Saturday, November 20, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Forget the Box, Think Outside Conventional Wisdom
Sure you can make money the tried and true, non-original, follow the pack, same old path to success that has been taught in business schools for a hundred years now in this country. But it is not easy and it is getting harder all the time.
I won't quote you statistics, you can find them anywhere on the internet these days. Try your local branch of the Small Business Administration for some great statistics on how many businesses fail within the first two to five years. The SBA is a great place to start if you are researching a business, industry, or demographic. Great for help with a business plan also. I preach business plans for one main reason; it FORCES you to look at EVERY angle of your new business, from your target market to your projected future income (and the expenses it will take to create that income). Take it from someone who has started from the ground up and has also purchased already established businesses. You Have To Have a Plan!
Today however, in our current business climate of worried consumers, a real estate market in flux, banks tightening the lending purse strings so tight that you could play a tune on them like a violin. Venture capital is out there but most of us can't get them to return our calls let alone listen to our pitches.
In times like these my friends, we need to get creative. We need to not only think "Outside of the Box", we need to think outside of "Conventional Wisdom" of what we have been taught for all these many years. We need to re-invent the way businesses get started. We need to use our collective entrepreneurial spirit to get out of this mess. Think of unusual avenues for getting around the roadblocks that are keeping us from moving forward with our dreams. Use our collective knowledge to kick-start new growth in the small business sector of our economy.
There are many of us in the same situation. What we need is a way to find out what is working and help our fellow entrepreneurs learn how to use new technology, new avenues of advertising, new sources of affordable startup capital, a forum so to speak for new business. When you find something that works, SHARE IT. I know keeping that competitive edge is something we all covet but that is the mentality that has gotten us where we are now. I know it sounds cliche but we really are all in this together. Together we stand, divided we fall.
I currently work in the Photography/Software Industry and one thing I have learned from this industry is that mentoring is a real necessity for a new photographer to make it these days. Without the help of our peers we will continue to make the same mistakes and miss the same opportunities. If you are starting out, find someone who is making it now and ask them for some simple advice over a cup of coffee or a meal. You may be surprised how much information you can get for the price of a good meal and a little time. You may even start a lifelong friendship or partnership you never could have had otherwise. If you are already established in your business or are contemplating retiring, take someone new to your industry under your wing. Offer to give them some of your time and experience. Believe me, it will make you feel wonderful and you will gain a friend indeed.
This country has always operated on the backs of small businesses. We pay more of the taxes, employ more people, buy more health care, dental, eye-care, fund Social Security, and fund more IRA's and 401K's than big business ever has. We need to stick together. We are keeping this country moving.
Talk to your local, state, and federal level politicians. Current and those that are running for the first time. Let them know what you are up against. Keep your problems current in their thoughts. And remember, change is good, necessary even, to move the country forward and into the next decade. Tell them to Think Outside of Conventional Wisdom.
Create a positive, collective, entrepreneurial spirit and pay it forward!
formspring.me
Do you believe in ghosts?
Absolutely, I had a personal experience of my own in a 200 year old house in Potterville, Michigan in 1982.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Speed of Changing Technology!
Picture me sitting in my favorite recliner in my living room, MacBook Pro burning the same pattern into my upper knees, taking a little break from the never-ending evening job that is my email inbox. I am, as usual, checking my personal Facebook account to see what everyone is up to and sharing with each other. In the corner of my eye I see one of the 200 or so friends that are online has sent me an IM. It's one of my business friends I met through BNI (Business Network International). He is the owner of a computer repair franchise in our area and someone who I sort of look up to in the computer repair arena.
We had run into each other a few weeks back at a Chamber of Commerce sponsored event where I happened to be running the Entertainment Tent (you can't call it a beer tent anymore) and he was volunteering for the Chamber. I never pass up an opportunity to network. Especially when there is live music and a micro brew or two involved. We happened on a conversation about the latest technology, iPhones, iPods, texting systems, and the Mac vs PC debate. You see even in his business he just doesn't see many service calls for Mac users. The majority of his business is PC and small network related. He mentioned his business has been hit or miss like most small businesses in this volatile economic period we are all struggling through. He is currently in a period of being quite busy and was relaying how many hours he had been working. I am always trying to help those that are in my networking circle so I offered to help out if he got too busy or ran into something Mac based that he might need help with. Which leads us back to the Facebook IM. He had a client with a critical need to have an iTouch configured to a new PC laptop and needed several applications downloaded to it and he had not had the opportunity to set one up before. I agreed to take the job for him as long as all the money went through his office (I always feel strange taking money from someone else's clients).
I decided that this would be a good opportunity for my 17 year-old daughter Danielle to "get her feet wet" in on-site service at a client's home. I would not usually do this but I happened to know the client from the same BNI group. My daughter as you can guess from her age is fluent in anything "i" related. iPods, iPhones etc. Upon arrival and after the usual networking banter we settled into the task at hand, finding out why they could not get the iTouch to connect to the new laptop. I let my daughter do the initial "driving", as I like to call it, as she is the expert in these devices. She quickly realized this would not be a quick fix. The client's iTunes account would not recognize the iTouch at all, no matter what she tried. We were able to answer lots of questions for the client while she was trying different things. The client is in her early to mid 60's but is very tech savvy for her age but this is completely new territory for her. Mobile technology is a basic cell phone in her world up to now. We even reminisced about the old days of DOS for a short while, totally confusing my daughter with the concept of an operating system that was command based with no GUI (graphical user interface). She just could not fathom using a computer without a mouse or touchpad to point and click.
I decided it was my turn to "drive" to see what the problem was while my daughter did some basic setups on the iTouch with the client. I quickly realized there were several issues to be addressed. First and foremost were 22 different updates to the operating system alone. The client thought that since the laptop had just been purchased two days before and that it was a Windows Vista Premium OS and a 64 bit processor that it would not need to be updated out of the box. This is an assumption made by many knowledgeable users. What people don't realize is that technology today is moving and changing at such a break-neck speed that even a brand new top-of-the-line computer is already falling behind the times right off the shelf. Can you imagine buying a brand new car off the dealer's lot and by the time you get it home in your driveway it already needs an oil change, muffler, and new tires? That is the closest analogy I can give you to a new computer that fresh out of the box needs 22 OS/Browser updates, 3 driver updates, and 4 hardware updates.
This did give me a chance to give my usual "lecture", as my daughter calls it, on automatic updates, virus protection, and backups. The Trifecta of any good computer maintenance program. If you want to keep up with the speed of technology today, you have to learn to automate these three important functions or you are just asking for trouble. I would give you my favorites for these functions but there are so many free aps out there that work so well and everyone seems to have their personal favorites anyway. Just make sure you are doing all three and test your backups to be absolutely certain you can restore your data from the backup file. It won't do you any good to have backed up all your files if you can't restore from it. I also showed her the proper use of "system restore". Always defragment, then set the restore point (name it for example "Before Widget Install"), then install any new software, and then create another restore point (name it "After Widget Install). that way no matter what you run into you will have a before and after setup at your disposal. Set up a scheduled restore point so that you never lose more than a weeks worth of files in case something goes wrong, and it will sooner or later.
There were so many updates I set it to continue to run them and made an appointment to come back to do the final setup at a later date. Maybe we can talk about how many 5 1/4 in floppies it would take to hold the same amount of files as her 16 GB iTouch will when we are finished. The speed of technology makes for some interesting conversation at the very least.
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