bizthreads.net: Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

I dropped in to see a friend of mine who was experiencing a small burst in his contracting business. He was pouring over a piece of paper filled with sticky notes, rearranging them like a puzzle.

I asked him what he was doing and when he could tear himself away from his work he said that he was scheduling his work teams for the following week.

Then he showed me his calendar. At first it looked to be a mess of sticky notes and I inquired about whether it wouldn't be easier to just write everything down or put it on the computer.

He pointed out that he often had to change his planning for the week, depending on updates he got from other trades (and whether they'd finish in time) as well as deliveries, equipment rental, and weather. His success was dependent on so many other factors that he had to accommodate for them and move people around accordingly. And he couldn’t type it into the computer because he found himself in the field in conditions not always conducive to computers. And to keep the sticky notes from blowing away or getting damaged, he slides it into a plastic sheet protector that you find in binders.

It struck me as a good idea so I asked him if I could suggest it to my readers. If you have a project that is highly dependent on many other factors for success, you may want to consider a similar sticky-note calendar system. It keeps your schedule very flexible.

This idea is going to keep companies like 3M in business for a long time. And it will keep your time more productive.

This must-have piece of equipment is going to make some people laugh… Unless you're in car, house, or investment sales, then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

For everyone who does any kind of selling (that's most of us, I think), this must-have gadget really is a must-have gadget. If you go on any kind of sales call, you need this gadget:

You need a pen.

Now I'm not talking about any kind of pen, here. I'm talking about a good, solid, dependable, heavy pen that you only take out to sign contracts.

I know more than one salesperson who carries two pens with them on sales calls. One is their regular pen: they do their presentation with it, jot notes during the information-gathering stage, etc.

The other one is kept in a special case in their briefcase. The salespeople I know splurge a little and get a nice Cross or Montblanc pen. And it only comes out to sign the papers.

I know plenty of salespeople who have their own little rituals: a pair of shoes they only wear on closing days, or an office that snips the tie of any salesman who sells over a certain amount of money. These are great rituals, but I love the “deal signing pen” as a must-have gadget.

When you're in a sales call and that pen comes out, you're filled with renewed confidence and it's all you can do to keep a wide grin from spreading across your face.

I was looking for a few resources about the changes between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (which are common ways of expressing how the Internet has changed since its inception as the popular World Wide Web).

Naturally, the title jumped out at me and I picked up the book. Goto and Cotler create a real winner, although not in the way I was expecting. The actual information I was looking for was only inferred, not stated. Still, I learned so much about web design.

What the authors were trying to create is a process, a workflow that will help any website designer — professional or the rest of us — to create a site that helps improve the users' experience.

They set up a step-by-step workflow at the beginning of the book that takes the reader from defining the project and works in incremental steps to launching and beyond. I love the user centric approach as well as the comparisons of websites as they were in Web 1.0 and how they were changed.

Small business owners will find this book very helpful for them to get a handle on their websites (since I hear from many e-tailers that their sites have taken on a life of their own). The book is easy to read and not technical! Very user friendly.

If I could make a wish for a “next edition,” I would love it if the authors could spend as much time on design as they did on analysis and implementation. The design-related content is often implicit throughout the book instead of explicit and I think the book's value would more than double if it combined its great approach with more explanation on design.

Still, it comes highly recommended.

Blogs. Blogs have been around for while but this is definitely the year of the blog. Businesses are getting in on the blogging scene in a big way; it's not just the domain of technical pundits anymore. If your business doesn't have a blog, maybe it's time to get one.

Myspace.com is sometimes billed online as “social networking.” It's a way for someone to post a lot of stuff about themselves so that others can see their interests. Some of the things you can post about yourself include music, favorite pictures, a journal, etc. It seems to be like a blog on steroids. What does this have to do with business? Well, Myspace.com has garnered a lot of news lately about its astronomical growth and popularity. But there's another organization doing something very similar for businesses that I think is going to get bigger, too: http://www.ikarma.com/ is a site that lets you post a page about you and your business. Your customers can leave comments about you and you can refer others to that site. Take the tour here:http://www.ikarma.com/tour/.I like this idea and I think it's going to take off soon.

A Yahoo! account is a growing resource for people… it acts as a central online hub to keep your photos, blogs, bookmarks, get financial information. It comes with a Yahoo! email address, a calendar, a place to play games, and a free instant messaging system. Google is quickly advancing to close in on this, but right now Yahoo! is at the top of the pack to provide a central hub for just about everything in your life: it's accessible online (which means you can manage this stuff anywhere in the world). Although there are business-related versions of this, this free version is great for your personal life management.

This is a fascinating development in the world of online/offline business:The flash store.

This virtual store — for a brief period of time — becomes a real store. Politicians might suggest that it opens up all kinds of problems, including the challenge of having (or not having) appropriate businesses licenses for the municipality in which you're doing business. This is one of the areas where the offline world will have to catch up.

But if this store has any success online, they may enjoy a burst of shoppers and create a little buzz by being offline for a day or two… it's like creating your very own “midnight madness” type of sale. And, they could potentially get exposure to more prospects who would (later) click onto their store.

It's a great idea. Is that something your business can do?

Webex.com has long been known for the excellent service they provide with online meetings and webinars. Frankly, that's all I ever used them for. I like their clean interface and user-friendly site.

Recently, though, I absentmindedly clicked on their “small business solutions” tab and came to discover just how much more they offer. Check out www.weboffice.com. Weboffice.com is a great virtual office system. They have one of the best and most comprehensive virtual offices I've seen and it comes with the great interface you'd expect from them.

Aside from virtual meetings — which we know they're already good at — they offer document management, calendars, task managers and databases.

The cost, starting at almost $60 per month, can seem prohibitive to the new entrepreneur starting out and trying to etch a living. But that $60 gives you 5-person access to the virtual office. By the time you have 5 collaborators, I'm betting there's a good chance the $60 per month will be worth it.

If you sign up now, you get a free For Dummies book, too. (If you've read some of my other blogs, you'll know how much I love these books… maybe I'll sign up…)

Time is a precious commodity. Some say that we all are given only 24-hours and the truly successful people make the most out of them.

So I say, why reinvent the wheel? Don't start over from scratch doing something that's already been done. Stand on the shoulders of giants and use templates and checklists to help guide you… most of the work has already been done for you!

Are you in a business that bids on projects? Use our Sample Proposal Format for Responding to RFPs checklist to help you answer a request for proposal with skill.

Before communicating with prospective clients, use this checklist to make sure that you cover all of the bases: Communicating with Prospective Clients

Want to start a new business? Our Business Plan Templates can help you save time.

Don't worry about hiring an attorney to do what's already been done. Check out our Sample Business Contracts.

Don't do more work than you have to! Use these plans and templates to help you run your business so you can spend your time doing the things that you love.

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.

I would like to award prizes (sorry, no fancy statues or red carpets, just my accolades) to 5 websites that I think do it right. I've selected these 5 sites to talk about various aspects of website design. Perhaps you can incorporate some of the same ideas into your site to increase effectiveness and make more sales.

Postaroo.com is a site I would probably never click on if I hadn't heard about it. And it's rare that I pay attention to commercials anyway (… that's why remotes were invented). However, Postaroo had a clever marketing campaign that included teaser commercials less than 5 seconds long that simply had a kangaroo hopping and a “coming soon.” I was intrigued each time I saw it and when they finally announced what they were, I immediately went to their website. Brilliant!

FedWorld.gov is the place to bookmark to begin any federal government search you may have. In spite of excessive red-tape when dealing with bureaucrats, this website is easy to use and well-designed. You might actually be proud of your tax dollars at work effectively, here.

MediaBistro.com is not a site that many people would visit, simply because it is fairly niche-oriented. But it looks good and collects together all kinds of resources into one page. If you fall into their niche, it's definitely a central hub you can go to time and time again. Can you be that site for your niche?

WebEx.com may be well-known to you as a premiere provider for e-learning solutions. What I like about this site is that the site is very well-designed and it gives all kinds of valuable information for people looking for information, but the three things they want people to do are front and center and so clearly marked that you can't miss them. Is your call-to-action as clear as theirs?

National Geographic has a lot of content it needs to put on its front page. What I like about this site better than (for example) Amazon.com is that nearly all of the important stuff shows up on the screen rather than requiring excessive scrolling. On Amazon, which also posts a lot of front-page content, the excessive scrolling can get annoying. I usually click off before I get to the bottom. Does your key information show up without scrolling?

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.