A Fun Fight

October 30th, 2008 Chris

First, let me apologize for my wimpiness. I’ve decided to make these postings weekly – each Wednesday. There is simply too much going on despite my best efforts to gently coast till retirement. As I’ve mentioned before I’m teaching in the local University’s MBA program and now I’ve landed a gig doing training for a large high-tech company. It’s quite a shock – having to shave and wear pants on more days than not.

But it’s not all work – last week we got to have some fun. I say fun in that I think we all occasionally enjoy catching someone doing something bad and then exposing the act for all the world to see.

In our case, it was some who had been stealing articles and letters from other sales trainers and posting it as their own material. In fact, in some cases, they had even been selling them as white papers – again all based on ripped off material.

We found out from someone who had googled an excerpt from one of Colleen’s article and found it on another trainer’s site. Then the fun began…

We did the right thing – attempting to contact the person involved to get some explanation. But none was forthcoming. In fact, in the interim, more people came forward to point out other works that this same individual had been stealing.

So this begs the question – what do you actually do? It’s pretty easy to get frothy, exclaiming that you’re going to drag this person’s ass into court and take their home, their car, their first born, etc… But it’s always important to think about how much you’re actually willing to spend (dollars and time) versus the damage being done.

Lawyers are expensive, legal action is time consuming.  You really need to think about what outcome you’re willing to pay for. For us, the biggest issue was to ensure that we’re getting credit for our own IP. We could achieve that without going directly to court. Instead, we sent of the following letter – ensuring the guilty party knew he was caught.

And it achieved exactly what we had hoped. The site that had the offending articles was taken down and I suspect Bob won’t be stealing from others any time soon.

The other benefit, it terms of getting that warm and fuzzy from making life hell for those that transgress against you, was that in the process the guy’s reputation has been trashed. As the expression goes (a la MasterCard): Suing someone in court, $1,000,000. Ruining their reputation and destroying their way of life, priceless.

Now, one problem that can occur is if someone rips you off and they aren’t held accountable. It can be seen as a dangerous precedent – showing others that they can do the same. So, you may be faced with the situation that unless you “invest” in taking legal action, you will lose more in the long run from repeat transgressions against you. In the patent world, it’s not uncommon to set a precedent by suing someone who infringes on one of your patents – just to show the world that you don’t tolerate the behaviour. Then, hopefully, you don’t have to do it again (patent lawsuits can be very expensive – $2M+).

So, keep you eyes open for people taking liberty with your intellectual property and copyright material. Once in a while, Google a common term or expression you use. If you find someone stealing from you – do something. It doesn’t have involve a trip to the courthouse but you must set the precedent.

C.

Posted in Legal | 2 Comments »

Money for Nothing, and the T4s for Free

October 22nd, 2008 Chris

As I’ve mentioned (ad passim, ad nauseum), I am not a big fan of blinding outsourcing everything. I find too often that you lose critical control of pieces that are key to the business and it’s just doesn’t make financial sense much of the time.

There is one operation in our business that I’ve recently become an outsourcing convert to, though.

The other day, our book-keeper came to us and said that ADP (the payroll giant) was making a big drive into the small business market and had a good deal. I was skeptical – we were managing payroll in a largely manual fashion which was time consuming, but cheap.

It was painful though – cutting cheques, tracking payroll tax, etc. And the only other service we’d looked at for payroll was through Quickbooks – which was not cheap and still required a lot of manual gyrations.

But ADP made us an offer we couldn’t refuse: for $12 an employee per month, they’d do it all. Calculate all the right deductions, calculate the payroll taxes, withdraw the money from our corporate bank account, make the direct deposits to employees, pay our tax with-holdings and payroll taxes and generate pay statements. The whole 9 yards. Here are the details…

In fact, I was originally quite skeptical – how could they make money from us? Well it turns out they have an interesting business model. They withdraw the money from our corporate account three business days before pay-day. Aggregate that over all the businesses, and that’s a lot of cash. Cash that can be leveraged. So, even if they don’t make money on us, they make money on our float.

So, chalk this one up to an outsourcing win. Doesn’t happen very often…

C.

P. S. Unfortunately the T4s aren’t free. There is a small charge for those ones… Still cheap though!

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Fool Me Once, Unleash Hell

October 15th, 2008 Chris

First, my apologies for missing my deadline yesterday. It was our federal election here in Canada and I was busy trying to hide my civil liberties in case the conservative government won a majority and tried to take them. That didn’t happen so I feel free to express myself, once again, freely.

And timing is good, ’cause I’m grumpy.

As many of you know, we hold an event each Spring in Ottawa where sales professionals and business owners all meet to discuss, well, sales stuff. And, as many of you know, we have been going through the process of finding a hotel for the ever increasing numbers that come to the event. And we’ve had our problems.

I’m happy to report that we’ve now secured our hotel location and are good to go for 2009. Contract is signed.

So now I get to unload. To quote Melville from Moby Dick: “. . . from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee“. OK – how many of you geeks thought it was a “Star Trek – Wrath of Khan” original line. OK – how many of you think I’m a geek ’cause I know the Star Trek reference. Mais je disgress…

OK, so maybe that Melville ditti is a bit over the top. But I am super grumpy about the way we were treated by the local hotel industry. Right now, they have a lot of power because supply is tight. Our local convention center is closed for a year for renovations so everyone is scrambling to find space.

In the process, most of the hotels are screwing over companies trying to do business in the city. There are demands for outrageous food and beverage commitments. There are completely unresponsive sales people who promise to help you find space and then never return your phone calls. For example, a local hotel, the Brookstreet, slow rolled me for four weeks negotiating their contract. Then, at the last minute, they wanted an additional $20K. And then when I balked, they told me there was no space anyways.

In the end, the hotel where we had the event last year squeezed us in. But they also squeezed us out of way more money than last year.

I sincerely hope that the hotels in town enjoy their year of prosperity. Cause, I bet there are a lot of organizations who are going to go out of their way to not give them business in the future.

We are now considering moving our event out of Ottawa – purely to punish those that treated us so poorly. And Colleen is currently the President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS). Hello hotels – they hold a huge event every year and do you think that our experience won’t impact their decision about where to go?

I know everyone has to make a buck but when you’re so disrespectful to your customers, don’t be suprised when Nemesis drops by. She’s the goddess of retribution (shown here looking like a G-rated airbrush painting off a 70′s van) and unless you’re good, she’s coming to town. And it’s going to cost you.

C.

Posted in Events | 1 Comment »

Crap – We Made Money

October 9th, 2008 Chris

We just closed out our fiscal year last week. We had a good year thanks to my uber-saleschick partner.

I was feeling great, purusing our Quickbooks-generated income statement showing some profit and a healthy increase in sales year-over-year. The one last thing to do to wrap a bow on things was to figure out how much we owed in taxes.

Now, I’m sure our tax regime is different in many ways from other places, but there are some constants. We pay business income tax and do so in installments throughout the year. So at the end of the year, you’ve being paying income taxes all along so everything will be OK. Right?

Well, it turns out that you are paying your tax installments based on your previous year’s results. So at the end of a given fiscal year, you look at what you paid in installments and compare that to your final tax bill based on your actual results.

If things don’t change that much, then life is good. You may have to pay a bit or get a bit back. But if things change – especially for the better – you are in for a rude surprise.

So I popped off a preliminary view of our results to our accountant and asked him what our tax bill was going to be. He wrote a very nice note back, congratulating us on our results and indicating that our tax bill had risen by 1000% from last year. Yes, dear reader, my finger did not get stuck on the “0″ key.

Turns out we had gone from breaking even to making some profit. And of course, I had failed to consider that when the cash was coming in. So, here we are at the end of the year with a big tax bill that we hadn’t been saving for.

Now, luckily, our tax bill doesn’t have to be paid for another couple of months so we have some time to scrape together the cash so we’ll be fine.

And we also have a great accountant, Nick. He’s helped us with strategies to deal with our lack of planning. Things like how to defer revenue – that is to not count sales you make in one year when you’re delivering the product or service until the next. And how to increase your expenses in one fiscal year by paying yourself a bonus in the next. Note: every one’s situation is different – speak to your accountant.

The real lesson learned is that you need to look at your financial progress along the way, at least once a quarter, and do an ongoing assessment of your tax situation. If sales and profits are up, stash away cash for your tax liability so you don’t get surprised by a big bill.

C.

Posted in Financial | No Comments »

Confronting Reality

October 7th, 2008 Chris

Colleen came home for a brief pit-stop before leaving me again - this time leaving for …ah… Actually, I can’t remember where. I stopped trying to track her travels. Not that I don’t care - it just doesn’t matter in this day of cell phones and blackberries (surely iPhones?).

Until yesterday, I thought Colleen had the utmost faith in my work ethic. I had hoped that despite being out of sight when she was travelling, she trusted that I continued to work hard. However, my faith in her faith was a bit shaken when she got home yesterday and asked what the heck I was doing.

I don’t know why – I was in the office, leaning back in my chair with my feet on the desk and my eyes closed.

While I would be fibbing if I said I had never taken advantage of a mid-day siesta to restore engery and vitality, this time I swear my mind was whirling away.

I had just watched the record drops in stock markets but it wasn’t the fact that we’ll now need to work till we’re 80 to retire. It was wondering what fundamental changes this means to our business.

I remember reading a great book, Confronting Reality, shown above. It made the case that people who run businesses need to step back and recognize key market trends. More importantly, it is critical to recognize these realities and act.

An example cited in the book was an American business intensely trying to increase efficiencies in their American operations in the face of increased competition from lower cost suppliers. The prescription was to Confront Reality: Competitors were taking advantage of overseas manufacturing and all the fine tuning in the world wasn’t going to make an American plant competitive. Confronting Reality meant facing the fact that only through moving product overseas would the business continue to be competitive. Strategic action – not tactical – was needed.

So, in today’s tough economy, we all could tweak away with pricing and marketing copy. Or we could Confront Reality. Reality that the economy is going to change what customers are attractive, change what they want to buy and change how they buy it.

So with my eyes closed and my chair-back definitely not in the upright position, I was trying to do figure out what fundamentally was going to change for us:

• What value was the customer looking for. Growing sales versus maintaining sales in a tough market, etc…
• What product the customer was looking for. High-end customized solutions versus cost effective off-the-shelf products…
• etc…

If you haven’t sat back with your eyes closed (or paced, or went for a run, or whatever works for you) and ran through the realities of your situation, you are setting yourself up to be a victim of the times versus someone who capitalizes on the times.

C.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Suck It Up, Princess

October 2nd, 2008 Chris

I can’t stand complainers. I’m sure we’ve all met them – those people that have a thousand excuses why they aren’t doing better, be it in work or their personal life.

There is absolutely no point in being miserable when confronted with challenges. When faced with a bad economy or a failed business initiative, you have two choices: 1. deal with it, or 2. use it as an excuse to fail.

I heard the best line ever from a friend who isn’t typically a complainer. Out of character, one day he was bemoaning something and was told to Suck It Up, Princess. It succinctly and brilliantly represented view.

Someone asked us the other day if we’re worried about the bad economic climate impacting our business. We said No! While banks fail and large companies call down their revenue and profit numbers, being a micro business actually makes it easier.

Easier because you might as well just accept the reality of external challenges. You aren’t going to change the economy. You have no choice to accept the external environmental conditions and move to dealing with it.

Easier because you are more nimble. Shifting messaging and marketing collateral takes a larger organization tons of time and requires all sorts of internal gyrations. The micro business can decide to change their value proposition in the morning and be done by dinner. For example, changing from our services help you capitalize on this booming market to our services ensure you increase sales, even in a tough market.

Easier because you will be targeting a particular niche in a large market and, regardless of the overall economy, there is always a niche that continues to grow and spend money.

So, next time you are feeling sorry for yourself – stop. Too much is on the line. Accept the reality of the situation and decide how to act to deal with it.

C.

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