you want to provide all of the data a potential customer demands before they are willing to commit to a purchase from you. At this level, the technology is not a do-it-yourself proposition, although so long as the basic structure doesn’t change, non-professionals can probably do the updates. You will need to take a long hard look at the data you commit to maintaining, though. A photo, or even a photo gallery of each product really helps a potential buyer, but consider the time it takes to set up the product in good lighting, take studio-quality shots including close-ups of details, and edit and crop everything in an attractive and consistent manner. Now multiply this effort by the number of new items you want to feature each year. Even using plain text, how long does it take to describe something accurately and in a manner that attracts customers?

Now suppose you want to actually sell from your site. If there is a problem, you need it fixed yesterday. You need someone to keep track of the traffic on your site, and manage service levels so each customer has a good experience, not an agonizing wait and abandonment. If your service really takes off, are you prepared to add the necessary capital investment to keep up with the business, and do you have the staff to do it? Outsourcing technology expertise is probably the way to go; just make sure they have the capacity to keep up with your growth!

Obviously, I’m just touching on a number of issues in this article, but I trust I’ve made the point that a “make it and leave it” website will bring results at a basic level. It’s still worth having for a large number of people, but at the point where you ask if the web site is pulling its weight, that’s when some heavy thinking is needed-is your business willing to put in what’s needed to go to the next level?

You may have noticed that I haven’t even touched on Marketing. Suffice it to say that in marketing a web site, Content is King. You’d better believe that maintaining good content doesn’t come cheaply!

Well, just what kind of question is that? Everyone should have a web site, right? OK, now put the emphasis on the word “you” or the word “need” instead of the word “why”. Too many people just wake up one morning and decide that the world won’t go on unless it has their web site running in it, and then they find someone who would be only to pleased to save the world and accommodate them. Unless you have thought out what a web site is going to do for your business, you are probably wasting a large proportion of your investment.

Here are four possible reasons to have a web site which are fairly easy to rationalise, and one that needs some more consideration. So let’s start with the simple ones.

Provide information to your clients. A web site can contain more information than a business card or brochure, and lots more than a 2-line entry in the phone book. If you want to reduce the time you spend giving directions, your opening hours, product specifications or shipping rates, even a simple web site can do this, and it does it 24-7!

Support Sales. By providing all of the information a shopper requires, and possibly a means to compare prices and or specifications of other products or suppliers, a business can “make” a sale (and if it has the technology, complete a sale) which would otherwise have not existed. Many shoppers these days will browse for information, shoppers reviews and hard specifications, make up their minds on a product and supplier and complete their purchase. Anyone without a web-site or whose website does not capture the shopper’s attention does not participate in this market.

Perform an on-line service. There are many models for this, most of which actually sell a variety of goods which can be easily shipped. Other services could include digital design, product support, proprietary information services, preparation of tax returns-in fact just about anything that can be performed with little or no human intervention. These services may enhance an existing business or they may be the business.

Create advertising revenue. Whatever the primary reason for the site, or even without having a primary reason, a web-site can generate revenue by including ads from other companies, who pay when a viewer clicks on their ad. Many sites today apparently have no other reason to exist than this, but usually ad revenue is a secondary objective for a site.

The other reason I often hear is Marketing. This sounds like a reasonable enough objective, until some thought is given to how a web site will do that. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a web site per se does nothing for Marketing. Maybe this is just tricky semantics, but the best web-site in the world won’t bring in a single new customer who wasn’t actively looking for its product. It’s like printing a glossy catalogue and keeping all of the copies in your warehouse and waiting for someone to ask for one. While a well designed web-site can assist in the marketing of a product, the real marketing effort is in getting visitors to come to your site.

So that’s several good reasons to have a web site and one that needs more examination. I like to tell clients that having a web site is a business necessity like having a telephone number. However, while the basics can be covered with little expense, meeting many of the other objectives which can be supported by a web site is a very different proposition, and the initial ease of getting a basic web-site with your very own domain name and e-mail address should not lull you into a false sense of simplicity.

Next month: Beyond the basic web-site: Perils and Pitfalls. What it takes to keep a web-site working for you.

In the corporate world, one gets all kinds of hints for when you’re spending too long on a task. Your boss will tell you. The department you’re doing work for tells you they wanted it yesterday. Your spouse phones to tell you to come home. And in the end, in many environments, it doesn’t matter that much if you did “too good” a job, because it’s all coming out of the same purse. As my own boss, I sometimes find that the time I want to spend on a project, to get it the way I want, appears extortionate to me when converted to billed dollars. If you’re wondering why that’s a problem, maybe I can borrow your conscience for the next few years! For the rest of you, here are some solutions which have helped me balance quality and cost.

• Where the project allows, provide an estimate, and try to live with it. A clearly defined project with a definite price takes all the billing guesswork away-even if it does put all of the risk on you.
• After you work with a client for a while, you will get a sense for whether they like basic service or value added; then you can start in the right ballpark, and keep fine tuning.
• If you run into problems because your experience is lacking, or your design was poor, “stop the clock” until you are back on track. My only exception to this is if a client wants me to do something outside of my current expertise, and they clearly understand that a certain amount or trial and error will be involved.
• When in doubt, communicate! If you have a choice of ways to do something, and you have time, ask what they want. (Sometimes the simplest solutions are best.)

One other course I have taken may be at odds with the conscience thing - I used to have different rates depending on what I was doing and where I was. Database development cost more than editing a word document, working away from my office was more expensive than working at home. Non-profits and seniors got a break. No more! My time is my time, and I let my clients decide whether it’s worth it to them. I’d like to think that I provide extra value on some mundane tasks, but in the end, it’s up to the client. It makes billing and quoting much easier.

My experience has been that clients appreciate good work and honest billing, and that often what seems expensive to me is a bargain to them, especially compared with what they were used to putting up with before. I’m providing services that my clients either can’t do themselves, or don’t have the time to do themselves, and despite my misgivings, they keep coming back. I do still get a hint when I’m taking too long: my wife doesn’t have to call me to come home any more-but she will sometimes ask if I’m ever going to bed!

And if I still can’t sleep at night, I can always throw in a freebie or two.

Some of the least productive and most frustrating times of my IT Manager career came just after those fateful words, “I need to create mailing labels for 400 envelopes, and I can’t get it to work.” Unfortunately, these projects usually started when someone sat down and typed in 400 names and addresses on their computer, and ended (for them!) at my door because the format of the data was all wrong.

It might have been a beautiful mailing list to the person holding it-nice columns, and everything lined up and fitting a maximum number of addresses on a page, but to anyone who has had to re-format or re-enter it all so that it can be manipulated as data, well, it’s just plain ugly.

Computer programs like to be able to recognise data boundaries. Where does the first address end, and the second begin? Which part is the postal code? What happens if there are two e-mail addresses, or none? The most elementary way many programs do this is to say that an entity ends at the end of a “line”. Typically that’s a paragraph in Word, or a row in Excel. If someone has entered addresses so that each one flows across several paragraphs or rows, then many advantages are lost. Within a line, it’s really nice if there’s an unambiguous way to separate the pieces of data: first name, last name, the pieces of the address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and so on.

If you have data in an ugly format, it’s probably worth your while to make it readable. If you’re just starting out, enter it the right way first time.

Try to imagine all of the ways the data will be used: mailing labels, a printed directory, a page on the internal web-site, emergency call list etc. Some of these uses will require extra data, which should be added from the start. For instance, the people on the emergency call list should be uniquely identified. If you want to address the envelope “Dr. John Smith”; have a personalised letter which starts “Dear John”, and the internal directory listing “Smith, Dr. John”, then you should separate the salutation, first name and last name.

If thinking about all of this is making your head spin, now may be a good time to buy your favourite IT person a coffee, and get some advice. If you’re hanging in there, the coffee thing may still pay off, because (a) it never hurts to have a friend in IT and (b) there might be some things you haven’t thought of.

Want to go further? OK, fasten your seat belt.

• Decide on which program you will use. Access is most flexible, but it has a learning curve, and not everyone has a copy, so if you’re sharing the data, others may have problems. (It’s beyond the scope of this short article to go into details on Access.) Excel is next best as a data repository , but may not be good for presenting results. Word presents well, but has less data handling. A good combination which most people can relate to is storing data on Excel and creating output with Word. In a pinch, create the data in a Word table; but someone will need to copy and paste it to a Excel spreadsheet before you can use it in a mail merge.
• Each row of data should refer to one and only one set of data. For example, one address.
• Each column should contain only one type of data. Don’t put a fax number in an e-mail address column because the person only has a fax. (You may want to add a “Notes” column for this kind of exception.)
• Make one column for each data element (e.g. Salutation, First Name, Last Name) that you will need and never enter more than one data element in a cell. If the person has two phone numbers, enter only the main one, and put the other in Notes. If you want to capture an unlimited number of possible phone numbers (home, business, cell, fax etc.) then you’re reading the wrong article. You need a database or contact manager!

If you follow these rules, you’ll be in good shape for your next step. Your IT guy will be impressed with your formatting if you go there for help, or if you start to delve into the “Mailings” tab in Word (2007) you won’t find that you’ve already shot yourself in the foot and wasted two days entering data in the wrong (ugly) format.

This was the subject of an article by Jon Bentley, published March 1985 in the British Computer Society’s Computer Bulletin. It has survived many of my paper purges over the years because I so liked the concept: a few rough calculations scrawled on the back of an envelope can save huge amounts of time and money when they unearth some basic flaw in the assumptions. OK, today you’d use a calculator, but who’s going to read an article titled “The Calculator”?

I recalled this article recently, after a consultation with a client who was finding that he wasn’t bringing in as much money as an entrepreneur as he had hoped; in fact it wasn’t even as much as he had been earning as an employee. He had come for advice on improving marketing, so he could do more business. As we heard more about his process, it became clear that each job was taking at least two weeks of mostly full time activity, and was netting him around $1,500. Even if he spent no time on marketing, and still by some miracle filled his year with 26 jobs, he would be bringing in $39,000 a year. $25,000 would be a more likely result allowing for down-time and other overheads, and that wasn’t what he had in mind when he decided against the traditional employment scenario.

A quick calculation on the back of an envelope would have revealed that better marketing was not the issue. In fact he really couldn’t afford to take on more of the same business, if he was to improve his income. That particular consultation continued with us providing advice on pricing and on reducing the time spent to produce his product.

While most small business people develop a business plan when they are first starting, as time goes on, they forget to revisit the plan. Every new job or process should be quickly reviewed to see if it makes sense, and existing practices looked at from time to time to see if changes are needed.

Reality checks need not be confined to financial numbers, either. Without going overboard, think about measuring and estimating every major aspect of your process. Time, space, weight, effort, impact… you name it, it can be measured, and with more numbers, you can make better decisions.

• You can make $10 on the resale of a fancy pillow - but have you worked out how much space 10,000 pillows will take up in your home-based business?
• Concrete garden gnomes are going cheap from your distributor, but you’re a mail order business-maybe your carrier has a maximum weight limit, or stronger cardboard boxes will cost too much. And how many can you put on your storage shelving before it collapses?
• You’re going to build up a mailing list by hiring someone to surf the internet for e-mail addresses-better do a test to see how many valid addresses the person can record and test per hour. Will it be worth it, and will the proposed recipients really appreciate another piece of spam?

When a measurement isn’t available, make an estimate and err on the side of caution. If your pessimistic calculations indicate that the project is feasible, then you’re probably OK, and it’s worth your while to look more closely. If the numbers don’t work out, then investing more time to get a better estimate may not be worth your while. If you do want to get a better fix, do a quick sensitivity analysis on your calculations and re-check the estimates for the numbers that make the most difference to the bottom line.

Whether you use the back of an envelope, a cocktail napkin or a calculator, doing some basic math can help you build a better business.

As a small business person, there are many things that you try to manage. By now, you’ve probably found out that if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it. So, many people are stumped when it comes to managing their web sites. However, there are an amazing number of things you can find out about what is happening, and once you have some data, you can start to make changes intelligently.

The organization that hosts your website (the ISP, or Internet Service Provider) will determine how good your information will be. Although just about every hosting platform captures the same basic data, how the ISP presents the data as information will vary. In the hosting companies I’ve seen, some offer a choice of statistics packages, some offer just one, and some basic hosting packages have no stats offering at all. You might even get an option to download logs and run your own custom analysis. If you’re considering changing ISPs, statistics should be one area you check out. Even if the ISP denies you access to your stats (or wants to upgrade you to a better package for the privilege), you can sign up with a third party which will provide stats for a small monthly charge or even free for a limited sampling. Third-party stats generally require you to insert some code into each web page you want stats for.

So, your first task is to contact the people who look after your website, or if that’s you, contact your ISP, to find out what reports are available. Now you can look at what’s happening. Most likely, the things you see first will be the raw numbers for your entire web site. The folk who write the report packages tend to go in for showing you how the number of hits varies by day of the month, hour of the day and maybe even day of the week. Unless you are doing capacity planning for a web server, this is interesting but probably not incredibly useful, in terms of things you can fix. Here are some of the things that I do look for:

·
• Which other web sites referred the most visitors to your site (or the least)? ·
• What terms did people type into search engines in order to find you? ·
• Which page on your site did those queries end up on? ·
• Which browsers do your customers use? ·
• What size screens do your customers have? ·
• After you e-mailed all of your customers with a link to some page on your web site, how many actually went there? ·
• How long after your mailing were people still visiting that page mentioned in the e-mail? ·
• Which countries do your visitors come from (or, at least: in which countries do your visitors’ ISPs have their servers in)

With this information in hand, you and your web designer can tweak your strategy for encouraging other sites to link to you; optimize your search-engine strategy; determine which browsers and screen-sizes you should use to test your web site’s usability on; determine the success of a mailing campaign and decide when to remove a page you referred to; and much more, including whether it’s worth creating a parallel site in another language!

In an ideal world, your web professionals will already be looking at your stats. In reality, many small businesses may not be able to afford to keep professionals on retainer to maintain their web site all of the time and the tweaking may have to be done by the business owner or as an occasional service. However, taking some time to do the basic analysis yourself will save you some fees, and knowing what to ask about will change you from a gullible client to an informed client.

Personally, I’ve always preferred to deal with the latter.

Sooner or later, if you have a commercial web site, you will begin to worry about Search Engine Visibility, and its technical counterpart, Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In a nutshell, when a client types a search enquiry into a search engine like MSN, then you want your web page to come up, preferably as the first “hit” but at least on one of the first 10 - 20 items. If it does, you have good SE visibility; SEO is the process of changing a web site so that this happens.

Your web site designer, or an SEO specialist, will make the changes to help this happen, but they can’t do it without your help. Before you meet, here are some things you should know:

·
• It’s tough to be number one. There are 718,000 results for the search term “widgets” . What are the chances that you will beat them all and become the new #1? ·
• Winning is temporary. Suppose your designer creates a page that manages to mention “widgets” 3,492 times on one page, and you’re now number 1. How long will it be before Widgets ‘R Us change their page to use the term 3,500 times? Besides, most search engines realise what you’re doing and will de-list you if you use blatant tactics like that, and your clients will get really bored reading it! ·
• It can be expensive. Companies that consistently rank highly for competitive search terms spend a great deal of time and money to do so. A typical small business needs to find an affordable niche where they can perform well.

With that in mind, prepare for meeting your SEO specialist by considering alternatives. Maybe you specialise in antique widgets. A smart consumer who is look for that topic will give up looking through 718,000 results sooner or later and search for “antique widgets” (putting the words in quotes makes most search engines look for the exact phrase). Now you’re only competing with 15 sites for the best ranking. Beating 15 sites is a lot easier than beating thousands!.

What other phrases will describe your product? Make a list and prioritise it. Ask your clients how they found your web site. Bear in mind though, that asking clients or looking at your web site statistics will only provide data about words and phrases that actually found you. While you can work to improve your ranking for those phrases, somehow, you need to dig and find the phrases that people used which didn’t find you, because those phrases are the ones you need to add for the search engines to find.

Your web-site techies can do marvellous things, but you are the one who knows your business and your clients. Use that knowledge to help your specialists do their job.

PS - when I chose to use “antique widgets” as an example for a search term, I had no idea that over 80% of the actual hits on a search of this term were other pages dealing with SEO. And I thought I was being original!

One piece of advice I have never forgotten makes a lot of sense: 80% of business success comes down to these three things: Say “Please” and “Thank You”; be on time; and do what you said you will do. I’ve always thought that was not a bad definition of being professional. However, there are a number of more mundane things that can spoil your whole image if you don’t take care of them.

Logo Design
If you are going to have a logo as a graphical representation of your business, it’s critical that it looks the same wherever you use it, so you get the full benefit of branding. However, as a practical matter, you will actually need different files for different applications. Either you or your graphic designer will need to create versions for a web-site (which will also do for e­­-mail) one or possibly two sizes for printed publications, and maybe a large size for lawn signs, car decals or other advertising. The worst mistake you can make is to design a logo in a (low) web-site resolution first, and then attempt to use it for high-quality printed items. It will look terrible. A rule of thumb is to use a vector-based graphics package for the design work, and convert to a pixel-based (bitmap) image in the right size as required.

Wordmark
If your logo doesn’t include your business name, you will probably print the name beside your logo. When this takes on a distinctive look, it is often called a wordmark. Choose a specific position, font and colour you will use for this purpose, and be consistent in always making your wordmark look the same wherever it is used. If the font is not one that you can expect to find on all computers, then in e-mails and web-sites, you will use an image (e.g. a gif graphic) of the wordmark and when you publish in a PDF you will embed the font so it will appear as you expected. (You’re also best to choose a font that you can distribute without running afoul of copyright laws!)

Colours
When a graphics professional talks about colours and the printing process, listen up! Some colours which look fine on a computer screen do not translate well at the printer’s. Some blues, in particular, will look quite different. An expert will be able to save you before you choose a Corporate Blue which you can never reproduce on paper. An expert will also advise on the psychological impact of colours, as well as how they “go” together-something I rely on my wife to tell me! Once you have your colours, use them consistently.

Business Cards
With those details attended to, you can think about your business card. My personal bias is against self-printed ones. When it’s possible to get professional full-colour, glossy, photo-quality cards for under $30, I say, go for it. I use a print service where I can upload my design and still add and edit text. The one thing I’d do differently next time is to include only the graphic elements in the upload. That would allow me to change an e-mail address or phone number without another upload charge.

Contact details
With all of these image-makers going for you, how do you think it looks when your e-mail address is joesmith23@cheap.mail.com? Even if you won’t be doing e-business, a web-site is almost a necessity these days. Get one, so clients can learn a bit about you before calling. Having your own domain gives you a unique e-mail address as well, and if you change your internet provider, your e-mail can stay the same. Naturally, the best time to do this is before you print up all of your business stationary!

A professional image-don’t leave your home office without one!

You can find many articles on e-mail etiquette - even one on this site, but I want to share a few thoughts that rarely get covered. As a small-business owner, one of your most valuable tools is e-mail, and your most valued marketing resource is a client’s e-mail address. Whether you are sending an individualised communication (e.g. an answer to a question) or a mass mailing, you don’t want to waste the client’s time or patience. In the latter case, a mass mailing, you especially don’t want the reader to click on the unsubscribe link!

The obvious advice, often quoted, is to keep your message short and focussed. You’ll find lots of suggestions for this, but my favourite is to put your message right in the subject line. Not all of the message, of course, but enough to let the recipient see what the mail is about. This can solve the problem of whether to continue a “conversation” or assume it’s OK. You said you’re free all day Friday. She said 3pm Friday would be fine. Do you leave it at that and assume a meeting for 3pm Friday? I’d reply with a subject line: “Meeting confirmed: Friday Jan 12, 3pm, your office” and the message “See you then”, rather than leave it to chance. It takes moments, and the client will appreciate the clarity. However, when you go that route, don’t add another question inside the e-mail. The subject should cover the entire content.

Another way to save time is to maintain the content trail of the conversation. As long as it’s relevant, don’t delete the conversation leading up to now. If the content changes, then change the subject line and consider deleting the now-irrelevant content. You might also choose to reply in two parts if there are now two divergent issues. Keep track of who needs to be copied as well. Not everyone is still interested!

Two major faux pas can really upset people:

• Having a template copy of an e-mail which you intend to individually customise and send to several people, but you forget to change the name, so David’s letter says “Dear George”
• Sending a mass mailing and putting everyone’s e-mail address on the cc: line. While this is fine if the recipients all know each other, if the only thing they have in common is that they are all your clients, they will not appreciate your giving their e-mail address to everyone else!

So put yourself in the clients’ place every time you communicate with them, and ask yourself: what is the message I want to send? Is this e-mail conveying that message quickly and clearly? Is there an unwanted message I am also sending? Is the attachment I promised really attached? These are important when you’re sending a simple response to a query, and critical if you are sending the message to every one of your clients. And to those of you used to sending mail to colleagues in a Corporate e-mail system, remember in the outside (Internet) world, there is no retract function-once you press “Send”, you can’t get it back!

I used to dream that after paying my debt to society-I mean completing a satisfying career-I would spend my life on a beach drinking margaritas and watching other people play volleyball. For me, it turns out that the RRSP ads missed the mark. While some retired folk may be content to sit on a beach, it’s not entirely satisfying. And I’d rather play volleyball than watch someone else. I have been known to sit on a beach, but not for long. It turns out that what is really satisfying for me is other peoples’ appreciation of a job well done.

I suspect I’m not alone in this. After a lifetime of honing skills and gathering experience, many professionals and craftspeople are not ready to throw it all away just because they no longer want to do it five days (or fifty hours!) a week. There are many ways to continue. Some are lucky enough to negotiate work-at-home days, or partial hours while staying in the Corporate world. Some retire and take to volunteering, and some start their own business.

If you are getting close to making any of these choices, now is the time to do some planning. No-one else can make the choice for you. Without going into too much detail (there are many other resources to help you) you should consider your financial situation, your family’s situation and feelings, and what really motivates you. It took me three years to find out what works for me, and I’m still making changes. My own personal mix turns out to be “all of the above”. I volunteer with several organizations, I have my own small business, and I have time to spend with my family and, if it works out that that time is on a beach, that’s just great.

In this forum, I’ll be addressing issues that affect small business from the point of view of a semi-retired former guru who is almost cured of a tendency to perfectionism. The focus will be the ultra-small business; the knowledge worker; the business which uses computer tools; the improvement of business processes; the fun of being in business and the humour which keeps everyone sane.

For me, at this stage in my life, there is still a need to pass the ultimate test. As a volunteer, I get appreciation; there’s a nice feeling of doing the right thing, of helping someone; supporting a good cause. However, that standard is not too hard to surpass. Turn up and do something and you’ll get a hearty thank-you for a job well done. Regardless. The ultimate test for me is “Did I do that well enough that someone was willing to pay for it-and then come back for more?”

That’s where I’m coming from. I hope to pass on thoughts, ideas and tips that have helped me in pursuit of my goal. Even if what motivates you is different, I think the results will be similar. After all, repeat customers are key for business. Their payments will feed your sense of continued worthiness (despite the grey hairs) and of course your bank manager will appreciate the contribution as well.