bizthreads.net: Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

When you face a challenge in your operations, what do you do? When budgets are tight and you're watching where every dollar goes, it can be challenging to find the right solutions to solve problems when they come up.

Need a networked time management solution? Need to get a financial calculator? Need to automate your invoicing process? Need to create better spreadsheets?

One option is to spend the time getting into your car and driving to the office supply store. You can walk among the shelves and look at a few different software options and listen to a commission based sales person tell you why the more expensive one is better.

Or you can bookmark:
http://www.morebusiness.com/tools/download/

This site is a big and growing portal to shareware that lets you solve those operational challenges inexpensively with affordable, downloadable software you can purchase online.

This will save you time, money, and effort. They say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is this line:

I met a freelance writer friend of mine recently for coffee. His work is brisk — very brisk — and he had started to complain about his wrists hurting. Tendonitis is bad news in his line of work and he was really concerned that if he continued writing, he'd be headed for trouble. To ward off the pain he was going to go shopping for an ergonomic keyboard.

Fast forward a couple weeks later. I gave him a call and asked him if he had found one. He had, in fact, found one that very same day. He took it home and plugged it in and has not experienced pain since. What's more, he says, his typing speed has increased… allowing him to pay for the extra expense of his keyboard in a single afternoon of extra work!

If you do a lot of writing in your business, consider getting an ergonomic keyboard. They don't take long to get used to, they'll keep you from ruining your wrists, and your productivity may just increase. That's a health and wealth recipe I like!

There comes a time in the life of many businesses when you have to start looking beyond yourself. If you've enjoyed some good success, and the workload is starting to become more than you can bear, it's time to hire someone else.

But before you do that, read Zig Ziglar's book Top Performance. I suppose that it's subtitle “How to Develop Excellence in Yourself and Others” may make it seem like it belongs with books by Anthony Robbins and other motivators, but Ziglar's book is a focused book about succeeding as a manager and should be required reading for management.

His book covers different aspects of managing, including motivation and rewards, how to build loyalty, good business communication, and goal setting. It's one of those books that sit on my shelf and every time I pick it up, I learn something valuable. Although Ziglar's writing tends to show his age, and at times seems a little self-centered, the content of the book is a hearty meal of tried-and-true management wisdom.

wURLdbook is difficult to explain. You almost have to see the guided tour yourself. At its core, wURLdbook is a free, online bookmarking company: You simply bookmark your favorite sites and they are stored in an account.

But there's so much more. You can subscribe to RSS feeds (so it acts as an online aggregator to collect information you've requested) and you can search within that information and share it. Moreover, you can organize your bookmarks for others.

They describe themselves this way: “wURLdBook is a free hybrid web service that facilitates your ability to subscribe to, manage, and store web based information such as news feeds, and web references. wURLdBook provides tools to easily navigate to frequently visited sites by using custom aliases and search your information reservoir.”

I simply haven't done it justice. Check out the guided tour (no plug-ins necessary, it's just a series of screenshots).

If you spend a lot of time online — and if you move from computer to computer — it's great to have this service to access the information you need regularly.

I'm not going to make a lot of friends by saying this, but I'm not a big fan of Kenneth Blanchard's One Minute Manager series.

In my defense, I like Blanchard's work and I've read Gung Ho, High Five, The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans, and The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. Most of them are good books and I know he has a lot of good things to say. (Especially with Raving Fans… it's a must read!). I just happen to prefer one kind of business book to another and The One Minute Manager isn't my style.

However, out of that series of books I would like to recommend The One Minute $ales Person. (Yes, that's a dollar sign in the title. I'm not going to tell you why; you'll have to read the book to find out). Although I steer clear of business “parables” (again, just a preference thing) I did enjoy the point of The One Minute $ales Person. The principles you'll learn can really help improve your sales. It's a short read, which sometimes makes it a good book to bring if you'll be waiting somewhere for a while. I also like the flowchart in the back. Most importantly, it's a good “back-to-basics” book that helps remind the reader why they're in a sales job (note to all entrepreneurs: that's you).

Of Blanchard's books, I own Raving Fans and The One Minute $ales Person. If you're going to read one good sales book this quarter (and you should) I recommend The One Minute $ales Person.

If the sign outside your office door says “President” and “Janitor,” then you're probably kept pretty busy with your workload: satisfying customers, balancing the books, and mopping up at the end of the day. For many people, when you're doing all of the jobs yourself, your door also says “IT department” which may mean that you're designing and maintaining your own website.

Websites can be built from scratch with good knowledge of code or they can be built with some of the good programs out there like Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Microsoft's Frontpage.

Those programs may be enough for you. But if they're not, I've just been recommended a great program at http://www.evrsoft.com/. They have a free version and a paid version. I've just been trying out the free version lately and am really impressed by it. I'm not a coding master by any means but I know my way around html and I've actually had a lot of fun designing websites with it. And what I like about the program is that you can design them in html or you can design them in WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get).

If you're looking to expand your web design know-how, check out Evrsoft's program for yourself.

Learn More: Website Builder Web 2.0 website design software and easy website builder for building a website today.

I picked up Keith Ferrazzi's book Never Eat Alone recently.

I tend to prefer books that outline the tried and true ways that business is done or books that gather together many different ideas. I admit to being fairly skeptical when I see books that claim to promote one person's successful way to do business. Someone who is naturally successful at something tends to write books by looking back on their experience and systematizing it.

Ferrazzi, though, does a good job of developing ideas in his book without developing overt systems.

Throughout the book he talks about building relationships and the types of things you can do to create meaningful relationships in your life and business. I found the book to be like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People but with a modern twist. He talks about “pinging” people (to keep in touch with them periodically) and the art of making small talk. And, what I like about this book — more than a lot of similar books — is the focus on business.

Many entrepreneurs spend a good portion of their day on the phones… it seems like we've all reverted to being teenagers again! Although this time, instead of talking about the person we like or the party on the weekend, we're making deals and building our customer base.

Being on the phone that much is good for business, but not so good on your phone-holding arm or your ear. And if you're like me and you have to scrawl notes to yourself while you're talking, the “shoulder-holding” method isn't that effective.

Enter the hands-free phone. You need two.

Get a hands-free cell phone. That way, you'll keep both hands on the wheel while you're driving. And, when you're sitting around waiting, you can make your phone deals while thumbing notes into your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

Get a hands-free desk phone. There are a couple different kinds: the conference call phone is good for when you have several people in the room, but it can be hard to hold a conversation on a conference call phone. If you don't have to make sure that 10 people are listening in on your call, consider getting a desk phone that has a headset. This will let you do the typing or writing you need to do while you're talking on the phone.

Who knows, you may spend more time on the phone!

The Ultimate Consulting Series by Alan Weiss 

I've been thinking a lot lately about consulting and its impact on every kind of business. After all, every entrepreneur (like every consultant) is often a “lone wolf” trying to build a brand by developing expertise in a highly competitive market.

As a result, I've been reading many books about consulting and considering how the techniques and ideas for consultants boil out into other types of businesses. In my local library, Alan Weiss's book Million Dollar Consultant has my name stamped in the card several times since it was published in 1992.

Lately, while browsing the consultants’ section, I found a series by Weiss that I've really enjoyed and I'd recommend all of them to you. I read the book with a pen and paper nearby and it's usually full of ideas by the time I'm done. In the book I just finished, How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession, he gives so many great ideas about branding that I think the book should be required reading for any entrepreneur.

I try to give a balanced view of the books I review so I'm sitting here trying to think of something slightly more critical to say. I'm drawing a blank. The books are practical, easy to read, and easy to implement. I can't think of anything better than that. I wish he wrote more and I would have liked to see these less focused on consultation and more focused on entrepreneurs in general. The ideas wouldn't change, but more people would read them.

You've probably read a bit about RSS feeds and podcasting on my site in the past. Podcasts are audio shows (like radio-based talk shows, but usually in mp3 format and often specialized for a certain niche) that you can download and listen to on your mp3 player. RSS feeds are computer programs that act like homing pigeons, bringing the podcast mp3 file (or other file formats) right to the computer of the person who has subscribed to the RSS feed.

I've suggested that podcasts (and text-based subscription content, too) are great ways to promote your expertise to your niche, and RSS feeds allow you to do two things: get the file to your subscribers, or post fresh, revolving content on your site to keep the search engines happy.

But what if you want to receive news and podcasts yourself? You need an aggregator, which is what allows you to subscribe to the RSS feed. The feed will return to your aggregator on an ongoing basis, as long as you remain subscribed.

One free aggregator that I really like can be found at www.feedreader.com. This aggregator is really lightweight, meaning it won't take up a lot of space on your harddrive, and it's very easy to use, so you won't be fiddling with it constantly. Also, Feedreader lets you enjoy podcasts right on your computer, instead of on your portable mp3 player.

Once you've downloaded the “binaries” file, they have some good default subscriptions (to BBS and the Wall Street Journal). But you can subscribe to the ones you like by going to an RSS directory (there are so many, just Google “RSS directory” or go to www.2rss.com) and looking for some news or podcasts you'd like to subscribe to. Although you may want to look for one or two that are humorous to bring some levity to your day, make sure you are subscribing to text or audio files in your industry and especially to podcasts by your competition.

Additional information:

Find news and podcasts at www.2rss.com

Need more help? Try:http://www.feedreader.com/node/19 which can take you through the steps quite clearly.