We bought a truck this week. It was the most difficult and exhausting vehicle purchase we have ever made! And it all had to do with supply and demand, and the economic effects of a recession on a particular product line.

We wanted a truck. But not just any truck. A 3/4 ton or better. Now, half ton trucks are a dime a dozen. But the price just JUMPS as soon as you go any larger. There is not much price difference between used 3/4 ton and one ton trucks – a matter of perception of fuel efficiency, mostly. But supply drops, and demand rises right at that 3/4 ton breakpoint.

The problem in Wyoming is that it is a truck state. Everyone and their dog has a big truck. In the current economy, big trucks are not being traded in, or sold used by owners. They are keeping them longer. More people are buying used instead of new. So we now have a shortage of used trucks, and a higher demand for them. This has pushed prices up about 50%.

So what you now find, is higher miles, and higher prices. Not a good combination. That means they are harder to afford, harder to finance, as well as being harder to find.

We searched aggressively for days before finding one. We had a time limit, could not take our time. Every other time we’ve bought a car, the entire process took less than a day, to find the car, and finalize the deal. We’ve even bought two cars on the same day, and it didn’t take the whole day. We found good deals and met our needs quickly. So this time was really exhausting.

We’ve had one other time when outside influences affected a market this strongly, and that was from the seller’s perspective, not the buyer’s perspective. We sold bulk foods, and computers. When 9-11 happened, the computer market crashed, and the bulk food business boomed – so much so that we could not meet the demand, and had to issue refunds because the items simply were not available.

We often don’t connect things like this until we need something that has been strongly affected. When they do happen, we just have to deal with it. Tiring or not, we had to spend the time. High, or not, we had to spend the money, and take what was available.

People who say they don’t have to let the recession affect them are dreaming. Because it will reach out and touch you whether you want it to or not. We can’t choose what comes into our lives, but we can choose how we deal with it when it does.

Check out our new Cottage Industry Consulting and Development services at CottageIndustrialRevolution.com for help in meeting business needs in a trying time.

“All things being equal, business owners do not make more money than those who hold a corporate job.”

All things are not equal. I get up every day and go to work, in my livingroom, and I earn more than just mere money.

• I earn time with my husband. A precious commodity, even though working together in a business has been one of the hardest things we’ve ever done.
• I earn time with my kids. Yes, that is hard too. But worth it.
• I earn the ability to set my own schedule. Mostly.
• I gain the opportunity to work with people I like, and can choose to let go of those I don’t like working with.
• I get the chance to chart my own destiny – to choose the work and business that I engage in.

It isn’t all sunshine and roses, not by a long shot. But it is better than working a job for a boss. The last job I had drove me nuts. I could see so many things that would help, but could not do any of them. I was required to do things that didn’t matter, at the expense of things that did, on someone else’s schedule. It made me truly appreciate what I have in being a business owner.

And now, the money ain’t bad either. Though we put in long years of work to get it to the point where we feel like we have more of the financial choices that we wanted.

But I would not trade it for a job that paid twice this much.

So we’d like a means of accessing the internet on the road. And an iPhone isn’t quite what we have in mind.

We need a high-bandwidth solution which we can use while traveling, which allows us to actually maintain websites in a relatively secure environment. Can’t do that with cell, it fails on two points:

1. Inadequate bandwidth. Most cell plans have a pitiful amount, and it drops to no more than a smidgen of that if you are out of area.

2. Inadequate security. Cell signals are too insecure to use for website work where passwords are transmitted over the net.

We have Satellite internet here at home, as our backup internet provider. So we know the limits of it, and we feel it would be adequate for travel. But we will never use Hughesnet again, and they are about the only consumer provider of mobile satellite.

We finally found a commercial provider which offers consumer priced options – the plans have unlimited bandwidth, so one of our primary problems is solved, and the connection is private, so it is much more secure than cell. The drawback is that the dish has to be mounted on an RV (we don’t have one yet), and the cost is around $7500 for the dish and install.

We have determined that it would be worth it though. Combined with a used RV, we would have the ability to travel as we wished. Traveling is currently a problem for us because hotel connections are often insecure, which limits the kind of work we can do on the road, and because time in hotels is limited. We have dietary issues with hotels too – we have to pack all our food since we cannot eat out, and we have to rent hotel rooms with a fridge and microwave – this puts us in the higher cost bracket. An RV would solve both of those problems.

So we are now planning and budgeting for an RV and the mobile dish. It won’t solve all the problems, but it will give us some very useful business capabilities.

There is a myth out there about business startup. It is perpetuated by magazines like Taste of Home, and other sources that tell stories of small business startups. It goes something like this:

Betty Jean loved to make salsa. She gave salsa to her friends and family for Christmas, and pretty soon people started to ask if they could buy it from her. So she started selling it at craft fairs, and demand became so great that she finally added on a commercial kitchen to the back of her house, and now business is booming.

Makes it sound easy, right? Like you can just lazily indulge in a hobby, and business will come your way without even trying, and people will pay you to do what you’ve always done.

Only problem is, they left out half the story.

Betty Jean spent weeks making the stuff for her friends and family at Christmas. She prepared sampler bottles for everyone at the company where her husband worked, and distributed them at the Christmas party, or sent them to work with her husband. Her husband loved her salsa, and was a great talker. He talked to everyone, and kept asking Betty Jean for more salsa to give to his clients as thank-you gifts. In fact, he gave salsa to everyone he met, eventually. He always thought she could sell it and researched the legal and financial requirements for going commercial long before Betty Jean was sure that is what she wanted to do.

Betty Jean started working the craft fairs – again, working for weeks ahead of time to prepare. She created her branding and worked on a clever slogan. She bought the decorated jelly jars instead of the plain ones, and put cute stickers on the top. She experimented with various pricing and sizes to work out what people really wanted most.

By the time Betty Jean went commercial, she and her husband had BOTH been working hard on laying the foundation. In fact, they’d done more work BEFORE she expanded to a commercial kitchen than many business owners do AFTER they have already obtained a business license.

It didn’t happen accidentally. It happened because they started out putting a lot of effort into it, and when they realized it was a practical opportunity, they pursued it and continued to work on it. Demand from friends and family didn’t happen by accident. It happened from a lot of work – work to share it, work to let people know what she could do. Demand from friends and family just let them know the market really WAS there.

Business never happens accidentally, and it never happens easily. It always takes work.

So the next time you read one of those fairy tales about someone just happening into business without really meaning to, don’t believe it. Read between the lines, because there was a lot of work and effort put into it, whether they intended to form a business from it initially, or not.

“In a month, I’m going to have the top service in this industry.” He bragged. He then confided that he was building a competing product, and had only bought the one he had from us because he thought it had a feature that it did not. Presumably, he wanted to steal that feature.

He bragged that he was a coding guru. Less of one than he thought, because if he HAD been a coding guru, he’d have known that the feature he thought we had was actually impossible – NO ONE can have it, because the technology that it depended upon was controlled by another company, and they would not EVER make it available.

Never mind the fact that the reason he thought we might have this feature is because he did not read the description of our product. No where did it even imply that it had what he wanted.

Shortly after purchase, he had demanded a refund, saying we had misrepresented it, and that the only reason he had bought is because he thought it had something it did not. Our sales pages clearly described the system, and did not misrepresent it in any way.

But I informed him that he could have a refund if he met the usual terms. He had not. He did not want to. He just wanted an easy way out of his original poor choice. He tried to bully us into issuing a refund that was outside of our policies, and we refused.

He paid the monthly fee, and then listened in on some training calls, and asked for a training session, which he then decided not to do, and was insulting to the two people he talked to about it. He stated that he did not have time to do a day training session because he had “a real job”.

He asked some additional questions, which were indicative that he was trying to copy the site. Interestingly enough, these were also questions he should never have had to ask if he were the “coding guru” he claimed to be, because they involved fairly elementary skills.

Then he stated he did not want the site. Tiring of his games, the manager pulled the plug on it – suspended the site. He went into a panic! Where was his site? Now, he had not even changed the default text in the site, it had nothing in it to even suggest that anyone actually owned it, and was not even usable as it was. So no harm was done to his business by suspending it. We just stopped him from copying it and selling it as his own, and our terms of use state that this is grounds for immediate termination of service (we had only suspended, not terminated).

He then filed a complaint with PayPal, stating we did not deliver what we had promised, and that we had misrepresented the product. We can prove that we did deliver exactly what we said we would. But it didn’t matter, because PayPal refused to investigate, because it was more than 45 days after the purchase had been made. It galls me a little that I don’t have the chance to defend ourselves, since we were honorable in the process.

All in all, a rather nice example of someone who inspires absolutely no fear in me. As a potential competitor, such a person is not a threat at all.

1. He wanted to steal instead of coming up with an innovative approach of his own. Now, anyone who thinks this is a way to get rich quick is not firing on all cylinders! Those who look for shortcuts, invariably fail, because there ARE no shortcuts to success. Just hard work, creativity, and perseverance, none of which he had. You can only clone and steal a product or the APPEARANCE of a service. You cannot clone, and cannot steal, the work and effort it takes to SELL that product or service, or the work that it takes to actually run a business. And people who are looking for shortcuts usually bomb on that.

2. He was arrogant, and overestimated his own skills. Now, there is nothing wrong with confidence, and feeling you can achieve something big even if you don’t know everything. But to think you are an expert and can do anything without having to learn anything else, is always a colossal mistake. His arrogance will stop him from doing what he wants to do, will cause him to make costly errors, and will turn off his potential customers.

3. His manner and communication were so poor, and so rude, that he will repel his customers very quickly. It will make it very hard for him to get clients at all.

4. If he thinks that anyone who works their own business does not have a “real job”, then he will never be able to be successful at owning his own business. Because it IS a real job. In fact, it is a job and a half! It is clear that he thought we played at working, and that he could have what we did by playing at working. Such a person won’t ever be a threat to real business owners.

I am predicting that this person will not be able to get a business off the ground at all. If by some odd chance he manages to make a sale or two, he will quickly burn out on the actual work, and drive his customers away by insulting them.

Stupidity, Dishonesty, and Arrogance are never a good combination. But for a business, they are fatal. And when you spot those in your competitors, especially those competitors who haven’t even got a business but brag about how much they are going to do, you may know that you don’t need to seriously worry about them. They are not any kind of threat to honest business owners, because their own actions will get in their way.

The best way to do business is still by being smart, honest, and by being willing to learn. And it always will be.

Update: He never did get it off the ground. His idle statements were just that… idle. All talk, no action in any way that could result in any kind of competition for our company.

Many webmasters, and site owners make a big deal over W3C Compliance. It is actually an almost meaningless standard for small businesses (and most big ones) – and is always likely to be.

I expect these comments to raise a hailstorm of controversy. But I’ve not written this hastily, and I have the experience to back up what I am saying.

First of all, WC3 standards are created by a group of major players in the web industry. Microsoft is one of them. There are others. They have set standards for code – some of these standards are nothing more than common sense (things that good coders do anyway). They include such things as making sure all tags are closed, and that certain kinds of tags are used to go forward. Others are completely nonsensical, apparently chosen by someone who had the power to say, “That one”.

The original goal was to enhance predictability across browsers. From the beginning, browsers interpreted code differently – and still do in spite of W3C Standards. Web designers have long been counseled to get pages to look GOOD in all browsers, but not to attempt to get them to look identical, because they simply render differently. It was bad enough when web pages were composed primarily of HTML, but now with a high usage of JavaScript, CSS, and other languages, the problem is much more of an issue.

When checking for W3C compliance, gross errors are rarely an issue. I mean, unclosed tags will cause rendering problems, so they don’t usually get past a designer anyway. Huge issues are easy to spot because they cause issues that are visible on the page. But there are a ton of fussy, immaterial little things which do not affect output, do not affect usability, and do not affect anything that matters to anyone, and which can be difficult to solve for a number of reasons.

Site development funds are supposed to be channeled first to areas where the site owner can see an appreciable ROI (Return on Investment). If they cannot, then it should be left out unless a site owner has money to burn and insists. Obsessing about compliance can burn money with no ROI at all.

Now, the real problems come in with four issues:

1. The prevalence of code checkers and buzz about compliance has lead many site owners to believe that somehow their site is superior if it is W3C compliant. Sadly, that isn’t true at all. In fact, a site that passes may be a WORSE site than one that does not, because in general, W3C compliance does not have anything to do with the things that matter most – such as suitable design, readable text, good images, search engine optimization, etc. I’ll repeat that – W3C compliance has NO effect whatsoever on SEO. This means a lot of site owners end up spending extra working out tweaky fussy irrelevant things to make  a site W3C compliant, when in fact, it does nothing to enhance the site at all, in any way that matters. Judging on a basis of site owner ROI (Return on Investment), compulsive adherence to W3C compliance fails to deliver any increase whatsoever in enhanced profitability, but it can end up being more costly to implement. We’ve even had clients who insisted on a W3C compliant template, then went in and edited their own site and inserted non-compliant code, so even if a site starts out that way, it may not stay that way!

2. Browsers are not really W3C Compliant. In fact, Microsoft, one of the players in dictating the standards, consistently produces the LEAST compliant browser! It is clear in release after release, that compliance is not at the top of their list for development, because for every compliance issue they address, they introduce additional non-compliant issues. Microsoft has never been about being a team player, they’ve always been more about perpetuating their own way of doing things – one gets the distinct feeling that they are not on the board to comply with standards agreed upon, but to try to make sure THEIR way of doing things is included in the standard. They display only a token effort toward complying with the standard. If the standard is meaningless to them, then it is pretty well meaningless to anyone else. Because non-compliance by a browser means you CANNOT produce a 100% compliant site and have it function correctly, in many cases. A non-compliant browser may REQUIRE that you use non-compliant code to achieve certain goals. As long as browsers are non-compliant, rigid adherence to the standard is not practical, and in fact, is a little silly. And obsessing about compliance becomes merely a matter of elitism, not a matter of performance or anything else relevant to the ROI for the site owner.

3. The standard is changing. W3C standards are not a “write them once” endeavor. They are constantly evolving, because the code and usage are constantly evolving. And browsers have yet to catch up with the LAST standard, let alone move forward to the next one. This lag and delay means that while the original goal of developing a standard for web code that would enhance predictability across browsers was not a bad one, the practicality of realizing it is an impossibility.

4. Coding is incredibly complex. It is a language. This means that the usage and rules can NEVER be completely defined and absolute, any more than the English language can be. Just as a dictionary is always out of date, and just as grammar rules always have exceptions, and good writers always break the rules, coding rules can never possibly define every conceivable usage or combination. So any attempt to define standards ends up being an exercise in futility long term.

Do I think it is a complete waste of time? Not really. I just think that a healthy dose of common sense needs to be applied! I’ve seen template designers wallowing in apologies over a non-compliant bit of code in their template, when that was the only way they could get IE to behave. And I think it is silly that anyone in the industry would think that an apology was needed at all! I see new site owners running W3C checkers on their site and worrying about the errors, when they should be LOOKING at their site, and worrying about what is on the surface, because that is what their customers are seeing.

• It is possible to produce a site that functions predictably, looks good, works well, and earns money, that is not W3C Compliant – in fact, there are millions of them that do this.
• It is possible to produce a horrid site that is not indexable by search engines, that looks terrible, which customers hate, and which repels every person who visits it and fails to function predictably, and have that site pass the W3C Checkers with flying colors. In fact, there are millions of these out there too.

Code checkers cannot think. They can only look for specific technical issues, some of which matter, some of which do not. They cannot tell what is good, they cannot judge quality. And that is the problem with an arbitrary standard which creates rules, but cannot adjust those rules for practical and realistic situations.

It comes back to the bottom line. If what you are doing does not help the site owner earn better, then there isn’t any point in doing it, no matter how good a coder you had to become to do it. If it works for the intended purpose, it is good. A good coder will already be doing the Compliant things that really matter. Beyond that, they’ll be focusing their efforts where it pays the client to do so.

I anticipate a great deal of disagreement with my points. That is what blog comments are for.