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The Loss of Group Conversation
I love a good forum – if that forum emails me when there are posts. I liked being able to post something of value, and get conversation about it. And I liked that the conversation was there, and searchable. I liked being able to ask a question, or brainstorm something, and get responses.
Ryze was one of the best venues to find forums like that – they call them “networks”. But Ryze is dying. It hasn’t been sudden, more of a trickle of attrition.
None of the new big networking sites can come close – their group conversation tools stink. And before you say, “what about Twitter?”, let me clarify – I’m talking REAL conversation, where you can make a comment of more than 140 characters, and where the comment lasts longer than the time it takes to scroll off the bottom of the stream of inanities that flood in.
Blogs don’t cut it either.
FaceBook has “groups”, and “pages”, but there is no notification on either the wall, or forum activity for those. It is like you join a group, and then it NEVER reaches out to you. The only way a group can tap you on the shoulder and get your attention is if the owner does a mass mail to the group. Too many of those, and people drop the group. So on FaceBook, groups really aren’t groups at all – they are just lists of people who never participate because there is nothing to remind them to take time from their busy lives to check in.
Statistically, forums that require you to check in to see if there has been any activity are failures. Stupidly, FaceBook has never figured this out.
But then, neither did FastPitch, LinkedIn, or any of the other major platforms that I checked out. I think they like transience. It takes smaller databases.
So group conversations that are meaningful have all but disappeared.
Sad, really.
And sadder… We downgraded our Ryze memberships today. With a sense of loss as we did so. We closed our own network there, and unsubscribed from some that have become either nothing more than questions about why there are no posts, or mostly ads – and one that has degenerated into mostly a commentary on Twitter (If I wanted Twitter, I’d be THERE, not somewhere else reading about it). The last people to go are the spammers, and a few die-hards who want to try to doggedly MAKE it what it once was.
Our profile is still there – it could come back. I don’t think it will. I give Ryze 6 months before they are forced to close their doors. And it is because they did not listen. They offer something nobody else does, and it has been successful, and is still valuable, but not without additional tools to entice people in to begin with, and to keep them there. And implementing the tools should not be difficult, the technology is readily available. Heck, I can do it using Open Source software! They could still pull out a spectacular recovery. But I think they won’t.
And the loss is more than just a venue… It seems the loss of what they did that no one else has had the intelligence to implement in a smart way.
A Scathing Report on Grant Writer’s Institute
Ok, this is not something I want to do. I like to believe in the good intentions of people. And I rarely feel the need to write an article solely for the purpose of exposing a business that acts in a way that I can only consider to be highly unethical.
Grant Writer’s Institute, which goes under several other names as well, has been promoting our grant to the people whom they are charging hundreds of dollars for something that is quite a bit less than they are encouraging people to believe that it is. They provide an information packet that supposedly contains information on grants that business owners can get to fund business expansion or startup. They have added us to their list, and we are being contacted regularly now by people who have been taken by this company. We have been contacted directly by three people, and have had applications submitted by others. The three people we were contacted by all reported how useless the information was that they were given, and that it was misleading and incomplete about the reality of actually GETTING a grant.
They operate on the fine edge of legality. They word their information carefully, so the eager applicant will THINK they are getting something they are not. They are not picky about the “grants” they recommend – some are actually contests, not grants (and there is a huge difference). Some require fees to apply. Ours is not money, and they represent it as such – it is clear they have never even read our site beyond the word “grant”.
We received an application, which some guy apparently paid them to prepare.
- Now, in the first place, our application can be prepared by ANY qualified candidate – if you can’t prepare your own grant application for our program, you are not qualified to operate a business!
- In the second place, the job this company did on preparing it was appalling.
It was obviously prepared by someone who did not speak English natively. To their credit, they did conceal it well, but there were inconsistent phrases which gave it away. This is something a professional company would have paid more attention to.
They did NOTHING to help this person to actually appear qualified. It was patently obvious that they just wrote down whatever he said – even the things that were redundant, and a bit rambling. They did not help him actually present his information in a way that would help him qualify for the grant. The information presented is in fact completely unsuitable, because there is nothing in it which even outlines a viable business concept. It is completely unoriginal, and the business, as outlined, would have no chance of succeeding.
This company is NOT a professional grant writing company! They lack the most basic skills in presenting grant application information in a way that will help an applicant actually GET an award. They take money while representing themselves as such, but the kind of work they did on this grant application suggests that they are not concerned about whether you actually get the grant. They do not appear to be concerned about learning what the requirements of the grant are – no one from their company has so much as ASKED us for any of the judging criteria (and a good grant writer would do that), and they clearly did NOT read the available information about our grant requirements, or they would have done a better job.
A real grant writer looks at many factors – the grant requirements, the likely judging criteria, the competition level for the grant, and the best way to present the information given so that it meets those requirements. They will recommend wording things in a way that presents them in their best light. They will outline the value and feasibility of a proposed project, and they will detail the greater good of the project.
There was no effort whatever in this application toward actually helping this person GET the grant. The job they did could have been done better by a high school student.
The information I am presenting here is documented, and can be legally proven in a court of law. I am not committing libel – I can prove what I say. We have the applications, we have the witnesses.
- Avoid this company, and all of their affiliations.
- Do not EVER pay more than the cost of an average priced book for ANY kind of grant listings. And be careful even with those!
- If you can afford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for grant information, you can afford to bootstrap a business. It does not take much to do so, as long as you are willing to work and be creative.
I am sorry to have to write this. I’m sick of having to explain to people the reality of grants – and seeing a company like this just makes me ill. It will eventually catch up with them – you can’t do this much harm over and over without it eventually coming back at you.
Right now I’m torn – I can seek legal help in making these people stop using our grant in their listings. But if we do that, we lose the ability to build a potential case against them. We also lose our ability to advise the people they are harming on what possible redress they might seek. So I haven’t yet decided exactly what to do, other than publishing what I know, and sounding warnings far and near.
If any legal entity or reporter wishes to pursue this, we will cooperate fully, but we will not release applications, or contact names without permission of the applicants, or a court order, pursuant to our privacy terms.
A Tale of Two Cities
We market into two towns in our area. We are located in a dinky town, population of just 300. So there really is no customer base for our services here. We have spent a lot of time marketing into two counties – the one we live in, and the one next door where we shop the most. They are very different towns.
Neither has yielded much in the way of business, but the quality of the business and the relationships is quite different. Over the years, we have tried to do things within the county we live in, but it has proven to be a hopeless effort! They do not want to progress, and the attitudes of the business owners have been unproductive to to work with.
Wyoming is a distinctively different place to live and work anyway. People love it or hate it. We love a lot of it, deplore other aspects. The complacency drives us nuts sometimes. The high alcohol and drug use rates are beyond apalling. But the day to day interactions are often difficult, and frequently painful. It has brought me to the point of wondering whether we are making an effort that may have a positive effect in the long term if we just keep trying in spite of opposition, or whether we are just wasting time poking ourselves in the eye.
In our home county, EVERY business prospect has been twice as hard to get, and twice as much trouble once we got them. Petty politics and power plays become an issue, and cause all sorts of grief. In the last two months, we’ve been insulted, verbally abused, accused of failure to honor a contract (in one case where the entity wanted more for their money when already receiving 50% discounts on rates that are far below industry averages, and in another case because we refused to do all of the work for Phase 2 in a contract in the Phase 1 payment period!). One was salvageable, the other was not, and it was a relief to see it go, though hard, because one of the main instigators is someone who had posed as a friend for a period of about three years.
I think I am just tired of working so hard to try to help people locally, only to have it blow up on me. We are contemplating seriously just dropping our two Chamber memberships in the county we live in, and only maintaining the one in the nearby county. One has profited us, the other two have not really. It is a sad thing to come to the conclusion that you have to give up on an entire area though. Because it is about more than just business – it is about community, and attitude, and direction, and progress.
Our membership in the Chamber in the other community has been productive. It has resulted in teaching engagements, new contracts, and reciprocity. This has been far from the case in the other two towns – one is a nice, though tiny, area. But it has that quality that many small tourist areas do – they will welcome you on the surface, but you really won’t be part of them until you have lived there 40 years. The other has been completely a waste of time. A sense of normality on the surface, but no ability to make progress. Every effort is like rowing upstream.
By withdrawing from the community we will potentially lose $25 per month in income. That is $25 per month that is hard to get actually PAID, and which takes more time than most of our maintenance agreements for the same amount.
It still surprises me how communities can be so different. And how people just seem to take on the skin of the community they adopt, whether intentionally or not.
I’m not entirely sure where we’ll be going with this. But I do know that something has changed in me. I’m just not sure how it is going to come out in action yet.
The 90/10 Rule for Small Business – Webmaster Secret #4
For small businesses especially, websites tend to operate on the 90/10 rule. That is:
90% of the results come from 10% of the work and expense.
This is especially true of SEO, and of site functions, but also applies to design, copywriting, and to a certain extent, to marketing.
So when we begin a contract, we don’t try to do it all. We try to determine the 10% that will get the most results, and we include anything that is critical for their industry or site concept.
This 10% will vary from site to site – there are no two the same. So it takes careful thought and planning for each site, and a thorough understanding of the challenges and needs of their industry to get it right.
Use of this rule has been a huge factor in our success. It is a primary aspect in achieving our goal of delivering higher quality, better performance, lower prices, while still maintaining higher profits for ourselves. It sort of makes the impossible, possible.
When you understand that certain things make sense for big business, but do not scale for small business, and in fact, give no real benefit to a small business startup, you then give yourself permission to not do them, and to understand that it is BETTER to not do them. At the same time, when you understand that other things, typically not included in a corporate contract, are absolutely ESSENTIAL for small business. We are not operating by corporate website standards – we are creating new standards that work better for small businesses specifically.
If it does not contribute to the profit of the site, then it isn’t part of the 10% that we include in a contract, unless a client requests it specifically – in which case we charge more.
The miraculous result of this is that we can take a $50k site, and deliver substantially equivalent performance for under $5k. The site owner can get in the door, develop a successful web presence, and then improve gradually from there – slowly adding those other touches that cost more, but which bring lower returns. 90% performance is typically more than enough to launch a successful business and get it rolling so that it can earn enough to support further enhancements.
But only if you choose the RIGHT 10%, and get the RIGHT 90% of the performance.
Can You Do it for $20?
A prospective client asked me that yesterday. I said no… Our price is $25.
Sometimes I say yes. This time I didn’t.
He then said, “Some other companies say they can do maintenance and hosting for $20.”
I replied, “They cannot do for $20 what we do for $25, and we cannot do this for $20.”
Sometimes I come down in price – we sometimes have a little wiggle room, we sometimes are able to negotiate with a client to reduce services that they do not need as much, or we sometimes can see that a particular job will be worth doing and will pay us back if we come down on one price.
But this time I could not. This particular service is already stretched to be able to offer it at $25 per month. And it offers a ton of value. To come down would mean running into problems as we overstretched ourselves.
I have always had the confidence to say no when I knew I could not come down on a price. But this is one of the first times I have been able to boldly say that the value made it worth it – and it honestly does make it worth it. That felt good. I recommend trying it!
If you have thought out your prices, and there is wiggle room, there is nothing wrong with negotiating. If there isn’t though, sometimes you just can’t do it. When you can’t, it is easier to be bold when you know your prices are worth the value.
If you are destitute and have more time than money, you have nothing to lose by coming down even when you know it is worth more (and sometimes we do so for reasons of kindness – when we choose to help someone out). But if you are in a position where doing so will cost you over time, it isn’t wise to do so, especially in situations where the client can probably afford it if they understand the value.
The Nameless Faceless Merchant
“Please”, she said, “I don’t want my home address on my website. My husband is in law enforcement, and I don’t want people to be able to locate us.” I suggested she have a Post Office Box. “No”, that was an extra expense, she didn’t want that. Just a store, with a shopping cart.
“No name on my site” another client said. Competing with large faceless corporations, her only advantage was being personal, and she did not want her name public.
Many of our clients buy into the myth that Private Domain registration is a good thing.
In this highly competitive market, all of these are fatal. Consider:
If you are a small company, people want to know who is behind it. You can rely on your reputation like Dell and Wal-Mart. You have to give them some idea of who you are. Your name is essential. Your reputation is more about YOU than about your company name. Someone needs to be able to Google you and learn enough about you to know if they trust you, or at least read a bit to see if they think you are someone they might want to do business with. This is especially important when competing with large and impersonal corporations – being someone approachable is your only advantage.
Paranoia about your name being on the web is not a valid reason to keep it off your website. It is already out there. Not using it on your website won’t make one bit of difference to anything except your ability to sell. If you are going to have a business, this is the cost of doing business. Because frankly, a website without a name has only the minutest chance of every serving the purpose of helping you earn.
You MUST have a mailing address. Even a post office box. If a customer has no place where they can serve papers in the event of a dispute, then they won’t buy!
Private Domain registration has been used by every scammer in the world. If you use it, you look like one of them. Besides, it doesn’t really protect you, does your business more harm than good, and can potentially cause some very serious problems.
If there are three merchants on the street, two whose faces you can see, and a third who wears a mask, who will you buy from?
Web business requires the maximum degree of possible transparency. You don’t have to post pictures of yoru kids or give your home address. But you have to have a name, and a mailing address, and as much validation of those as you can get. Without them, you are wasting your time and money.
There Are No Fireflies in Wyoming
In the book, the family crossed Wyoming, and stopped to camp one night and caught fireflies. The author could not have known… It was obvious she had never been here, or if she had, she had not noticed that one thing. Because Wyoming has no fireflies. Plenty of mosquitoes… none of which have lights on the end. Of course, if you grew up where fireflies were a common thing, you might never realize that someplace else did not have them!
It is details like that which only those who DO know will notice. But when they do, you lose all credibility!
This is pretty important if you write for a living. But I think there is a broader application also. We often make assumptions based on our own background and experience, and never realize that they may not be accurate for other situations.
We may make assumptions that are incorrect in client negotiations, in assessing an unfamiliar target market, or in networking situations. They can be embarrassing, or even disastrous for our business.
Sometimes we make those assumptions about our own skills or expertise, due to lack of experience, and end up muffing the job. That is REALLY embarrassing.
The most important thing that experience teaches us in this regard, is to not assume things, to research more carefully, so we don’t try to catch fireflies in Wyoming.
Why Would ANYONE Judge VALUE Based on Hourly Pricing Alone?
About a week ago an overseas outsourcing company contacted me through a venue that I frequent. Since I was looking for a coder for a specific database conversion project, I asked them for a quote – they had told me that it could be done for $10 per hour. I send them the two databases, along with instructions about what needed to be done. I knew it would take me about 5-6 hours to do it. It was not work I liked doing, so I was interested in outsourcing it.
Their quote came back for 24 hours of work, at $360. Hmmm. That isn’t $10 per hour…. And it is more than triple the maximum amount of time that I’d allote to the project.
I then contacted a regional coder – she charges $85 per hour. Ouch! That is a LOT compared to $10 per hour! Or even $15!
But, she could do the work in 2-3 hours. Hmmm…. $170 to $255, instead of $360! Which one is the real bargain? Especially when you consider language, cultural, time zone, and legal recourse limitations.
Even when you are comparing local with local, hourly rates are just NOT a reasonable basis of comparison. The best way to judge, is to ask for a list of included services, and a flat rate, or at least a firm estimate. Any experienced professional can give that, and a newbie can still offer reasonable guarantees that it won’t go over a certain amount.
Often, higher hourly rates pay for the following:
1. Reduced legal recourse risk. It is easier to recover from people who are within the same country as you, or who are in a country that has reciprocal agreements with your country.
2. Easier communication – time zones, language and cultural differences, or inexperience on the part of the technician in communicating with clients can all cause communication barriers, which equate to lost time or poorly done work.
3. Better tools – Better tools mean better quality output, and faster work speeds. The right tools can shave hours off many kinds of tasks, so hourly rates become meaningless when you are trying to compare the cost of one service that is done manually, and one that is done with better tools to do it more efficiently.
4. More experience – this means both faster output speeds, AND better quality. But it also means that an experienced professional has knowledge of “gotchas” that might bite you if you work with someone who is less experienced. For example, in our industry, there are certain things that municipalities or non-profits of certain types have to do with their sites, or which they cannot do on their sites, which are different than the standards required by small businesses. Experience protects those entities from potential lawsuits.
5. More Accurate Applicable Charges – One company may charge for research time, if they lack experience in a certain area, another may not. One company may charge for negotiation time, another may not.
6. Less Lost Time – Higher quality and accuracy can be worth paying a higher hourly rate for, because it saves you in the long run. If a lower hourly rate means work has to be redone, it costs you even if you don’t have to pay for it directly.
7. Attention to Different Kinds of Details – Often higher hourly rates are charged for higher risk projects because there are more details to attend to. Simple projects do not require this, but complex ones may. Often, as a business grows, so do their risks, so a service level that was appropriate for a startup may not be appropriate for a larger faster growing business. Higher risks almost always mean higher hourly rates, but they also result in more protection for the client.
There are MANY good companies who charge low rates. There are MANY new businseses and service providers who can do a very good job at a fair price. This is not in any way a condemnation of lower priced companies.
Rather, it is an encouragement to actually compare the REAL price, and the REAL VALUE rather than making a knee-jerk reaction based on the appearance of price, by using a number which is actually meaningless.
It would be like saying “A car that gets 35 MPG is better than a car that gets 12 MPG” without comparing anything else, like the reliability of the car, the size, the intended purpose, or even the side the steering wheel was located on!
Judge price and value based on factors that really matter, and you’ll find that what appears to be the lower price, often isn’t!
A Rant About Grants
Who spends $3000 to get information on getting grants, but will not invest that much into their business instead?
We’ve been getting grant applications lately from people who are TOTALLY unprepared to operate a business, and completely uncommitted to their business! How do we know? Because they have NOT done what is OBVIOUS to even TRY to start their business!
Instead, they have come to our website, filled out our grant application, and tried to persuade us that they are deserving of a business grant, when they have not done anything to even start their business. Not all of our applicants, but many of them.
Here is the reason I am so frustrated over this:
They are not even READING what the grant IS!
We are getting people who are asking for MONEY, even though our site clearly says, in many places, NO MONEY IS AWARDED.
Most of them do NOT need a website! Don’t even WANT a website, but since they did not read the grant information, they are clueless about what they are even applying for!
So these people, who want an offline business, which they could bootstrap if they were smart about it, are sitting there talking about their dream, applying for grants so someone else will give them their business. Most of them could get started if they’d just start doing something. Start small. Start bit by bit and work toward it. Do SOMETHING productive other than just running around looking for someone to fund it for you.
The great irony is that some of them have PAID MONEY (often a GREAT DEAL of money) for information on getting grants. In some cases, it was enough money that they could have started their business if they had been smart about what they spent it on.
It is peculiar to me that they will spend money on a supposed shortcut, but they will not spend the same amount of money on a more sure way of doing it.
So I’m puzzled at human nature today. If you just stick your hand out and expect it to be filled, no one will ever consider you to be deserving. You’ve gotta do what you are capable of doing. I am going to have to find a polite way of communicating to these people that they got taken on the grant information, and help them to understand what it takes to REALLY have a business.
‘Cause I ain’t going to hand you money. And I’m only gonna hand you a website if you’ve worked hard already and can indicate to me that you will actually do something worthwhile with it.
Answering My Associate’s Question
She’s launching a new service (quite a good one actually). She wanted to know if she should set a cap on how many she would take on. Each client pays $25 per month for a specific service. This was my answer to her:
No, do not set a cap, but do some planning instead:
It is good to figure out how many you can handle, BUT… beyond that, your task is not to LIMIT it, but to figure out what would be needed at the next level.
- At what point would you need help?
- What things could you systemize to speed up and thereby increase the workload? This is the first resort usually because it is free, just takes smarts.
- What things could you automate? This is the second option if it costs to do it, first if it can be done without additional cost.
- What would you outsource? This entails a breakdown of the tasks involved in the whole service, and figuring out which ones you WANT to do, which ones you COULD outsource easily, etc. Remember, outsourcing is the THIRD choice!
- Whom would you outsource to?
- How much could you afford to pay them per task, and still profit?
It is good to do some calculations on that now, so that you know what your direction is when you get there, and so that you can start laying groundwork for this as you get 10, then 20, then 30 clients.
If you want to grow your business, as my associate does, then planning when you outline a new service, can help you know where it can go, and help you avoid overwhelming yourself at a later point. You’ll know when you need to adjust, and HOW you need to adjust, so that growth happens more smoothly and service delivery continues consistently.
Norwex Sites Go Public
This past fall, a delightful lady from Canada contacted us about creating “replicated websites” for her downline. We told her we could do much better than that, and provide them with a site they could make changes to themselves, so they’d get indexed by the search engines. We moved forward, and have since sold several of the sites to her downline.
The sites are now going public – so anybody can purchase one if they are a Norwex rep. We provide custom design and help with the most technical parts of the site personalization, so we don’t do as much for the sites as we do for a full site build. That keeps the pricing lower than our normal websites.
We’ve felt pretty good about this, because it was an opportunity to do something we’d known we could do for a long time, but finding the right client was difficult. Our programmer is finishing the auto-install script for them, which will make the process even faster for us, and keep the pricing stable for the site owners.
This has been one of those pivotal contracts for our business. One that has opened all kinds of doors, and has caused me to think about business differently. It laid the groundwork for our Kit websites, and for our franchise. Before this, I didn’t really have a good concept in my head of the kind of value and training we coudl provide with our franchise, or whether we could offer work referrals. With this project rolling forward, all of those things became clear, and possible.
It has also got me thinking differently about coding our own solutions, and customizing existing solutions. There are more possiblities now, and they are more affordable because our resources are more fluid.
Often, when an opportunity presents, we don’t see at the time where it can take us. This one felt like a good thing, and I knew it was a key to growth. But I could not have predicted the way in which it would open my mind, and how it would change our business to open up more possibilities that I had not yet thought of, or thought possible. Thing is, I had this kind of contract partially thought out three years ago. Then I put the final pieces together about a year ago. It took time after that for it to bear fruit, but when it did, the payoff was well worth the wait. I find that many things that we do are that way. It takes a good deal of time to bring them to a point where they pay, but it is worth it when they do. Often the benefits are broad spread and unexpectedly good.
From that, I encourage you to stick to it. Keep working on the details until you get it right. Move on to other things, but keep it open and alive in the background if it does not yield results right away. Often some things just take time to “ferment”, and when they do, the results are incredible.
Details about the sites are in the sidebar, under the Downline Sites website link.
What it REALLY Means to Think Outside the Box
There is some misunderstanding of this concept. Recently I have heard two people condemn the phrase, one calling it “silly”, another calling it “dangerous”. These people will never be innovators or true entrepreneurs, because they have completely missed the point, and changed the meaning from what it really is.
When you think outside the box, it does not mean you do not apply common sense, or that you do not abide by necessary limitations that affect safety or legality.
It simply means that you do not let preconceived ideas, or the “rules” imposed by other people, which do NOT apply, constrain you from thinking creatively.
We do that… We assume that because 90% of people in the US send their kids to public school, and because we have done it that way for generations, that somehow it must be better. We assume that if the SBA teaches people to start a business and tells them that they have to have heaps of money to do it, and that they must have a business plan that conforms to bank requirements in order to get that funding, that this is how it must be done. We think that if we have been taught to do things a certain way, that we must do it that way, even when that way may not make sense for our particular situation.
Innovators and true entrepreneurs are not held back by limitations that do NOT affect safety or legality. They are able to see beyond the preconceived ideas and methods that others are constrained by.
In the web world, things are done on an enterprise scale, and taught for that scale, and nobody ever really stops to think that they simply do not scale well for small business, or how different the needs might be. They assume that you must do this, you must do that, and if you do not, that your website won’t perform. They do not stop to think that on a micro-scale, the things they require won’t make ANY difference at all, but will increase costs, and that perhaps they should be done at a later time when it WILL matter. Our “out of the box” thinking was to simply analyze those factors, and make decisions based on reality instead of assumption or dogma.
That is all it means to Think Outside the Box. To approach things from a new direction, and to consider new ideas in a productive way.
If you intend to go somewhere new, you can’t do it by following other people. You take the wisdom of others and learn from it, then you formulate a new plan that still fits the wisdom, but which does not incorporate the ideas that do not apply just because everyone else does it that way. If you want to LEAD, you have to get out ahead and try something nobody else is doing. If you want to succeed at it, you cannot compromise known safety or legality factors, the things you risk are just yourself.
It isn’t silly, and it isn’t dangerous. It is bold, and the path to true success.
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.
