Is there a person at a company that you prefer to reach when you call? I’m talking about a small company where there are three or four employees in a given area, where you might get any one of them. Which one do you enjoy talking with the most?

Why?

When people call you, do they do so because they WANT to talk to you, or because you are the only choice? If you had an office with three or four, would they still want to talk to YOU? Would they want YOU to be their favorite person to deal with?

I’m not talking about a popularity contest. I’m talking about something else instead.

• Courtesy
• Professionalism
• Expertise
• Helpfulness
• Kindness
• Friendship

Do you offer those things? If you hire employees, will they offer those things?

Do your clients want to call you for things that are really a bit outside your expertise, just because they know that if you CAN help, they’ll get the best?

I began thinking about this the other day, when a client was calling repeatedly. How some people, when they reach our office, just want to talk to me. Others will talk to Kevin just fine. What makes them want to talk to one or the other, or willing to accept someone else?

If we kindly help them, then they want to call again. True, that can be a blessing and a curse, but believe me that you do WANT them to call! It keeps the customers happy when they feel you are the person to turn to when they need something.

Two years ago when I had the concept for our business, I felt it was unique. I also felt that it was badly needed, and that few others would do it unless we proved that it could be done, first.

So what is the big deal? Lots of web designers say they specialize in small business. Many offer $500 and $300 websites. But they weren’t doing it like we were – and they were struggling to make a profit on the small contracts.

We discovered that there are techniques, skills, and adaptations that completely change the equation for a small website. We learned how to offer a $500 website that contained everything that a small business owner needed, and that they’d usually have to pay more than $1500 to get. What’s more, we learned how to do it efficiently, so that we could still make a handsome profit at it. Everybody wins.

Most small business web professionals are not aggressively exploring ways to cut costs and make things more efficient. You don’t find efficiency being much of an issue until you get into the corporate world. So we are an anomaly – a small business, that works with other small businesses, but which is applying business process management to streamline operations.

That just isn’t being done by most small web designers. It doesn’t occur to most TO do it. If they struggle to keep up with the bills, they simply raise their prices, and eventually price themselves out of the microbusiness market.

I like the people we work with. I like them well enough to want to keep working with them. So I started studying the ROI and price breakpoints for them, specifically. I also analyzed the way we are doing things. When we hit a wall in the profit equation, we revisit the way we do things, we don’t raise prices first.

We also provide a range of services – not just a site design, but many types of sites, and all of them with basic copywriting, SEO, security features, and basic ADA accessibility. We help each client write a policies page, and to present themselves professionally.

I’ve tried to explain how different we are, to both other web professionals, and to customers. Customers don’t get it unless they have previous web designer experience – then they appreciate what we do. Other web professionals generally cannot even wrap their heads around it all, they cannot conceive that there could be a faster way to do what they do, which still results in quality service.

It feels pretty lonely sometimes. I have the whole thing in my head – but it is slowly getting out, and the tools we are developing are slowly making a difference to our clients, and to a few other smart people who have decided that maybe we can teach them a thing or two after all.

It is hard to shake the world when the world can’t even understand the hugeness of a concept, simply because they cannot see how big big really is.

They call it BPM. It used to be called “systems management”. But the term “business systems” got corrupted, and the name changed for clarification. Business Process Management is nothing more than looking for repetitive task sets within a business, and developing a faster, more predictable process for making them more efficient.

BPM analyzes where the greatest time losses are occurring, and devises solutions to speed them up. Sometimes it involves software, sometimes training, sometimes better equipment, different office arrangement, etc.

You can do this in a small business, but you do it a bit differently, and the cost/benefit equations are somewhat different as well. It means looking at how YOU work, and making THAT more efficient. For a small business, standardized solutions may not work, especially if you are carving out a niche that is distinctly different than your competitors.

We realized early on that if we built websites like most designers, that we’d be losing money from the get-go, or we’d price ourselves out of our target market. Neither of those was an option.

Most designers start with a PhotoShop mock-up – a graphical representation of what the website will look like. Then after it has been approved and finalized with the client, they code it into the site.

We’ve built a few sites this way – sometimes it makes sense to do so. But mostly we don’t, because our clients cannot afford the extra hundreds of dollars that this kind of process requires. So we did it differently in order to make it more efficient and cost effective.

We design a header in PhotoShop, and the client approves that. We then discuss how we need the navigation to function. After that, we go straight to coding – of course, we don’t hand-code most sites, we start with a template that is functionally close to what we need. We install that, put in the header, change the colors and accents, tweak the CSS and we are done.

We recently built a design for a new client. We had a basic idea of what she wanted, and the colors she wanted. We were able to go from concept to approved design in about three days. If we had done it with a PhotoShop mockup, we’d still have been three days to the approvals, and then we’d still have had to code the design, which would have been another three to four hours of work to make the necessary changes. That’s a couple hundred dollars more that the client would have to pay, or that we’d lose. Not efficient. As it was, we finished the first portion of the contract in record time, and came out with a comfortable profit from the work.

We looked at what our target market needed. We then looked at the standard way of doing things, and at solutions for speeding that up. They were not sufficient, so we developed our own system for the process. It takes us through it in an organized way, and gets the job done quickly, but in a way that is still personal to the individual business owners.

A good business process can be streamlined in a way that suits your business, and your customers. It will keep the personal interaction that is most important, and systemize the parts that do not need to be personalized.

In our business, every single site install is the same. So we can automate and systemize parts of that.

Site design is personal. So we systemize that ONLY where it won’t affect the personalization of it.

Look at your own business. What are the things you are doing over and over again? How can you speed those up, what tools can you use to make it more efficient, cut out some of the headache, make the results more predictable, etc? And where is personal contact CRITICAL in your business? How will you build systems that protect that essential personal interaction with your customers?

Corporations put a lot of money into better Process Management. You can make many parts of your business flow more smoothly with just a little thought about how you do it, and by obtaining good tools that work for YOUR business. It doesn’t have to be a science of professional specialists. It can be used to benefit any business, at any stage.

When the good things happen, do you give thanks? Do you assume it is purely your charm and magnetism which brings good things into your life?

Are you thankful for the little blessings when you think you need a big one? And whom do you thank when you are giggly with glee over the latest good thing?

Gratitude is not just a means of increasing contentment, it is also a means of increasing the blessings in your life.

In the midst of hardship, we often focus on the negative. But sometimes we forget that while we feel we’ll sink any minute, we don’t sink, and not sinking is a great blessing. It is easier to cry that we didn’t get what we wanted than it is to say thanks because something worse didn’t happen, or to be thankful for pennies when we need dollars.

Every fall I ask for deer or elk. And every fall we get antelope. Antelope stinks, the meet is edible, but not at all tasty. You work just as hard to process an antelope as you do a deer or elk, but you end up with only about 25 lbs of boneless meat, instead of 50 to 100 lbs. That’s a lot of work for very little meat. Then you have to marinate it, and season it highly just to be able to swallow the stuff.

We made jerky one year, and sent some to a friend. He said, “I like it, but if I open the bag the smell of it will drive my wife from the room.” That pretty much describes antelope.

I have had to learn to be thankful for antelope. How can I expect to be blessed with anything better if I am not thankful for the small blessings? And antelope IS a blessing. It keeps food on the table that does not have the chemicals that make me sick. Sure, deer or elk would be MORE of a blessing, but I am happier when I acknowledge that even stinky gamy antelope is a blessing.

When a business contract is signed, a contract phase completed, when the client LIKES the design, when a client is pleased with our work, the credit is not solely ours. Yes, we made choices which contributed to the success, but a measure of it goes to the Lord. The greater measure, I believe.

Gratitude helps us see what is really there, instead of focusing on the negatives, and it helps us to receive more.

The application in business is directly relevant.