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I’ve Been Learning, Have You?
My primary website is a MESS! It was nice when it started out. But then I had more things. And web standards changed. And I learned some more stuff. What was good then is now an embarrassment. And like the shoeless cobbler’s kids, my websites are the last to get attention. Clients have to come first.
So today, I’m looking at the positive side of it.
People are hiring me anyway – so at least my client work is speaking well of me.
The fact that I see that it is an embarrassment means I’m learning. Learning is good.
The fact that I’ve outgrown it means our business is expanding. Growth is good.
The fact that web standards are changing means (usually) progress on the web.
Of course, the negative side is always there, haunting me. Which means that one of these days I’m going to have to put aside my other pressing projects and put some time into a redesign of the template. Luckily, the site is built so the template can be revised without having to redo the entire site… one of the positive aspects of the progress of the web!
Look around. What have you learned that has made something you did before obsolete? What have you outgrown that needs a change? Are you nagging yourself to get the change done without acknowledging the growth that necessitates the change?
I Don’t Read Your Emails Anymore
Yeah you, FaceBook “Friends”! I don’t read your teleseminar emails, your “join this” emails, or your “special deal” emails. Nope! I trash ’em!
I have some real friends on FaceBook. You know, the kind who actually KNOW me, that have talked to me about something real, who have taken the time to be a real person to me. If they ask me to join something (which they only do if they are reasonably certain I will be interested – see, they KNOW me well enough to know that!), then I read their message, and consider it.
But if all I have ever seen of you is your name in an ad, you haven’t got a chance. If you email me on a regular basis with ads, and have never taken the time to so much as look at my profile (by which you’d know I’m death on internet marketing spam tactics!), then you are going to be trashed without being read. In fact, I won’t even read the TITLE of the email (yours are so long that all I ever see in my email program is your name… you know, the hypy one that is too long…). I never SEE the great thing you are trying to advertise, all I see is your name and BLIP! You’re GONE!
I’m a nice person. At least, most of the people who know me say that (if you ask my teenage daughter who is in a mood, she might not agree, but the prevailing concensus is that I’m not mean). I don’t like getting snotty about this. But sometimes I think that this is all that certain people will HEAR!
I’m also NORMAL! Virtually EVERYBODY, except internet and social networking greenies, react the same way I do. They don’t have time for people like you! Their life is full of meaningful relationships, urgent tasks, and offers from trusted sources. Why in the world would they even bother to read your ad when you haven’t bothered to try to even get to know them?
You may think you are following the rules – you may think that your PM blasts fit some rule of “relationship building”. They don’t. They are ads. In a world saturated with ads. Everybody is screaming, and nobody is listening to anyone who hollers. They are listening to those who quietly talk to them, person to person.
Next week, I’ll be unfriending anyone who sends me regular PM blasts who doesn’t even know my name. I encourage everyone who reads this to do the same. They can all go and holler to themselves. The rest of us have a real life, and a real business, and we’re too busy succeeding to listen to your immature irritations.
If you need to know how to do it right, I’m always willing to help – and that ISN’T an ad. Countless people will tell you I’ve offered them free resources that were solid, or gave advice without cost that was invaluable. I don’t want to stop anyone from succeeding. I just want to help them get out of their own way, and stop irritating the very people they ought to be befriending!
Why are You Really in Business?
I find that most business owners have not really put a lot of thought into WHY they are in business, beyond “I like doing this.” or “I want to make money.” They haven’t thought about their own driving motivations.
It is really valuable to figure out what your real purpose in business is. Much like the true product in marketing, the real purpose is often abstract, or seemingly unrelated to the day to day tasks.
My purpose is to strengthen families. Most of my clients are parents, many are stay at home moms. Of course, I serve single people too. But underneath all my goals for helping businesses succeed, is the purpose of making life more affordable and manageable for families. By offering success services, I help them afford to care for their families.
So what is your REAL purpose? Beyond making money or creating or selling a product or service, what is the goal that gets you out of bed each morning?
If you identify that, and work toward making that more evident, then your business takes you places in interesting ways. It becomes something unexpected. Our business grant is a result of that. Bad Behavior Stand Alone came from that. We are working on other software tools development to further that purpose. I train webmasters for that reason. I constantly work to produce more, for less, and profit more, because of that. Because my success leads to the success of others, and that helps families survive.
Because this is my goal, it changes HOW I teach, and it changes what I do. It makes ethics paramount. It makes the methods I teach ultra clean, it means I must be able to do things differently because my goal is not just to be another web designer. It is to create something different and better, that makes the world, and families, better.
Take some time to brainstorm, and figure out why you are really in business, and what your long term goal is at a deeply personal level. It may surprise you. And it may be the key to unlocking potentials you never anticipated.
A Tiny Choice, An Immeasurable Result
It didn’t seem like that big of a choice at the time. I mean, it was sort of a scary choice to make, and I knew that it was one of those “letting go of the security blanket” type choices. I thought I knew what it meant at the time. I didn’t. And when I realized what the choice ACTUALLY meant, I was astonished at how it contributed to the defining aspects of our business, and even our identity as business owners and service providers.
This has happened to me over and over. It hasn’t been a single choice, but many, which have shown this pattern. A small choice, which seemed a little against logic, but which we made because in spite of the fear attached, it felt right. And then the impact unfolding into an eye opening concept. I’ll tell about three of those choices:
1. Years ago. I chose to do flat rate pricing instead of hourly rates. Scary… what if I underestimated? But I did it because it felt right. It has been more than a defining aspect of our business. It has been totally empowering. I didn’t have to track hours while balancing children and business. I saved that time I’d have put into tracking hours. I no longer had an earning ceiling. The faster I worked, the more I made. WOW! That has been huge also.
2. Making the choice to train my own competition, without holding back any trade secrets or empowering information. Scary at first. But the impact on our business even in the last two months since making that choice, has been huge. It is like a whole new world of potentials and possibilities have opened, and the things that are coming back to us are just incredible. I never could have predicted how good this one choice would be.
3. Making the choice to drop HTML sites and focus on dynamic sites. Since that choice was made, new opportunities have opened up. Not only that, but we feel more capable of pursuing certain things that we felt inadequate to do before. Our focus on making our dynamic site services better, has sharpened. Our vision of what we need to do next, has become more clear.
Each of those decisions seemed at the time like a small one, even though the philosophy we had to overcome was a major limiting one. How easy it would have been to say, “Nope, I’ll just do it the way everyone else does.”, and dismiss the idea to change. How easy it would have been to be caught in the rut that would have limited our potentials.
Those decisions that we make, which go against conventional wisdom, and which our mind tries to minimize into insignificance when we fear taking the leap, are often the most important ones. The ones that define us as unique, and which give exponential power to our growth potentials.
Where we are today, compared to where we were even two months ago, is astronomically different! Better, bigger, more exciting! And I can see, that if I had failed to make the choice for flat rate pricing 10 years ago, and then reaffirm it each time we grew or offered a new service, we would not have grown this much, and we would not have as much potential to grow further. I can see that the choice to train my competition is a fundamental aspect of where we are going now. I can see that the choice to abandon HTML websites and focus on dynamic sites is opening doors and potentials that I was little aware of at the time.
Fear will stop us. Dismissing choices and making them insignificant can in fact make US insignificant. Considering those possibilities, and being willing to take the risk, face the fears and go forward in new directions, can explode our potentials and make us a force to be reckoned with!
Which would you rather be?
Green Tomato Relish – Another Garden Metaphor
Yesterday, I enjoyed a nice chicken salad on crackers, made especially tasty by stirring in a healthy amount of green tomato relish. The day before, I savored nachos, topped with zingy green tomato salsa. Tonight, I’ll slice and fry the last green tomato to serve beside dinner.
Sometime about the end of August, our abundant tomato crop was hit with the first freeze. We weren’t sure then whether we’d get any mature tomatoes or not. In the best Frugal Yankee tradition, I began looking for recipes for green tomatoes.
Relish, Salsa, Fried Green Tomatoes, Pickles, Casseroles, etc. Who knew there were so many uses for unripe garden fruits?
Every single one required two things from me:
1. Additional ingredients. Sometimes they were things I did not have on hand – I had to get them specifically if I wanted to utillize the abundant crop of green tomatoes.
2. Effort and specific types of work. What I did with them made all the difference.
You can see where I’m going with this…
We didn’t plant the garden and say, “Oh! I hope we get a LOT of green tomatoes, I’m just so looking forward to having to make-do!” We had big dreams when we planted 40 tomato plants. We wanted sauced, diced, and ketchuped tomatoes!
That first freeze didn’t kill our hopes. In fact, after that first freeze, which only killed the tops of the tomatoes, we gathered a small amount of red tomatoes – enough to make a weeny batch of ketchup. A few more tomatoes ripened indoors after a hard killing frost in September.
But we had more greens than reds, and we had to do something with them. In order to use them, we had to add the right ingredients, and if we didn’t have them, we had to go buy them. One or two were things I’d not need for anything else – I had to get them specifically to make use of those green tomatoes. And I had to do the right things with them, to make them into something good, otherwise they’d just be yucky green tomatoes.
Life, family, and business all do that to us. We plan our plans, and start to carry them out, and along comes a disaster that blights our hopes and kills the plans. What do we do then?
Do we cry that we didn’t get our juicy red tomatoes? Do we look at the distruction of our plants and at all those sad green tomatoes and see nothing but disaster? Or do we go seek out recipes for green tomatoes, and then add the necessary additional elements to turn them into something unexpected, but every bit as tasty and useful as what we had originally planned?
Sure, I still wish I had been able to harvest a bounty of red, ripe tomatoes. But since life handed me green tomatoes, I’m just thankful that there was something good I could do with them to turn it into a blessing of a different kind.
Magento’s Turn
We researched a bunch more carts, and selected PrestaShop and Magento from the heap to learn to use. I’ve muddled my way through literally dozens of cart types and managed to make them work – some well, some not so well. Magento defeated me, and becomes yet another to be added to our “Never Again” list. Understand… I’m not stupid. I am pretty experienced now at templating, setup, and other common aspects of a range of dynamic software. I teach classes on this stuff, through a highly credible institution.
If you’ve wandered around in the cart world, Magento is getting rave reviews. At least, it sounds like it. But most people who choose not to use it just wander off, and never say a thing, because they somehow think maybe they were the cause, perhaps not smart enough.
It fails our tests on three critical points:
Design, Function, and Sustainability.
1. Templating is a nightmare. I kid you not. They not only scattered the template bits through about 200 files, they threw XML into the mix for no other reason than just because someone could, I guess. It feels very much like they happened to have someone who was all happy for XML, who just wanted something to do, so they let him work it into the templates. Unfortunately, for most designers learning how to template a cart, in a hurry, learning to apply yet another coding language, with proprietary usages, is not only inefficient, it vastly complicates things. Think I’m exaggerating? Look around. Algozone, Template Monster, and a number of other sites have Magento template areas with not ONE THING in them. All of the freely available templates for Magento are merely a variation on the default theme – many have just changed a graphic or two, no real significant changes are made. That says loudly that it is so difficult that even template gurus are avoiding it.
2. Bugs. Things just didn’t work. Simple things, like categories. And the fix for one was likely to cause something else to break. Some features didn’t quite work yet, because they are still on the drawing board. Some were supposed to work, and didn’t. Overall, it was surprisingly stable in some functions given the relatively young age, but it lacked stability in some rather basic areas.
3. Updates. Ok, so we NEED updates. And we expect them. In fact, one of the criteria for “good” Open Source software is that it have an active developer community. Magento feels a little more like being thrashed by Hammy. I downloaded and installed version 1.1.3, and tested it – the next morning there was a notice that 1.1.4 was available. I then downloaded and installed version 1.1.4 just a few days later. Within a week, there was a notice that version 1.1.5 was released, with a critical security update. Ok, I can see that. But then a week and a half later, version 1.1.6 was announced. Each update required a tedious install procedure (more tedious than the simple ones, but even simple ones would have been annoying every week!). Considering that each update had the risk and very real possibility of breaking something, it was simply too fatiguing to contemplate actually trying to manage a site in this for a client. How the heck could I afford to maintain it at my usual rates? And how in the world could the client afford to pay more just to keep up with an ill-planned update schedule? Many can barely afford even a small fee each month.
Given the complexity of templating, the lack of existing templates that would be easy to change, I’d have to charge considerably more to my clients for setting up the site. Given the bugs, they’d pay more, and get less than they expected. Given the update schedule, they’d be squeezed for even more to keep the thing running without unacceptable risk, and their site would be down once a week for updates and troubleshooting after doing the update.
I think that Magento has potential. But I think that it is immature, and that the templating is overly complicated without a benefit that even begins to justify the complexity. And the update schedule is simply insane.
This is one reason I have waffled back to the position of giving CRE one last chance. Because I keep getting told by other developers that there are plenty of other options. But there really aren’t. There are a LOT of potentials. Plenty of possibilities for tomorrow.
But today, we have only the choice between solutions such as PrestaShop (promising, functional, but lacking in at least one critical feature set), Magento (nuff said), Zen (clunky setup, awkward templating), CubeCart (I REFUSE to hand edit code just to get basic features, and then have to hand edit it again every time the cart needs a patch installed!), VirtueMart (functional, usable, but lacks key functions), Agora (PULLEEEZE… it has ONE shipping option… Anything else you have to custom code!), or any number of other almost but not quite usable cart systems out there that people use only because they don’t know that they shouldn’t have to spend all those extra hours setting up or maintaining a cart.
I’m not just complaining and trashing systems left and right. We are involved at a more practical level – reviewing and publishing reviews is necessary, I think. But actually working on the projects that can meet the need is also important. And we’ll keep doing that too. Sharing our knowledge of how to do things in CRE and Joomla, sharing our custom modifications for VirtueMart, making our auto-install systems available for others to use.
The need is there. And as long as our clients need it, we’ll fight to get it, and help create solutions.
There’s Always a Next Level
I’m not sure whether I find it exhilarating, or indescribably wearying. Sometimes a little of both, I guess. We are in the process of taking our business to “the next level”. I find that every time I do, there is another level waiting. I’m not even so sure it is like stairs or rungs of a ladder. Maybe more like a mountainside. Sometimes rocky outcroppings, sometimes smooth slopes, sometimes gravely slides, but always small pebbles, streams, hummocks and plants to navigate around and over.
I’m also constantly seeing differences between people who succeed in business, and those who don’t, and I think that the constant growth and change and upward climb is one of those things. Failure to grow when opportunity presents, and resistence to needed change stifles a business.
Growth isn’t something that just happens. Not sustainable growth, anyway. You can’t just get more customers and grow a business. Each time you get more customers, you have to adjust to the increased workload. If you don’t, you sink. So growth means planning, adjusting, and more work. It means changing the way you work long term. If you don’t, growth becomes an unpleasant experience.
Statistically, a significant number of businesses scale back after explosive growth, choosing to never grow that large again. They maintain a sort of equilibrium, by turning away business, or by neglecting to accommodate additional customers in a satisfactory manner – so they go elsewhere. They may choose to stop marketing, or decide that extra service is no longer possible. They reach “critical mass” and choose not to change how they do things to raise the limits so further growth is possible.
I think that there are two points that are missed by small business owners where growth is concerned:
1. Not understanding themselves well enough to know what it is they love about the business, and how to keep it in the business as growth occurs. Often, they think about what they want, but not what that actually means. Everyone wants to be famous, but do they want reporters waiting to ambush them when they leave their house? Everyone wants to be rich, but do they want to pay the taxes, make the choices, and deal with the responsibilities that come with it? Business is like that – rapid and large growth has two sides, and it is wise to understand what you really love about your business, so you can preserve it and minimize the negative impacts of growth. This should be considered early on. What is it that defines the business, and makes you love doing it? When growth occurs, those are the things to hang onto, and to develop new strategies to preserve.
2. Not being able to change in constructive ways. They tend to just get bogged down when growth happens, and they hate that, so they feel like growth isn’t what they wanted after all. Tied closely to the first point, the ability to actually initiate change in a business, in a way that keeps it fun, is one of the keys to growing beyond your current capacity. Sometimes it means systems for the routine or boring parts. Sometimes it means automation to streamline the processes so they are more efficient, and so you have more time for the fun parts. Sometimes it means outsourcing the parts you are not as good at, or dislike doing. Sometimes it means hiring someone and defining duties for them that take the less enjoyable tasks off your shoulders. But it always means lightening the load of the things that you do not enjoy as much, first, and never automating anything that is a critical element in defining your niche if it would lose quality to do so.
The onward and upward path is much smoother if we are thinking about where the time holes are in our business, and always thinking about how to make things operate more efficiently. Plug the holes, and life gets more fun, and less harried.
There is never a stage in business where efforts cannot be made to keep it enjoyable, and to keep it growing, if that is your goal. There’s always a change that can be made to make things better.
And Again with CRELoaded – B2B Released
Well, I’m not happy with the pricing on B2B. It is the subscription model revisited. Some very discouraging elements to the new pricing on it.
First, they raised the price – a LOT. I can guarantee they will lose business because of it. Many people who need it, and who would buy it if priced lower, won’t. It does include some tech support, but many of those who need to just get in the door with it don’t really care about that.
The entire package is now $595. An upgrade from 6.2 is $250. They are giving a short term concession to recent purchasers of 6.2, to reduce it to $200. If you just paid $350 for a piece of software, would you be happy about being stung for another $200 when you discover two weeks after you bought it, that an upgrade is impending? They are offering a free upgrade for people who bought it recently – but only to the people who KNEW 6.3 was coming. NOT to the people who didn’t know that – those who bought 6.2 B2B just a week or so before 6.3 standard was released. Those are the people who were caught totally off guard, and had no idea that it was coming.
The nasty part to it is that the price includes only three months worth of updates and patches. That includes bugfixes and security patches! They want another $195 for 12 months of the privilege of downloading fixes! This is not standard for the software industry. The standard is that patches and bug fixes are free, whereas there may be another charge for major feature update versions. This is just a variation on the subscription theme.
I think they should have kept the price lower. I will say this until I’m blue. $300 is one of those mental price breakpoints for many small businesses who need to get in the door with a wholesale-capable cart option. If they needed to cut something, they should logically cut support. Not everyone needs it, or wants it. And business-wise, that would actually increase their profits. Here is why:
If you offer software at a price of $300, with no support, the bulk of what you make is gravy. You maintain the website, the documentation, and the forums. All relatively low costs. Lowering the price increases sales on the items with the highest profit margin. Hmmm…. that’s a good thing!
If you bump the price to $600, you not only slashed your sales by MORE than 50%, you also MORE than doubled the amount of overhead if you justify that increase by bundling it with support. Personal support is expensive to provide. The profit margin on it is very low. You have to hire people to put in hours, to provide that support. You just slashed your sales, and you just slashed your profit margin, both at the same time!
On the other hand, if you charge SEPARATELY for the software, and the support, you come out ahead. At the lower price, sales go up on the things that have the lowest overhead and the highest profit margin. That’s smart! And there is no built in support cost for people who do not need it (many people are perfectly happy using the forums) – support becomes a separate thing which has to then be self-sustaining, as it should be. It becomes the LESSER part of the business, where software sales becomes the greater part. Again, as it should be.
Higher sales, higher profits, with each business owner paying only for what they really need. Everybody wins.
That said, it is also relevant to mention that I’ve been asked to review both the Pro package, and the B2B package. I’m currently selecting suitable projects to use them with, so that they will be truly tested under actual business need conditions. The reviews will happen in two stages – short term first impressions, and long term performance. I’ll be posting links to the reviews here when they are completed.
Note: The opinions expressed in this post are the perceptions of the writer, and should not be interpreted or quoted as fact without corroborrating evidence.
Take Heart CRE Users… X-Cart is Infinitely Worse
Gosh, I feel like a snippy critic for this one. I’d worry about it except that everything I’m going to say is absolutely true, and something that people investigating cart options oughta know.
A client contacted me to do some work on X-Cart. She paid for the software – no Open Source freebies here. We had trouble accessing the support forums in the first place, due to ownership issues. Once we did, I have become increasingly frustrated with this cart. I’ll outline a few of the reasons why I hope to never have to work on it again – in fact, any other new clients who have it will be turned down flat.
1. Documentation is weak. For a paid cart, that isn’t acceptable. It covers only the most basic stuff, and does not outline many necessary bits of info.
2. You are required to put the version number in the signature line of your forum posts to get help. The version number is hard to find – their instructions do not pertain to new versions. Once you find it, you have to go back and edit your forum profile just to put that sig line in. I don’t like being hassled to get help.
3. You have to edit a LANGUAGE FILE just to change the home page contents! Please be shocked here! This is inconvenient, awkward, and completely unacceptable for cart functions within the last five years! There are hundreds of language files, and you can’t even find the right one without explicit instructions.
4. The template is a NIGHTMARE. In excess of 100 files each one containing one little bit of the page, one snippet of the boxes, etc. The only templating I’ve seen that is worse, is Magento. I don’t mind a header, footer, and main template file. But when every single cell is chopped up on the page, and when the contents of those cells are all in different files from the cell code, it becomes an impossible task to try to edit any part of the design without a reference guide to do it. This level of complexity is not only unnecessary, it is the equivalent of rubbing two sticks together to get light.
5. Nothing is simple or logical. It is all convoluted and cumbersome. Backend functions take more steps than necessary, and there are no intuitive tasks. Forget trying to learn this one without both reading the manual, and spending a lot of time on the forums looking up stuff that should be intuitive, but is not.
6. Updating is also inconvenient. This makes site sustainability more costly.
7. Support is paid only. That wouldn’t be a problem, except they have two classes of tickets – HotRush, and Normal. If you have a problem that is urgent, like your site being down, the only way you can get timely help is with a HotRush ticket. They cost twice as much! Currently their support turnaround time on normal tickets is TWO DAYS! This isn’t just unacceptable, it is grossly irresponsible.
8. It has no outstanding features, no advantage that would make any of this justifiable. It doesn’t do anything that other carts don’t do, it doesn’t have ONE THING that is more convenient to do, or more functional. It isn’t a matter of the disadvantages outweighing the advantages – there simply ARE no advantages that would make this cart even a consideration for anyone who needs a functional cart.
I’d expect better than this from Open Source. In a commercial product, it is completely ridiculous. I cannot for the life of me figure out why someone would PAY MONEY for lousy software accompanied by bad support. That is available free, anywhere. Good software with decent forum support is available all over the place.
This doesn’t just go onto my “I don’t like it” list, it goes onto my “Never again” list. Sad, because at one time they had some potential. They obviously have not kept up with the rest of the industry.
Note: The opinions expressed in this post are the perceptions of the writer, and should not be interpreted or quoted as fact without corroborrating evidence.
Don’cha Wish I’d Shut Up About CRELoaded?
Some things have gone on behind the scenes. One small improvement has occurred, along with some other troubling things. We take heart from the improvement, worry at the indicators that things are still very much up in the air where the future of this much needed software is concerned.
Some shakeups in leadership. Unknown what the effects will be.
Some forum members reinstated. This is a good thing, and they’ve come back in and are posting without recriminations. A hearty cheer for greatpcs (Jason over at Hoosier Web Design), and discounttools (Jody – sorry don’t know your major business name). I’m sure some others I do not know well enough to know about.
So, it is with great trepidation that I release a report, of sorts, which is a listing of recommendations. I’m releasing this publicly for two reasons:
1. I don’t have the ear of anyone at CRE anymore. This is a way to put this out there so it can be received in whatever spirit they choose to receive it in, or they can reject it outright.
2. I think there are great lessons to be learned about the Open Source world, and about treating your customers well, developing a project, targeting a market, support and service, and cost containment. In presenting my conclusions about what should be done, publicly, I am not just complaining and listing problems. I am giving the other half of the lesson – not just what should NOT be done, but how it might be done better, to overcome both the long term problems of the company, and the newer ones precipitated by a misguided attempt to overcome the earlier ones!
I don’t know all the inside scoop at CRE. But I know what is happening on the outside, and what those things mean must be happening on the inside. All recommendations are based on the problems I see. I’d assume there are other problems under the surface which I cannot address.
You may download the CRELoaded Recommendations PDF HERE.
I don’t expect them to like it. I don’t expect everyone in the CRE user base to applaud what I have to say either. But experience tells me my recommendations are sound, sustainable, and completely achievable, and that implementing them will turn the project around in the way it needs to be in order to not just survive, but to thrive.
I hereby throw it to the wolves.
Note: The opinions expressed in this post and in the attached report are the perceptions of the writer, and should not be interpreted or quoted as fact without corroborrating evidence.
Recession Survival Tactics – Outsourcing
Part 6 of a 6 Part Series on Recession Survival
Outsourcing has a couple of applications within recession survival. It can help to manage growth more fluidly if you manage to continue to grow, or it can help you in downsizing if that is what you need to do.
Now, first, I have to make one thing clear. You hear all the time that it makes more sense to hire someone to do something if they can do it faster and more efficiently. The example is given that if you bill at $45 per hour, then you can save if you pay an outsourced subcontractor $25 per hour to do the job instead.
That ONLY works IF you have MORE profitable things to do in the same time! If you do not have enough work, outsourcing only saves money if it saves you from costly errors, or helps you make a leap forward in your business that you could not make without the service or which simply yield a higher result when done professionally (marketing, website services, printing services, etc). Otherwise, you really have no choice but to do it yourself, even if it does take you more time.
Outsourcing can help you find automation solutions (you can hire a professional to help you devise them, or to create or install them for you), it can help you create templates that you may not know how to create yourself, and it can help you handle work overflow (so you do not lose clients), without having to hire an employee.
If your business is scaling back, you can either offer a work at home option to your employee, and keep them on part time, or you can move to outsourcing to at least keep the services and preserve as much of the business as possible.
When you have a chance at something that you cannot otherwise handle yourself, or which you lack the expertise to do completely, you can find skilled subcontractors to help you with parts of the job.
If your services need to change in ways that offer different combinations of tasks than you previously offered, and you are not skilled in all of them, you can collaborate with other professionals to be able to offer something more. It is better to get $400 from a $500 contract than it is to not be able to GET the contract. In this way, outsourcing can help you be more flexible, to meet a wider variety of needs in changing circumstances.
Usually, outsourcing is built on a backbone of networking relationships. When you work with subcontractors, you develop a mutually beneficial business relationship. It often ends up being one where you refer other work to them, and they refer work back to you. It helps you build a network of people who know you, who know your work standards, and who are happy to refer others to you. Since they know you, they can speak with conviction when giving the referral, and that goes further than referrals from people who have not actually worked with you.
It won’t be a solution for everyone, but it can be a valuable tool in managing work loads, and in being able to supplement your skills with other specialized skills when needed.
Recession Survival Tactics – Automation and Systemization
Part 5 of a 6 Part Series on Recession Survival
One key to saving money, and giving your customers higher value in a recession, is to systemize and automate where possible.There is NO BUSINESS which cannot benefit at some point from systemization or automation.
It may be as simple as creating a routine to do repetitive tasks faster. It may involve creating a template to start with each time you write a contract or proposal, or for producing products, documents, or other items. If you do something once a week, or more, you can usually find a way to make it faster.
Automation is something that can be implemented in a website, or through online services, or through use of the right tools in the office. It is one of the keys to breaking through to new levels of profit and getting past some of your time barriers, but it can also be a key to retaining high value while containing costs for your customers or clients.
For small businesses though, it is important that you automate the right things, and in the right way. There are three basic keys to good automation:
1. It should save you more time than it costs you. Done at the wrong time (too soon), or with the wrong tools, you’ll spend more time setting up and maintaining the automation than you’ll save. So think about the long term tasks involved before you jump in, or you’ll just bury yourself.
2. It should NEVER negatively affect your unique selling proposition, and it should not harm your customer relations. Good automation preserves what is unique about your business. It allows you to automate the IMPERSONAL parts of the business, while retaining the essential elements of personal contact or custom service that may define your business. This is especially critical for small businesses, because this is often what allows you to compete with larger companies that are fully automated.
3. It should save you time, while simultaneously enhancing your ability to deliver consistent and high quality service or products to your customers. The point here is that it should make business better for THEM, too. Done right, it makes your business better, and is not something that lessens quality or availability.
Some of this can be done through a website, and often it can save you money over other options.
Some can be done with free software – either on your desktop, or installed into your hosting space.
Some can be done through purchase of hardware or equipment in your office.
Some can be done with templates or other tools that you make, which eliminate the repetitive steps in a process.
Time can be saved simply by devising routines, or systems, for getting tasks done, that shave off time. Not “automation” per-se, but more of an assembly line procedure where you work from templates, start with the same base each time, or work out the fastest way to do something, then do it that way every time. Often, this lays the groundwork for automation, because it helps us spot the repetitive tasks that CAN be automated without harming quality.
Automation and systemization are one of the things that help you achieve extraordinary results, either in growth, uniqueness in your business, or in offering higher value for less money. In a recession, all of these aspects can be part of defining the success potentials and making you an exception in the sea of losses.
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