Just a quick tidbit with a profound quote all professionals should consider:
“The natural state of communication is misunderstanding.”
The quote is from Larry Wilson and the hat tip goes to Kevin Stirtz, who has more context on AllBusiness.com.
The Wall Street Journal published an article a few days ago about the pros and cons of blogging for small businesses. The pluses can be counted in new clients, new business and an increased profile in one’s professional community. The downside is most definitely the time-consuming writing that regular blogging takes.
I’ve found that there are blogs out there by consultants and strategists who are paid to attend conferences, write books, and blog about a given topic day in and day out. It is what they do for a full time living, much like print journalists must write their stories or TV journalists must produce their reports. Their business is, in a lot of ways, their blog.
For those of us who have more of a business than a blog, blogging multiple times a day to keep up with the pros is an impossible goal. Focusing on a more realistic goal — one post a day — is a fair target for busy professionals engaged in client service and workload management. While visitors to your site want to see new, fresh content, they also don’t want to see meaningless posts. They want to see that you are proactive, knowledgeable, and able to help them face their challenges.
For political candidates, my advice would be the same. Your campaign blog is an important tool to communicate with your target audiences and should be updated accordingly with news, pictures and links pertaining to your candidacy. But it should not be the centerpiece of your communications strategy. Blogs (and associated tools such as podcasts, vidcasts and microblogs) are tools to be used as part of an overall outreach strategy and resources should be allocated to them as such.
Is blogging worth it? If you have something to contribute to the marketplace of ideas, then you have something to contribute to the blogosphere. It’s just a matter of taking the time to share your perspective with a world of potential clients.
Any other “Grey’s Anatomy” fans out there? Eh, either way, if you watched last night’s episode, Chief Webber destroys Christina in their surgery competition, and he does so with his eyes closed. His trick? “It’s all about the basics” he tells Dr. Yang. She later used that advice to, well, you will just have to watch the show.
The moral of the story for small business? Are you in touch with the basics? Do you have a solid foundation as your company grows? If you don’t, it could come back to bite you down the road. Having the right processes and infrastructure in place now may seem overkill for your small team, but as you grow, that structure will help facilitate growth and, ironically, give you the flexibility to beat the competition with your eyes closed.
Flat Creek is not just an outsourcing vendor, but an integrated operating partner, managing your back office and helping you keep track of all your vendor relationships. Often outsourcing gets wrapped up in the offshore debate between IBM and Dell and… well, seems like it has nothing to do with small businesses. To the contrary, this article on AllBusiness.com points out the benefits of outsourcing for small business. Not to spoil the surprise, but the benefits include:
These are all good reasons to outsource some of your business operations, but ultimately it’s about giving you more control over your company and giving you more time to do what it is you really want to do. To our clients, thank you for making us part of your vision. To readers who aren’t clients, let’s talk today about how your company can move forward with a solution from Flat Creek Management.
How much do you spend each month on travel for your employees? If the answer is "nothing" then skip ahead to the next post. But if you do spend any money to bring employees to the home office on a regular basis, then you should take a look at virtual meetings as an alternative. Using high-speed Internet connections, you can connect with employees face to face at a fraction of the cost or time it takes to fly them in for a couple of meetings. Such interactivity is useful for sales trips, working from home, communicating with a dispersed workforce, or a thousand other ways that may apply only to your company.
There are lots of options out there. Some work and some don’t, so let me know if you would like to look at cost-effective virtual meetings with your team.
It’s intersting that of all the activities offshore outsourcers are eager to take on, News.com reports that one they won’t touch is payroll services, supposedly due to industry giant ADP.
While ADP does offer a host of valuable services, we have actually found Paychex to be more responsive and an all around better fit for small and medium businesses. If you are looking at a way to resolve your HR issues, let me know and we can talk about setting up a solution for you.
As part of our services, Flat Creek evaluates and purchases equipment for our clients. They rely on us to select quality products that will stand up to anything they can throw at it. What good is a $1,200 color laser printer if the output isn’t quality?
But selecting the right product isn’t rocket science. It really just takes some time - and that’s something very few of our clients have. But if you do have the time, here are some great resources to help you evaluate office technology products:
PC World - This page has a list of lists where they have evaluated computers, computer accessories, and home entertainment components. While the ranking system can be misleading, it’s nice to see what professionals think about a product before you go to Sams Club or Costco to buy it.
CNet - Similar to PC World, CNet provides professional reviews of products and gives a ranking or “Editor’s Choice” award to the best in class. Their site is more user-friendly than PC World, plus you get the added bonus of user reviews, which gives a more diversified perspective on your purchase decision.
Amazon - The traditional online bookseller has always made user feedback a centerpiece of its business model, and fortunately this has stayed true as they expanded to other product lines, such as electronics. While an Amazon.com product review is rare, the extensive user reviews can be very insightful.
Hopefully these sites will help you make better product decisions just as they have worked for us. But even if you decide on a product based on these reviews, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. How will it fit with what you already have? When you start putting pieces together, will they work? What’s the best way to buy and setup several units for a whole office? How long does it take to set up?
Well, in that case, I’d hope you’ll just contact us.
PC World has a nice round-up of inkjet and laser multifunction printers for personal/home office needs. These multifunctions can be a great workhorse as they combine several functions: printer, scanner, copier, and fax. As they saying goes, they can do all these things in one unit, but they can’t do them all well. For those who demand quality, I would suggest buying a separate scanner and printer, then using your PC’s modem to send faxes.
Once upon a time, we used a tool called eRoom in order to collaborate and share documents online. It worked in most situations but on a global scale it failed miserably. Then, we found the new tool out by Microsoft - SharePoint. This is a terrific online collaboration tool to share documents, calendars, contacts, tasks lists, etc. It takes tools that project managers need and puts them together and then puts them online. I know some people aren’t big fans of Microsoft and their products, but if you’re going to take a bite of the apple go ahead and eat the whole thing. That is to say, SharePoint integrates very nicely with Office 2003. You can view contacts, calendars and tasks from the SharePoint site in Outlook and manage document edits in Word and Excel.
To be totally honest, there are a couple of areas where the usability needs some help. For instance, in order to edit a document, you must first select to “check out” the file so it is locked from others who might make conflicting edits at the same time. Once you are finished updating the file, you then must select to “check in.” This seems straightforward but it never fails that someone checks it out, makes their edits, then fails to check it back in. Fortunately, an administrator can perform the check-in but at the risk of losing the editor’s changes. Also, there is no built-in function to send e-mails to the entire SharePoint site - the one useful thing that eRoom did. You can work around this by selecting all of the contacts from SharePoint in Outlook then sending an e-mail to the group.
We currently offer SharePoint services through a third party but hope to purchase the server solution soon in order to make this already inexpensive solution more cost-effective for our clients.
Since we’re on the topic, does anyone else have experience with SharePoint, eRoom, or any other online collaboration tool?
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