Fearless Money » Entrepreneurial

Building a Business – Proper Focus

Bruce Kroeze — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:23:02 +0000

Going through my notes from studying the NitroBlueprint – an excellent internet business building course I purchased last year – I came across this timely quote about focus:

(referring to a business model of putting up 10,000 junk web pages for adsense)

That might be focus, but is it proper focus?

Does that build a business and do they love doing it? The graveyard of adsense site roadkill with people who went from making $10,000 a month to $83 a month is a mile long.” — Page 14. NitroBlueprint Manual

Good point!

When considering a course, book or product, consider:

How am I going to use and apply this to my business?
Do I want to follow the system this course proposes, or does it just teach a tactic?
Do I have the time to devote to go through it, learn and apply the material?

Even though I’m burning up with desire to get moving on some of the ideas I learned at the excellent Earn1KADay Summit 2009 last weekend, I’m keeping this in mind. In a nutshell, does it really build a business and will I use it?

Technorati Tags: adsense, Business, Marketing

Don't Quit and Don't Sell

Bruce Kroeze — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:05:15 +0000

A little sanity check during an incredibly turbulent time in the economy.

Don’t Quit

If you are already out there building your own business, keep at it. If you were all prepared to jump ship from your lousy office job, do it. The nasty little secret is that harder times clean up the pool for the people who are actually good at what they do.

Yes, a lot of businesses fail, although that stupid “fact” about 9 out of 10 businesses failing in the first couple years is so biased and slanted as to be nothing short of a lie.

For example, you know that selling your business counts as a “failure” in that statistic, right? Sounds like a win to me. The only people who pump that biased “fact” are selling you something or are trying to talk themselves/you out of starting a business. They are losers and you should always ignore losers.

The the truth is that if you are smart, practical and aggressive, you’ll do fine. If you work on the business at least some of the time. If you actually build value for clients and customers. If you actually have a plan, and if you can get over the aversion to actually telling people what you do and why they should buy from you, then you’ll do fine.

In fact, you’ll do better than fine, since all the fair-weather folks will drop out very early on in the so-called harder times. Persevere and you’ll come out on top during the recovery.

Face it, are you really safer at that corporate gig? I’ve been laid off, or quit just prior to mass layoffs several times from supposedly secure jobs. The idea of safety in putting all your income earning potential in the hands of another is simply foolish, and I finally learned the lesson reality was trying to teach me.

Don’t Sell

At these kinds of times, when the market is on a roller-coaster, I usually just turn off all market data feeds for a month or two. I can’t stand thinking “I’ve lost $x,xxx today.”

The truth is, if you look at it historically, the people who simply rode out the huge turbulent periods did fine every time. The people who actually see the big dips as opportunities and buy the right stuff at the bottom of the trough did way better than fine. They joined the ranks of the newly rich come recovery time.

Yes, it is annoying. Yes, you might need to put off that addition to your house because you shouldn’t liquidate the asset you were going to use to pay for it. But selling because everyone else it? You aren’t that dumb.

Technorati Tags: Business, Encouragement, Layoffs, Office Job, Sanity Check

Accounting is not so fun for me

Bruce Kroeze — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:44:58 +0000

For as long as I’ve had any business, I’ve done my own accounting. After all, I have a decent accounting program (MYOB FirstEdge ) and I understand the basics of accounting.

In a way, it is like programming or a particularly boring board game. You learn the rules and apply them to the inputs: receipts, bills, invoices and expenses. But all the time I find myself delaying and avoiding keeping my books up to date.

The final straw was me realizing on Thursday that I hadn’t been treating PayPal properly. I’d been treating it as “undeposited funds”, when really I should have been treating it as a bank account. It wasn’t a big deal before I started getting a flood of payments via PayPal primarily from my overseas clients . So, I downloaded my past year history and entered all of it that way.

Of course, that meant I needed to correct (with journal transactions), all transactions I’d entered inappropriately as petty cash or undeposited funds. Laboriously, line by line, I got it all to balance and be understandable. Like I said, I can do it, but it makes me want to pound my fists into the desk in bored frustration and irritation at the time this is taking.

Bleah and bleah again. I’m definitely outsourcing that job as soon as possible. I’ve got an interview with a bookkeeper this Thursday. It will be money well spent not to waste my time on stuff I find so incredibly boring.

Technorati Tags: accounting, outsourcing

Technorati Tags: Accounting, Business, Programs

Outsource to America. Hire me for cheap?

Bruce Kroeze — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:28:43 +0000

Yesterday I had my kickoff call with a new client from Germany. Analyzing the sale, which is always a good idea, I was thinking about why he didn’t even blink an eye at my hourly rate. It truly is a bit higher than many can get away with charging for web development work, and I often have to defend the rate. I’m worth it, of course, but that isn’t really the point.

The point is that he didn’t even flinch at the rate. I thought about it. Maybe my blogging at CodersEye is so great and such a credibility enhancer that he was primed for me. Possibly my work with the Satchmo open-source Shopping Cart Engine was the selling point. Those help of course, but they also help me with my U.S. customers.

Then I realized the key difference. He’s German. To him, with an incredibly strong Euro, my rate was normal, or even a bit cheap. Haha! I’m the cheap outsourced labor now.

So how do I feel, being exploited

I feel wonderful. I can charge my preferred hourly rate, so I win. He can pay me at a reasonable-to-him rate so he wins. If this is exploitation, I’m all for it. Please, exploit me.

Hey all you Europeans! Outsource to the newly cheap American programmers!

Technorati Tags: outsourcing

Got that client

Bruce Kroeze — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 23:55:14 +0000

By the way, we did get that giant client. This is mostly a job for my design partner, but it was an amazing feeling to land such a big job.

It is a big surprise to me, discovering how much I enjoy the process of selling. I actually like reading books about sales and marketing, and I thoroughly enjoy the process of connecting with a customer. Geeks aren’t supposed to like that.

I like it and I seem to have a solid knack for it, so I’m thinking of scaling back the amount of time I spend programming. That way, I can do more technical sales for my company. I think that technical sales may be a rarer and more lucrative skill than programming.

Technorati Tags: sales, technical sales

Biggest client yet!

Bruce Kroeze — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:15:50 +0000

Wow, I just got back from pitching my biggest prospect ever. My web consultancy is growing by leaps and bounds.

This is a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, which makes it not only the biggest job, but the biggest company we’ve ever had on our radar. This final pitch was a half hour in-person presentation before 3 VPs. We’ve already made it though three preliminary rounds, so this was it, and we’ll know within a day or two if we got the job.

I am so grateful to my Toastmasters club for helping me grow in my speaking skills. I’d never have been so comfortable making such a presentation before all the experience I have had in that excellent group.

If we get the job, which I’m thinking there is a great chance we will, then we have the rest of the summer covered for work, and a crown jewel of a connection into the Portland business scene. Woop woop!

Technorati Tags: consulting

Identifying as a Small Businessman

Bruce Kroeze — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:25:21 +0000

Months into my new life as a small-businessman, I still stumble on the old question "What do you do?"

But I am getting better. This weekend, at the Beltane party, I started to answer "I’m a programmer…", but then caught myself and said, "Actually these days I am a small business owner. I went into business for myself earlier this year with a couple partners."

I really love identifying myself this way. It has something to do with the fact that my father was a small business owner, which I always admired and knew I wanted to emulate some day. It also has something to do with the fact that people don’t seem to glaze over quite so quickly when you talk about starting a business.

In the past, I often found that people would pigeonhole me quickly if I would talk about programming and why I liked it. "He’s into computers, I’m not.", "He’s into computers and that is boring." or sadly enough often, "He’s a Linux guy, I’m a Windows guy, so he must hate me."

But if I talk about the challenges with building a business, getting clients, and really talking with them, I find that I usually connect. Everyone, even employees, face some of those problems. Whether the difficulty with communicating, or with coming to an agreement about what needs to be done, or even difficulties getting paid in a timely manner.

I’m trying to use these opportunities to polish my "elevator pitch" about my business. Not so much in the hope that these people will hire me, but to try it out in various ways and get good at delivering a short, punchy summary of what we do and why we love it. If I can keep them interested for 30 seconds then I might have a better shot at the next big client.

Technorati Tags: startup, small-business, consulting

Review of Cashboard

Bruce Kroeze — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:04:30 +0000

Since I started taking clients for my business last fall, I’ve been careful to track my time. I don’t usually charge by the hour, preferring the simple honesty of flat-rate prices for tasks, but even then I still track my time religiously.

Until now, I’ve been using a combination of MarketCircle’s "Billings2" application, and the Harvest web time tracking application. I had to use two apps because neither was capable of doing what I wanted by itself. Billings couldn’t handle a simple weekly time entry or summary. Harvest can’t track bills or anything but hours.

Yesterday I got fed up with the pain of keeping two systems in sync, and began looking for a new time and billing app. I’ve found what appears to be nearly my dream application in Cashboard.

(Note, this is not a paid review, and I won’t receive anything for the following almost 100% positive review.)

What it is

Cashboard is a Web 2.0 app for managing & billing project hours. It understands and handles smoothly:

Multiple projects
Multiple clients – including multiple projects-per-client
Multiple employees or subcontractors – each can enter time, without an additional fee for each user.
Clients who want to login and view hours – I can delegate access to them to view only their projects.
Hour/Task estimates – with later analysis of the real time taken to that estimated
Varying tasks. Each project can have custom tasks.
Invoicing, it will generate invoices and allows you to apply payments to one or more invoices (which not even my accounting software does).
Agreements with countersigning (I don’t use this, and don’t plan to do so). Basically this is a locked down estimate and Statement of Work, with recorded digital signatures.
Weekly and summary timesheets.
Flat-rate tasks, even alongside tasks which are hourly.
Basecamp integration of projects and tasks.

Why I like it

There’s a lot to like. The feature list above is extensive, but it is also focused. It doesn’t try to take over my whole business, it just helps me match time to billing. That’s pleasant.

Also pleasant was the price. In Harvest, I was using the $9/month plan, but to go above 10 projects, I’d have needed to upgrade to $24/month. In Cashboard, I am paying $15/month and I’m not even half-using my available projects. Also, to have multiple users in Harvest, I’d have had to use the $40/month Business plan, but all Cashboard plans, even the free one allow multiple users.

What is even more pleasant is the ease of adding projects, time and tasks. I spent a total of 7 hours, loading in all 17 of my projects so far this year, and back-entering all hours for the entire year. It was boring, true, and it forced me to face the fact that I’d underbilled two clients due to synchronization problems in my old workflow.

But when I was done I got this incredible screen:

That screen told me so much about my business, my work, and my status. It also told me who needs billing and who needs me to get much more aggressive with about payment. I knew that before, but this screen shows it to me so much more clearly and in a way that promotes useful, efficient action.

What I don’t like

The system does let you apply downpayments or retainers without having to attach them to invoices. But it seems awkward, and it messes up the totals. For example, if a client pays me $1000 down, and I haven’t invoiced him yet, then my "amount uncollected" is decreased by $1000. For me, that seems to hide the negative balances of slow-paying customers. I’d rather it did not combine those downpayments.

Also, there is no way to partially invoice. I usually require 50% down to begin work on a project, and I can enter the flat-rates in my tasks on Cashboard, but I can’t bill for just the 50% down. If I invoice, I invoice the whole job and the remainder looks like an unpaid balance due, even if it is not *really* due yet, since I haven’t finished the job.

Lastly, during prime-time today, it seemed like the system was quite a bit more pokey than when I was entering most of my data last night. Harvest seemed much snappier, but then it was doing much less.

Conclusion

Cashboard is an invaluable tool for my business. It works the way I want it to work, and it gives me information not easily tracked in existing business workflows. I plan to be a long term user.

I give it a well-deserved 8 out of 10 rating. Cure those last functionality quibbles and I rate it a 10.

Entrepreneurs are the heroes of the world

Bruce Kroeze — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:17:26 +0000

Synchronistically to my post about business being a noble calling, I found someone who really hit the nail on the head. It is from the winter Cato Institute Letter, and is titled "Entrepreneurs Are the Heroes of the World."

During the last 100 years, we have created more wealth, reduced poverty more, and increased life expectancy more than in the previous 100,000 years. That happened because of entrepreneurs, thinkers, creators and innovators.

Thanks, ExtraEagle for the link.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs, heroes, cato

The Nobility of Business

Bruce Kroeze — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 06:37:31 +0000

Business is a noble calling. There, I said it. For some reason that is a non-mainstream way to think, but it is a truth that I’ve only recently come to terms with.

I certainly haven’t always felt that way. I can recall a time in the not too distant past when I agreed with my fellow “downtrodden white collar workers”, arguing that executives should be limited to some set multiple of the wages paid their lowest level employees. The only way to support such a foolhardy notion is to demonize business people, arguing that they are merely exploiting people, that they are basically parasites.

I certainly put other, more obviously selfless folks above business people in the moral-scale-of-worthiness I’d constructed in my head. Firemen, doctors (the good ones, not plastic surgeons), and teachers all seemed infinitely more important to society than businessmen.

What I never asked myself was, “who is going to pay the salary for these people?” Who will contribute to the volunteer fire department? Who will enable the volunteers to feed and clothe their families so that they may spend time in charity work?

Business, that’s who. Government can’t do it, at least not by itself, as it is also supported through the industry and sacrifices of business people.

In the last century, the U.S. has gone from a primarily agrarian economy to a vastly more interdependent and commerce oriented one. Where in the past, the basic supporter of society might reasonably have been seen to be a farmer, I argue that today it is the business people.

We are the bedrock of society. We provide the base that allows others to carry out their own passions and lives. This is no Objectivist praise of selfishness, this is the simple observation that we are the engine that drives the modern world. Without us, there can be no noble teachers or doctors.

It’s not just a noble calling, its a full on spiritual one. Serving society with every ounce of energy at my disposal, I am proud to be a businessman.

Technorati Tags: business, philosophy