All You Can Eat

July 31st, 2008 Chris

For those who don’t know me very well, I have a dangerous combination of deadly or near-deadly sins: gluttony and cheapness. First, I love food – ranging from chicken wings to foie gras – and I love them in quantity. And I am cheap – I love getting good value for money. That’s why “all you can eat” always appeals to me in theory. Unfortunately, in practice I usually find the product sorely lacking.

For example, I’ve never found an all-you-can-eat sushi meal that I like. It’s always a bunch of kappa maki and no tuna or salmon to be seen. And God help you if you get between the big overweight guy and the shrimp tempura roll…

While I can’t always find satisfaction with the all you can eat buffet, I am increasingly finding great all you can eat deals in service offerings for our micro business, especially in telecommunications. Much of it happening in the last 12 months.

Here’s a couple of examples:

• Long Distance. In the past, we’ve paid per minute charges for our long distance and toll-free lines. In the last few months, different vendors have introduced flat rate or bulk minute plans. At home where I sometimes work, we have a $20 a month, all you can call 24 x 7 in Canada and the U.S. At the office, we just switched to a bulk minute package that meets our needs and is cheaper than what we were paying before.
• Teleconferencing. Again, we’ve been paying per minute per participant in teleconferences. We recently switched to a vendor who gives us unlimited use of teleconferencing up to a certain number of phone lines for a monthly rate. This is really cool – we can have as many teleconferences each month and we just pay one rate.
• Web conferencing. Here is an area that has seen substantial pricing changes over the last six months. It started with Microsoft changing their web conferencing package to an unlimited use, per month charge. Adobe has also entered the fray with similar pricing. There are some restrictions on the number of participants at different service levels, but regardless, the price difference is substantial (I mean like 80% less than conventional plans).

If you’ve not re-examined all your vendors and their price plans in the last year you should. Ever year virtually every market gets more competitive and you can reduce or even slash costs which, for the micro business, means more direct money in your pocket.

And it’s not just saving money that makes these all-you-can-eat plans attractive. It’s the change of behavior that results when you know you have essentially eliminated variable costs.

For example, if you’re paying flat rate for web conferencing, why would you ever do a customer presentation with only a teleconference? (OK, there are probably some examples but bear with me as I make my point). If you’re paying flat rate long distance, why would you ever hesitate to contact a prospect via email when you can give them a phone call. Etc…

By shifting to fixed service costs and eliminating variable costs, you put yourself in the position to expand marketing efforts, to increase customer touches and improve the professional look of your company.

So make a list of your top 5 service costs (start with telecom) and go see if there are better deals out there. It is time well spent.

C.

P. S. Bonus points if you can identify where this post’s image is taken from.

Posted in Financial, Telecom | 2 Comments »

Boy, Did I Look Goofy…

July 29th, 2008 Chris

I have to admit, I am a bit of a techno-file (aka geek). I’m easily attracted by new, shiny electronics. I even bought my first PC in grade ten. That may not seem that early but not only was it my first PC, it was essentially the first PC.

OK, probably not the very first PC but the first popular one. In fact, to call it a PC is not fair and some may even suggest sacrilegious. It was an Apple II+ and in the early 80s, it was very cool.

Fast forward several years (I would appreciate you not doing the math) and, while having dinner with a friend from New York, I first saw the iPhone. No two ways about it, it was cool. And on July 11th, when they first came to Canada, I had to have one.

Luckily, a friend of mine at my former employer had a line on an unlikely place for a stache of iPhones that morning – the corporate head office of a local reseller. So, I crawled out of bed at 6am and headed out to their office where, along with my friend, we perched in our lawn chairs in line for the phone.

While lots of people lined up at other retail stores that morning, there was perhaps no more pathetic sight than that of two guys, sitting in lawn chairs for hours, all by themselves. Yep, it was such a good plan that no one else came. We sat there by ourselves as every employee coming to the office walked by, shaking their heads. We looked goofy.

Of course, after we got our iPhones, all was good. It is indeed everything that people say. After years on a Blackberry, it was very cool to see our company’s emails coming in with all their full HTML formatting, looking good…

That was now. Three months ago, those emails would have looked goofy. Month after month, we’d been pumping out emails that looked great in Outlook 2003. Then a friend of mine in the email marketing business warned me about Outlook 2007. Turns out that Microsoft’s implementation in 2007 depricated a bunch of different HTML functionality. The result is when I looked at our emails in Outlook 2007, the formatting blew up – it looked goofy. And our emails never looked quite right in GMail. And I don’t even want to think what they would have looked like on my iPhone.

What did we do?

The first thing we did was to remove all <style> commands and moved to in-line CSS. In addition, we converted everything to tables. This is the kind of stuff your web developer should be able to do.

A really cool tool we used was provided by Campaign Monitor. Their testing site allows you to pit your email against virtually every web, thick and mobile email client. For the micro business, this is a god-send. You literally get something that looks like the screen shot below… Do up your template and test it – it only costs $10 a shot.

So – if you haven’t done testing on what your emails look like, how do you know you don’t look goofy?

C.

Posted in E-mail, Email | 1 Comment »

Is Free a Dirty Word?

July 24th, 2008 Chris

Last post, I discussed the scourge of evil “free” offers and how they can be used for good… But how do you get that message to your users. Especially with email where you always run the danger of being tagged as a spammer?

We have debated the use of “Free” in our emails to our base. Would it get through or would it be stopped as spam. For about a year, we’ve avoided it and used terms like “no-cost”, “complimentary” or “it’s fizzle my bizzle” (that one’s just for Snoop).

All those words are lammo campared to FREE but if half the emails aren’t going to get through ’cause they get tagged as spam, then it’s better not to…

So, like most things, we put it to the test… And the envelope please…

“Free” kicked butt – again and again, our response rates have been higher using the word. Debate closed!

But not so fast: that one word is just one of the myriad of factors used to decide if your email is spam. The reputation of your sending ISP to the percentage of HTML code versus text to the use of specific words can all impact your score. And of course, it varies from one spam filter solution to another.

If you’re a big company, you’ve likely got an email provider with all sorts of helpful services on this front. As a micro business, however, it’s tougher.

What do we do? We take a sample of our emails (a newsletter, a sales tip, a promotional offer, etc…) and run it through a great service from Campaign Monitor. They do a bunch of stuff but one thing that we use is their spam testing service where for about 10 bucks, you can test your email against a variety of spam filters (example screen shown below).

Occasionally test your emails, find out what is driving your spam rating and fix it. That way you’ll maximize the number of emails that actually get to your clients and prospects. And you can say “Free”.

Chris

Posted in E-mail, Email | No Comments »

Act Now and as Your Free Gift…

July 22nd, 2008 Chris

Giving away something of value is a great incentive to get a prospect to do something like sign-up for a newsletter or make a purchase. However, making sure that free offer is credible is sometimes overlooked in the stampeed to sell.

I recently saw a special offer for someone selling a product. While the product was priced at $200, if you purchased it you would get $600 worth of bonuses. Maybe I’m more paranoid than others, but I am always skeptical of offers that include more free gifts than the product is worth itself. I typically assume one of the following:

• The free gift value is bogus – something artificially inflated to make the offer sound better than it is. In other words, if the gift was being itself sold, it would not be at the price suggested by its “value” as a free gift.
• There are strings attached. I’ve seen free gifts where there is a follow-up component that entails me forking over some dough. Like, getting a free month of a particular service that, after that month, magically starts being charged to my credit card.

These types of free gifts give, well, free gifts a dirty name. And the more you do that to your prospect base, the less valuable they’ll perceive your offer.

That doesn’t mean that a free gift can’t have good marketing value for you. Here are some of the things we think of:

• Gifts that have low variable cost to provide and high value. Again, not value that is some B. S. number made up, but stuff we legitimately can sell. Often for us, recorded web classes are good ones as they are very inexpensive to produce copies of and stand-alone do sell for a good price.
• Gifts that get you customer information. Direct mail, despite all its issues, still has better conversion rates than email. So we love to get our prospects’ addresses. A gift that gets mailed requires an address and getting that address for the price of shipping a CD is a good deal.
• Gifts that get you a payment information. I don’t know how I feel about this… We’ve not done it but I’ve seen free gifts offered for simply the price of shipping and handling. This is done so that prospects have to provide credit card information. Once you’ve got some one’s payment info, it’s a heck of a lot easier to convert them later. Offers that do that conversion automatically unless you cancel (often called “forced continuity”, see above) are dirty pool IMHO.

So in short, don’t burn your bridges with prospects by making outlandish free gift offers. I think most are smart enough to tell when something stinks. Make sure it’s not you.

Next time, I’ll also talk about the challenge of getting your offer of a free gift to your prospect!

C.

Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

How’s Your Day Going? Mine Sucks!

July 17th, 2008 Chris

I had a very bad day on Tuesday. First, I left the house with a dozen eggs on the stove hard-boiling. About 5 hours later I pulled back in and heard a strange whiny sound. Turns out it was the smoke detector going off. I opened the front door only to be greeted by a waft of smoke and a very bad smell.

Luckily, there really wasn’t a fire but I did discover an interesting aspect of eggs – when exposed to high heat, they explode. So our kitchen was coated with a uniform layer of egg guts and I spent the next two hours cleaning shrapnel off the floor, walls and ceiling.

Unfortunately, the worst casualty was our dog Conrad who ended up hiding in the back yard having been traumatized for hours by the alarm and the smoke. I’ve enclosed a picture of him hiding under a bush in our yard, refusing to go back into the smokey, eggy house.

My day took another turn for the worse later later when I was at my Tuesday night track work-out. On the first 1000m interval, I finished and sauntered off the track. Unfortunately, while doing so I rolled my ankle which made a delightful snap. Or at least, so I was told by others as I was too busy rolling around on the ground reciting every curse I could think of.

After fours hours at the hospital, I was happy to hear nothing was broken – just torn ligaments. A month of no running will be a drag but that also means I get to sit back and watch Colleen walk the dog, bring me beer, etc… Not all bad!

My day would have been much worse if I had to be re-creating our blog and member site databases. As I mentioned in my last post, our web hoster had major backup issues and we almost lost a wack of data.

My experience with web hosters has been very checkered. If someone from a micro business was to ask me for advice who to pick to host their site or blog, I would impart the following wisdom (random thoughts?):

First, if you don’t have tens of thousands of visits a month and your site is not transactionally intensive (no climate modelling), a VWS (Virtual Web Server) should be fine. A VWS is where you and other sites share the same server. Thus, you share the load but it’s also very economical (and you really can’t tell that you’re sharing).

When I say economical, no one should be paying more than $10 a month. In fact, we pay under $5 a month. Web hosting has become a pretty much commodity business. But beware! While prices for VWS hosting are pretty standard, the service you get can vary.

For example, my current web hoster is terrible. Hosting Zoom (no link provided because you shouldn’t use them) is a great case study of all the things a hoster can screw up. They have a lot of down time (our site is unavailable for at least an hour or more every month), their service is terrible (they don’t have phone support – everything is via email or chat to India) and as you’ve recently read, they have an unreliable backup process.

Why don’t I switch? Well, three things: 1. I am lazy (or at least we have other thing that more urgently require attention), 2. I have a one year contract with them (i.e. I am cheap) and 3. I just switched from GoDaddy! (who also suck) and there is a fair bit of work to do so (see #1).

But when I do, I likely will be going with Host Monster. I’ve had a personal reference for them plus they routinely appear in reviews as one of the top providers. As a test, I phoned their support line (they have one!) and spoke to a nice gentleman from California who was eager to help me – a refreshing change!

So, in short:

• Don’t put eggs on the stove and then leave the house.
• Watch where you’re going when you’re on the track.
• Don’t pay more than $10 a month for a web hoster but make sure you have a reference for whoever you choose.

C.

Posted in Web | 1 Comment »

A Near Death Experience

July 15th, 2008 Chris

This weekend, Colleen and I were sitting around in our family room, each with our laptops on, well, our laps. I knew something was going horribly wrong when she leaned over and asked why her blog was only showing posts up to March 08. Of course, I automatically assumed it was user error and made some crack. But then I looked at this blog, a noted the complete absence of, well, this blog.

I went to the support forum for our hosting company, Hosting Zoom, and in terror read:

“There are some ongoing issues with the database after the primary node was rebooted. It looks like the databases has rolled back to a previous date. Unfortunately, the daily backups are not up to date.“

In fact, daily backups hadn’t been working since March. That’s why all Colleen’s blog entries since March were gone and this blog (which started in May) was vaporized.

As a side-note, I had to laugh at the response of the hoster. In my previous life, we made mission-critical security software and when a bug was found, all hell broke lose. Nothing is grumpier than a big bank on a Friday afternoon when their security software isn’t working. All you can do is stay professional, develop a well thought out plan and grovel. Hosting Zoom’s first response was not quite along those lines:

“It is ultimately your responsibility to keep current back ups of your data. This is noted in our terms of service: ‘HOSTING ZOOM DOES NOT GUARANTEE THE AVAILABILITY, COMPLETENESS, CURRENCY, OR INTEGRITY OF THESE BACKUPS OR THE DATA THEY CONTAIN. Consequently, you must not rely upon the availability, completeness, currency, or integrity of these backups.’ “

In other words, it is all my fault that they didn’t keep backups. From a PR perspective – complete disaster.

But you know what? They are right. It was my fault.

As a micro business, I’m at the mercy of a variety of service providers to make our business run. A business that is the only source of income for Colleen and I. Not making sure that I had contingencies in case one of those service providers blow up was negligent or at least dumb.

I sat down and made a list of all the places I’m vulnerable:

• Data on PCs in the office and our laptops
• Customer and marketing data in our CRM system
• Web content and databases on our hoster
• Financial information in our payroll system

Not to mention a few non-IT related insurance things:

• Disability and life insurance for Colleen and I (we do ride motorcycles after all…)
• Content insurance for the home and office
• Liability insurance for the business

As it turns out, we’ve actually got business continuity or at least back-up processes in place for most – apart from the one that blew up. And believe me, we now have back-up stuff for the web out the wazoo.

The story has a happy ending. It turns out, we were one of the few Hosting Zoom accounts whose back up processes were running correctly. So we had our backups recovered and we were back in business. Actually – it was really a good thing as it exposed a current weakness in our processes.

When is the last time you sat down and thought through all the systems your business relies on and what would happen if those systems failed or your data was lost? Don’t wait for a near death experience, fix it now.

C.

P. S. I’ve not linked any of the references to Hosting Zoom because you should not do business with them under any circumstances. More on that later…

Posted in Operations | 3 Comments »

A few more of my favourite things…

July 10th, 2008 Chris

This is a follow-on from my previous post of my insourcing favorites. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not a big fan of indiscriminate outsourcing. That is especially true with some of the tools available to the micro business. I had previously discussed our disc duplicator. My next favorite? Our boring old printer…

Now don’t get me wrong – I love our print outsourcer (PrintThree). They do a fantastic job and when we need a big job done quickly – there is no one better…

In the last years, though, what I’ve found is a need for professional looking small print runs that need to be done quickly. That means colour. That means variable data (i.e. the client’s name and information appearing on their copy). That means printing 100s of copies at a time.

So off we went to find the right tool. After much research, we purchased the HP 2840. It is perfect niche for the micro-business: colour laser, auto doc feed, multi-size paper handling. And it’s cheap – we got ours for under $1,500. And it’s a tank – it just keeps on going and going.

Pretty boring stuff, huh? But think about what you could do if you could crank out high quality printing and do it quickly and on the cheap by doing it yourself:

• Print personalized postcard mailers. We get blank postcards printed up on mass with a graphic of our choice (check out modernpostcard.com) and then run it through our printer when we have an event to announce or want to send out coupons or tickets or whatever. Each copy is personalized, looks super-professional and is cheap to produce.
• Print marketing labels. Running a particular marketing campaign? Crank out sticky labels with your message and then stick it onto every envelope that leaves your office. You can’t afford a big custom envelope print run every time but printing big professional-looking mailing labels is easy.
• Print pictures. As I’ve said before, the more of a personal connection you have with your clients, the more you will sell. Every letter that goes to our coaching program members has a picture of Colleen on it somewhere.
• Etc…

Now – the printer is slooooow. Four colour pages per minute is pretty poky but heck, if we’ve got a big job we just let it fly and go home for the night.

I can’t think of anything more boring than talking (or listening) about our printer. But keep in mind: if you don’t have something like this, I can guarantee you that you’ve compromised on costs or turn-around time or quality of customer communication. Or all three.

Once you have this capability, I guarantee you that you’ll start subconsciously inject it into your marketing and customer communication. You’ll be sitting around, thinking about a new product or promotion, and you’ll decide that you need to send out a personalized invitation postcard to your clients that afternoon. And you’ll do it. Cheaply and with a minimum of sweat.

C.

Posted in Outsourcing, Technology | 1 Comment »

Running Blind

July 8th, 2008 Chris

Every week a buddy and I go to a track work out where we run intervals and get reminded just how old we are. Unfortunately, we rapidly offset all caloric benefits with the ingestion of several beers but at least we figure we’re breaking even…

One of the challenges of our work out is when the coach tells us to go run 800m at a certain pace. Half-way through I’m always completely confused – am I going fast enough? Too fast? Eek! I find myself having to tuck behind someone with sufficient disposible income to have one of those GPS-enabled Gramin training watches – they always know what exactly the pace is.

One of the lessons I got from a big company was the need to likewise always know where you are as a business. Instead of figuring out how fast you’re running, tracking revenue, expenses, lead-generation, share of voice, etc… is the key to knowing if you’re on track with your business.

That prinicple is 100% applicable to the micro business. You may not need to track as many things but if you don’t know what’s driving your revenue and where it’s going – you will be in trouble. Today’s let’s focus on revenue.

When we go out setting our plan for the year for our business, we take the major product types (for us it’s coaching, training, speaking and events) and set goals for each. Goal-setting itself is a topic worth focus, but for now let’s just say you should always have targets.

How do you know you are reaching them? Each month, we sit down and figure out how much revenue we received in each of those for categories. We compare those for our targets for that month (derived from annual targets) and we know if we are ahead or behind target.

But what happens if you’re not on target. Every micro business will be different and it’s your job to figure out why there is a variation but regardless, you need to be figuring out what to do about it. When we’re doing our track workout, if the first 400m is slow compared to our target pace, then we need to speed up to get back on track. If the first 400m is fast, well then theoretically you can slow down a bit – though, in reality someone always tries to show off and run faster regardless…

So, the questions I always ask in the case of variation:

• If we’re below target, what caused it and will it happen again? What can be done to prevent that from happening again?
• If it’s going to happen again, should we reduce our targets for future months? If this impacts overall revenue, should costs be reduced to maintain profit?
• If we’re above target, was it a one-time fluke or a trend?
• If revenue is going to be hire going forward, should we increase investment in any activity to sell even more (ex. markeitng, development, etc…)?

In short, if you are not setting targets and tracking your sales by product group against those targets at least every month, then you are running blind and can’t react to fixing a problem (that you won’t know exists).

And remember – knowing you’re off course is useless unless you take specific action as a result.

C.

P. S. Sorry I missed last Thursday. And for the record – it’s still Tuesday in my time zone.

Posted in Financial | 1 Comment »