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Employee, or Entrepreneur?
It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the qualities of an employee, and the qualities of an entrepreneur, are radically different. Being the boss, the developer, the navigator, the leader and the executor of a business plan is a set of jobs that the average employee has difficulty grasping.
I’ve watched my husband make the transition from “company man” to a business owner. It has been very difficult for him. It is only as I watched him that I began to understand why I’ve watched so many friends and family members fail at business ownership.
As a mom of many children, I had to lead. I had to determine what was best, then see to it that it got done in an efficient manner. I had to teach my children how to do the things that I needed them to do. This was excellent preparation for business ownership. Even so, I struggle with many growth and delegation issues.
We were called by a prospect recently, who had big plans. He called regularly for many days, discussing the plans. After talking to him just once, I felt he would not carry out the plans. He had many ideas, but no real direction, and no ability to commit to a course of action, and carry it out. When it came time to “cross the Rubicon”, he could not pick a ford – he kept looking for a shallower spot, so he never crossed.
I mentioned it to my son – and said that the man was ex-military, so he did not know how to be the real leader. My son protested that if the man were in the military, he would learn to lead. I agreed that he would learn to follow orders, and ensure that the personnel under him followed orders, but reasserted that it does not teach someone how to be THE leader. All decisions at the top are made by committee, and no one has full authority to develop a plan independently and carry it out themselves. It is quite unlike the leadership required to run one’s own business.
The same is true of major corporations. The cogs in the wheel are unprepared to BECOME the wheel. Again, no single person is responsible for the direction, execution, and performance of the entire plan. It is all done by groups.
When you begin a business as a sole proprietor, it is all you. You must learn to juggle, prioritize, and act with dispatch. To plan well, and then to commit to a course, and go boldly forward. If assessment is needed, you must do it. You must learn to examine yourself for shortcomings, then devise solutions to compensate. Failure to do all that results in failure of the business.
Not everyone has the ability to be a successful business owner. But then, not every one NEEDS to. If you do need to though, it is wise to realize that new skills are needed, and that you cannot be an employee in your own business. If you are waiting for someone else to tell you what to do, your business will never get off the ground.
When do you Listen to the Experts?
I’ve consulted a number of business “experts” about issues in my business. Some of them have been very helpful about general things. The rare one has been helpful about specific things. An alarming number were no help at all, for one primary reason:
- They did not understand what my business is, and they did not “hear” when I tried to explain. They wanted to make my business conform to their idea of what it should be, rather than seeing what I wanted it to become and then stepping outside their box to help me make it into that vision.
One expert told me, “Your business is just like every other small business website design company. How are you going to differentiate yourself?” This, after I had just explained how we were different, and what made our business so revolutionary. They didn’t have enough of an understanding of the web development world to even have a clue what we were saying.
Another told me to choose the line that was the most profitable and forget the other two. I tried to explain that was precisely what made our business revolutionary and gave it the potential to be something more than just “another web firm”. If I focus on web development without the rest, we are just another company. If I focus on teaching, I lose the ability to teach anything new because I have no experience in which to develop the strategies that make my teaching effective (a primary problem with most web development training is that it is taught by teachers who have little real-life experience, and NO microbusiness experience). If I focus solely on the trade association, I lose the ability to benefit the members with training, and I lose the edge of day to day experience with clients – the very thing that makes the trade association work. All three, together, can reshape an industry and have HUGE potential. One, by itself, is just another in a long line of ineffective attempts to make something great. The expert didn’t get it, because he didn’t want to listen.
- Any time an expert hands out canned information that is not applicable to your situation, you need to have the confidence to disregard it.
- If an expert hands out information that could be adapted to apply, you need to have the confidence to adapt it – and keep asking until you learn how.
- If you explain something to an expert, and they still hand you the same thing they handed you before you explained, then find another expert because this one isn’t listening.
Business counsel is not a “one size fits all” solution to every business problem. This is especially true if you are developing a revolutionary concept. You need to work with people who are willing to see the “ah-ha” moment in your concept, who are willing to catch the potential, who can get excited about it and then use their skills to help you develop the potential that is there.
Training, consultation, and coaching can be a huge help in getting over a hurdle in your business. But only if the expert is willing to listen long enough to understand just what it is you are trying to achieve. Otherwise, their guidance is going to be useless, and potentially harmful to your ability to achieve.
The Delicate Art of Article Writing
I notice that I learn things, and never really realize that I’ve learned them until I see someone else who hasn’t.
After a disappointing meeting with a prospect yesterday, I did some research on their behalf. The meeting was disappointing not because I did not make a sale – hey, that happens, and I can live with that. It was disappointing because they did not understand what I was trying to tell them. This became painfully clear when I began researching the marketing that had been done for them in the last year.
They told me that article marketing had been done for them. I went digging. I was able to turn up only three mentions on Google of articles with their URL in them. I found a gaggle of them on Yahoo though. And I wish I hadn’t.
The articles were full of gramatical errors, childish statements, wandering sentences, awkward phrases, and worse. They gave no new information, had no appeal. Reading them was painful – I had to force myself to read more than a paragraph because it was hard to follow the convoluted sentences. It had all the feel of someone writing in a second language – one they were almost, but not quite, fluent in. These articles will never be picked up by anyone else and reprinted – no one cares for such poor stuff. Google didn’t bother with them, and no one else will either.
I wish those were the only problems though. It was just the beginning.
First, was the glaring one. The potential legal issues. One article made MORE than suggestive claims of a guarantee on a service that could not possibly be guaranteed. I know for a fact that the owners of the site would never wish such information to be published in their name. Yet they are the ones legally liable for the information in the article, and that article is grounds for a lawsuit by someone who has a bad outcome. Another article made a statement that screening eliminated risks – again, in a profession where risks can never be eliminated entirely. This writer not only stuck their foot in it and dragged the client with them, they set up a legal time bomb. One which may come back to harm the site owner years later.
Second, the articles were not written as article marketing. They were merely thrown together using keywords as a guide for what to write about. There was no effort to target the messages as marketing messages – in fact, some of them were repelling rather than encouraging. They had hyped titles, failed to make any kind of useful conclusion, and often talked more about the negatives than the positives. Not one single article addressed the one compelling reason why someone might choose the site owner’s service over the competition. Not one addressed the one major reason why someone might NOT choose the site owner’s service over the competition. Good marketing messages are a subtle, and often delicate thing to pin down. But they are absolutely ESSENTIAL to successful article marketing.
If you write about a topic for marketing purposes, you must do two things:
1. Provide value to the potential customer. This doesn’t mean writing what you want to write, or just researching a topic and writing about it. It means you have to think about what motivates the customer. What do they want, what are their fears, desires, and hopes? What questions do they have that you can provide an answer for? Provide THEIR value, and article marketing works. But to do that, it is essential that you understand the mind of the customer, and how to address their needs a little, before the sale.
2. Provide information that leads them to you. I’m not talking about the signature line. I’m talking about not giving away your business in your articles, while still providing value. Write about topics that they need to know about as a CUSTOMER, not as a Do-It-Yourselfer (unless your customers are do-it-yourselfers). Consider topics about how to choose service (and give it some teeth, not the usual drivel), how to check up on a hired professional, how to care for their purchases, how to evaluate the value of a product or service, changes in your industry, applied technologies in regard to your product or service (things that predict industry trends, or that enhance value). There are all kinds of topics you can write about which help the customer, but which don’t try to make the customer into the expert.
It is a delicate art. And it is something which requires experience and practice to get right. If you are in a business involving legal, medical, business, financial, or other professional information, then you also need to make sure that certain safeguards are observed to keep you from being held liable for careless statements.
So if you are hiring article marketing services, how do you know if you are getting full value?
1. Ask to review all articles before they are published. You will be legally responsible for every word printed at your request. Make certain that what goes out is worthy of having your name on it! Check to see if it is original, fun to read, informative. Think like your customers – will they appreciate this?
2. Ask for a listing of every place the article was published. This is valuable for two reasons – you can make sure the article was actually posted, and if you learn later that something in an article is inaccurate or that it has a serious problem, you know where to go to start the recall process.
3. Make sure you check out examples of writing before you hire. Sadly, the company that published the articles I was so distressed over had similar writing on their home page. Had the people who hired them read that page, and really thought about it, they’d have hired someone else.
4. Expect to be involved. Any professional who claims to write for your business CANNOT do a good job without involving you. They need to know what makes your business unique. They need you to check to ensure that articles are accurate according to YOUR position on the topic (they can research all they want, but they won’t write what you want if you don’t get involved). Expect to have to brainstorm with a writer for new topics every once in a while – expect to talk things over with them, suggest new directions to go, and work with them. A motivated writer will be giving as many ideas as they get from you, but together you’ll do much more. And a good writer will consider you to be their best resource, and will want to work with you to produce the best possible marketing for your business.
Quality costs more. But what is the use of paying for bad writing that harms your company? Like feathers on the wind, an article carelessly loosed on the web can never be fully taken back. Making sure it is good before it goes is your only means of ensuring that it will go on promoting you well for years to come, instead of giving you a black eye every time you turn around.
The delicate art is worth learning. Because the power of good writing truly is phenomenal.
10 Things for MicroBusiness Owners to Do Over the Holidays
An adaptation of an idea from Tech Republic.
Their article lists things that are appropriate for corporations. But most microbusiness owners would look at that list and say, “What documentation?”, or “What network?”. But the idea of using any holiday downtime for catching up on things you might not think of doing when you are busier is a good one, and easily adaptable for a smaller work environment.
1. Evaluate your business for implementing new efficiency strategies. Look at the repetitive things you do, and think about how you can speed them up by preparing templates, reorganizing workspace, or other simple methods to speed up your work.
2. Backup your website and hard drive files. Something that is often overlooked. While you are at it, create a plan for regular backups, and figure out how to stick to it!
3. Look for equipment that is wasting your time. Consider the cost of replacement, and devise a plan to afford upgrading. Prioritize to figure out what will be most cost effective to upgrade.
4. If you plan on growth, begin to document policy, procedure, and training materials. If someone came into your company tomorrow as an associate or employee, what would you need them to know, and to be able to refer back to? What would you want them to agree to if they worked with you? Write these things down. They will not be consistently delivered unless you write them down. Laying groundwork for growth can help make it go more smoothly when it comes.
5. Organize your information – Improve your paper filing system, or download a free copy of Notesbrowser (http://www.notesbrowser.com) to keep those bits of information organized that you keep losing. I use Notesbrowser for task lists, instructions that I find online that I don’t want to have to keep looking up, to organize URLs when my Bookmarks list gets too cluttered, to keep notes about clients, and much more.
6. Make sure your firewall is on, your AV software is up-to-date, and that your Anti-Spyware software is working. Just check to make sure that the basic security measures are in place for your desktop computer. If you use a dynamic website (a shopping cart or a complex website with a login), make sure the software that runs it is up-to-date as well.
7. If you are feeling like you are fragmented, this is a good time to analyze your business and see what is profitable and what is not. Prune out the things that waste your time but don’t bring a return, and then focus your efforts on the things that do work, and the things that you most want to be doing.
8. If you are in that awkward stage of not having enough money to hire, but not having enough YOU to keep up, you can benefit from some analysis and planning here also. Consider the tasks that you might be able to save money on if you hired a sub-contractor to do them – less complicated than hiring an employee, and a sub-contractor can do bits of work here and there. Think about how you intend to grow, and begin laying the groundwork in how you handle higher workloads. Look for opportunities rather than limitations, and see if you can come up with some workable solutions to bridge the gap from overworked, to sustainable growth.
9. Get some training. Take the time to pick up a manual, practice using a new piece of software, testing out some new skills or technologies, or catching up on the latest industry news. Choose something enjoyable that still gives you something valuable, and you’ll emerge refreshed and enlightened.
10. If you know that you are in for a longer lull after the first of the year (many businesses slump during that time), then create a plan for how you will cope with the extended down-time. Determine which activities will enhance your business in the best way, and consider ways to implement alternative revenue generation that either remains stable, or which increases during the time in which your current business lines dip.
Of course, you may not have Holiday Downtime. Your slack may come at another time of year. If you are just hanging on till you can catch your breath, then it is a good time to make a list of the things that are the most annoying when you are rushed, so you can create a plan to work on a solution to those annoyances the next time you do have downtime.
Either way, don’t forget why you are in business, and find the time to enjoy your business, and your family.
Christmas Survival Strategy
I have an infallible strategy for surviving Christmas. Since I have lots of kids, and lots of extended family, and a business, Christmas survival is very important. If I tried to do it all, I’d crumple into the corner in a sobbing heap and not get back up! So here is my three part strategy:
1. Procrastinate as long as possible on gift buying. This frees me from worry until at least a week before Christmas!
2. I don’t. I don’t decorate, I don’t bake, I don’t dress in cute Christmassy Clothes, I don’t worry about being festive. I just try to be kind, try to get through what is most important each day, and don’t worry about what anyone else might think. My kids decorate the tree and cut out paper snowflakes, and do other festive stuff. I let them and feel grateful that I don’t have to fuss with it. I do sing carols, we sing in a production of the Messiah, and we have Christmas traditions. I just don’t overload myself with it.
3. I’m cheap. I don’t overload the credit cards or spend excessive amounts. $20 is the limit that we spend on ANYBODY at Christmas, unless we do something special for the family. Usually my limits are even lower than that. If I tried to do something extravagant for everyone on our list, I’d spend more than we earn in a month. So frugal is the order of the day. We do try to select things that are useful, appropriate, and that are selected for the individual in question.
Yes, I suppose I am sort of extreme about some of these things, but the alternative is getting out of my depth, getting warped every Christmas, and feeling overwhelmed. I refuse to do that, because frankly, all those things just AREN’T really important! Caring for my family, meeting the needs of our clients so our family can eat, and making sure that my marriage is strong are the priorities. When anything else cuts into those, out it goes! There just isn’t room in my life for all the trivialities.
Who is it that decides that you have to have your house decked out to the point of frenzy, the freezer full of hand-baked goods, and the tree loaded with thousands of dollars of gifts anyway? I’ll tell you who:
Sellers
They don’t want you to do this to make you happy. They want you to do this to BUY THINGS. Decorations, gifts, ingredients. They don’t care if you are benefited by it or not.
You can have a perfectly happy Christmas with a few strands of decorations that your kids made, some gifts that you purchased from love instead of a desire to impress, and with a few carefully chosen items that you made just because they were the ones you thought were most important.
The key to it is to determine not which things are VISIBLE, but which things have the most MEANING. Keep them. Let the rest go.
Bad Ugly Man
The class was talking about how the search engines or Google AdSense may key in on phrases you did not think they would. One of the students spoke up and asked if he could tell a story about that. I said, “of course!”. This was his story:
He had put a web page up, which addressed a technical topic. It had a photo of himself on the page. He watched his traffic, and soon found that he was getting a lot of traffic from Google Images, for the term, “bad ugly man”. He then discovered that if he searched on that term, his picture was the top item returned.
Turns out, his technical topic was “(subject), The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. Google paired it up with his photo in an unexpected way! A simple disallow tag for his images folder in his robots.txt file solved the problem, but his illustration was priceless.
AdSense and search engines both do sometimes pull out keywords that you do not expect. This can be a good thing in many instances, because it means that you do not have to worry about overanalyzing keywords or calculating keyword density to mine the long tail of search terms. Rather, you just write well, be descriptive in what you say, and the natural result is usually very good.
Once in a while though, you have to tweak a page. A page on Christian Infertility called “Leah After Judah” pulls all sorts of ads about Judaism and Judaic symbols. It isn’t at all what the page is about. So tweaking had to be done to eliminate or selectively target the right phrases on the pages.
When creating a product catalog, take advantage of the search engine’s propensity to catalog everything – write visual and evocative descriptions. You’ll benefit two ways: You’ll help people want the item more if they read the description, and you’ll just naturally include another series of relevant keywords that will get picked up and used in a way that may surprise you.
The descriptions need not be long, or complicated. Just imagine you are describing the item to someone who cannot see it, and who may not know what it is for. Include colors, features, and some phrases to get them thinking about how to use it, or how they’ll feel when they use it. For example:
“Soft and snuggly throw rug. Cuddle up by the fire and enjoy a winter evening with someone you love. Forest green and black colors give this blanket a woodsy feel. Cotton polyester blend is itch-free, soft, and easy to care for.”
Nothing remarkable about that description. It gives an emotional setting, an accurate description, and some adjectives. It will increase the appeal of the item to both search engines and people.
Of course, if you find that you come out on top for searches on the term “itchy blanket”, you’d want to change something. Otherwise, you can probably sit back and watch something unexpected and good happen, just because you took the time to write something natural, and thoughtful.
Update: This page is now pulling search engine results for the term “ugly man”!
How to Produce Truly Awful Software
The software world is becoming more competitive, and in light of this increased competition, it becomes necessary to give some thought as to how to gain supremacy when producing mediocre or truly horrid software. We have developed the following guidelines to help perpetuate the myth that sub-standard software is a necessary interference with productivity:
1. Steal ideas from other developers. This is necessary to develop a product when you have no creativity yourself. If you insist loudly enough, and often enough, that it was your idea, people will eventually believe you.
2. Prosecute, vigorously, anyone who tries to develop an idea even remotely similar to yours. It does not matter that you stole the idea to begin with.
3. Buy out the competition. This is the best option for squashing upstarts who come up with a truly original idea. This is essential if the idea threatens you with obsolescence. If it is something people really want, you can release your own buggy version a year later, and then use it as proof that the idea was not very good to start with, or, alternately, take credit for the whole thing if you do get it to work on your existing clumsy foundation.
4. Bloat is Beautiful. If there is a more cumbersome and awkward way to write code, use it. If you can increase the size of the program, and the resources it demands, do so. This achieves a range of objectives, from annoyance, to giving the appearance that you actually added something useful to the program.
5. Require as much RAM as possible. This will place an increased financial burden on the users, as well as perpetuating the technological tradition of planned obsolescence. If you also produce computer systems, you are in a win-win situation. You may also buy stock in companies that produce memory chips, and you’ll be able to assure your future financial base.
6. Add unnecessary features. Make them look really good, so it appears that you tried to please your customers. This tactic is especially useful in achieving maximum bloat and memory usage. It has the further benefit of slowing down operations, placing an additional burden on the computer, and interfering with productivity. Unnecessary features need not be stable, unexpected errors, hangs, and restarts serve to lower the overall expectation of quality.
7. Any new feature which is introduced must be accompanied by at least 10 new bugs. Less than this will foster unrealistic expectations of quality in the minds of your users. If possible, bugs should conform to the following ratios:
- 1 in 10 should be serious enough to stop the feature from performing at all, on at least 1/3 of all computers.
- 2 in 10 should cause the computer to require restarting. Complete failure to respond, when multiple programs are opened with unsaved work is optimal.
- 2 in 10 should cause the program to close without warning, or to hang and fail to respond. Under no circumstances should there be a pattern to these behaviors. Corruption of documents in progress is an added bonus.
- The remaining 5 of 10 should produce random annoyances such as inappropriate responses to menu commands, dramatic system slowdown, cryptic error messages, failure to open compatible documents, etc.
Patches and updates should promise solutions to these problems, but should not actually provide them.
8. Plumb the potential of dialog boxes. Dialog boxes with unhelpful information should appear at random. You can use them to notify the user of system processes which they do not need to know about (or do not care about), produce error messages which are not related to any action the user performed, or to delineate steps to a process which could be done in a single step.
9. Confirm everything. The simpler the task, the more annoying it is to confirm it. The less likely people are to make a mistake, the more important it is to put in a dialog box to confirm the task. This feature is a cardinal hallmark of bad software, and helps to keep the annoyance factor high, and the user expectations low, so do not overlook it when putting the finishing touches on your masterpiece.
10. Create the illusion of security on the surface. This will relieve you of the obligation of providing meaningful security protection, while giving you the added benefit of being able to create further interference with productivity. The following dialog (or the written equivalent) should be used as often as possible:
“Your computer is doing something that may present a risk. You may have started this process on purpose, or it may be starting without your knowledge. This process may be harmful to your computer – just because you started it does not mean it is not dangerous. This process may cause considerable harm to your computer, up to, and including, total data loss. On the other hand, this process may be necessary to the function of your computer, and failure to allow it to continue may seriously compromise your ability to use the computer to perform essential functions. Click Yes if you wish to continue this process. Click No if you wish to discontinue this process.”
This warning may be followed by small print, reading: “Continuing this process may void your warranty.”
11. Silence your critics. Use creative methods to punish your critics, while rewarding people who praise your software.
12. Force your users to upgrade. This removes the ability for users to choose an older, more stable version of software over a newer, buggy version. Such choices place an unreasonable burden of quality on you, and give the user an excessive degree of control over their own computer.
13. Assume the user is stupid. This assumption opens all kinds of possibilities for maximization of useless dialog boxes, but also allows you to bury necessary controls so that the user cannot locate them. The potential is far greater though, because an assumption of stupidity of the user also relieves you of the obligation of providing anything that is user-friendly, and increases your ability to create more awkward and cumbersome interfaces to interfere with accomplishing simple tasks.
14. Assume the user must be protected from themselves. Ownership of a computer is too great a burden for the average person, but they do not know this, so you must not let them know that you have protected them from themselves. It is best to create the ILLUSION on the surface that they have control of the software, but the real controls should be hidden, and only accessible if someone is aware of the hidden manner of accessing them. This strategy causes untold frustration in the user, as they repeatedly attempt to access the false controls to set necessary configurations or give permissions, not realizing that the controls they are accessing are not the ones they need to access. Naming the real controls and the false ones with the same name further enhances your ability to feel superior and to frustrate the user.
15. When issuing new versions, maximum effort should be taken to introduce a wide range of new (unnecessary, and useless) features, but persistent problems and annoyances should not be repaired. The prettier you can make the new features, the better – this helps achieve your goal of high RAM requirements, and it helps to make it look like you actually added value when in fact you did not. It is easier and more fun to create eye candy than it is to repair deep problems or patch bugs and security holes. Eye candy has the added benefit of being more visually appealing for promotion of the new version, and is easier to promote than stability, enhanced productivity, or greater ease of use.
16. Change the rules. This is most effective if you can establish a standard way of doing things, and then change it after your user base is finally adapted to it. Making the interface less intuitive than it was originally is optimal. A great way to achieve this is to change everything that works, but do not fix the problems.
17. Provide the illusion of automated help. When errors occur, or programs stop responding, provide a dialog box which offers to find a solution to the problem. No further programming is necessary in this feature, other than a progress bar, followed by a message which says that no solution was found, and which instructs the user to visit the software publisher’s website to look for an update. This feature does not provide any useful function, but leaves the user with the feeling that at least you TRIED to help them. This is an easy, and inexpensive way to enhance public relations, without having to actually provide anything of substance.
The software world is advancing, and becoming ever more complex. Keeping software from performing predictably is in the best interest of every software developer, lest computer users feel that good function is a justifiable expectation. It is our hope that this guideline can assist developers in maintaining the status quo, so that profit margins will not be negatively impacted by the expectation of true progress.
If this guideline is adhered to by current developers, we can look forward to wide vistas of ease and profit in the future.
It’s Just Life After Cancer
Alex’s blood tests were ambiguous. They contained “immature cells”. For a kid who has come out of chemo for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia, that is unsettling news. The lab said they’d get the results confirmed and clarified, and that we’d have to wait until they did. That was on Friday.
Of course, no one was in a hurry over the weekend. Had this been the relapse it very well could have been, the four days that it eventually took just to get the results back could have made a huge difference in his prognosis. Relapse is grim enough as it is, and delays make it worse.
We agonized over the weekend, and through Monday, calling to find out what the status was. We were finally informed on Tuesday afternoon, that he had “reactive cells”. This was their way of telling us that it was normal cells, but cells which are not normally found in the blood (they are normally confined to the marrow). There are three basic times when they come into the blood stream – when the body is reacting to an illness (generally a significant one such as flu or mono, or something else that you know they had), when the body has been subject to trauma, or when the body is stressed by a disease process (cancer can be one of those, or Crohn’s, or other serious but silent illnesses).
To our knowledge, Alex has none of those. His weight had also dropped significantly, and he is looking very skinny and losing strength, feeling fatigued and cranky. Nothing dramatic, but there, and worrisome. The very symptoms he had four years ago at initial diagnosis.
His other blood counts are not typical for a reaction that would normally accompany the presence of reactive cells – no atypical rise or fall in other blood counts. Just this one odd blip, and lymphyocytes on the high side of normal.
But this is, again, all part of living after treatment for cancer. You never see illness the same again. It is not a panicky feeling, though you do worry. And you know, as few parents do, the urgency of getting results in a timely manner. You watch for signs and indications that most parents never think twice about. And it will never go away. There is no known outside range at which B-cell Leukemias have a zero risk for relapsing. It gets less likely over time, but it never completely goes away. You learn to be vigilant – not overreactive, you just pay attention. Because it matters.
We learned things from this. That we were woefully unprepared financially for a crisis of this magnitude. That we are mentally well prepared – we knew within half an hour of the news, just how we would handle it if it were a relapse. We knew within days what our best treatment options would be, and how we’d handle the difficulties that could cause. We knew we’d be ok if it WERE a relapse.
And we learned that four days is far too long to wait for test results. We’ll be using a different lab from now on. One that can determine leukemic blast cells from myelocytes right away.
Alex goes back to the doctor in another week, for a repeat CBC and checkup, to see whether he is still in a decline, or whether he had something going on in the background that he is bouncing back from. So the worst worry is over, but a niggling one remains.
And it probably always will.
An Update on Previous Posts
The experiments are going well, the garden is dead, the classes are thriving, and business is still growing. There… all done. You can go home now.
More detail? Well… If you insist…
Megafamilies and Natural Diabetics are both earning better than before. The forums are hard to get going. People like to post to a busy forum, they shy away from taking the lead. So you have a tidy little catch-22. Nobody posts because nobody posts. So every week or so I email the site members (they DO sign up… they don’t necessarily DO anything once they have, but they do sign up!). I welcome the new ones, give them an idea of the overall membership numbers, and invite them to go out on a limb and get the forums rolling. And I reply any time someone posts. So far the courageous are few.
But the Google income is up. So far up that one of the sites is now making what ALL of my sites used to make. Traffic has not slowed down at all. They’ve been in the new format for a month now, and the traffic is still high – in fact, Megafamilies seems to be particularly high, with a 50% increase over last month, primarily Google traffic. Natural Diabetics has maintained its growth trend.
Our web development class is going well. Five students payed for the whole course at once. One could not afford to do that, so he pays for each class as he goes. He is my bellweather. As long as he is coming back, I know I must not be doing too badly. We teach SEO this week. Last week was a whirlwind tour of images and the web. Kevin continues to film me, and I continue to sound good, but look stupid. Pretty normal.
The University Outreach Coordinator has asked me to do more this spring. Two full courses, plus four smaller classes. That is a lot. They’ll be done in a series of three saturdays for each full course though, instead of spread out through 12 weeks. I don’t know if that will make it easier, or harder. We’ll teach Joomla, and CRELoaded. The curriculum is outlined, but unwritten, so I’ll have a busy few months getting that done. Fortunately the four smaller classes (2 hours each), will be expansions on four of the modules from the full course that I am teaching now. That means the curriculum for them is already 90% finished, I just have to polish them into stand-alone classes.
Contracts keep coming. I have a few appointments each week to meet with prospects, which is about how it needs to be to keep us in shoes and milk and potatoes. Been so busy lately though that I’ve just wanted to sit down and cry a few times. I’d rather be busy than not, but sometimes it does get overwhelming.
My computer developed some dead pixels. Quite a lot, actually. Enough to be a problem. So I’m now working from a brand new HP laptop (it was cheap), which is in need of a RAM upgrade since it is running Vista (I’d have stuck with XP if they’d have given me a choice). After discovering how to get into the hidden Admin account in Vista, and running from that, I’m less frustrated with the OS in general. Still don’t like it, but now I can at least function at a minimal level.
I’ve had trouble transferring things over though, so I’m functioning with the technological equivalent of having one arm tied behind my back. It is certain to be a few more days before I have this thing firing on all cylinders where my personal info archives are concerned.
And this laptop had 40 GB of stuff on it out of the box. I uninstalled about 10 GB, but STILL… THIRTY GIGS, and they called it a “barebones system” as far as software was concerned! They were right…. it has almost nothing on it but Vista and a few games, and HPs stuff. Greedy beggers, aren’t they? The system has two hard drives – I suppose they thought they should make sure both got used?
Pending Growth within the Medicine Bow, Wyoming Region
The name “Medicine Bow” has been known to only a few traditional western fans. It is the fictional site of a book that is renowned as the “first Western” novel – The Virginian, by Owen Wister. It has been the setting of three movies based on that novel, but has never been the SITE of the actual filming.
Recently, the name of Medicine Bow has been bandied about within the government and alternative energy circles. If you Google “Medicine Bow Coal to Diesel”, you’ll find a treasure trove of both factual and speculative information.
DKRW, a relatively new company, is in the development process for a coal to liquids facility which will be located just 10 miles from Medicine Bow. The facility will support a workforce of approximately 300 workers when it is fully functioning (numbers vary according to sources, this is the most often repeated number). Work crews are currently reported as being scheduled to begin construction in the spring of 2008.
The facility will be the first of its kind, and represents freedom from foreign oil, as well as significant advances on the environmental front. It is supported not only by regional government, it has widespread support on the national level. Several other facilities are planned to be built, based on the success or failure of this one. Coal states are watching this one.
Land prices in Medicine Bow are already rising. The last round of property taxes showed a fairly high increase in tax values (nearly double for many homes). Of course, since taxes have been very low here, the increases were not huge by standards elsewhere, but they still ruffled a few feathers.
Medicine Bow has had a depressed housing economy for decades. Where else can you purchase a 3 bedroom home in decent shape for under $100 k? WELL under $100 k. That may change within the next two years though. Even the housing of the work crews will present a challenge in a town that usually has only 4-6 houses for sale at a time, and where finding a rental is as much a matter of luck as it is of timing.
Growth within Carbon County in general is already strong. Housing in the surrounding towns is becoming increasingly difficult to get. The spillover is already affecting the ‘Bow. If a person had planned to purchase land low and sell high, the opportunity is already all but gone. The feeding frenzy is already on, and houses that you could not give away last year are being priced at twice their current value. In a year, they’ll get it.
For now, the small and isolated feeling is preserved. And even with growth that doubles or triples the size of the town, we’ll still be considered unbearably small to most people. When you are starting with an optimistic estimation of 300 people, the anticipated growth still won’t move us beyond “small” or “rural”. Most people in town really just want to regain a small grocery store, and it would take doubling or tripling the town size to make it feasible. It may no longer be an unrealistic goal.
Some of the atmosphere that brings people here will undoubtedly be lost. But it would be lost due to stagnation and neglect if the growth does not occur, and loss due to growth is infinitely preferable to loss due to attrition. Things will change. But we hope to find progress within the change.
Take a look at the town website for more info about Medicine Bow: http://www.medicinebow.org
Network, Network, Network
It wasn’t just about the people who came to our booth and were interested in hiring us. That was really only a small part of the value we received from purchasing a booth at a state-wide business event. I went in with expectations of more than just one advantage, which allowed me to gain a great deal from the event that went far beyond those few potential contracts.
Networking is all about getting to know people, building relationships, and reciprocity. If you have something of value, people will recommend it, but only if they trust you to deliver. Trade events are a good place to meet people who may be interested in what you have. But they can also benefit you in other ways, depending on what your goals are.
You can meet up with people who might be considered your competitors. If you shun them, and treat them like the enemy, you’ve just cut off a potential advantage. If you get to know them, and learn the differences between what you do, and what they do, you may find that cooperation is possible, in a way that benefits you both. For example, two other web design companies at the first event were happy to take our card, with the intent of passing on referrals. They wanted big contracts. We wanted the small ones. We can help one another.
Those two benefits – potential clients, and potential cooperations, are two benefits that nearly every business can gain from networking, and from event participation. There is a third, which will benefit a business if they have goals that go beyond their own business. If you want to change the world, one more benefit is possible.
You can meet people who have the power to help you gain credibility to achieve great things. I’m not a power pusher. I don’t get into the games involving scratching and clawing my way to the top. But I do understand now how knowing the right people can help your business in ways you never dreamed.
I’m trying to define a new niche industry. To do that, I have a two-pronged approach to my business. It includes both DOING the job, in a service business, and TEACHING the job, in an educational environment. To teach it, I need more credibility than I do to just DO it. People with power can help me do that, and can help to grant me the credibility I need. They can refer me, put me in a position of being “the” expert to call on the topics I want to educate people about.
The events we attended did that, to a certain extent. We came to the notice of people who have an agenda of eliminating certain problems. The things we teach help to address some of those issues. In talking to them, once they finally understood the real difference in how we are approaching the industry, we were able to make an impression, and be remembered as the only people doing this one thing. Long term, that will benefit us. It already is on a local and regional basis.
No one else is going to build your business for you. They really don’t care whether you succeed or not, unless you are doing something that will benefit them also. People in power won’t want to help you unless it makes them look good too. You have to have your ducks in a row, you can’t just ride someone else’s coattails to the top. But if you DO have it together, and if you ARE willing to work hard at building a smart business, networking can help you succeed in ways you cannot predict.
The Intellectual Footprint of Your Business
She wasn’t getting it. I could tell that by the way she kept looking at me with this, “so… and this matters to me, why?” look on her face. It should have mattered to her, because my goal was to eliminate one of her problems.
All week I’ve been at trade shows, explaining what I do and where I am going, over and over. Some people get it right away. Some people don’t get it until you really tell them flat out, “I am not trying to just provide a service. I am trying to redefine an industry across the globe.” Then they begin to have a clue how big a thing I am trying to do.
I’ve decided to call it the “intellectual footprint”. And every business, or person, has one.
- Consider Charles Dickens. What did he contribute to the world that was good?
- Think about the safety pin. It forever redefined how we performed emergency clothing repairs.
- The Frosty made people reconsider how they thought about ice cream in a cup.
Are you trying to build a business? Or are you trying to make an impact on more than just your little corner of the world? Why, exactly, are you IN business?
If you are out to change the world, are you documenting what you learn? Are you assembling a means of passing on what you learned to others who may want to follow in your footsteps?
Often, the real difference between someone who owns a business that serves a few people, and someone who owns a business that redefines the way a group of people think about something, is nothing more than the fact that one of them documented their knowledge, and shared the life-changing lessons that they learned. They left an intellectual footprint on the world.
How big are your shoes? Will people know where you’ve trod, not because of how loudly you yelled as you went by, but by what you shared that helped them to do what they do just a little better?
You have the capacity to change the world for good. How do you intend to do that?
Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.
Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
