Keeter Consulting Blog

New & Improved Bookkeeping System

2012-02-02T19:43:00.001-08:00

I just finished work on a tutorial for the new “Bookkeeping in a Box” turnkey record-keeping tool for my customers. If you’re still looking for a bookkeeping system, or are shopping around for something that’s a little more streamlined, this might be for you.

Visit http://www.keeterconsulting.com/forms to download a .pdf version of the tutorial or of the various forms included in the kit:

Daily Checklist (Verifies you’re tracking everything you need to be tracking)
Money In Log (The name really says it all, doesn’t it?)
Invoices
Set-Aside Worksheet (Helps to make sure you’re earmarking enough of your revenue for taxes and future expenses)
Money Out Log (If you liked the Money In Log, you’ll love the Money Out Log.)
Mileage Log (Track your business travel)

But wait, there’s more!

I’ve also added updated versions of several other popular forms and templates to the Keeter Consulting Toolbox page:

Business Idea Evaluator (Is your idea a good one?)
Generic Business Plan Template (A great starting point)
Generic Revenue & Expense Forecast Template (Ditto)
Vehicle Expense Calculator (Helps to estimate your business travel costs: fuel, oil changes, tire rotations and tire replacements)

If you check out any of these tools, please let me know what you think of them.

How to be a good public speaker

2012-01-17T19:01:00.001-08:00

I was fooling around on LinkedIn earlier today and responded to the following question in their Answers area:

It dawned on me that public speaking is an activity that small business owners frequently encounter and that I’d never addressed the issue in my own blog. I decided to share my response to the question here as well:

Know your subject matter intimately. Self-explanatory.

Know your audience. Tailor your language, how in-depth you get, and how you incorporate humor and audience interaction to their specific needs and preferences.

Don't write and rehearse a scripted speech. If that's all a speaker has to offer, I can just download his presentation notes or an MP3 recording of his lecture. Even a well-written, well-delivered, scripted speech is boring to the audience. Public speaking is essentially another form of live theater. What makes it exciting is the chance of something going wrong, or an inspired moment of improvisation.

Plan out the key points you want to make during your presentation, and the order in which you want to make them. Then rehearse discussing those points in a conversational manner. The focus here is on developing the pace of the presentation and honing your language; if you happen upon a clever turn of phrase or a good analogy, make a note of it so you an include it in the actual show.

Be entertaining. look for topical, interesting or humorous anecdotes when you need to illustrate your point.

Be factual. Back up what you say with objective data and hard numbers where possible. Nobody cares that you THINK that shiatsu massage can help with preventing migraine headaches. Bring data to support your position.

Be concise. You're not being paid by the word. Keep it tight. The Gettysburg Address was only 271 words long.

Learn from the best.

Relax and have fun with it. Presenting a topic in which you have some degree of expertise, and hopefully passion as well, to a room full of smart, interested people should be a very fun and rewarding experience. Enjoy the ride and your audience will as well.

Repost: Gov. Snyder Encourages Mentors

2012-01-12T18:51:00.001-08:00

Although I’m still waiting for Governor Snyder to publicly retract his claim that he’s a nerd (see my open letter to the governor from 3/16/11 for details), I’m 100% behind his call to experienced professionals from all walks of life to seek out opportunities to volunteer as mentors for the newer workers coming up behind them. In fact, I posted on this same topic back in 2009:

(Click here to read my blog entry dealing with mentoring)

(Click here to read Gov. Snyder's letter)

I’m rather passionate about this topic. It’s especially important for the growing ranks of newly self-employed people, who are encountering an entirely new set of challenges.

As any of my customers who’ve gone on to start and run their own businesses can tell you, there’s a huge difference between having technical expertise with the products or services that your business offers and having the management expertise to operate your own business. The latter involves an endless series of decisions regarding cash flow, marketing, recruiting and managing employees, sales, risk management, etc.

Leveraging your experience with running a small business, even if your business is very different from that of the person you’re mentoring, is an invaluable resource to them.

You don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to be a sounding board who helps them to stop and take a critical, objective look at their choices before they plunge headlong into an under-thought decision.

It can be a fair amount of work, depending on the arrangement you make with your “mentee”, but rest assured, it provides equal benefits to the mentor as well as the mentee:

Mentoring will expose you to marketing and management issues that you probably haven’t encountered previously. It will sharpen your thinking and communication skills. It will help to position you as a leader in the self-employed community. And it will help you to expand your personal and professional networks.

So take it from Governor Snyder or me (whichever of us seems the most impressive to you): making yourself available as a mentor to someone is a no-brainer. It benefits you, them, and the state as a whole.

Lastly, if you’re a newbie to running your own business, take the initiative to seek out a mentor to help you learn the ropes as you enter this new phase in your career.

How to Get Started:

Gov. Snyder’s letter includes a link to the Mentor Michigan web site (part of the Michigan.gov site), but if you want to dig a little deeper:

Aspire Collaborative Services posted a great overview called How to be a Great Mentor Without All the Fuss that’s well worth the read.

To get connected with a mentor or volunteer as a mentor, some good starting points are the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), chamber of commerce, Michigan Works! Service Center and/or your local Michigan Small Business Technology Development Center. You might also mention it on your LinkedIn profile.

What has your experience with mentoring/being mentored been?

Harnessing the Power of Pessimism

2012-01-02T21:00:00.001-08:00

I have a confession to make:

I'm a pessimist.

A huge pessimist. The sky is falling. The end is near. Anything that can wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment. Yep, that's me.

I have a near-zero tolerance for financial risk. I've pretty much convinced myself that our economy will remain weak and unpredictable, and probably get worse, over the next few years and decades.

Thus the creation, and ongoing success, of Keeter Consulting is the very definition of the word "ironic."

Entrepreneurs are, of simple necessity, optimists. To be willing to risk one's time, money and sanity on a new business requires a person to believe in the possibility - no, make that probability, even inevitability - of success and of catching more than a few positive breaks as the business grows. It's not a lifestyle for the timid.

So why would I, the most pessimistic, risk-averse person alive today, choose to be self-employed? And not just self-employed, but working to help other people pursue self-employment? Why would I opt to earn my livelihood in an optimist's world?

Actually, that's a pretty good question.

First, a little background on how I got started:

Risk factor #1, “Will I be able to obtain enough business to sustain my business?” was pretty well addressed from the get-go. Based on my prior work with the CMU IBIE (formerly the CMU LEC) when I was an MRS counselor, they stated their willingness to single-handedly provide me with enough work to keep Keeter Consulting afloat. They already had a decade-old working relationship with MRS to support their ability to do that.
Risk factor #2: “How will I obtain start-up funds, and what will I do if the business fails?” was also a non-issue. Since CMU's program handled most of the marketing work, my start-up costs amounted to little more than a notebook PC, printer, file cabinet and some business cards. I had very little money tied up in launching the business. That meant that I didn’t need to worry about losing a bunch of money invested in the business, or about having a big loan to pay off.
Risk factor #3: “Am I actually qualified to do this?” I’d already written several reasonably good business plans, and worked in a home-based, self-directed setting in the past, so there wasn’t much uncertainty in my mind on this point.

In short, it was perhaps the lowest-risk small business start-up in human history save for opening a beer store next to a fraternity house.

Next, there's no denying that I probably feel the anxiety that accompanies launching small businesses more acutely than my optimist colleagues.

However, there's also a lot of value and satisfaction that goes with being a sort of "outsider" working in a world of optimists.

As a pessimist, I'm probably predisposed to overestimate the chances of potential problems occurring, and also of overestimating the severity of those problems should they actually happen.

But I'm also more attuned to identifying potential problems than my optimistic counterparts. I think that lets me help my customers approach their business ventures with a more complete picture of the risks and rewards that they entail. It also helps them to recognize an plan for "show-stopper" events, and to make sure they at least something in place to mitigate the range of less likely or severe developments.

Here's how I "harness the power of pessimism" in a way that reduces the risks of self-employment without scaring myself or my customers so badly that we scrap the whole thing and just curl up in a ball in a corner somewhere:

Don't risk what you can't afford to lose. Even the most promising business idea, just like the most promising employment opportunity, can fail. Jack Parr, Johny Carson and Jay Leno had each hosted The Tonight Show for literally decades when it was turned over to Conan O'Brien. Who would have imagined that despite managing good ratings, he'd be fired from the show after only a few months? Well, it happened. While Conan's income was never at risk (he was already a multimillionaire), his professional career was, as were the livelihoods of many of his staff who left New York to follow him to L.A..

Pessimist Question #1:

If your business tanks, can you and your family withstand the financial, personal and professional hit you'll take?

Because even when it's highly unlikely, failures can happen. If you know you can survive this, you'll have fewer sleepless nights.

Of all of the things that could go wrong during your first year of operation, SOME of them will.

Gas prices could go up. Taxes could go up. New competitors could enter the market. Customer needs and preferences could change. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, trade disputes or labor strikes could disrupt your supply of products or raw materials. You could experience a personal or family health problem or other emergency that disrupts your ability to work. Laws governing how your product or service is made, delivered, or to/from whom it can be sold or provided can change. Technological innovations could make your product/service obsolete (iTunes and iPods killing off CDs and record stores; web services like Orbitz and PriceLine killing off travel agencies).

Will you face a perfect storm where all, or even most, of these catastrophes occur? Of course not. But it's a virtual certainty that one or two of them will happen to some degree during the early stages of your business's existence.

Pessimist Question #2:

In a realistic "worst case scenario," would your business still be able to stay solvent and generate enough income to meet your family's basic needs?

Failing that, would you be able to walk away from you business in a (personally/professionally/financially) tolerable manner? Do you have an exit strategy?

"Born under a bad sign / If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all."

Pessimist Question #3:

Does your business plan count on a lucky break somewhere during the process?

Because that's just stupid.

If your plan relies of a some law being passed or revoked in a specific time frame, or a bank loaning you a given amount of money when that's a far-from-certain outcome, you've got a recipe for disaster.

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." - Tsung Tsu (from The Art of War)

The point here is the notion of "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it" or "I'm sure some opportunity will present itself" is the Achilles Heel of the optimist's mindset. By all means, hope for the best, but always plan for the worst.

In the end, let your optimism open your mind to the possibilities that surround you. There's tremendous creative energy you can tap into with your can-do attitude.

Let your pessimism help you to spot, and plan for, potential pitfalls.

But don't stop there. Finally and most importantly, let your pessimism and optimism serve as checks and balances on one another to make sure that you're progressing "eyes open" with full awareness of the risks as well of the rewards.

You wouldn't be an entrepreneur if you weren't already leveraging your optimism. Now harness the power of pessimism. It will increase your chances of success, improve your profitability, and most ironically of all, it will help you to sleep better at night.

Bottom Line:

It can't be done.

Now go out and do it!

Other impossible things:

Inc. Magazine: How to Prepare and Launch Your Start-Up

2011-12-07T16:44:00.001-08:00

I just ran across a good article discussing launching start-up businesses from a “30,000 foot” perspective. It’s well worth the read.

Topics > Start-up > Writing a Business Plan > Writing a Mission Statement >

How to Prepare to Launch Your Start-up

Preparing to launch your start-up means more than simply making sure you have a viable product and potential customers. Here are five tips on how to prepare yourself to be a founder.

By Matthew DeLuca | Aug 29, 2011

Click here for the full article

Here are the comments that particularly stood out to me, along with my usual editorializing:

“Really do your research,” (Brenton) Hayden advises any entrepreneur, whether they are starting their first company or their fifth. Don’t rely on a great idea, he says. “I call great ideas the death of your company and your personal finances. Often if you’re starting up they’re both going down the drain.”

Ideas are like noses. Everybody has one. Always bear in mind that the human race has gotten along just fine for about 100,000 years now without whatever product or service you propose selling to them now.

Find out how people are currently meeting the need you intend to fill. Can you (profitably) provide them with an alternative that they’ll prefer?
Dig deep to really understand your customers. Apple did this when they invented the iPhone, learning how the design of the phone, both aesthetically and ergonomically, could be improved upon before actually finalizing the product. They also uncovered their customer’s desires for ancillary products and services that accompany the iPhone such as iTunes, the App Store, and now iCloud. Make sure you’re providing the best, and most comprehensive, solution possible.

“The first thing when you look at the bottom line when you go into this is you have to think one thing and one thing only, and that’s ‘I will not fail,’” (Jeff) Brinkhoff says. “And you have to be careful that it is not ‘I will not fail’ while you’re going down the wrong path.”

Never bet more than you’re prepared to lose. Before even starting the business, determine how much time, cost and risk you’re prepared to accept, and what your exit strategy will be if you reach that limit. Make sure that “Failure is not an option” is a statement about your personal motivation to make the business success, and not a statement about how a business failure would destroy you, financially or otherwise.

“Many entrepreneurs I speak with have great ideas and even a great plan, but 99 percent of them have no practical industry-related experience,” (Brian Janeczko) says.

As I’ve stated repeatedly in past blog entries, on-the-job learning and starting a new small business are fundamentally incompatible concepts. Your ability to find efficiencies, spot market opportunities, and anticipate potential pitfalls is critical to your business being competitive. You can only do those things effectively if you’re dealing with a product, service and industry with which you’re already very familiar.

“Get counsel from different sources,” (A.W.) Pickel says.

Many people understand one or two facets of a business or industry reasonably well. Very few people are truly expert on the entire picture.

Even the “gurus” who do have a broad understanding of a particular type of business may have different approaches to success (which may or may not align with your own style) and different tolerances for risk than you. Or they may simply be working from inaccurate or incomplete information. Get several opinions, then form your own. Double-check the information you get from one source against other sources.

“I find that often the biggest and most healthy businesses look very different from what the founders first envisioned,” Bradberry says. “They responded to what the market was telling them and it was something they could execute on.”

Let the numbers, and your actual customers, tell the story. Be open-minded to your business model evolving in unexpected directions. For instance, maybe you envisioned running a video arcade in an old storefront in your town, but the real market demand ends up being for a mobile arcade that can be set up in churches, schools and community centers. Chase the money.

Just be confident enough and alert enough to recognize when the business is evolving too far away from your original concept for you to still be comfortable with it.

What were your take-aways from the article?

How to Get More Out of Google Searches

2011-12-03T17:20:00.001-08:00

First, a quick thanks to my high school classmate, Tom Dana, of Digitalsea.com for Tweeting about this on Twitter:

A fun web site that I check out from time to time, www.lifehacker.com, recently posted an article about getting the most out of Google searches when doing research.

You can read the whole article by clicking here, along with an “infographic” from www.hackcollege.com detailing the tips and tricks, but the infographic is a 15 slide presentation all strung together in a single, really long image, so it’s awkward to view and print.

However: since everyone knows that a business has to add value to something in order to attract customers, I took the liberty of “adding value” by converting the image into a 15 page .pdf document that you can download here.

Even if you’re pretty slick with your internet searches, it’s well worth checking out to see if you can happen upon at least one new trick to add to your bag.

What other tips and tricks do you have to pass along to others for improving the speed and quality of their internet searches?

Partnerships: A Few Things To Consider

2011-11-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

Common sense says that you would never enter into a business partnership with another person unless you and they already had high levels of mutual trust and respect as well as a clear and common vision for the direction of the company. Doubtless both partners don’t envision any future circumstances where they wouldn’t be able to find mutually agreeable solutions to implement. And ye those circumstances always seem to turn up sooner or later.

While sometimes a person you know, like and trust will suddenly reveal him- or herself to be unscrupulous, lazy or incompetent, that’s not usually the case. What is a much more common occurrence that can have equally significant consequences for a business is when one partner’s general life circumstances change unexpectedly, or when two honest, ethical, and well-intended partners simply disagree on some critical business decision.

What if one partner wants to buy the other partner’s share of the business?
What if one partner wants to sell his share of the business and leave?
What if one partner wants to bring in a third partner?
What if one partner perceives that he/she is taking on more of the work, cost or risk of operating the business than the other partner (whether this is an accurate or inaccurate perception)?
What if both partners have different opinions on a major decision regarding the company such as

Relocating?
Expanding/Downsizing?
Shifting the focus of the customers they serve, or the goods and/or services they provide?
“Going Public” with the company by issuing stocks?
Selling the company?

The ramifications of this type of thing can ruin an otherwise good business and devastate what may have been a lifelong friendship between partners.

There is a simple precaution you can take to avoid, or at least mitigate, these types of potential pitfalls: Drawing up Articles of Partnership.

ARTICLES OF PARTNERSHIP

The name given to an instrument of writing by which the parties enter into a partnership, upon the conditions therein mentioned. This instrument generally contains certain provisions which it is the object here to point out. Read Full Entry…

Articles of Partnership are essentially a “pre-nuptial agreement” between partners that detail the exact expectations of, and for, each partner. They also include agreements on how a wide variety of potential situations (like trying to buy out the other partner’s stake in the business), so that when one of those situations arises, or is under consideration by one partner, both parties already know the agreed-upon plan for addressing that contingency.

To do this right, it needs to be legally binding, and it needs to be well-thought-out to avoid accidentally missing certain potential situations and to avoid including agreements that may have undesirable, unintended consequences. For that, you need to bring in an attorney, preferably one with expertise in this area.

However, you can save yourselves and your attorney a great deal of time (which means saving you a great deal of money as well) by drafting a preliminary, simple-English, layman’s terms, version of your Articles of Partnership prior to even approaching an attorney.

Each partner can voice their concerns and share their ideas for how to resolve specific conflicts. Often solutions to most potential conflicts can be mutually agreed upon prior to hiring a lawyer, or at least headway can be made on both partners understanding (though not necessarily agreeing with) the solutions that the other is presenting. If nothing else, this will help both partners to determine what their key questions are for the attorney.

Everything outlined above is just general “best practices” material for your consideration. Now I’m going to shift gears and offer some opinions based on my small business experience as well:

With very few exceptions, I’m usually opposed to partnership arrangements and advise against entering into them if at all possible.

Invariably one partner will begin to feel that she/he is working harder than, or assuming greater risk than, the other partner.
Inevitably there will come a point where both partners cannot find a mutually acceptable answer to a key business decision.
More often than not, there comes a point in the life of the business that partners will disagree on how to divide business profits or business assets if the business is being liquidated.

Lastly, while we all like the old adage “two heads are better than one”, we’re less enamored with the prospect of surrendering some significant portion of our control over our lives, our finances, our careers and of course our businesses.

I tend to prefer an arrangement where one person is the clear “owner” of the company and therefore is recognized as the final word when making decisions and the other person is a major stakeholder with a high level of influence but is ultimately a subordinate. This lets the business leverage the knowledge, experience, expertise, professional contacts, and other assets of both people while avoiding the partnership pitfalls described above.

Ultimately it’s a personal decision that each entrepreneur has to make for themself. Bottom line: only consider a partnership with someone with whom you have a long-standing relationship with mutual trust and respect. Give serious consideration to other potential non-partnership arrangements that might be possible instead of a partnership. If you do establish a partnership, spend the time and money to get Articles of Partnership drawn up.

What has your experience been with partnerships – either your own, or those of employers you’ve worked for in the past? What advice would you give entrepreneurs on this topic?

Creating a Professional Web Site (On the Cheap)

2011-11-11T06:15:00.000-08:00

Wow, things have come a long way in 17 years!

Back in 1994, when the internet was just beginning to enter public awareness and businesses were starting to create their initial presence on the World Wide Web, to make even the simplest web site, a person needed costly software (Microsoft FrontPage was probably the simplest and least-expensive “professional grade” option at about $300) that required at least some formal training to learn to operate. Plus to get the web page just the way one wanted it, he or she really needed to know some HTML as well.

Adding to the fun was the complexity of uploading one’s files via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and the “one-way” nature of communicating through the web…businesses posted stuff on their web sites, and customers were limited to emailing questions or comments or adding them to a low-tech “guest list” page.

Having your web site, even a very small one, hosted on a web server might cost $20.00 per month or more.

That was then. This is now.

Now many businesses, including Intuit, Google, Vistaprint, Comcast and GoDaddy (just to name a few), offer free, or very inexpensive (under $10 per month) web site hosting services as well as free, web-based (read: no expensive software, no special training required), template-driven (read: everything’s automatically formatted to look professional and consistent) web page building tools.

With WSYWIG (what you see is what you get) page builders that use pretty much the same features that people are already used to from working with Word, Outlook and Internet Explorer, with many very powerful features like adding a blog, a poll, an embedded video or a “follow me on Twitter” button as easy to insert into your web site as clicking an icon, suddenly anyone with painfully middle-of-the-road computer skills can be creating a company web site in an hour or two in a way that will cost the business under $120 per year to keep live.

But don’t take my word for it.

Hey, I like this stuff, and I like Star Trek. When I say something’s easy to do on your computer…I can’t be trusted. I’m too much of a geek to maintain true objectivity in the matter.

So give it a shot for yourself: Intuit (the company behind Quicken and Quickbooks) is now offering a free web hosting for a 3-page web site, including the web-based pagebuilder tool and domain name registration (GoDaddy will ding you for about $11/year to register a domain name) for one year, and then just $6/month after that. (Special thanks to Tom D’Ambrosio of Oak Forest Sales and Consulting for alerting me to this offer)

I tried it out and was impressed. While the end product isn’t nearly as polished is what a professional web developer armed with a high-powered tool like Dreamweaver could create, for 99% of us one- or two-person, very small businesses, it’s a more than adequate solution at an amazing price.

Check it out here: www.michigangetonline.com

$72 per year still a little too steep for your tastes? No problem. There is still a cheaper way to get your business online.

Just create a blog using one of the free blog services like Wordpress or Blogspot, then register your domain name with Godaddy and point it at your blog’s URL. $11 per year for the domain name, and everything else is free.

Questions:

Does your business have a web site?
If you answered “no” to question #1, proceed to question #3, otherwise skip to question #4.
What are you, nuts?
How do you use your web site? Is it just to share basic information like driving directions and business hours? Is it an ecommerce site? Do you use it to interact with your customers through a blog, a social media site like Facebook, or a threaded discussion?
How important do you think your web site is to your company’s ability to attract new and repeat customers?

Worth Following: Changing Gears

2011-11-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time on the road driving to meet my customers all over Michigan. One side-effect of that aspect of my job is that I end up listening to a lot of NPR radio programs. NPR’s local affiliate, Michigan Radio, has been running a segment for the past couple of years called Changing Gears, which covers the ideas and efforts underway to re-invent Michigan (the whole Midwest region, actually) as a post-manufacturing economy.

Changing Gears is a great project. It highlights the enormous number and variety of efforts underway to remake our state and thus generate the new jobs we need and attract and retain more businesses and families to the area. However, Changing Gears tends to focus more on the “big” projects and companies at the expense of telling the stories of the very small businesses that are springing up as well…the stories of the kinds of people I work with.

Michigan Radio is constantly soliciting story ideas from listeners about their experience with this re-invention process, and a few weeks ago I finally took the bait and sent in my story.

I talked about the kinds of successes I’ve seen people have with self-employment when they have assistance from programs like the CMU IBIE, Michigan Rehabilitation Services, the Michigan Commission for the Blind, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, local Community Mental Health programs, local chambers of commerce, local SCORE chapters, the PASS and Ticket to Work programs, and the Michigan Loan Fund.

Here’s why I think those successes are more meaningful than many people appreciate:

Ignoring any time needed for retraining (6-48 months?), it's currently taking well-qualified candidates 12+ months on average to find new jobs. A small business can be planned and launched in 3-6 months, usually at costs comparable to, or less than, retraining.
In the new economy generous salaries or "gold-plated" benefits are rapidly disappearing. That makes the earning potential, even in the initial 12-24 months, for self-employment much more competitive with traditional employment in many situations.
In the new economy, job security is non-existent. Any employee, regardless of their work performance or time with the company, is vulnerable to losing their job at any time. The old social contract of "do a good job and you'll have it for a long time" has been abandoned. In comparison, a self-employed person who sub-contracts their talents to several businesses, or who can rapidly adapt to changing market conditions, has a much higher level of job/income stability.

At the end of the day, every time a person becomes self-employed, even if they are their company's only employee, is once again earning an income, stimulating their local economy, paying into the tax base, lessening the overall demand on government assistance, and planting one more seed that might turn into the next big thing. Apple Computer started with two guys in a garage; same with Amway. Even if only one in 100,000 *very* small businesses grows into a giant, it's still a huge boon to Michigan every time a new one starts.

More Must-Have Apps for Your PC (updated 10/07/11)

2011-10-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

I originally posted this on 5/29/11, but was compelled to update and repost it based on my personal experiences.

I realize at times that this small business blog sounds more like a blog about computers and all things techy, but since most of our small businesses are so reliant on our computers, and since most of us also rely on all-too-easily stolen or damaged notebook PCs, I think that any time I run across a good resource to help mitigate the threats our computers face, it’s worth passing along.

I have some good ones today:

First up is PREY (www.preyproject.com). Prey is a free, open-source program that installs on your PC that allows you to track your PC and what’s happening to it if it’s ever stolen, so long as the thief ever connects it to the internet. I installed Prey on my work notebook PC today and flagged it as stolen and within 20 minutes I was emailed a link to a report that showed me where my PC was on a Google Map, a webcam photo of the thief (me, in this case), a screen shot of what was happening on my PC, and numerous details about what programs were running and what files had been altered.

Pretty slick, eh? It’s free, super-easy to install and configure (took me under 5 minutes) and equally easy to use (flagged my PC as stolen and accessed my Prey report the first time without any instructions at all). Highly recommended.

But what do you do when the thief gets the bright idea to wipe all of the data off of your hard drive before you can get your PC back? Or if your PC falls into the swimming pool, gets trashed by a nasty computer virus or something else like that?

That leads us to cool free program #2: Dropbox.

Dropbox is a wildly popular online file storage and backup tool with fantastic compatibility with other computers, smart phones and similar devices.

The free program is downloadable to most PCs (Windows, Mac, Linux) and smart phones (Blackberry, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone). Once you have Dropbox installed on your device, you automatically get 2GB of free web-based, secure “hard drive” space where you can store files, folders, sub-folders, etc., and then add to or retrieve that information from any other Dropbox-enabled device. You can purchase additional storage space if you wish.

What makes it really cool, however, is how it behaves: Dropbox looks, acts and behaves just like any other folder on your PC. You can open files from it, save files to it, drag and drop files into it, etc. exactly the same as you normally would with any other folder.

Also useful is that you can opt to share certain files or folders with other people if you want.

There are other free and for-purchase alternatives to Dropbox, however:

Windows Live Mesh from Microsoft. This is another free application that is quick and easy to download and install. Windows Live Mesh lets you select specific folders on your PC (like My Documents, My Photos, My Music, etc.) and have them automatically synchronized with your associated (and also free) Windows Skydrive account. That means your data is backed up regularly without you doing anything. Not only can you use that to recover files if your PC is lost or damaged, but it also lets you access those files from any other PC if you need to get at them when you don’t have your own computer with you.

Both Windows Live Mesh/SkyDrive and their main competitor, Google Docs, offer the same free 2GB of storage space and comparable functionality to Dropbox, but for sheer ease of use and overall compatibility, Dropbox can’t be beat.

Finally, a for-purchase alternative to Dropbox that is also very popular is Carbonite.

Science Fiction geeks (like me) fondly remember carbonite as the imaginary material that Han Solo was frozen in in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

While a lot less cool than that, the Carbonite backup tool is infinitely more useful for protecting your data. It simply runs in the background, constantly backing up your files online in a secure folder. It’s insanely simple, requires zero attention once it’s operating, and is about as secure and reliable as a Jedi Knight. Well worth the expense if you need a “fire and forget” backup system.

Anyone else aware of any good, free (or cheap) software, services or peripherials that can help protect a person’s PC and its data?

Are these PC tips and tricks useful, or should I stick to stuff more directly related to small business?

Happy 5th Anniversary to Keeter Consulting!

2011-10-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

Wow, that went quickly.

Yep, as of October 6, 2011, Keeter Consulting has officially been in business for five years, and I'm still having a blast doing this work. Everyone should be as fortunate as I am and have a job that they love doing and that they believe is genuinely worthwhile.

On a good day, I get to be a key member of a much larger team that helps an individual who has been sidetracked by a disability to regain control over their career, to increase their income, and in so doing, to lessen the financial burden on the government (fewer disability benefits to be paid), lower the unemployment rate by one person (sometimes more), add to the tax base, and make one more small step toward turning the economy around.

And I get to do what I love: coaching people, thinking creatively, problem-solving and building stuff.

Sometimes the victory is a smaller one, such as helping a customer to understand why their business idea is not a viable one before they commit to something that can't realistically be successful. That's never an enjoyable experience, but it's still beneficial for the customer and counselor.

Big changes since I started doing this include:

Having Veterans Affairs customers added into my case load, and then customers of the Michigan Commission for the Blind as well beginning in 2010.
Along with my "parent" program at CMU, I think we've found numerous ways to improve the quality and timeliness of our work.
I've identified a huge array of other resources that my customers can tap into when planning, launching and ultimately operating their businesses.
I've learned a great deal more about the technologies that relate to self-employment.

I'd especially like to thank my customer/boss, Mike Vuillemot, of the CMU Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship (IBIE - formerly the LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center) for his ongoing mentoring as I continue to develop my skills as a consultant.

Ditto for Rehabilitation Counselor Val Warne from the VA for being a supremely effective partner in our shared self-employment cases, a consistently steady flow of work for me, and an unfathomably patient and understanding person as I've occasionally stumbled along the

way...and for being insanely good at her job.

Also warm fuzzies for Margaret Brown of Insurance by Ivey & Brown, to whom I've referred countless customers for business insurance quotes. Preparing these quotes is not a quick-and-easy task, and not every business plan ultimately ends up in purchasing a policy from her company, but she's always come through for me/us.

Finally, on a similar note, warm fuzzies for my fried Tom D'Ambrosio of Oak Forest Sales & Consulting. Tom has repeately gone above and beyond for me, sharing his sales and marketing expertise to help me work through the best solutions for numerous customers.

What's ahead for Year #6?

Get faster in turning around my work. That's priority #1.
Continue to improve the quality and timeliness of my communication with my counselors and customers.
Continue to improve the quality of my business plans to help keep my customers one step ahead of an ever-increasingly competitive marketplace.
Help the CMU IBIE to more effectively market our collective services to the counselors and customers we serve.
Continue to diversify my customer base so I'm not overly reliant on any one organization for the lion's share of my business.

Again, to everyone who's worked with me over the past five years -- thank you. I'm greatly appreciative of your willingness to let me try to help you with your endeavors and I hope to continue to warrant your trust and your business.

Steve Jobs: Visionary and Business Genius

2011-10-07T07:46:00.001-07:00

Yesterday marked the passing of one of the great innovators and business minds in the history of America…of the world, really.

We all know the basic story: Steve Jobs, raised by working class parents, drops out of college with his friend and partner, Steve Wozniak, to start up Apple Computers, initially working out of his garage. Fast forward 30 years and suddenly Steve’s a billionaire, leading one of the most successful companies in the world. iPods, iPads, iPhones, iTunes and MacBooks are everywhere. As impressive as that summary is, I think it’s only a small part of the story.

Jobs certainly wasn’t the first person to have a revolutionary idea that changed the way we lived and created an empire: Ray Kroc founded McDonald’s and Henry Ford launched Ford Motor Company, just to give two examples. I think that Steve Jobs’s accomplishment surpasses both of them in several ways, though.

Let’s start with Ray Kroc. He invented the model for the modern fast-food chain with standardized menus, drive-throughs, consistent quality, rapid preparation, etc. He grew his empire by franchising it. Did he change the world? Yes, but as Morgan Spurlock brilliantly pointed out in his documentary, Super Size Me, not necessarily for the better.

More importantly, Kroc’s idea had a major flaw: it was easily imitated, hence Burger King, Wendy’s, Sonic, etc. That competition sprang up quickly, turning fast food into nothing more than a commodity where the only two advantages any competitor could hope to have were price and location. Any other innovation could be just as quickly replicated by the other guys.

Ford’s Model T, and the production line concept that allowed it to be mass-produced affordably, arguably had a more positive impact on the world than Kroc’s restaurants, but again, the cost of entry into the market at that time was still relatively low – hence Dusenberg, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, Packard, etc. – but in the end, cars too became largely a commodity. As a self-avowed car nut, even I’ll admit that for all practical purposes, the differences between the current Ford Mustang and Chevy Camaro, or Ford Focus and Chevrolet Cruise, are largely academic. Same basic cars, same basic features, same basic prices.

One thing that Ford got right (though probably unintentionally) was the notion of “planned obsolescence.” Well-made modern cars, if properly maintained, are generally good for 200,000 to 300,000 miles, though few people ever keep them that long. Eventually the cost of repairs and maintenance, combined with the improved features in their newer replacements, compel most drivers to upgrade sooner than absolutely necessary.

Here’s where I think that Steve Jobs and Apple Computer really pull ahead from their contemporaries as a business success story:

Jobs had a unique and nuanced understanding of human beings. In the late 90’s, when everyone was in a race to create the next generation of “Palm Pilot” PDA, Jobs opted to ZAG when everyone else was ZIGGING. He noted that a PDA was a nice-to-have, but not a need-to-have, device. Franklin Planners still worked well and were 50% cheaper. Ironically, Apple had actually introduced the first PDA, the Newton, many years earlier, but the product was a flop because the technology available wasn’t sufficiently advanced to make it a user-friendly tool.

Jobs noted that in all of human history, even during times like the Black Plague, every war, every depression, and every famine, people always found a way to keep their music and take it with them. As a civilization we’ve spoken: music is supremely important to us. So instead of making the next Palm Pilot, he went forth with the iPod, which we were only too happy to snatch up at $300 each.

His product was so brilliant, so far ahead of the competition, and so well-marketed, that much as Windows became the default OS for computers, iPods became the unofficial default media device for the world.

How many people do you know who own and iPod or iPhone? Now how many do you know that own a Microsoft Zune or Sony Walkman MP3 player?

Moreover, Jobs’s “planned obsolescence” of his products hasn’t been based on the old products wearing out, but rather on Apple rapidly and constantly replacing them with newer, demonstrably better versions that are irresistable to consumers: the iPod Nano, Shuffle and Touch, for instance.

This pattern of lightning fast and constant innovation, and bringing (almost always) really well-thought out, well-made products to market has kept Apple’s products from ever being turned into mere commodities. A current Mac Air notebook PC sells briskly for $1,600 and up; regular notebook PCs can be had for as little as $275 regularly.

Jobs also placed tremendous importance on the entire purchasing and ownership experience for his products. Not only are all of Apple’s products highly intuitive, making them easy to use, but they also have a major “cool” factor…again, just look at the Mac Air next to a regular notebook PC.

This experience goes beyond the product: the packaging of Apple Products, the appearance of Apple Stores and Apple “kiosks” in other stores like Best Buy, the style of Apple ads, etc. are all extremely cool. Suddenly the product becomes more of a lifestyle or a form of personal expression.

And that builds tremendous customer loyalty.

When Apple realized that PCs were becoming commodities across the board, rather than chase the herd, the company chose to focus on a few niche markets where they could make their products so superior that their customers wouldn’t even consider alternatives. Apple found that in the realm of art, photography, video editing and animation. Not coincidentally, those are all “hip” professions, so adoption of Apple products by those industries only further bolstered the company’s image as the coolest game in town.

Jobs had the vision and the will to look broadly beyond his industry for the best ideas. In what was perhaps the most ethically questionable, but unquestionably brilliant, move in his career, Jobs famously visited the XEROX PARC research center and talked his way into a tour of their advanced research and development lab, here he saw their prototype PC, complete with its mouse (an unheard of device up to that point) and graphical user interface (also an unheard of design). Did he steal their idea? Look at the XEROX PARC prototype ad the first Apple MacIntosh and decide for yourself.

Personally, I think one specific moment from Steve Jobs’s life summarized who he was and what has made his company so amazingly successful:

In 1983, Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

So what can we all learn from the legacy of Steve Jobs?

Truly, deeply know your customers. More importantly, know fundamental human behavior.
Figure out how your business fundamentally makes the world a better place. If you can’t answer that question to your own satisfaction, move on to an idea or career that does let you answer it.
Before trying to be all things to all people, focus on a core niche market that you can satisfy better than anyone else out there.
Make sure the entire customer experience is superlative. Their first impression of your company, their purchasing experience, ownership and return business should all be very easy, pleasant and rewarding for them.
Think about your branding. From the start, create an image that will strongly appeal to your customers.
Innovate. Constantly. Look for places your business can go that your competitors cannot chase you.
Surround yourself with employees and vendors who are smarter than you. Listen to them, learn from them, and get out of their way to let them do their best work for you. “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”
Stay true to yourself, your core values, and your vision.
Remember that while it may not happen often, once in a while a small, start-up company can rise to become a world-changing empire.

So…Steve Jobs: well done, sir. Thanks for changing the world in a positive way and for demonstrating how to truly excel in business. You will be missed.

How to Write a Complaint Letter

2011-08-25T09:27:00.001-07:00

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, companies and organizations love to have complaining customers.

Don’t get me wrong – they much prefer to have happy, completely satisfied customers – but the reality is that even the best run organization is going to make mistakes, turn out the occasional badly-built product or have processes that don’t fully or adequately address the needs of some of their customers. That’s just reality.

What organizations hate, however, is to have an angry, dissatisfied customer who simply leaves to do business elsewhere. Now they’ve lost a customer who’s probably costing them additional business as that ex-customer bad-mouths their organization to other potential new customers.

But this isn’t about the business or organization that screwed up. This is about you, with your problem and what you can do to get it resolved.

Rule #1: Never attribute to malice that which can just as easily be explained through stupidity.

Translation: 99% of people, 99% of the time, are honestly trying to do their jobs well. Very often when an employee fails to do their job correctly, it’s not because they’re lazy or even incompetent, it’s because they’re unaware they’re even making the mistake in the first place. The worker may not have all of the information or the latest set of policies and rules to work with. They may not have access to a supervisor or co-worker to clarify some detail they’re not sure of. Give them the benefit of the doubt. This leads to rule #2.

Rule #2: Remember the Roadhouse Rules.

I like this rule because I get to quote Patrick Swayze from the movie “Roadhouse”, which happens oh-so-very infrequently in my line of work.

Expect the unexpected. Will the business want the serial number of your product? Will they ask you if you put a cover sheet on your TPS report when you submitted your complaint? Prepare for these kinds of challenges.
Never start anything inside the bar. Okay, that one really only works as it's worded if you happen to have a complaint with a bar somewhere, but the bigger point is that you should avoid an outright verbal confrontation in a public space if at all possible.
Be nice. This is often the hardest - and usually the most important - rule of all.

Civility never goes out of style.

Rule #3: Don’t worry about assigning blame, worry about resolving your problem.

Someone screwed up. Now you have a problem. You’re angy. Hell, your downright pissed. This screw up is costing you money, or preventing you from getting some medicine you need, or something else of real consequence to you.

Telling the organization how angry you are, or how incompetent they are, does nothing to improve the situation. Sure, it’s fun and it feels great, but it doesn’t make things any better. Focus on the Fix.

Rule #4: If it’s not in writing, it never happened.

Have your facts straight. Document (if applicable) like date of purchase, when you submitted the product registration, dates and details of your communication with the organization (who, what, where, when, how, action steps agreed upon, actual outcomes). Save receipts, copies of emails and hard copy correspondence and maintain a log of your phone communication. Facts beat no facts every time.

Rule #5: Treat people as you would want to be treated…with honestly, dignity and respect.

This is probably the hardest rule to follow, especially when you’re dealing with a particularly unhelpful person on the other end. Keep in mind three things, however:

Other people may be observing your interaction with the other person;
While the other person may not be able to resolve your problem, they can almost certainly slow down, or even prevent, the resolution of it; and
That customer service representative you’re chewing out today may be the same one that you desperately need to help you with something else next month

Rule #6: Be Professional.

Whether you’re communicating by email, regular mail, phone or in person, use appropriate language, spelling, grammar and general etiquette. If complaining in person, ditch the old Pantera t-shirt you bought in 1989 and dress like a more serious customer. If complaining in writing, use a proper business letter format. Check your spelling.

Rule #7 (The Dragnet Rule): “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Take emotion out of your communication entirely. If you’re incredibly angry or frustrated, leave it to just that.

“I am very frustrated and disappointed in the efforts of your company to address my issue so far.”

Done. Anything more just detracts from the impact of your communication.

Include all of the relevant facts. Not all of the facts, just the relevant ones.

“Because the rental car was not available when promised, I was unable to attend my sister’s wedding.”

- not -

“Because the rental car was not available when promised, I was unable to attend my sister’s wedding; a wedding she’d spent two years planning, and one with a Huey Lewis cover band at the reception that I personally picked out!”

Rule #8: Less is more.

Write your letter in a clear, logical order. Then go back and take out every single paragraph, sentence or word that is not absolutely essential to making your point. The shorter and clearer the letter is, the greater impact it will have on the reader.

Rule #9: There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Did the dry cleaner ruin your new shirt? You may want a replacement shirt as compensation (and you may get it). But if all they can offer you as two months of free dry cleaning, or a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy, be open to those different types of solutions, provided you feel they’re fair and satisfactory.

Rule #10: Everyone needs to save face.

Look for a solution that lets both you and the organization or individuals you’re dealing with to walk away from this experience with their dignity intact. When you place yourself or the other guy in an “all-or-nothing” situation, you both lose the capacity to negotiate and problem-solve effectively.

Click the image below to see a sample complaint letter, Keeter-Consulting-style.

What do you think of this posting? Any complaints?

Repost: The Cloud is Here to Set You Free

2011-08-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

As a person with ADHD, one of my side projects is managing a blog for an adult ADHD support group called FOCUS+. Through that blog I’ve frequently mentioned and posted material from Dr. David Nowell. In the same way that many physical accommodations intended to assist people with disabilities often are equally helpful to non-disabled people (the automatic door at your grocery store, for instance), many techniques and technologies that are helpful for those of us with ADHD are also very helpful to the rest of you as well.

I recently reposted another great piece from Dr. Nowell on our FOCUS+ Blog, this time describing the many ways that “cloud computing” can help all of us to be more productive and efficient.

The full article is available on www.psychologytoday.com and can be read in its entirety here: The Cloud Is Here to Set You Free.

(From Ed the editor/webmaster): My only gripe with his article is that it doesn’t explain clearly enough what “the cloud” is for the truly technology-challenged. Here’s my quick addendum:

As it relates to this topic, “the cloud” refers to a variety of web-based (meaning they exist out on the internet, not on your own PC or cell phone) tools that do things like provide us with calendars, to-do lists, alarms & reminders, and instant access to key information anywhere, any time. One good example of this is Google’s GMAIL and Google Docs products. GMAIL is a web-based email system (probably like the one you’re using right now) and Google Docs is a secure, personal folder for your documents, photos, etc. that you can access from any internet-connected computer and most smart phones.

How does this help with ADHD? Say you’ve got a family member who’s taking a lot of prescription medications. You could write all of their meds down in a document and store it in Google Docs so it’s always available through your phone when you’re visiting the doctor or pharmacist. Or maybe it’s the game schedule for your daughter’s soccer team, or your packing list for the upcoming camping trip. You get the idea.

GMAIL and Google Docs tie in together and share a web-based calendar, to do list and address book as well.) Throw in tools that can provide instant maps and driving directions like Google Maps and you start seeing how this could be helpful for those of us who can be forgetful or who are perpetually running behind all through our day.

GMAIL

Google Calendar

Google Docs

The Cloud Is Here to Set You Free

Web-based strategies for an organized and focused life

Published on August 8, 2011 by David D. Nowell, Ph.D. in Intrinsic Motivation and Magical Unicorns

One of the challenges for people with ADHD -- or any of us for that matter -- is having the necessary tools at hand when we need them. My clients who struggle with organization and time management tell me they spend 30 to 60 minutes on a typical day looking for their car keys, their calendar, or their phone. And even if it doesn't entirely "set you free", the cloud does offer some practical solutions for many of these challenges.

Now the cloud is not a real thing, and it's not even a new thing. Much of your social life is already in the cloud (think Facebook) and available to you at your office, home, and on your phone. Your email has been in the cloud since the mid 1990s. Anyone who had a Rocketmail account 15 years ago was essentially engaged in cloud-based communication, and one of the great features of webmail was its universal accessibility. It was always just there.

And there's more that the cloud can do for you. Three common organizational problems with practical cloud solutions are:

Read the full article

How are you using The Cloud to help stay organized, efficient, or at least more or less sane? What’s worked well for you? What hasn’t been as effective? Why?

Scams. Part Two.

2011-08-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

– P.T. Barnum

The following blog posting is reposted from www.onlineinvestingai.com, and pretty much sums up the only get-rich-quick schemes in the world that actually work:

…but that’s pretty much the only way to get rich quick unless you can throw a 101MPH fastball with pinpoint accuracy for nine innings, day in and day out, or nail baskets from outside the 3 point line on a basketball court with 98% accuracy.

Now fortunately for me, I’m both pretty (#1) and stupid (#3), so personally, I’m just waiting for my ship to come in, then it’s “hello, Ferrari.”

Sadly, such is not the case for many of the people I work with on self-employment ideas. My customers tend to be living within really tight personal budgets and generally have at least of some level of desperation in the background as they try to put together the next step in their career.

These folks are honest, hard-working and well-intended, but occasionally a bit too naïve when confronted with “own your own business”, “make money in real estate”, “make money online” and “multilevel marketing” scams.

I did a few blog entries on the world of scams a couple years ago:

However, a recent discussion with a customer of mine motivated me to revisit the topic again.

Scams are really easy to spot. To borrow shamelessly from Jeff Foxworthy:

If your web site doesn’t clearly and immediately state the nature of the specific product or service you’re supposed to buy or sell…

…you’re a scam.

“If your bu$iness u$e$dollar $ign$ in place of the letter “S”…

…you’re a $cam.

(You’re also horribly unoriginal, and very annoying)

IF 90% OF THE TEXT ON YOUR WEB SITE IS CAPITALIZED, BOLDED, ITALICIZED or UNDERLINED…

…you’re a scam.

(Once again, also horribly unoriginal and very annoying)

If your business or program has some ridiculous, grandiose, self-important name like “Team of Destiny” or “Income Ninja School”…

…you’re a scam.

(You also need to watch my video blog about picking a name for your business. Team of Destiny? Really??)

If your web site contains a variation of the any of the following phrases:

“Make fast money”
“Make easy money”
“Make huge money”
“Live the life you’ve always dreamed of”
“Live the life you deserve”
“No cost to you”
“No risk”
“No training or experience required”
“Learn the secrets that they won’t tell you”
“Learn the secrets that they don’t want you to know”
“Multilevel Marketing”

…you’re a scam.

(and that’s the real secret they don’t want you to know)

If your web site is littered with any of the following images…

…you’re a scam.

Or you’re possibly the Robb Report, which is a magazine about obscenely stupid and expensive things that obscenely stupid rich people like to buy. But since the Robb Report isn’t trying to sell you on a scheme to become rich (it just assumes you already are), it’s not a scam.

Bottom line:

There are no secrets that “they” don’t want you to know and won’t tell you. Exactly who are “they” anyway?

You can’t build wealth without some money to get started, some level of effort and some level of risk. Period.

Any income idea that requires “zero effort”, “zero training” or “zero investment” would immediately be copied by lots of people, which would immediately increase the supply of whatever goods or services you’re providing, and then immediately push down prices and profit margins to zero.

I like the new Lamborghini Aventador and Gulf Stream 5 executive jet just as much as the next guy, but you know what?

Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

Maybe in my next life, but not this time around. Sigh.

Ain’t gonna happen for you either, dear reader. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably (and by probably I mean “absolutely”) is too good to be true.

When in doubt,

Check out the company with the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org)
Run a Google search on the company. See who’s saying what about them. Any complaints?
Simply walk away.

“Turning Your Blog Into A Business”

2011-08-11T13:56:00.001-07:00

Here’s a good article I ran across by Karen E. Klein on Bloomberg.com. It relates the real-world story of Macala Wright.

Ms. Wright successfully grew her blog, http://fashionablymarketing.me, from a a mostly-for-the-fun-of-it personal blog about a subject for which she possessed passion and expertise, into a hugely popular, revenue-generating, advertiser-sponsored, media outlet.

(Click here for the full article)

Sigh. That’s always been my dream for this blog, but in hindsight I set mine up on too much of a shoestring budget and I discuss a topic that has too small of a niche audience to draw the attention of most paying advertisers.

If you currently have a blog, or are contemplating creating a blog as part of your small business’s overall marketing plan (hint: you should be!), this article is well worth reading.

One final thought about setting up a blog for your small business:

While it’s ideal if, like Ms. Wright, you can turn your blog into an income stream for your business, it’s still easily worth the time and effort of maintaining one even without that income. Here’s why:

Blogging about your particular area of expertise, product, service, industry, etc. is a great way to show that level of expertise, and passion, that you have to your (potential) customers. That makes you a more interesting and appealing alternative as they decide where to purchase their products or services.
Blogging gives you an excuse to make periodic contact with your past and present customers, e.g. “Hi everyone, just wanted to let you know the March posting for my blog is up. The topic this time is ‘How to get better gas mileage without spending money or driving slower.’ Check it out and let me know what you think.”
Blogging positions you as a “subject matter expert.” That looks good in the eyes of customers, and can help “sell” you as such to other local media outlets like TV stations and newspapers. It’s a huge win if you can work yourself into that “go-to” person whenever a news outlet has a story that touches on your industry. It means a lot of free promotion for your business. Plus it’s really fun.
Well-written blogs invite readers to join the discussion by leaving comments. Do they have any questions about what you wrote? Do they have other thoughts on the subject? Getting them to comment on your blog entries helps establish communication, and ultimately a new or better relationship with a current or potential customer.

There you have it. Now do YOU have any questions about this posting, or other thoughts on this subject? Click that comment button below and let me know what’s on your mind!

Download this App: OpenProj

2011-08-06T14:17:00.001-07:00

If you’re in the process of developing a business plan, launching a new business, or making some major change to your business, e.g. relocating to a new store or adding an ecommerce web site in addition to your storefront, you have dozens of things that need to be done. Often certain tasks are dependent upon other tasks being completed first before they can be addressed. Similarly, the time, cost and specific skill sets associated with certain tasks may dictated when it can be accomplished; e.g. you can’t create the web site until you can get the graphic designer for 10 hours to create some icons, or you can’t purchase the software until you’ve banked $5,000.

At best, these kinds of projects are usually rife with errors and inefficiencies, driving up costs and extending unnecessarily increasing the amount of time necessary to complete them.

At worst, they can cause you to miss critical steps that can delay or even completely prevent the successful completion of the project.

If you have the time and money, you can always get certified in project management and buy some high-powered project management software. Heck, if you’ve got that kind of time and money, you can just subcontract a certified project manager with his or her own software.

But if you’re reading my blog, the odds are that you don’t have that kind of time or money at your disposal – at least not at this stage in your business’s development.

No problem.

I'veve recently started using Serena OpenProj, a freeware download available throughwww.download.com. (Side note: download.com is a great resource for freeware and free-to-try-ware for things like word processing programs, web site building software, security software, etc.) An alternative to OpenProj is Microsoft Project, which is also an excellent product

Click here to go to the download page for OpenProj)

This is a pretty powerful tool and it can be used several different ways depending on your specific needs. However, the function in OpenProj I find most useful is the Gantt Chart feature.

Gantt chart (From Wikipedia)

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts also show the dependency (i.e., precedence network) relationships between activities. Gantt charts can be used to show current schedule status using percent-complete shadings and a vertical "TODAY" line as shown here.

The sample Gantt chart shown above illustrates three kinds of schedule dependencies (in red) and percent complete indications.

Creating a Gantt chart for your project using OpenProj is pretty straightforward:

Open the program and create a new project.
Create your Resources…usually people but occasionally equipment, e.g. the company HD camcorder or moving van.
For the first line on the Gantt chart, list your project and select your start date.
On the next line down, list any tasks associated with the project. Indent each task. Tasks may have sub-tasks (which would be indented further), sub-sub tasks, etc.
For each task (or sub-task), identify any other tasks that need to precede it. Look for opportunities to have multiple tasks occurring simultaneously.

So what are the advantages?

Make optimal use of all resources
Avoid “double-booking” resources
Capture all tasks and sub-tasks associated with the project
Sequence tasks/sub-tasks for maximum efficiency
Sequence tasks based on dependencies to other tasks
Establish and update a realistic timeline for project completion
Track how much money will be expended, and when (help with cash flow)
Set “milestones” in the project to gauge actual vs. projected performance.
Provide a regularly updated, “big picture” view of the project that everyone involved can see.

One last suggestion: If you’re new to the concept of project management a great starting point is to grab a copy of Project Management for Dummies from your local library or bookstore (or click here to find it on Amazon). This is a quick, straightforward tutorial to help you make the best use of any project management software.

Have you used OpenProj, Microsoft Project or some similar project management software? What was your experience?

Interesting Idea: 5x5

2011-07-20T09:35:00.000-07:00

Got an idea for what could be the next big thing, or failing that, do you have an idea for a new small business, nonprofit organization or similar venture that you think has the potential to be reasonably profitable and sustainable?

Is the only thing keeping you from making your idea a reality the $5,000 it would take to get your product patented or get your business up and running?

- OR -

Do you have a good idea but you know that it can and should definitely be improved upon? 5x5 may be the event for you.

5x5 is a monthly event held in Grand Rapids, though I believe many other cities around Michigan and nationally have similar events.

The concept wonderfully simple: Five people (who’ve registered in advance through the 5x5 web site) each have 5 minutes to present their idea to 5 judges, using no more than 5 slides as visual support during their presentation.

If you’ve ever seen reality shows like Shark Tank, you have the general idea…although I get the distinct impression from the 5x5 blog that their event is much more friendly and professional and with a much lower ratio of total crackpots to actual entrepreneurs presenting.

5x5 Night March 29th - David Buick - FitCup

Clip from Shark Tank on ABC

If the judges like your idea and deem it (one of) the best of the evening, you can receive a grant to move it forward worth up to $5,000.

Even if your idea doesn’t capture their imagination, the event is a great chance to gather unbiased, expert input and feedback on how you could improve upon your concept and how to connect with other possible resources to continue your efforts. (It also never hurts to have an opportunity to practice and hone your presentation skills!)

Me? I think this sounds really fun. I’m officially applying for one of the July or August slots to pitch one of two product ideas I’ve been playing with for a few months. Watch for future blog entries letting you know if/when I’m presenting and how things went for me.

Check Out This Resource: Disability Blog

2011-07-13T09:05:00.001-07:00

Big thanks to Dept. of Veterans Affairs counselor Shannon Cleveland and CMU LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center Director Mike Vuillemot for passing this along to me.

All of the following are programs, web sites and/or blogs operated by the federal government. At the end of this entry I’ll also list some state and local resources specific to Michigan (where I operate).

Disability Blog is another good information source with greater focus on the impact of a disability on (self) employment as well as a guide to some of the resources available specifically for persons with disabilities.

http://blog.govdelivery.com

The blog is actually a sub-section of the government www.disability.gov web site, which is so much broader in scope than the small business/self-employment topics I focus on here that I haven't shared it previously. Still, it's worth a look if you're a person with a disability regardless of your employment goals.

https://www.disability.gov/

Speaking of government-run web sites that can be helpful, this is probably a good time to mention VETBIZ as well. This web site is a portal for assisting military veterans (both service-disabled and non-disabled) with launching or expanding their own businesses.

http://www.vetbiz.gov

As I discussed in an earlier blog post, yet another good government-run web site for (aspiring) small business owners – veterans and civilians alike – is the U.S. Small Business Administration site, www.sba.gov (formerly www.business.gov; new name, same purpose).

Candidly, in all of the cases I’ve worked on over the past 4+ years, I’ve turned to these sites very infrequently. A variety of factors, usually financial, have limited the nature and type of assistance that most of my customers have been able to obtain through the SBA, and while many of the veterans I’ve worked with have been involved with VETBIZ in a variety of ways, it simply hasn’t overlapped with the types of support I was providing to them at the time. That having been said, I did attend a conference held by VETBIZ a couple of years ago and found it highly professional and informative.

I’ve already talked about the Social Security Administration web site and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs web site at length previously, so I’ll just mention them here in passing to round out the list of federal online resources.

Lastly, SCORE – the Service Corps of Retired Executives – is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small business owners. While they are a national entity, they have local office and people in most communities. You can visit their web site at www.score.org or read my 2009 blog entry about them here.

As promised, if you’re a Michigander, there are some great resources as well:

Central Michigan University LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center

www.cba.cmich.edu/ibie

Michigan Economic Development Corporation

www.michiganadvantage.org
Michigan Employment Loan Fund

www.michiganloanfunds.org

Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center

www.misbtdc.org

State of Michigan

www.michigan.gov (official state web site)
www.michigan.gov/business (MI Small Business One Stop)
www.michigan.gov/cpexpress (online portal to register your business as an official vendor for the State of MI)
www.michigan.gov/mcb (MI Commission for the Blind)
www.michigan.gov/mrs (MI Rehabilitation Services)

Statewide listing of chambers of commerce

http://www.2chambers.com/michigan2.htm
The parent site, www.2chambers.com has similar lists for other states as well.

What other federal, state, local and/or non-profit organizations, agencies or web sites have you identified? What was your experience with them?

A Quick Primer in Online Marketing Lingo

2011-06-13T19:27:00.001-07:00

This joke email has been making the rounds on the internet (thank you Walt Reynolds, internet marketing guru for sharing with the CMU crew). Joke or not, it’s a brilliantly simple, and scarily accurate, explanation of the jargon.

If you've ever struggled to understand the lingo when it comes to promoting a website or blog online then the following list of definitions should help you to find your way around.

Exhibit A: a cow.

Social marketing

You have a cow.
You show some friends a clip of a man being hit in the crotch.
They tell their friends who pay money to come and look at your cow.

Social media

You have a cow.
You tell your friends.
People start listening to what you have to say.

Affiliate marketing

Your neighbor has a cow.
You show a film clip of a man being hit in the crotch.
You charge people to go see your neighbor's cow.

Traffic

You have a cow.
You put it on the side of the road.
People stop to look at it.

Spam

You have a cow.
You put it in the middle of the road, stopping traffic.
A few morons buy some viagra from you, making the initiative profitable.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

You have a cow.
You put up a road sign with "Cow" in the title.
Passers by stop to look at your cow; you charge them for parking and sell them lemonade.

Content

You have a cow.
You write a novel about it.
A pig farmer copies your novel, paraphrases and publishes it as his own.

PageRank

You and your neighbor each have a cow.
You both put signs up to advertise your cows.
You pay someone to move your sign directly in front of the neighbor's in the middle of the night.

Advertising

You have a cow.
People pay you to paint their logos onto your cow.
Your cow looks like a billboard.

ROI (Return On Investment)

You have a cow.
You pay $50 to dye it pink.
People flock to buy tickets to see your cow; you earn $1000.

Conversion

You have a cow.
You refurbish the barn.
More people pay to look at the cow.

Reality

You have a cow.
No one cares.

If you still don't understand online marketing...

Don't have a cow, man.

Huntington Bank Announces $2 Billion Lending Commitment In Michigan

2011-06-10T07:13:00.001-07:00

Reposted from The Street

By PR Newswire 06/02/11 - 02:36 PM EDT

MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich., June 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Huntington Bank (NASDAQ: HBAN; www.huntington.com) today announced a groundbreaking public-private lending partnership with the State of Michigan and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) by committing $2 billion in commercial and small business lending throughout the state. Huntington's expertise in small business lending has made it the No. 1 SBA lender in Michigan and the 3rd largest SBA lender in the country.

Click here to read the full article.

Gov. Rick Snyder announces Varnum program to offer $1 million in free legal assistance to Michigan startup companies

2011-06-10T06:59:00.001-07:00

Reposted from Mlive.com:

Chris Knape | The Grand Rapids Press

Posted: 06/08/2011 11:31 AM

LANSING — Gov. Rick Snyder today announced another leg of his economic development agenda with a commitment by Grand Rapids-based law firm Varnum LLP to provide $1 million in free legal services over five years to early-stage Michigan companies.

The MiSpringboard program, which Varnum has been teasing via a Twitter account focusing on business startups for several weeks, is being billed as another component of Snyder’s Pure Michigan Business Connect initiative, unveiled at last week’s Mackinac Policy Conference.

“Varnum’s generous donation is an impressive commitment to Michigan’s long-term future,” Snyder said in a statement. “The firm is taking a proactive approach by rolling up its sleeves and partnering with us to create a positive climate that keeps our economy moving forward. This investment in Michigan will fuel our state’s drive to be a leader in the 21st century economy.”

Read the full article here

Two More Must-Have Free Apps for your PC

2011-05-29T15:07:00.001-07:00

[If you're reading this, please be sure to check out the updated version of it posted 10/13/11]

I have two good ones today:

That leads us to cool free program #2: Windows Live Mesh from Microsoft. This is another free application that is quick and easy to download and install. Windows Live Mesh lets you select specific folders on your PC (like My Documents, My Photos, My Music, etc.) and have them automatically synchronized with your associated (and also free) Windows Skydrive account. That means your data is backed up regularly without you doing anything. Not only can you use that to recover files if your PC is lost or damaged, but it also lets you access those files from any other PC if you need to get at them when you don’t have your own computer with you. Again: free, safe, secure and easy…another must-have.

Anyone else aware of any good, free (or cheap) software, services or peripherials that can help protect a person’s PC and its data?

Are these PC tips and tricks useful, or should I stick to stuff more directly related to small business?

Great resources to educate yourself about blogging & search engine optimization

2011-05-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

[Note: This entry was updated on 10/10/11]

In several recent blog entries, I've shared my thoughts, research and personal experience about the best ways to leverage your company web site, blog, and social media sites like FaceBook,LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. I've also touched on the concept of Search Engine Optimization:

However, while doing some research for one of my customers, I ran across a collection of really slick presentations and other resources online at www.bravosmartwebdesign.com. This content is well worth viewing if you have, or are considering, either a company web site (really a must-have part of your marketing strategy in 2011) or a company blog (a very valuable, if not absolutely essential, part of your marketing strategy as well). Look under their Free for You tab.

I haven’t worked with Bravo Smart directly yet, but if the quality of their own company web site and the content of these presentations in any indicator, they’re definitely a company worth considering if you’re in the market for web development related services.

7 Pages every business Web site must have (by Christopher Elliott) is an posted on the Microsoft Office Live Small Business web site several years ago, but it’s still 100% accurate and relevant. A must-read.

Here are a couple of other great resources I've encountered in my research as well:

11 Steps to Create a Successful Web Site is a lengthy article that’s been turned into a web site itself. I originally found it through Microsoft, but the original source was http://www.startupnation.com.
The Power of Podcasts was an article published in The Costco Connection, a general interest “magazine” send to Costco members. I liked it.
Finally, Podcasting that Rivals Radio Ratings is another article I ran across but can’t remember the source. It’s also worth a read.

What good articles, podcasts, etc. have you found that shed light on the rationale for, and best practices of, maintaining a web site, blog, podcast or similar online presence?

Cool Free Online Gadget of the Month: Doodle

2011-05-03T15:49:00.001-07:00

First off, I have to give a shout out to my colleague Kim Kazmirski at Michigan Rehabilitation Services for turning me on to this one…it’s one of those “Where have you been all my life?” apps that is going to seriously simplify my job.

Kim somehow discovered www.doodle.com, which contrary to the name has absolutely nothing to do with doodling. Doodling, while fun, is sorta-kinda useless.

Instead, Doodle is a free service where you can post a list of date/time options for a multi-person meeting and email messages to all of the planned attendees, inviting them to follow a link to a “poll” where they can each select the specific dates/times that they’re available or would find preferable. This circumvents the tedious process of manually (and repeatedly) emailing everyone to nail down the nearest time when everyone is actually available to attend. Brilliant!

I’ve added this to my bag of tricks along with using Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) as a secure web area where I can upload, view and edit documents and make those individual folders accessible by other specific people for collaboration purposes.

So…Doodle. Learn it, live it, love it and let me know which other really cool apps like this you’ve discovered that help to speed up and/or simplify your business life.

Read This: The Personal Efficiency Program

2011-04-13T09:38:00.001-07:00

This falls in the “I can’t believe I didn’t already blog about this” category.

Operating your own small business means managing a tremendous amount of information and numerous projects at the same time. Missing steps, losing important information and spending time unnecessarily filing and re-filing the same documents will cost you time and money in the best case, and it can deal a lethal blow to a start-up business in the worst.

So far The Personal Efficiency Program (available at amazon.com) is the most practical, straightforward book I’ve found on the topics of organization and efficiency. As a person with ADHD who’s responsible for tracking 20-30 business plans in development at any moment in time, the advice in this book has been invaluable to me.

I won’t try to regurtitate the entire book into a single blog entry (largely because that’d be a whopping copyright violation), but here are some of the key points that I’ve taken to heart and used over the years:

Keep your desktop clear. The only things that belong on it at any time are

The specific documents you’re working with';
The tools you need do do your work (PC, pens/pencils, telephone, etc.); and

Your In/Out/Pending basket (see below).

Use the desk drawer or file drawer closest to you and most easily accessed to contain the files that you use most – in my case, that’s just the records for my currently active projects and my business bookkeeping documents.
Take other files (closed cases, reference material, etc.) and keep them in a separate file drawer/cabinet so they aren’t cluttering your “active” files.

File each document only once.

In basket
Handle the Item
Out basket
Filed.

On a monthly (or quarterly?) basis, go through all of your files and cull anything that you no longer need. Still got a folder with your handouts from the sales seminar you attended in 2008? Get rid of it. Do you have multiple copies of the same letter in a client folder? Ditch the duplicates.

Go digital. Keeping electronic copies of things, and scanning hard copies when they come in, makes it easier to search for them and to file them, and if you’re backing up your data regularly (which we both know you are!), it means that the chances of them being lost or destroyed is greatly reduced. A quick hint: while most printers today are multifunction printer/scanner/copiers. they have flatbed scanners that force you to scan each page of a document individually. While this works, it’s much slower and more tedious than an upright feeder-scanner.

Your desk should have an

In basket for new documents arriving at your desk that should be reviewed daily;
Pending basket for documents that you’re still waiting on additional information or verification before you can complete them; and
An Out basket where completed items are stored prior to being properly filed daily.

Speaking of going digital, these same concepts apply equally well to managing records on your computer.

Your PC Desktop should only display icons for the software, web pages or documents that you need to access the most frequently. You might also temporarily move files you’re working on (the big business proposal, the PowerPoint presentation for the new hires, etc.) onto your desktop while you’re using them, but be sure to refile them appropriately when you’re done.
Setting up separate folders for active items and archived items similarly improves efficiency. Ditto for email.
Going through periodically (monthly? quarterly?) and culling your electronic files is also vitally important to maintaining efficiency. Again, ditto for email.
Make optimal use of your Calendar and To-Do List! Most Smart Phones can be synchronized to your desktop calendar and to-do list, making it even easier to stay on top of things even when you’re away from your desk. I use Microsoft Outlook and am very happy with it. My wife is equally happy with Google’s calendar system.

Lastly, I have a personal tool I use that wasn’t discussed in the Personal Efficiency Program that I’ll mention just because I’ve found it so helpful:

I find that a permanent visual tracking tool really helps me to recognize what needs to be done and what tasks are falling behind so that I can focus on them and resolve them before they turn into problems. I call mine the “Wall of Knowledge” and use it to track when I’ve last had direct contact with each of my customers and identify the specific projects I’m supposed to focus on each day for the current week. My goal is to have weekly contact with everyone, or at least bi-weekly contact. I also use it as a reminder for catching up on my bookkeeping, invoicing, file-culling, backing up my files and making updates to my blog and web site. Here’s a sneak peek at my system. It’s not pretty, but it’s very reliable:

But don’t satisfy yourself with my unbelievably brief overview – get the book. It’s well worth the read.

What tools, techniques or systems do you use to stay organized and efficient?

Thoughts on SSDI and Employment

2011-04-01T11:09:00.001-07:00

I've recently had a pair of conversations that occur from time to time regarding the merits and appropriateness of applying for or receiving SSI (Supplemental Security Income) or SSDI (Social Security Disability Income) while also starting or running a small business.

I've found that there are some common misperceptions regarding this topic, and that many people are not aware of the programs in place in the SSI/SSDI system to help persons with disabilities pursue and maintain (self) employment. Here's a quick review of this issue as I understand it:

I don't view being on SSDI as being at odds with pursuing gainful employment, whether it's traditional employment or self-employment, and I don't think SSDI sees it that way either.

Keep in mind that the social security system includes programs like Ticket to Work which allows recipients to continue receiving SSDI income and Medicare while they build up their income level when starting a new job (or business) and may have to wait up to 90 days for medical benefits (if there are any) to kick in. It also allows for fast-tracking back onto SSDI if the employment situation doesn't work out.

Similarly, SSDI has the PASS (Plan for Achieving Self-Support)program to help people save for necessary equipment to start their business while continuing to receive benefits.

Also, SSDI even has a component in place for people who are working but not earning enough to replace their benefits: under Ticket to Work they can earn up to around $950/month (I don't remember the exact figure) indefinitely without jeopardizing their SSDI benefits.

For individuals who are medically unstable, still in the process of physical rehabilitation or who have progressive or variable conditions like Parkinson's Disease or Multiple Sclerosis, it's never a sure thing that they will continue to be able to do a specific job.

In many situations an entrepreneur might determine that their business should be a profitable venture, but not a highly profitable one, so having an additional income stream could be very valuable.

Lastly, in terms of the "ethical" aspect of MRS supporting vocational rehabilitation and SSDI at the same time, please also keep in mind that obtaining any employment even if still receiving full SSDI benefits means that the individual would be paying into the tax base (both personal and business), and stimulating the economy by increasing his or her personal and business consumption of other people's goods and services.

Finally, returning to even a modest level of employment greatly increases the odds that he will one day be able to grow his business (or find a better job) that ultimately reduces or eliminates his need for SSDI.

So:

SSDI encourages pursuing (self) employment;
SSDI provides a valuable safety net when attempting to return to employment;
The increased taxable income of a person still receiving SSDI helps to mitigate the cost of that benefit to the government;
The added income from self-employment results in more goods and services being purchased for the business and business owner, stimulating the economy, and
SSDI provides an invaluable hedge against the possibility of the person’s disabilities becoming more severe.

Does anyone have a different perspective on this to share? How about additional factors I neglected to mention?

Fascinating Article on Economics from The Onion

2011-03-31T19:21:00.001-07:00

The Onion, my third-favorite satirical news source behind The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, just posted a fanastic article about how Edible Arrangements has called into question over two centuries of theories on what’s necessary for a business to survive. While Edible Arrangements itself is a big corporation, its individual storefronts are owned by small business franchisees. So in addition to being funny, it kind of relates to my small business universe. Anyway, read on.

Continued Existence Of Edible Arrangements Disproves Central Tenets Of Capitalism

WALLINGFORD, CT—Upending more than two centuries of free-market theory, leading economists across the globe announced Thursday that the fundamental principles of capitalism had been "irrefutably disproved" by the continued existence of the designer fruit-basket company Edible Arrangements.

Click here for the full article…

Show me the money! (part two)

2011-03-30T19:56:00.001-07:00

So you’ve written a truly brilliant business plan, and your income forecasts for year one are terrific – you should easily make a generous profit even within the first 12 months. Time to go buy some equipment and supplies and start living happily ever after, right?

Well, maybe, but before we pop the cork on the champagne, let’s talk about an issue that virtually every company I’ve helped to launch has encountered to at least some extent: Cash Flow.

Let’s say your business paints houses. You’ve projected with perfect accuracy that in the first month you’ll earn $5,000, and your expenses (rent, utilities, advertising, etc.) will only be $2,000. At first glance life appears to be pretty good. But when you dig deeper, you start to recognize the following:

Rent for your store is due on the first of the month, but since you still have to go get some jobs, you have no income yet.
The company credit card you’ve run up $300 on gassing up the company truck is due for payment on the 10th. By this time you’ve done a couple of jobs, but after invoicing the customer, they still have 10 days to pay (assuming they pay on time).
The third big job you’re scheduled to start on the 12th requires purchasing $500 worth of paint. You haven’t received payment from anyone yet and your credit card is already near its limit.
Oh, and the two guys you hired to help you are demanding that you pay them.

The issue isn’t how much money your business will earn: the 4 jobs you did in that first month will easily cover all of your expenses. The problem is cash flow: bills coming due before you receive payment for the work you’ve done.

For some businesses (like mine) this is a non-issue because I have embarassingly low overhead expenses. While I hate to get stuck paying interest on my company credit card, if I need to do so to make sure that my bills are all paid on time, I can do it in a pinch.

For other businesses that strictly cash-on-delivery, like a take-out restaurant, it’s less of an issue assuming sales meet your projections and you were able to adequately front-load your shop with inventory and set enough cash in your bank account for other expenses like wages.

For the remainder of businesses where there are significant operating expenses, unpredictable sales volumes and anticipated lags between services being provided and payment being received, there are still several options available, all relatively common sense:

Requiring a down payment of XX% on jobs
Offering a discount for payment up front or immediately upon project completion
Building in a 90 day slush fund to cover expenses during the first three months of operation when you’re burning through cash but still building up your customer base
Pre-negotiating with your creditors some arrangements in the event that you are slightly delayed in paying them
Setting up a line of credit for the business to cover sudden expenditures

The good news is that for about 75% of new businesses, after the first 90 days the cash flow crunch has more or less resolved itself.

The keys to avoiding getting caught in this situation is proactive planning, gathering sufficient cash before launching the business and making very conservative estimates on your sales volumes and expenses. If gas is $3 per gallon today, don’t assume it’ll be $3 in a month; budget for $3.50. If you’re pretty confident that you’ll sell $10,000 in the first month, determine that the bare minimum you need to sell will be in order to keep the lights on and then make sure you’re extremely confident you can sell to at least that level.

Do you have a good cash flow horror story? Better still, do you have a good story of how you avoided cash flow problems during the first few months of operating your business?

More Thoughts on Finding a Business Opportunity

2011-03-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

In past entries I've talked about how you can begin your search for a self-employment opportunity by looking for the point where your passions, your expertise and the local market all converge:

Today I'd like to expand on that topic just a bit further. Looking at the bigger trends in our society right now, where are the obvious (better still, the not-so-obvious) growth sectors? Here are the ones that I can see:

The Browning of America: The rapidly growing Hispanic segment of our population. These individuals will need all of the same goods and services as everyone else, but along with the obvious issues related to English as a second language, they also face challenges related to their continued interaction with friends and families from their countries of origin as well as navigating the cultural differences between those home countries and their adopted home.
The Graying of America: The rapidly growing seniors segment of our population: the aging Baby Boomers. As this population grows older, they face new issues related to health care, managing their budgets (as many have seen their retirement savings shrink dramatically and/or experienced cutbacks in the benefits available through their pensions) and mobility. At the same time, this group as a whole seems determined to remain active and relevant as opposed to "quietly growing old" as many of their own parents did.
The Crumbling of America: Our entire infrastructure: our roads, schools, hospitals, airports, phone and data systems, state and national parks, etc. are falling apart due to age, neglect, increased use at levels they were never designed to handle, or simple obsolescence.
The Greening of America: Cities are reclaiming abandoned industrial sites that are often polluted with chemicals and other waste from years of unregulated use. As gas prices again flirt with $4 per gallon, more people and companies are aggressively pursuing ways to improve efficiency, reduce energy consumption and transition from fossil fuels to cleaner, renewable resources like wind, solar and geothermal.
The Dividing of America: It's news to no one that the gap between the wealthiest and poorest Americans is growing. What is a relatively new development is how quickly it's happening and how the great Middle Class is quickly breaking into the wealthy and less-well off groups. You can see it on car lots: car makers are moving all of their brands upscale (Cadillac XLR-V: $100,000+) to chase the more well-heeled customers and at the same time introducing smaller, cheaper, more fuel efficient models (Ford Fiesta, MINI Cooper, Chevy Cruise, etc.). High-end organic food "boutique" stores and low-end chains like Aldi and SaveALot are carving out larger portions of the grocery segment at the cost of traditional stores like Kroger and Family Fare.
The ADD'ing of America: Do you still remember a time when if the family took an 8 hour car trip to visit relatives out of state when you didn't have SiriusXM satellite radio with 200+ channels to choose from, or iPhones and iPads that let you stream your favorite movies and TV shows online from the road? Or when you didn't have iTunes or Kindle Readers that let you instantly download albums or books and carry 100's of them with you everwhere you went? In 2011, consumers now have the expectation that they will have 24/7 entertainment, on demand and in nearly infinite variety, and that they can purchase almost any item they want online whenever and whereever they wish.
The Reconnecting of America: Sure, Starbucks makes a mean cup of coffee, and your town's microbrewery probably offers an excellent ale, but in an age of "cocooning" where we all live like hermits in our homes with broadband internet and digital cable TV, these businesses also offer the opportunity to directly connect with other human beings in the real world, and that's a big part of their appeal.
The Scaring of America: Terrorism. Road Rage. Tainted Food. Chinese Toys with Lead Paint. I don't know if America is a more dangerous place than it used to be, but I do know that we're all much more aware of, and concerned about, the dangers around us than we used to be.

Do you have passions and/or expertise in any products, services or industries that can be adapted to responding to one or more of these trends? If so, that's probably a good place to begin your search for self-employment opportunities.

An Open Letter to Governor Rick Snyder

2011-03-16T19:34:00.001-07:00

(I actually sent this to the governor on 3/16/11…minus the gratuitous images that make the blog version more fun to read)

Dear Governor Snyder,

Congratulations on your success in the last election and best wishes for a productive and successful term as our new leader. However, I must take issue with your assertion that you are “one tough nerd.”

As I’m sure you’re aware, your decision to repeal the various tax breaks to moviemakers that had previously been used to lure film projects to Michigan directly resulted in the production company that was going to shoot portions of “The Avengers” in Michigan to pull out of our state and make their movie elsewhere.

Here's the thing: no legitimate, self-respecting nerd would ever do anything to prevent a movie starring Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Hulk from being made in his home state. to paraphrase Lloyd Bensen:

"Governor, I am a nerd. I know nerds. Nerds are friends of mine. Governor, you're no nerd."

All joking aside, I hope you will seriously reconsider your decision to repeal the tax incentives to attract more movie projects to Michigan, and here’s why:

Outside of our state, the rest of the nation sees our entire state is little more than the city of Flint – closed plants, foreclosed homes and an angry, frustrated and largely unemployed population of former production workers.

By attracting high-profile, glamorous and inherently creative businesses and industries into our state, we can make great headway toward changing the perception of the rest of the nation – the whole world, really – of what our state is really like. We are knee-deep in brilliant designers, engineers, writers, performers and other high-value professionals. The movie industry is a spectacular platform to accomplish this.

Additionally, moviemaking is a goldmine for tourism. Case in point: the largely forgettable Christopher Reeve romantic period piece, “Somewhere in Time”, which was shot on Mackinac Island in 1980, continues to attract tourists to the island and the Grand Hotel. In the same vein, don’t you think that real nerds would come by the thousands to see the spot where The Hulk knocked Thor through the side of a building in downtown Detroit?

Movie making will help us to retain our current pool of talented, creative, innovative citizens and help to attract new ones to Michigan.

Again, I sincerely wish you great success as you tackle the many and daunting challenges facing our state. Oh, and I’d like you to issue a public retraction of your claim that you’re a nerd. But mostly the “great success” thing.

Regards,

Ed Keeter

What's your opinion? Was Gov. Snyder right to repeal the tax incentive program for the film industry? Or am I right that the film industry is an invaluable component of our efforts to re-invent Michigan in the new economy?

Free Antivirus, Spyware Removal & Maintenance Apps

2011-02-28T07:24:00.001-08:00

So you just got your new PC, or inherited a good hand-me-down computer from a friend. In past blog entries I’ve talked about ways to improve and maintain your PC’s performance and to avoid catastrophic data loss problems, but here’s some stuff you can do to proactively protect your computer as well.

95% of the hackers who do these things are fairly unskilled, antisocial 13 year olds with too much free time, but if you’re unprotected, they can still do serious damage. And the other 5% are very skilled hackers who can do even more damage, more quickly.

When you first look at the daily reports from your antivirus software, you may be shocked: you can expect multiple attempts to get into your computer to be made every single day.

If you have the budget for it, programs like Norton Antivirus or McAfee are absolute must-haves. Any time your PC is connected to the internet – which is really any time your PC is turned on, if you have a high-speed cable, DSL or satellite internet connection, you are vulnerable to having your data stolen or your computer infected with a virus.

If you’re on a more limited budget, a terrific (and free) alternative is AVG Antivirus Free Edition 2011, available from www.download.com. The editors ad CNET highly recommend it, and I’ve used it with good success on computers in the past.

In addition to a good antivirus app, you also want a powerful program to prevent, detect and remove spyware and malware programs that can covertly track your internet activity and forward it to a company or hacker without your knowledge. Download.com has a great freeware app for this as well, Adaware Free Internet Security.

Lastly, because I can never stress the importance of this enough, get in the practice of regularly backing up all of your data. The best/fastest/easiest way is to subscribe to a service like Carbonite, which will automatically back up your PC data to a secure server on the internet without you doing anything.

Two free alternatives to Carbonite that requires you to manually move your files to a free, secure space online are to set up an account with either Google Docs or Microsoft Office Live.

Lastly, you can always back your files up on a USB Thumb Drive (4GB thumb drives can be purchased for under $20 almost anywhere), CD or DVD or to an external hard drive.

Fair warning: thumb drives, CDs and DVDs can be lost or damaged, and external hard drives can be damaged or corrupted as well, and in the event of something like a house fire, the odds are if you lose your PC in the fire, you’ll lose any backup files you have in your home as well.

Have you used any of these apps? How did they work for you? Have you found other antivirus/spyware programs that worked well for you? Do you have a personal experienced with getting hacked or having your PC data lost or corrupted you’d like to share to warn others of the importance of being well-protected and backing up data regularly? Jump in in the Comments section and share your experience!

Check Out This Resource: Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center

2011-02-13T13:07:00.001-08:00

“When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” - Anonymous

Most of what I share on my blog relates to the types of services available through my own business, Keeter Consulting, and the Central Michigan University LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center, for whom I frequently operate as a sub-contractor assisting customers of Michigan Rehabilitation Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Don’t get me wrong – my company and the CMU LEC are fantastic resources, but I’m a firm believer in [A] using the right tool for the job and [B] obtaining feedback from a variety of sources when possible. In the same manner that even the best resume writer will have someone else review their resume before they send it out, any good business consultant will encourage you to solicit opinions from other experts on their project. Different organizations will have access to different data, more region-specific knowledge, different areas of emphasis in their work, etc.

In the past I’ve mentioned organizations like The Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), local chambers of commerce, the Michigan Small Business One-Stop web site and professional organizations like Business Network International.

Today I’m adding in the Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center to that list of resources. Rather than offer my interpretation of it, here’s their own description of what they do:

The Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center (MI-SBTDC) enhances Michigan's economic well-being by providing counseling, training, research and advocacy for new ventures, existing small businesses and innovative technology companies. With offices statewide, the MI-SBTDC positively impacts the economy by strengthening existing companies, creating new jobs, retaining existing jobs, and assisting companies in defining their path to success.

The State Headquarters, located at Grand Valley State University, supports 12 regional offices and over 30 satellite offices, each providing counseling and training to small business owners and entrepreneurs throughout the 83 counties in Michigan through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Judging from the case studies and other information on their web site, my sense is that they focus on small businesses of a slightly larger scale (# of employees, start-up costs, revenue) than the ones that I work with directly or via the CMU LEC. It’s also my sense that they are assisting people with more direct self-employment/small business experience at the start of the process than I typically encounter. That having been said, if they can spot an error or missed opportunity, or they can offer suggestions for alternative funding options or creative solutions to help control operating expenses, they can rapidly make themselves well worth the exchange of a few phone calls and emails to engage them in the process.

I’ll be learning more about the MISBTDC in the coming weeks and months and will report back what I learn in this blog.

Do you have any personal experience with the MISBTDC? How were they able to help you?

What Weird Movies Can Tell Us About Self-Employment

2011-02-13T12:34:00.001-08:00

I was sitting around the other day, hard at work procrastinating to delay doing the laundry list of tedious chores around my house that was waiting for me, when I suddenly drew a connection between two seemingly completely unrelated things: my small business blog and my love of quirky cult movies. The movies in question are the fantastic, but scarcely known, movie “The Zero Effect”, and the just-plain-bizarre science fiction epic, "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension." I recommend The Zero Effect to any movie buff. Buckaroo Banzai is a much more niche audience movie…watch at your own risk. You’ll either love it or (more likely) hate it.

Let’s start with The Zero Effect:

If you’re among the 90% or so of moviegoers who probably don’t recall ever having heard of this flick, here’s the quick version: Bill Pullman stars as Daryl Zero, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. When on a case, the multilingual, sleuth who has encyclopedic knowledge of science, architecture, history, etc., Daryl Zero is a master of disguise and unparalleled in his deductive abilities.

Like his inspiration, Holmes, when Daryl is between cases he’s a complete, non-functioning train wreck of a human being. You get the idea. You can watch the trailer here.

During the story, one of the sub-plots is that Daryl is writing his memoir in his down time, summing up some of his strategies and tactics. I was thinking about these comments when I realized they had a bit of relevance to the work I do with my customers when we’re preparing business plans.

Here are the ones that struck me, and how I related them to the world of self-employment:

Daryl Zero: I can't possibly overstate the importance of good research….research is an art, not a science, because anyone who knows what they're doing can find the crumbs, the wheres, whats, and whos. The art is in the whys: the ability to read between the crumbs, not to mix metaphors….The art of research is the ability to look at the details, and see the passion.

Ed:Researching a business idea: the market, the customers, the competition, the industry, the economic trends, all that good stuff, is time consuming and usually difficult. 90% of what you will “uncover” is simple confirmation of things you already knew, e.g. more women go to romantic comedies than men, and more men go to action movies than women. But when you get enough data on all of the factors at play in your business, e.g. customers, competition and demographic trends, you start to make new connections between pieces of information that result in chances for greater competitive advantage and profitability.

Daryl Zero: Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.

Ed: If you go out looking for how many homes in Kent County bought dishwashers in 2010, you’ll probably hit a dead end. That specific data simply may not exist or it may not be available to you. But if you go out looking to see what households were spending money on in general in 2010, you might be able to pick up related data (overall appliance sales, average life span of dishwashers, new home builds, kitchen remodels, etc.) that let you “triangulate” what you need and maybe even understand the situation more deeply.

Daryl Zero: I always say that the essence of my work relies fundamentally on two basic principles: objectivity and observation, or "the two obs" as I call them. My work relies on my ability to remain absolutely, purely objective, detached. I have mastered the fine art of detachment. And while it comes at some cost, this supreme objectivity is what makes me, I dare say, the greatest observer the world has ever known.

Ed: Let the numbers do the talking. Before you make up your mind as to whether or not a business idea is a good one, or to add a new product or service, or to buy some new piece of equipment that should improve your profit margin, take emotion out of the game. Which will have the greater impact on the bottom line: buying the $10,000 machine that will double your productivity or buying $10,000 worth of advertising that will increase your sales by 30%?

Daryl Zero: Passion is the enemy of precision.

Ed: Passion leads to selective hearing (only hearing the information that you want to hear, not anything challenging it) and cutting corners, which invariably will catch up with you in the end.

Daryl Zero: A person can't escape their nature.

Ed: I read this two ways:

First, If you’re an artist at heart, you’ll never be truly successful running a business that doesn’t allow you to express that aspect of yourself. If you’re a structured, by-the-book personality, you’ll have similar problems with a job that is entirely a fast-and-loose, always-improvising type of self-employment. “This above all, be true to thine self.” – Bill Shakespeare.

Next, if people have needs, they will find a way to fulfill them. Your customers will find a way to obtain the type of goods or services you offer whether or not you’re there to provide them. The world functioned very well for 10,000 years before the instant oil change industry was created…the question is how you can meet more than just the stated need (like an oil change on one’s car) but their unstated needs as well (avoiding the time and hassle of doing it themself, avoiding the risk of screwing it up and wrecking their engine, enjoying the confidence of knowing it was done by an experienced professional).

------

Next is The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. The title alone should be warning enough that this is *not* your mainsteam type of movie. However, if morbid curiousity gets the better of you, you can watch the trailer here.

The shortest possible synopsis of this movie: Buckaroo Banzai is the world’s greatest neurosurgeon, spy, test pilot and physicist (among other things).

He leads a group of similarly multi-super-talented adventurers who battle evil and save the world. Oh, and they all play in a rock band in their off-hours.

If it sounds like a 14 year old boy’s hero daydream, that’s probably because that’s pretty much what it is, right down to the evil aliens and the damsel in distress to rescue.

I digress. Here are Buckaroo’s words of wisdom:

Buckaroo: "Nobody is nobody. Everyone has something to offer."

Ed: Doesn’t even need translating, does it? Value yourself, value your customers.

Buckaroo: "Remember; no matter where you go, there you are."

Ed: Your business, much like your life, will take you in entirely unexpected directions. Make the most of the situations that arise around you.

Buckaroo: "Nothing is ever what it seems but everything is exactly what it is."

Ed: Look deeper behind the data. Why aren’t your competitors offering some product or service that it seems glaringly obvious that they could sell to their customers? Why are women buying more lipstick even as the economy is getting worse? Shake off your assumptions and look with fresh eyes.

"Treat us good, we'll treat you better. Treat us bad, We'll treat you worse."

Ed: That is what every customer is telling you every time they walk into your shop.

"Expect the unexpected. He does."

Ed: Things will not go entirely as you plan. Have some contingency plans in place in case the price of fuel doubles unexpectedly, or your #1 supplier suddenly isn’t available, or the company notebook PC you rely on gets stolen.

"Those in a hurry show only that the thing they are about is too big for them."

Ed: In over four years of helping people launch businesses, I’ve seen many loose some money because they took longer to launch properly than they’d hoped. However I cannot think of a single business that I helped to “rush-launch” that didn’t encounter major, often fatal, problems.

"Progress over Protocol."

Ed: Something is always better than Nothing. If you can’t get all of the data need on your customers, get what you can so you have at least something to refer to. If you can’t get the perfect piece of equipment for a specific job, get the one that you can obtain, even if you know you will need to replace it in 12 months. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough, and don’t let formalities like “we should all have a face-to-face meeting” bring your project to a complete halt for two weeks until the meeting can occur.

"The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care."

Ed: If you’re not afraid that your business might crash and burn, then either you’re not passionate about it or you don’t fully understand the risks involved. Either way, you’re not in the right frame of mind and/or the right line of work if you’re not at least a little anxious.

"A battle won is a battle which we will not acknowledge to be lost."

Ed: Count on multiple setbacks during the process of planning and launching your business. Make the commitment tosee it through, and make arrangements to allow yourself do stick with it even with the delays, added expenses, etc. that will accompany the setbacks. Self-employment isn’t for the faint of heart.

Do you have any famous quotes from movies, famous people or people in your own personal circle of friends and family that guide you in your life and career choices? Do you like weird movies? Tell us about either of them in the comments section!

Great video from Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs

2011-01-12T14:09:00.000-08:00

This is slightly off-topic for my blog, but it was so interesting and entertaining that I couldn't resist sharing it anyway. The video at the end of this entry is of a presentation by Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. If you're that one person who's never heard of this show, Mike travels all over America in search of the most filthy, difficult and dangerous jobs in the country, then heads out with the people who do them every day to attempt to do them himself.

His speech hits on a bunch of different things, but relative to my blog audience (and you know who you are), he made three points that really hit home with me:

1. We've always been told to "follow your dreams." Maybe that's not the best idea! Most people who run off to LA to become a movie star or rock star end up losing their shirt on the deal and never having any real success. Mike - who happens to be a classically trained opera singer, but now has a TV show where he's up to his waist in all sorts of muck each weak - thinks there's a better approach:

2. See which way everyone's running, and then look for the job they're fleeing from. He cited the example of the pig farmer in Las Vegas who gathers up all the left over food scraps from the casinos (a truly disgusting mess) and then feeds it to his pigs. The casinos love him for taking care of their waste more cheaply than a trash company, the food companies love him because his pigs grow bigger and faster on that diet, and the community loves him for his brilliant recycling system. Oh, and he's gotten rich in the process. What "dirty job" is there that others want to avoid but you could do?

3. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that there's dignity, and a tremendous amount of happiness, to be found in work, even "dirty job" types of work. We need people to do these things to make our collective quality of life what it is. Mike noted that the vast majority of people he's met doing dirty jobs are genuinely happy, despite the working conditions.

Anyway, if his philsosophical discussion of the importance of dirty jobs doesn't grab you, then his story about castrating sheep will do the trick.

What ideas did Mike's presentation generate for you as you watched it? What's the dirtiest job you ever had? What's the best job you ever had?

Sales Projections: How to Do Better than Just Guessing

2010-12-23T09:09:00.001-08:00

Perhaps the most critical and difficult challenge that goes into creating a good business plan is making accurate sales projections. It’s easy enough to figure out what your overhead expenses (rent, utilities, fuel, etc.) will be, and it’s not too much harder to figure out what your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) on a per-item basis or your variable expenses (travel, advertising, etc.) will be, but your bottom line net profit still depends on your top line: total revenue, a.k.a. sales.

In the best circumstances, you have timely, apples-to-apples data upon which you can make your sales projections. If you’re buying an established business that has consistently done $100,000 in sales each of the past three years, and you’re not changing anything, the odds are pretty good that you’ll be doing about $100,000 in sales the first year you run the business.

Similarly, if the Burger King directly across the street from where you’re opening a McDonalds has been selling $1,000,000 annually, the odds are pretty good that your shop will sell between $500,000 and $1,000,000 annually (depending on how much new business you attract to the area vs. how much you “split” with Burger King).

But the best circumstances are exceedingly rare. Usually we have to look at regional or national vs. local data, or data from 3-5 years ago vs. current data, or we have to look at similar-but-not-the-same businesses (budget chain haircut shop like Supercuts vs. a high end, full-service beauty salon), or we have to look at data only tangentially related to our business, e.g. statistics on the # of cars that travel daily on the road on which our coffee shop is located.

Here are some basic guidelines for making sales projections:

Data that is more recent and related to more similar businesses to your own is better than older data and/or data from less similar businesses. (Duh.)
At every turn, err on the side of conservative sales estimates. There are no consequences for outselling your projections, but there can be dire consequences if your business model is counting on hitting a certain sales figure to make ends meet and you come up short of that level.
When you have to rely on more tangential data (Supercuts vs. the Beauty Salon), make note of, and factor in, the differences (Supercuts does higher volumes at lower prices, but has longer hours and spends more on advertising).
Whenever possible, get data from two or more sources. If the sources all indicate similar sales volumes, great; if not, try to find out why they don’t agree with one another.

Let me share an example (names/details changed to protect the innocent) of how you can “triangulate” your sales projections by looking at multiple data sources that are only tangentially related to your business.

I had a customer who opened a take-out restaurant. He calculated that he’d need to sell about 6 meals/hour on average in order to cover his expenses and make a reasonable profit for himself. That would add up to sales of about $50,000 annually. Based on his prior experience working in restaurants, that seemed reasonable (Data Source #1).

We found regional data on all restaurants that offered take out as part of their models that suggested annual sales of about $500,000 annually. Upon closer inspection, that included restaurants like McDonalds that had longer hours, bigger, cheaper menus, more advertising, etc. We estimated that my customer’s restaurant might do 10% of that average annual sales level, or…$50,000. (Data Source #2).

We found sales data from the previous occupant of the restaurant, who had operated a take-out hot dog stand several years earlier. This was a lower cost product and it wasn’t marketed as aggressively as my customer would be promoting his own business, so we figured that we could conservatively do at least 50% better than he previous business had done, which would put us at about $40,000 (Data Source #3).

Finally, we found Michigan Dept. of Transportation data on the street where the restaurant was located. Based on the number of cars that travelled that road daily, if 1% of them stopped to buy something, that would work out to about $60,000 in sales annually.

Owner Prior Experience: $50,000
Regional/Industry Data: $50,000
Older/Similar Business: $40,000
MDOT Data: $60,000

All of the numbers more or less agreed with one another, suggesting that the $50,000 sales projection was probably a reasonable one.

In the end, was our sales projection a guess? Of course. But it was a guess that was consistent with the the multiple (if limited) data sources we could locate. It was also a conservative guess. We could have said 5% of cars stopped and we were able to make 20% of the $500,000 regional sales average, which would have suggested a higher sales volume for us, but recognizing the limited quality of our data, we played it safe.

So where can you find data upon which to make sales projections?

www.wikipedia.org

Industry Data
City, County and/or State demographic data

www.google.com

Google Search

Industry Data
Industry/Professional organizations

Google Books

Industry Data

Google Maps

Competitors (who often have some sales information on their web sites or on financial sites of they are publicly traded)

www.freedemographicsdata.com

Demographic Data re: income, age, gender, ethnicity, family status, household value, etc. by ZIP, City, County, State

Your State web site (e.g. www.michigan.gov)

Industry Data
Demographic Data
Secretary of State / Dept. of Transportation / other agency data

Similar businesses in other regions (with whom you’re not competing)
Other businesses in your same region (with whom you’re not competing, e.g.auto mechanics vs. auto body shops)
Your prospective customers (via interviews, surveys)

How much do they intend to spend monthly/annually on your types of products or services? How much might they be willing to spend with you?

Your local

Library (in Kent County, MI: www.grpl.org)
Chamber of Commerce

What other resources or best practices do you use when making sales projections?

Computers & Business: How to NOT Have a Bad Day

2010-11-22T10:32:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone.

I'm HAL 9000, the computer from the movie "2001: A Space Odessy." As a computer who was damaged by too many people putting in too many programs that didn't work well with each other inside me, I'm uniquely qualified to offer some thoughts and experiences to small business owners like yourselves who work with your own computers.

Since Ed, the usual blogger here, hasn't had time to pound out the next video blog on business plan development, I volunteered to share a story about Ed and some advice to all of you on his behalf.

About two months ago Ed's faithful Toshiba notebook PC, "Toshi", began acting up with increasing frequency and severity - both hardware and software problems. It's led a hard life with a lot of heavy use, a lot of travel, frequent additions and deletions of new software, etc., and it was four years old, rapidly approaching that magical 5-year mark where PCs tend to start malfunctiong a lot.

Being nobody's fool, Ed had been backing up the files he kept on Toshi onto an external hard drive monthly and had actually done so only days before his PC totally quit working. Efforts to revive it by reinstalling Windows Vista on it inexplicably failed (it'd always worked in the past) and Ed was forced to buy a new notebook PC.

Smiling at his own genius, smugly content that he had done everything right, Ed connected his external hard drive to my new PC to pull down the files he'd backed up, and....nothing. The external hard drive had failed as well! A little research revealed that for about $250 a data recovery company would ATTEMPT to recover the lost information, and that if they did succeed that amount would rapidly exceed $500 for the effort, so that was a dead end.

Actually, Ed got off fairly easily by comparison. When I acted up on the way to Jupiter, I killed almost all of the astronauts travelling with me on our spaceship...but that's another story.

What saved Ed was a 3-month old data backup he'd done on a DVD, plus copies of most of his emails, complete with attachments (like copies of business plans, invoices, etc.) still available through his Yahoo email account. Long story short, it took a few days of digging, but Ed was finally able to recover all of his mission critical files and most of his other files as well.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer some recommendations for each of you as you work with your current business computers that will hopefully save you a lot of time, money and trouble:

First, make sure you have a secure wireless network (most people don't, by the way) and that you've got the latest and greatest in PC protection software running on your machine. Very often your internet service provider will offer its users an antivirus program like Norton or McAfee for free, otherwise you can purchase them online or at any electronics or office supply store for $50-$100. If money's tight, there are some good freeware PC protection apps available at www.download.com (part of the CNET web site, a very safe, legitimate download source).

Next, back up early, back up often -- and I'd add this: Back up different ways! Hard drives and thumb drives can fail on you. CDs and DVDS can get lost or scratched. Online services like www.officelive.com or docs.google.com can have technical problems. As I said, it was a 3 month old DVD backup that saved Ed when his hard drive backup failed.

Finally, maintain some discipline regarding who uses your business computer, how and where. Remeber, this PC is a critical asset to your business. Don't get yourself in trouble because your spouse deleted four years of customer records to make room on the hard drive to download a copy of "Avatar" or because your son or daughter downloaded some game with malware that wrecked your PC Registry. Business PC = Business Use Only. Personal PC = Personal Use Only.

How can I make accurate sales projections? Also, Happy 4th Anniversary Keeter Consulting!

2010-10-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

First off, this blog entry marks the fact that Keeter Consulting celebrated its 4th year of existence earlier this week, so....yay, whoopiee and such. I offer a giant and heartfelt thank you to the friends and colleagues who helped me to keep the business running this long and I look forward to working with all of you for another 4 years, or until my business is destroyed by a scathing 60 Minutes investigation, whichever comes first.

I want to throw in a quick discussion that's slightly out of sequence with my ongoing video blog series on writing a business plan. I've recently been approached by several customers, both current and previous, who were looking for help with making sales projections for their businesses. This is one of the more challenging but important aspects of business planning. Here's my take on the issue:

In a perfect world you want hard, apples-to-apples sales statistics. This is fairly easy to do if you're taking over an existing busienss that can share its sales statistics from previous years, or if you have access to sales figures for a direct, apples-to-apples competitor. For instance, if you're opening a McDonalds directly across the street from a Burger King, BK's numbers should give you a very good estimate for what your own might look like...if BK was foolish enough to share that information with you.

However, since most of the small businesses I assist are more "niche market" players who have small, privately held businesses for competitors, it’s usually nearly impossible to get good, straight-to-the-point, statistics.

What’s left is to try to “triangulate” an estimate from 2 or more tangentially related information sources. For example, let's say we're opening a take-out restaurant that sells Chinese food. We might be able to identify three sources of reliable, if tangental, numbers. The following example uses fake numbers but is based on work I did for an actual take out restaurant:

We located a restaurant industry report that showed fast food/takeout places in Michigan averaged something like 600 transactions daily. Now that includes juggernauts like McDonalds that probably do 1,500+ transactions daily due to longer hours, wider selection, lower prices, huge advertising campaigns, dine-in/drive through options, etc., but we said “What if we conservatively estimate that we’d do just 10 % of the industry average? 60 transactions daily?”
We found MI Dept. of Transportation statistics for the vehicle traffic on the road where our restaurant is located said that 4,500 cars would drive past us daily. We then said “What if we got 1% of them to stop? That’d be 45 transactions daily.”
We found some 7 year old sales numbers for the hot dog stand that had previously operated there…different products, prices and hours, but same location and same take-out model. They’d done something like 80 transactions daily. "We'll probably sell a little less because our products cost more, but we'll also make more profit per sale due to that higher price, so 80 transactions seems reasonable."
Well, 45, 60 and 80 are reasonably close numbers relative to our purposes, so we averaged them and concluded we’d probably do (conservatively) about 62.5 transactions daily. To play it safe, we rounded that down to 60.

Our estimate of 60 was still largely guesswork, but it was guesswork that corresponded well with very conservative interpretations of the best data we were able to gather, and that data from three completely unrelated sources corresponded with itself surprisingly well. It was also a number that comfortably exceeded the sales volume that we needed to make the business sufficiently (but minimally) profitable, which I talk about in the last section of this well-intended but very long-winded blog entry.

Okay, new example. Now let's make sales projections for a computer repair shop in Faketown, MI. How many repairs are we likely to do monthly? Annually? Since none of the other 3 repair shops in or near Faketown will share their information with us, we need to get creative. Again, using fake numbers, here's what we might piece together:

Census statistics say that 85% of homes own at least 1 PC; a 2008 article in Wired magazine says that most homes have 2 PCs. We conservatively figure 1.5 PCs per home.
Census statistics also say we have 3,000 homes in Faketown.
We know that PCs generally are replaced every 5 years and usually come with a 1 year warranty.
We know that PCs generally require non-warranty serving twice in their lifespan.
We know we have 3 established competitors that don't market their services aggressively anymore; we believe that our better service and aggressive marketing will allow us to grab 1/4 of the computer repair market.

Let's crunch the numbers:

3,000 homes * 85% with PCs * 1.5 PCs per home = 3,825 PCs.
3,825 PCs - 20% still under warranty (765) = 3,060 PCs that might need servicing.
3,060 PCs * 2 repairs / 4 years = 1,530 repairs needed annually.
1,530 repairs / 4 competitors (you and the three existing ones) = ~380 repairs annually.

The Golden Rule here is this: Every time you have to make an educated guess, acknowledge it and go with the more conservative end of the scale with your guess.

It’s still a lot of research, but it turns a “wild-ass guess” into a “data-driven, educated, wild-ass guess.”

Lastly, while knowing how many computer repairs or chinese dinners are sold annually in your area is obviously a very important data point, it’s not the only one that matters. Again, in a perfect world, you’d want to be able to set up your operation so that it could be profitable even if it only made one sale per year. Clearly that’s not realistic, but it begs some other relevant questions that help to establish the viability of the business idea that are best answered with a Revenue & Expense forecast:

What are your anticipated sale prices, your cost of goods sold, and your variable and fixed expenses? I like to look at this monthly. Example:
Widgets sell for $4,000 each with a cost of goods sold (COGS) of $3,000 each so your Gross Revenue per Widget is $1,000.
Your fixed monthly fuel, insurance, rent, marketing, etc. costs are$1,700.

So...

If I sell one widget, I net a $700 loss ($1,000 - $1,700)
If I sell 2 widget I net a $300 profit ($2,000 - $1,700), and
If I sell 5 widgets/month I net (pre-tax) $3,300.

The point is you want to be able to establish what the minimum sales level needs to be to make the business sufficiently profitable. Then as long as your educated, conservative, but still largely wild-ass guess is comfortably above that number, you don’t need to worry as much about how spot-on accurate the sales projections are. You’ve proven that you can be profitable even in a realistic, worst-case-scenario. Anything better than the worst-case-scenario is just gravy at that point.

Make sense? Seem reasonable?

Keeter Consulting Video Blog: 02 of 18 The Marketing Section: Part 1 - Customers

2010-08-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

This is the third installment in a beginning-to-end, step-by-step walk through of creating a business plan. This video blog starts to discuss what goes into the marketing section of a business plan, focusing specifically on information related to customers. A second installment will be posted looking at competitors, and a third will address product, price, place and promotion considerations.

Me on "A Wider World" TV program

2010-08-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I helped out Tom D'Ambrosio, a former customer of mine and current owner of Oak Forest Sales & Consulting. Tom is an independent sales representative who markets a wide range of products throughout Michigan, particularly in the northern and western regions of the lower peninsula.
One of Tom's more successful products is a device called Emergentag. This is a bright red, water/dirt/shock resistant USB thumb drive that when plugged into any PC, automatically pops up a screen containing the relevant medical and emergency contact information for its owner. I'm sold on these, by the way -- I carry one and bought others for my wife and mother.

Tom had been approached by the producers of A Wider World, a TV program that shows on numerous PBS stations around America, to discuss his personal experience as a person with a disability reentering the work force as a small business owner and his experience with marketing the Emergentag product, with Emergentag itself being a similar small business.

Tom asked me as a fan of the product if I'd be willing to let them record me for the segment the show was doing on Tom and Emergentag. Never one to shy away from a video camera or an excuse for a day trip to Detroit, I was happy to help out. Here's the video segment A Wider World did that featured both Tom and me.

If there's a small business lesson to all of this, it's probably a lesson about the power of networking, personal selling and aggressive, "guerilla-marketing" styles of promotion. Four small businesses (Emergentag, Oak Forest Sales & Consulting, A Wider World and Keeter Consulting) were all able to connect on a project that was fun, easy, inexpensive and yet provided a great marketing tool for each of them. In honesty, this is mostly about me having fun seeing myself on TV.

New Business Story: Murfee's Boutique

2010-08-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

Today I was able to visit the official opening of a small business in Benton Harbor that has proven to be one of my most challenging, interesting and educational launches since I started working as a small business consultant.

At 10:30 a.m. this morning, Owner Ethel Golliday officially opened Murfee's Boutique, a clothing store specializing in dressy-casual fashions for plus-sized women. The business is located at 82 West Main Street in Benton Harbor, MI, immediateley adjacent to Tabor Hill wine tasting room...in case you need that little tiny bit of extra incentive to pay her a visit!

This was a total team effort, lest I give you the wrong impression:

Ethel was a customer of Michigan Rehabilitation Services where she worked with Rehabilitation Counselor Yvonne Lopez, who contracted the CMU LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center for assistance with evaluating, refining and ultimately implementing her business plan. I worked as CMU's front man assisting Ethel, but I relied heavily on the rest of the CMU LEC to help with improving our market research and other aspects of building her business plan.

Given the nature of the business and the start-up costs typical for this type of venture, MRS wasn't able to fully fund the project. At that point we turned to the Cornerstone Chamber of Commerce (the chamber of commerce for the Benton Harbor/St. Joseph area). The Cornerstone CoC helped in a variety of ways including assistance with marketing her new business and connecting us with their local chapter of SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) who helped us refine our business plan to improve Ethel's chances of securing a loan.

The Cornerstone Chamber of Commerce also connected us with the Cornerstone Alliance, a separate program through which Ethel was able to secure a loan to cover the remaining start-up costs after MRS's contribution.

Throw in the other organizations that helped at least tangentally, including the Social Security Administration's PASS Program and Ticket to Work Program, the Michigan Employmet Loan Fund and the Small Business Administration, all of whom offered guidance even when they could not provide otehr support, and you see why I don't get to claim full credit for this launch.

We ended up revisiting and refining the business plan until we'd reduced the anticipated start-up costs by nearly 50% of their original projections. We repeatedly invented and re-invented our marketing strategy to accommodate our changing budget and the impact of a changing start-time. We repeatedly sought out more, new and better data to support the business plan and its sales projections as we had to shift from our original anticipated funding sources to new and different ones. But in the end we had what we needed: a well-qualified entrepreneur, a sound business idea and an array of resources available that all shared in the goal of making Murfee's Boutique a reality.

The result of all of this effort was that we were able to work with Ethel to take her intial idea, refine it, establish the most cost-effective way of realizing it and marketing it and to secure the funds and other support necessary to make it happen. Now we have a new business in Benton Harbor's rapidly returning downtown area and a highly skilled and motivated individual back at work after a years-long absense due to an auto accident.

I'll try to keep everyone posted on Ethel's progress as she now grows this fledgling enterprise into an ever more profitable, sustainable business.

Hey, want to see the place? Check this out:

Behold the Power of Press Releases, Public Relations and Promotion!

2010-07-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

Advertising is great. It's an essential and effective component of any small business marketing strategy. But it does have its limitations and drawbacks. Obviously there's the cost, as well as the challenge of finding an advertising channel that cost-effectively reach your target audience (no point in paying to advertise to a lot of people or businesses who aren't likely ever going to become your customers). And of course as consumers we all know that advertisements will always present the company and its products or services in the best possible light -- not always in a fair and balanced manner.

That's where public relations and promotional activities have many advantages. They're incredibly inexpensive: sending out 100 press releases can be done for under $50, cheaper still if they're sent by email or fax. They eliminate the need for cost-effectiveness: if it's free publicity, who cares if it reaches 10,000 people you don't care about as long as it reaches the 1,000 that you do? And it's generally percieved as providing a more objective picture of your business and its products or services.

First, a quick definition of public relations / promotional activities:

PR and promotional activity is the process of announcing to area media outlets like newspapers, radio and TV stations about some new development related to your company that will be of interest to their audience. In its simplest form, this means sending a press release - a one page announcement - to either all area media outlets or to a few ones selected because of their logical connection with the announcement.

This can become more elaborate through arranging press conferences, proactively approaching outlets to suggest that they interview you about your area of expertise, publishing "op ed" (opinion editorial) letters in local newspapers, staging events in the community, etc.

The best practice for getting your PR announcement picked up and carried by media outlets is to (a) have an announcement of clear and direct interest to their audience and (b) to find a way to tie the announcement to the larger stories of the day, e.g. recent layoffs in the community, the upcoming election, changes in local laws, etc.

Two of my current customers recently made outstanding use of public relations to the benefit of their businesses, and I can't resist relating their stories in the hopes that more people will follow their lead.

The first example is from a new gun shop and training center in Holland, MI called The Bullet Hole. The Bullet Hole is owned and operated by Ben Phillips and Dennis Johnson. Bullet Hole's story was positioned by Ben and Dennis to appeal to local media outlets on several levels. First, it's a story of a new business opening in Holland during a time of continued recession, layoffs and closures. Next, it's a story of an product/service being made available locally for the first time in decades. Finally, Ben and Dennis were able to "name drop" how they engaged Michigan Representative and Gubernatorial candidate Pete Hoekstra to help them expedite the paperwork necessary to open the business.

Here's the article that was written about them in the Holland Sentinel:

My second example is for a soon-to-be-opened coffee shop in Kalamazoo, MI called Urban Blend Coffee House. Urban Blend is owned and operated by Louis Parker Jr. and his wife Gloria. Unlike Bullet Hole, which leveraged PR simply to raise its profile in the community, Louis used it as a tactical tool to address an immediate concern: when congress failed to extend unemployment benefits for people on long-term unemployment, his plans to finalize the launch of his business (which counted on that income) were put on hold indefinitely. The PR move of getting a story about him on FOX 17 News served to raise the business profile but also to encourage members of the community who might be able to help with getting the business up and running to step forward. It worked. Again, he was able to tie his story into the big national story about unemployment benefits as well as the smaller, local story about Kalamazoo's efforts to create more small businesses and new jobs.

As you have new developments related to your own business, are you taking a moment to consider if/how they might be communicated as press releases and connected to larger stories to obtain free (and extremely valuable) media coverage? Do you have a good story of effectively leveraging PR for your own business or organization you'd like to share?

Keeter Consulting Video Blog: 01 of 18 The Executive Summary

2010-07-23T07:01:00.001-07:00

This is the second installment in a beginning-to-end, step-by-step walk through of creating a business plan. This video blog looks at what goes into the first section of the plan, the Executive Summary.

Keeter Consulting Video Blog: 00 of 18 Creating A Business Plan (Overview)

2010-07-09T14:41:00.000-07:00

Over the past three years I've covered several elements of creating a business plan, but I've never done a beginning-to-end, step-by-step walk through of the process...until now. Today's blog is the first in a series I'll be posting that cover the entire business plan development process; my goal is to upload a new one every other week.

Quick! While it's still relatively new! Leveraging Social Networking Sites for Your Business!

2010-06-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

The top three marketing tools for 99% of very small businesses have been the same for centuries: Personal Selling, Word of Mouth and Repeat Business. But times change, and now we have better resources at our disposal to leverage those tools in the form of Social Networking Sites like Facebook. Not convinced this is something your business should be exploiting? Check out my latest video podcast -- bet I can change your mind.

So, did I change your mind?

Video: What drives us?

2010-06-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

This is a video I found on YouTube from a company called RSA Animate You can check out many other videos from them on their YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg. It's really cool on about 10 different levels, and it has a surprising amount of relevance to we small business types.

The short version: to motivate someone to be more productive doing "grunt" work, e.g. cranking out parts in a factory or mowing lawns, just pay them more.

However, once money is not an issue -- the worker is paid well enough to get by with adequate comfort -- pay is not the best motivator to get the best work out of people when you're asking them to do intellectually challenging tasks. It turns out that people doing those kinds of tasks (writing a newspaper article, developing a new product, negotiating between management and unions, etc.) are most motivated by three things:

1. A sense of autonomy -- they can do the work the way they want to
2. An opportunity for mastery -- they can get really good at what it is they do
3. A belief that the work has meaning and value -- that it somehow makes the world a better place in some small way

I'd argue that this is a bulls-eye for those of us who are, or want to be, self-employed. Most of us could make better, or at least comparable, money in a traditional job. But those regular jobs probably offer less of a chance for autonomy, mastery and meaning in our work.

Stop and ask yourself why you're really trying to start your own business. Is it really about getting rich? Not that I'd complain if Keeter Consulting turned into a big, hairy, American, money-making machine, but that's not what gets me up in the morning...

This is also helpful when framing how you can recruit talented people to come work for you when your business may not yet be in a position to pay them well.

There's a famous story of how Steve Jobs, back when Apple Computer was still relatively small, recruited a top executive from either Pepsi or Coke. His sales pitch was simply: "Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water, or would you like to change the world?"

Anyway, enjoy. The way the presenter "animates" the show with his on-the-fly doodling makes it a must-watch video all by itself. Comments encouraged as always.

Accepting Credit Cards - Things to Consider

2010-05-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

In today’s economy, nearly 80% of all businesses provide the option of paying by credit card to their customers. In some industries like fast food, it’s become a necessary cost of doing business to remain competitive. However, there are costs, sometimes significant ones, associated with accepting credit cards as payment. There are also multiple aggressive credit card companies competing for your business. To make matters worse, all of the fees, options and other factors involved make choosing the best credit card processing service a very complex one.

The following is a high-level summary of some of the key costs and considerations to take into account when determining if and when your business should accept credit cards and in choosing which cards and related services it should offer.

Your business will almost certainly have unique needs not addressed in this summary, but this information should help you to enter the marketplace as a better-informed consumer.

Fees

For a typical business where most individual transactions are under ~$250 and there are a relatively small number of daily transactions, figure on the average monthly cost of providing a credit card payment option to your customers of between $50 and $100, slightly higher for online retailers.
Typical fees include

Flat fees of around $0.20 per transaction

A fee that is a percentage of the transaction amount (usually 1-2%)

Batch fees (paid when transactions stored on machine are submitted at end of day)

Note: It’s important to batch out (submit all of the transactions from) your credit card machine at the end of every day! If a customer uses a credit card and the retailer does not batch (submit) it within 30 days, the customer is legally no longer responsible for that purchase!

Annual fees, often as a % of all transactions

Additional fees when non-qualified cards, gift cards & loyalty cards are used

Fees are lowest when

>> Qualifed cards (see below) are used
>> A conventional card swipe machine is used

Note: when a retailer tries to swipe a card through the reader and it doesn’t work, and then the retailer tries again, but with the card inside a plastic bag, the retailer is charged the highest possible amount for that transaction! It’s always better to manually key in the credit card information in that situation.

Fees drop for retailers when

>> They have higher volumes of credit card transactions.
>> They have annual transactions exceeding ~$100,000.

Fees increase for retailers when

>> Individual transactions are frequently fir larger (~$250+) amounts
>> American Express cards, Non-Qualified Cards, Gift Cards & Loyalty Cards are used
>> There are “card not present” transactions, e.g. online purchases, retailer phones in the card for approval, the “plastic bag over the card” trick is used

Types of Cards

Qualified Credit Cards

These are your old-fashioned, just-a-credit-card types of cards. The retailer incurs the least fees when a customer uses one of these cards.

Non-Qualified Credit Cards

These are credit cards that let customers win “rewards points”, “frequent flyer miles” and the like when used. The retailer incurs extra fees when they are used.

Debit Cards

This is your typical ATM card. These usually have low fees associated with them.

Gift Cards / Loyalty Cards

Retailers will generally pay an additional $5-$10/month and $0.12 - $0.20 per transaction to be able to accept these cards.

More importantly, once a retailer sets up a gift card or loyalty card program with a particular credit card processing company, it can be very difficult, even impossible, to migrate those card programs to a different credit card processing company.

Discover

In most regards, Discover behaves just like VISA and Mastercard. However, some companies say they can process VISA, Mastercard and Discover, but they do not handle Discover in the same system as the other two cards, resulting in separate reports (one for VISA/MC, the other for Discover) to be issued monthly. When this happens, the retailer incurs additional fees. Always ask the vendor “”Will I get a separate statement in the mail if I use Discover?” Look for vendors who can handle all three cards in the same system/statement.

American Express>>

AMEX cards are in a different category than VISA,Mastercard & Discover because while most credit card processing services provide services for VISA and Mastercard (and often Discover as well), AMEX is a stand-alone service that is never provided by those companies; it’s only available through AMEX itself.
>> AMEX also has some of the highest fees in the industry. They also charge an arbitrary, additional $8-$10/month to retailers for the right to use their cards. Because of its high costs, AMEX is generally only recommended for
(1) Business-to-Business companies (since so many companies use AMEX)
(2) Businesses with $50,000 or more in monthly transactions.

Credit Card Reader Devices

Most modern machines/systems are capable of also processing ATM debit cards, loyalty cards and gift cards. There is usually a flat fee but no % fee for those transactions.

Credit card swipe machines generally retail for between $300 and $and $500. Often they can be leased for $25-$50 per month as an alternative to buying a machine outright.

Sometimes machines will be provided for free or at a reduced cost in exchange for entering into a long-term contract with the processing company.

Negotiating the Best Deal

Go with a well-recognized vendor, e.g. Costco, 5th 3rd Bank, Hartland, etc. These established players tend to have competitive rates and are less likely to try to hide additional fees into the process.

See if you can get a better deal by having a membership (at places like Costco) or doing your banking through them (e.g. 5th 3rd).

See if you can get a better deal through your local chamber of commerce.

Credit card processing is a hyper-competitive industry. Let the vendor you’re considering know that you’ll be shopping other vendors as well, and that the company with the best offer will win your business. This will motivate them to make you the best offer they can.

Other General Recommendations

If you aren’t sure whether or not your customers will want to be able to pay by credit card, or if you’re considering setting up a gift card or loyalty card program, start off without providing any of these services. You can always add them later, but customers will usually react badly if they’ve come to expect those things and you later decide to discontinue offering them.

If you’re unsure how many of your customers will want to pay with credit/debit cards, leasing a machine for the first year is a good way of managing the risk.

If you sell a lot of very inexpensive you may want to make a rule that cards are only accepted for transactions over $5 or $10. Similarly, you may want to offer a 5% discount for paying in cash on more expensive purchases.

Here is a chart that can be helpful in comparing offers side-by-side:

Video Podcast: Why Self-Employment?

2010-03-31T17:10:00.001-07:00

There are a surprising number of advantages to considering self-employment instead of pursuing "traditional" employment at an existing company, and many of the drawbacks to starting your own small business have diminished, especially when compared to traditional employment alternatives. This month's podcast answers the question: "Why Self-Employment?"

What's your take on the merits of self-employment vs. traditional employment?

Stupid Computer Tricks, Part 1

2010-03-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Stupid Computer Tricks, Vol. 1

Many people who have only recently learned how to work with their PC, or who have only used their computer infrequently but now have to work with it on a more regular basis, become very frustrated at the time and effort it takes to perform many simple tasks.

There are a handful of simple tricks that will work on any Windows PC (XP, Vista, Windows 7, whatever) and in 99% of programs that run in Windows that can save huge amounts of time, effort and confusion.

If you’re already a self-described computer freak, geek, or the official “alpha-nerd” around your home or office, this isn’t for you – doubtless you’ve already uncovered all of these tricks. But if you still consider yourself a newbie or just plain slow when working on your PC, it’s worth a read; you might pick up one or two new tricks that can make your life a lot easier.

Trick #1: Copy & Paste

This is the single most basic and useful feature in all of Windows, and a surprising number of people still don’t know how to do it, or how to do it as quickly as possible.

You can select a block of text by placing your cursor at the start of it, holding down your left mouse button and dragging your cursor over the remaining text you want.

You can then Cut the text (Edit >> Cut or Right-Mouse-Click-Cut or Ctrl+X) and the text will be removed from the screen, but copied onto your Clipboard. You can then place the cursor anywhere else you want in that document, or even in another program entirely (say a PowerPoint presentation you’re creating) and Paste (Edit >> Paste or Right-Mouse-Click-Paste or Ctrl+V) it. You can Paste it as many times and places as you want; it’ll stay on your clipboard until you Cut or Copy something else.

Similarly, you can Copy (Edit >> Copy or Right-Mouse-Click-Copy or Ctrl+C) the text without removing the original.

And you can Cut, Copy and Paste images within a document by placing the cursor over the image and left-clicking once on it to select it, then cut/copy/paste as usual.

Last, but certainly not least, you can cut, copy and paste entire folders or files by going into Windows Explorer ([Windows] + E), clicking on the file(s) you want, Cut or Copy it and then Paste the file wherever you want.

Trick #2: Right-Mouse-Clicking

We all know that clicking the left button on your mouse makes stuff happen, but many of us ignore the equally useful right button. Windows, and virtually every program you’ll ever run in Windows, uses the right-mouse-click to bring up a context-sensitive menu of the most likely actions you’ll want to perform on whatever particular screen you’re looking at.

For instance, if you’re writing a letter in Word, a right mouse click will pull up an options list like this:

The program is guessing that the most likely things you’ll want to do when typing in a Word document include cut/copy/pasting text or images, messing with the font you’re using, adjusting the paragraph, adding bullet points or numbered points, etc. In my experience, about 80-90% of the time, this list contains the option I’m looking for, saving me dragging my cursor to the top of the screen to click Format >> Bullets & Numbering >> Numbered >> Etc.

Trick #3: Keyboard Shortcuts

If you’re a mouse-type-person, right mouse clicking is your best friend. If you’re like me and more of a keyboard person, however, you can learn several quick keystrokes to do most of your common activities.

At the top of your screen you’ll notice that the menu headings each have an underlined letter in them. For example:

By pressing and holding the Alt key on your keyboard and then pressing the underlined letter for the menu heading you want (like F for File), you can automatically open that menu.

Faster still, many commands can be instantly used by holding the Control (Ctrl) key and pressing a corresponding letter. Some commonly used ones:

Trick #4: Screen Shots

At any time you can take a “snapshot” of your PC screen by pressing the Print Screen button on your keyboard (often labeled [PrtSc] or similar) and then using Paste to insert it into a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, etc.:

Trick #5: Grabbing images from the Internet

Note: while you have the ability to “grab” almost any photo, graphic or other image you find on the internet, those images may be copyrighted and you may need to seek the author’s permission to reuse them.

If you find an image on the internet that you want to save to your PC or insert into a document, you have two options:

1. Select, Copy & Paste the image into your document, or

2. Right-Mouse-Click on the image & choose Save Image As to save a copy to your PC.

Any of these new tricks to you? Any other great stupid computer tricks to share with the world?

Video Podcast: Google Fiber in Grand Rapids

2010-03-20T21:30:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I had a chance to participate in the Google Fiber in Grand Rapids project, a "grass roots" effort to get Google to select Grand Rapids to test its hyperfast fiber optic internet service...basically internet at speeds that would seem more appropriate to the Starship Enterprise than a midwestern city that once birthed the wussy-rock pop band "Debarge." I digress.

My role in this project was small but fun - a video crew taped me for a few minutes sharing my thoughts on why GR would be such a great location for Google Fiber. Im not sure if my segment will make the final cut, but this is an endeavor I believe in, so I thought I'd share my case for Grand Rapids here just to make sure it gets heard,or at least read, by someone.

Here's the video:

And here's the case for Grand Rapids:

1. West Michigan in general, and Grand Rapids in particular, is pushing hard to become a sought after location for moviemakers to film. We've had some early success: two years ago a production crew was here with Val Kilmer to film The Steam Experiment, and only last winter 50 Cent was here for a second time filming Gun. However, James Cameron's latest opus, Avatar, is the wave of the future. Filmmakers will be increasingly reliant on global production teams for CGI work and post-production work, and that means they'll need the ability to collaborate remotely and to exchange ridiculously huge files. A city with a hyperfast internet infrastructure will have a clear advantage over other locations.

2. Grand Rapids went through the chaos that Detroit is experiencing right now over 10 years ago when the office furniture industry collapsed. As a result, for the past decade we've had an army of highly talented, educated and experience professionals pursuing a variety of entrepreneurial paths to recreate our economy, including numerous designers, engineers and project managers. Mark my words: if Google provides the entrepreneurs in this town with a new technology to exploit, those people will invent entirely new and unanticipated ways of leveraging it for competitive advantage. A lot of other cities have let their largest businesses and institutions drive the push for Google Fiber, and I'm convinced that their approach won't yield the same innovation.

3. Lastly, I think your next generation of college grads will look for a city/region's internet infrastructure in the same way they (and we) look at other infrastructure elements like the quality of the roads, schools and public services when deciding where to reside. A cutting edge internet backbone will not only speak to quality of life issues in a town, but it will also be seen as a good indicator of the long-term economic welfare of the city...towns that are trailing in this area will probably be trailing in many others soon enough as well.

So that's it. If you're a fellow Grand Rapidian, I encourage you to visit www.inthe616.com or the Google Fiber for Grand Rapids page on Facebook.

Video Podcast: ADHD & Self Employment

2010-03-07T15:57:00.000-08:00

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is a condition that many people live with that can pose serious challenges to performing well in the world of work. Most employers place high value on a worker's ability to focus, pay attention to detail and handle complex tasks in a consistent manner, most people with ADHD tend to struggle with those kinds of activities more than the rest of the world. Meanwhile, a lot of the special attributes that people with ADHD tend to possess in greater levels than the rest of the world - energy, creativity and a love of novelty and variety - can often go unnoticed or at least under-appreciated by many employers. Not surprisingly, I've encountered a lot of people with ADHD who want to know how feasible and/or desirable it might be for them to become their own boss, choosing self-employment over traditional employment. Everyone's situation is unique, of course, but the video podcast included in this blog entry covers a lot of the considerations that are shared almost universally by people with ADHD who would like to run their own business.

Are you someone with ADHD? How has it impacted your ability to manage your job with another company? How has it impacted your ability to be successfully self-employed? What tactics have you used to lesse the impact of ADHD on your work?

Tips for Maintaining Your PC

2010-02-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

Almost every one of my customers relies on a PC for some aspect of their business, but unfortunately many of those same customers still aren't terribly comfortable, efficient or effective with their PCs. Earlier today I wrote up a quick-and-dirty "cheat sheet" for one of them detailing a handful of free, quick, easy things she could do to improve her PC's performance and also to use it more effectively. Since her request for help was one that I get fairly often, I thought I'd share my cheat sheet here in my blog. I hope it's helpful and I'd love to hear any other suggestions that you might have.

Tips for managing files on your PC:

Clean house!

On your PC,

Go through manually and delete or archive to a CD or (USB thumb drive) any old files you no longer need or that you rarely need to access. I like to use Windows Explorer for this; you can open Windows Explorer quickly by holding down the Windows key and pressing E)
Use Start >> Control Panel >>

Uninstall a Program to uninstall any programs that you no longer need.
Windows Update to check for, download and install any software patches or updates recommended by Microsoft.

Use Start >> Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >>

Disk Cleanup to delete junk files created by the PC in the background.
Disk Defragmenter to defrag your hard drive.

Explanation:

When you save a file like a Word document, your PC saves it in multiple “chunks” located randomly on your hard drive. This makes your PC have to jump around to find all of the chunks when you open the file again, slowing things down. Disk Defrag consolidates all of the related file chunks next to each other, speeding things up.
Note: this may take several hours to run on your PC the first time; subsequent defrags usually take less than an hour.

Follow the links to download and run the following free programs

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ to download the Security Essentials program. This will detect and remove many known viruses as well as spyware and malware and create a protective layer against future spyware and malware.
Go to http://www.download.com/ to download and install:

CCleaner (removes unneeded files)
Glary Registry Repair (fixes your registry)

Be Proactive!

Daily: turn your computer off (always Start >> Shut Down).

Explanation: The longer your PC is running nonstop, as you (and it) open and close programs and files, temporary files get created but not deleted and parts of your PC's memory get called into use but then not 100% freed up. Shutting your PC down is a lot like giving it a good night's sleep. As it shuts down and later reboots, it will delete the junk files, free up the memory and function better.

Monthly:

Rn Windows Defender and Disk Cleanup.
Back up all of your files to a CD or thumb drive.

Annually: Run Disk Defragmenter.

Be Consistent!

Create or select one folder (My Documents, for instance) that you will place ALL files into when saving them, uploading them from a camera, thumb drive, etc. or downloading them off of the internet. You can create as many sub-folders as you want to help keep them organized, but at least you'll always know the primary location of the files.
Periodically (monthly? annually?) go through your files to delete or archive (to CD) files you no longer need.
To make sure that your files are saved to the correct folder, don't use SAVE, always use SAVE AS. This will let you browse to select the desired folder.

If a program won't readily let you Save As to the folder you want, make a note of the filename you're saving ("winter report.doc" or "Desoto Dash.jpg" for instance) and then immediately after saving, use SEARCH to locate the file. You can then Move or Cut & Paste it into the desired folder.
Always name your files in a simple, descriptive and consistent fashion.

For instance, I save all of my customer-related files (documents, images, spreadsheets, etc.) as

LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME, YYYY-MM-DD FILENAME

Examples:

Jones, Steven - 2010-04 Business Plan.doc
Cartwright, Allan - 2009-10-14 Map of Competitor Locations.jpg
Harper, William – 2009-12-14 Marketing Proposal.doc.

This allows me to search by customer name, date file created/updated or file type (business plan, demographic info, etc.) very easily. It also causes the files to be displayed in Windows Explorer arranged aphabetically by customer name and then date.

What other tools, tricks or techniques help you to keep your computer running smoothly and to use it efficiently?

Check this out: "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"

2010-02-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

One of the fun things about writing my own blog is that I can go off on the occasional tangent when I think it's potentially useful and/or just plain interesting. The following meets all three criteria: tangental, potentially useful and just plain interesting. It's a link to an article that my friend Jeff The Canadian ran across and forwarded to me.

On 12/21/2009, Wired Magazine ran an article by Jonah Lerher called "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up". Gee, I thought. I screw up all the time. A lot of my customers do too. Let's check this out.

Lehrer summarizes a study that was done on scientific innovation - or lack thereof - and what the factors were that influence it. The too-short-you-should-really-just-read-the-article version goes something like this:

Our brains are hard-wired to throw out information that doesn't make sense or match up with what we expected to see.
Occasionally there is something new and potentially valuable in that information that we discard.
By being aware of our natural predisposition to disregard unexpected information, we can challenge ourselves to stop, engage the fresh perspective(s) of an outsider and once in a while spot something new and very useful to us.

Okay, so that works great when you're discovering penicillin or the Big Bang, but what does that have to do with the guy running a hot dog stand or a small engine repair shop?

Let's say that the hot dog guy expected to do brisk business at lunch time (logical enough) but instead found his sales flat throughout the day. Might a closer inspection of the available information (work hours at nearby offices, demographics of the people who pass by his stand, etc.) uncover a change in his product mix, pricing, location or promotion that could take the business in an entirely new and unexpected (yet profitable) direction)?

Even if this sounds like a bit of a stretch in your situation, it's a fun article to read.

Check this out: www.atouchofbusiness.com

2010-01-28T17:32:00.000-08:00

This one comes from the "Man, I should really read the e-mails that people send me" file. My colleague Mike Vuillemot from the CMU LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center sent me a link to this site last year and I only just now got around to visiting the site.

http://www.atouchofbusiness.com/ is a free resource with a large amount of information, much of it product- or industry-specific, related to selecting, planning, launching and optomizing a small business. A cursory review of the content impressed both Mike and me; it's certainly worth a visit.

A word of warning: Right below the title graphic (but still above the actual site content) is s a list of a half dozen paid advertisement links to content unrelated to the web site itself. Just be aware that these are outside links and not part of the actual web site.

Once you reach the real content, however, it's very simply organized into 5 sections:

Business Ideas
Starting a Business
Small Business Management & Marketing Tips
Fine Tuning Your Business
Sections of A Touch of Business

That's it! Once you're done perusing my own site, http://www.keeterconsulting.com/, and committing my blog to memory, take a moment to swing by A Touch of Business and check it out. But then come back to my site.

What are the best sites you've found for providing information and ideas to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Startup Weekend West Michigan Feb 26th-28th

2010-01-26T08:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.starupweekendwmi.com/

I ran across an article about this in the Grand Rapids Press and it sounded interesting:

Startup Weekend West Michigan is a weekend-long event where participants work in groups to develop business ideas from concept to plan & presentation.

"This is two days of berserk business building, including pitches, product planning and presentations." -- Mike Boylink of Boylink Interactive, of the event presenters.

The event is $40 to attend. This might be a good opportunity to infuse a business plan with a large dose of creativity and subject matter expertise regarding marketing, financing, etc.

Free Stuff 2.0

2010-01-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

In previous blog entries, I've talked about some of the free software resources available online such as Ubuntu Linux, a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows, Open Office, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, and Download.com, which lists literally hundreds of programs ranging from spyware removal apps to web developer software that is free to download and use.

Well, it's time for another round of free, very useful apps to spotlight in case they can address anyone's specific needs.

The first candidate this time is Microsoft's Officelive suite of products. Officelive, is a 100% web-based set of tools (meaning you can run it from just about any internet-connected PC, regardless of the PC's speed, age, memory, etc. and you can pull it up on any PC whereever you are). Most noteable among these tools is the ability to create rich, professional-looking, user-friendly web sites by selecting from a library of pre-made templates. While the templates greatly simplify and speed up the process of creating a web site, they're still highly customizable: changing fonts, graphics, colors, adding/deleting pages, etc. is very easy. You can create and host a web site on Officelive for free, and setting up your own domain name (URL) for it, e.g. www.fredstaxservice.com, only costs $14.95/year.

The second resource I want to highlight is also free and web-based: Google Docs. Google Docs also provides an array of services, but there are two that I'm most intrigued by:

First, Google Docs offers web-based word processor, presentation maker and spreadsheet programs, loosely comparable to MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Again, since they're web-based, you can access them from any PC and run them on much older/slower PCs without difficulty.

Next is the web-based Folders option in Google Docs. This lets you create password-protected, secure, folders and sub-folders online that you can use to back up your files and/or make your files accessible from other PCs. Better still, it lets you grant folder- and file-specific permissions to allow other people to access them. This is great for collaborating with other people at remote locations.

Speaking of online collaboration, that brings us to the third tool I want to mention, Microsoft's Sharedview app. This is a free program that you install on any two (or more) PCs that you want to use. It allows one or more people to view, and even control, what's happening on someone else's PC, and to quickly and easily exchange files with them. This is fantastic for training, presentations and trouble-shooting software problems. I also like it because I can edit a customer's business plan or report and they can watch and give me feedback in real-time.

Resource #4 is also a free app you can install on our PC: Nvu. Nvu is a web site developer tool that is similar to MS Front Page or another freeware app I've mentioned previously, PageBreeze. It's not terribly powerful, but it is (a) free and (b) user-friendly.

Last but not least, I recommend checking out http://www.vistaprint.com/. Vistaprint is an online printing service for things like business cards, brochures and promotional items like coffee mugs. The only 100% free part of their deal is a batch of 50 business cards they'll print up for you at no charge. However, for all of their cards and promotional materials, they also have a library of preset templates with different looks for different business/industry types. While these templates may not offer the highly-customized, one-of-a-kind look that you can get by using a graphic designer, they're all very professoinal looking and far less expensive than the cost of using a designer. For many businesses, this is a very favorable trade-off.

So there you have it: five more free resources to keep in mind when trying to meet your company's communication/collaboration/marketing needs. Incidentally, links to all of these apps, and many more, are available in the Toolbox section of my web site, http://www.keeterconsulting.com/.

Have you had personal experience with any of the resources I've mentioned? If so, was it positive? Do you know of any other free online resources that others might find helpful?

Check Out This Resource: Michigan Loan Funds

2009-12-16T07:34:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned in previous entries, about 95% of my work is with persons with disabilities who are trying to start their own businesses. These customers have already addressed the disability-related barriers to their employment by the time they've reached me, to any actual physical or mental impairments they may have are rarely an issue.

The consequences of having sustained a major injury or illness, however, can be a big challenge. The all-too-common story I hear is that a person was working and making a decent living when they became injured or ill. They subsequently were forced to run through their savings and usually damage their credit as they attempted to make ends meet while they recovered and worked to re-enter the workforce.

For people trying to start their own business, this is often a huge problem. Banks (who are already reluctant to loan money to small business start-ups) see a person with little or no cash or collateral and a poor credit rating and usually won't even consider loaning money to my customer so they can get the tools, inventory and services they need to start up their business.

The Michigan Employment Loan Fund (formerly the Michigan TeleWork Loan Fund) has been a terrific resource for many of my past customers. It's a loan fund specifically intended for persons with disabilities who are seeking self-employment and/or work-from-home arrangements. This fund is overseen by a committee that places more emphasis on the strength of a person's business plan and their character than lenders normally would, and less emphasis on their credit rating and collateral than lenders normally would.

Past customers of mine have used this loan to cover any gap between the money they have and can obtain through Michigan Rehabilitation Services (or the VA) and the actual start-up costs associated with their businesses. I've also seen them take out this type of loan for a smaller amount ($1,000-$2,000), knowing they could pay this back easily, just to use it to help improve their credit rating.

So: if you're a Michigander and a person with a disability who's seeking an additional funding source to start your own business or to purchase equipment that will aid in your getting (or retaining) other employment, definitely check the Michigan Employment Loan Fund out. It may be a useful option for you.

Have you had personal experience with the Michigan Employment Loan Fund? How did it work for you? Have you had personal experience with trying to obtain a traditional bank loan for your business? Were you successful? Do you have other similar funding sources that we can share with others via this blog?

Check Out This Resource: ww.KeeterConsulting.com

2009-10-21T09:06:00.000-07:00

Usually I devote blog entries to summaries and reviews of other web sites that I think my customers might find intresting and/or useful, but today it's my turn. If you usually just shoot straight to this blog intead of following the link to it from the Keeter Consulting home page, you may be missing out on some resources that could be helpful, particularly the Toolbox page which lists dozens of forms, templates, tutorials, web sites, freeware software downloads, etc. that are relevant for many small business owners.

So, in the hopes of piquing your interest, I'm bringing my home page to you this week. I'd love to hear what you think of the site and how I might make it better.

(from the home page of keeterconsulting.com)

10/21/09 I've done major updates to this web site, including adding 25 new items to the Keeter Consulting Toolbox, including a new Vehicle Expenses Calculator and and Personal Selling Tools section. Four other items in the Toolbox were also updated. I've also updated the Frequently Asked Questions page.
10/21/2009 I'm starting to experiment with using the shared folders option in Google Docs to allow me to store business plan drafts, revenue & expense forecasts and research data in a secure, online folder where it can be instantly opened and edited by me or my customer and viewed by the referring counselor.
10/19/2009 For the past two months I've been posting all of my new blog entries (http://keeterconsulting.blogspot.com) as video blogs. These are lean, mean tutorials covering a wide range of topics, generally running from 2 to 6 minutes in length. Check them out; I'd love to hear what you think of the new format.
10/10/2009 Keeter Consulting celebrated it's 3rd anniversary on October 10!As of 10/10/09, I've assisted over 100 MRS and VA customers. Thank You to all of Mike and Leah at the CMU LaBelle Entrepreneurial Center and to all of the the counselors and other service providers who've given me the chance to work with them and their clients. It's been a fun and rewarding business and I look forward to new challenges and successes in the year ahead.

What are your thoughts about using Google Docs to have a private, shared file with the people who are collaborating on your business plan?

What did you think of the Keeter Consulting site? The Toolbox? What would make it a better resource for you?

Video Podcast: Read This Book: The 10 Faces of Innovation

2009-09-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

I liked this book, and my own blog summary of it, so much that I was compelled to redo that entry as one of my video podcasts. So for those of you who prefer listening while watching cheap, flashy visuals, over reading boring old text, I give you my summary of "The 10 Faces of Innovation" in video podcast form. Feedback on the material and the presentation are very welcome.

Video Podcast: Thinking About Your Business Plan

2009-09-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

Like a resume, a business plan doesn't need to follow any one particular format. What it does need to do is to explain an identified market opportunity and how you proposed to capitalize on that opportunity in a clear, concise and comprehensive manner. Today's video podcast probes into that.

(This is a continuation of a series of video podcasts re: moving from idea to business plan.)

Do you have a preferred format for making business plans?

Video Podcast: Is there a market opportunity for your idea?

2009-08-31T09:24:00.001-07:00

Yep, more with the hexagon theme from last week's podcast. Okay, so you've started with yourself and based on your passion and expertise, uncovered an idea for a small business. Before pouring large amounts of time and money into creating a business plan, what can you do to quickly assess whether or not there is a legitimate market opportunity for your idea?

This week's video podcast attempts to answer that question - or at least to provide a new way of thinking about it.

What are your thoughts on spotting market opportunities? Does the model I suggest work for you?

Video Podcast: How can I find a good self-employment idea? How can I tell if my idea is a good one?

2009-08-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

I'm frequently approached by people who for a variety of reasons are interested in self-employment. Invariably they either don't know where to start when it comes to selecting a small business idea, or they have an idea and they're not sure if it could be turned into a successful business. This is the first of three short video podcasts I made that I think might help would-be entrepreneurs to select and evaluate their own ideas. It's just a broad overview, but future podcasts will dig a little deeper into the topic.

Let me know what you think! Was this helpful? Too much or too little information? Mildly annoyed by the use of hexagons for everything?

Keeter Consulting - First Video Podcast!

2009-08-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I created a blog entry regarding selecting a name and logo for your business. While the information was good, I wasn't satisfied with the entry because it lacked the images that helped illustrate my points. As an experiment I created a "quick and dirty" video version of the blog. Apologies in advance for inconsistent sound quality, but I think it's worth checking out.

Want more video podcasts/video blog entries? Too long/too short? What did you think of it?

Some of the businesses I've been able to help get (re)launched

2009-08-21T21:20:00.000-07:00

I was doing my monthly cleanup of my old files and thought it might be fun to put together a list of some of the businesses I've been able to help to either launch or relaunch since starting Keeter Consulting in 2006. Then I thought that'd be a not bad blog entry. In the spirit of full disclosure, not every business has been a runaway success, and some have failed due to changing economic conditions or other factors, but all had good plans, solid launches and the best possible opportunities for success.

Special recognition to Andrea Graham of Graham Consulting, who created most of the logos, business cards, etc. shown above.

ABC (April Bouwman Cleaning)

Access Property Management Inc.

Better Bits

bobyettah @ Associates

Body Kneads Therapeutic and Medical Massage

CAD: Calkins Architectural Design

Clean Solutions

Computer Concepts

Curb Appeal Interior & Exterior Painting

D&D Home Repair

Doc's Electric

Don's Special Touch

Eye of the Hawk Photography

F&F Bicycle Shop

Four Seasons Taxidermy

Gorilla Grinders

Griz's Installing Service

Immaculate Details Woodgraining

Jazz by Chaz Jewelry

Lynn's Sew-What?

May I Cut In?

Newaygo Property Management

Oak Forest Sales & Consulting

PAC Business Capital Services

Pro Patria

Radical's Toys

Reaper's Motorcycle Repair

Stone Creations

Val Pack of Central Michigan

Wayne's Wooden Wonders

West Michigan Home Entertainment Systems

Getting Started "On the Cheap": How to save 70%

2009-08-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, you've got an idea for a small business but very little money to get off the ground. You can't get banks to talk to you and you'd like to minimize how much you run up your credit cards getting started -- you don't want to pay interest and you'd like to still have credit available for buying inventory or materials or to respond to unexpected developments.

Here are some options that could potentially lower your start-up and operating costs for the first year of operation by 70% or more. Very few businesses would be willing or able to use all of these "tricks" to keep costs down, but maybe there are a few in the list that could be applied to your business. Even a modest 10% savings on a $30,000 launch, or $3,000, could make a huge difference in that first year of operation.

It's a good thought exercise at the very least...

How have you been able to control your start-up and/or operating expenses?

Keeter Consulting Blog

New & Improved Bookkeeping System

How to be a good public speaker

Repost: Gov. Snyder Encourages Mentors

Harnessing the Power of Pessimism

Inc. Magazine: How to Prepare and Launch Your Start-Up

How to Prepare to Launch Your Start-up

How to Get More Out of Google Searches

Partnerships: A Few Things To Consider

ARTICLES OF PARTNERSHIP

Creating a Professional Web Site (On the Cheap)

Worth Following: Changing Gears

More Must-Have Apps for Your PC (updated 10/07/11)

Happy 5th Anniversary to Keeter Consulting!

Steve Jobs: Visionary and Business Genius

How to Write a Complaint Letter

Repost: The Cloud is Here to Set You Free

And there's more that the cloud can do for you. Three common organizational problems with practical cloud solutions are:

Scams. Part Two.

“Turning Your Blog Into A Business”

Download this App: OpenProj

Interesting Idea: 5x5

Check Out This Resource: Disability Blog

A Quick Primer in Online Marketing Lingo

Social marketing

Social media

Affiliate marketing

Traffic

Spam

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Content

PageRank

Advertising

ROI (Return On Investment)

Conversion

Reality

If you still don't understand online marketing...

Huntington Bank Announces $2 Billion Lending Commitment In Michigan

Gov. Rick Snyder announces Varnum program to offer $1 million in free legal assistance to Michigan startup companies

Two More Must-Have Free Apps for your PC

Great resources to educate yourself about blogging & search engine optimization

Is a Web Site Smart for your Business?

Is the Internet a Good Sales Channel for your Business?

Cool Free Online Gadget of the Month: Doodle

Read This: The Personal Efficiency Program

Thoughts on SSDI and Employment

Fascinating Article on Economics from The Onion

Continued Existence Of Edible Arrangements Disproves Central Tenets Of Capitalism

Show me the money! (part two)

More Thoughts on Finding a Business Opportunity

An Open Letter to Governor Rick Snyder

Free Antivirus, Spyware Removal & Maintenance Apps

Check Out This Resource: Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center

What Weird Movies Can Tell Us About Self-Employment

Great video from Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs

Sales Projections: How to Do Better than Just Guessing

Computers & Business: How to NOT Have a Bad Day

How can I make accurate sales projections? Also, Happy 4th Anniversary Keeter Consulting!

Keeter Consulting Video Blog: 02 of 18 The Marketing Section: Part 1 - Customers

Me on "A Wider World" TV program

New Business Story: Murfee's Boutique

Behold the Power of Press Releases, Public Relations and Promotion!

Keeter Consulting Video Blog: 01 of 18 The Executive Summary

Keeter Consulting Video Blog: 00 of 18 Creating A Business Plan (Overview)

Quick! While it's still relatively new! Leveraging Social Networking Sites for Your Business!

Video: What drives us?

Accepting Credit Cards - Things to Consider

Video Podcast: Why Self-Employment?

Stupid Computer Tricks, Part 1

Video Podcast: Google Fiber in Grand Rapids

Video Podcast: ADHD & Self Employment

Tips for Maintaining Your PC

Check this out: "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"

Check this out: www.atouchofbusiness.com

Startup Weekend West Michigan Feb 26th-28th

Free Stuff 2.0

Check Out This Resource: Michigan Loan Funds

Check Out This Resource: ww.KeeterConsulting.com

Video Podcast: Read This Book: The 10 Faces of Innovation

Video Podcast: Thinking About Your Business Plan