December 2011

It’s all over the news and if you have missed it – it’s too bad. GoDaddy recently announced their strong support for SOPA/PIPA legislation only to revert their position once public outcry started affecting their bottom line. It is obvious that reversal is a purely a PR stunt and a bad one at it. No one argues that any company is out there to make money, but advocating legislation that, in the long run, will prevent people from making more money is plain stupid. The SOPA support game that GoDaddy has got themselves into is a short small gain, long big loss kind of a deal and any company that has any future plans should have known better than that. Judging by GoDaddy’s recent actions – they don’t. This leads to only one simple conclusion – I cannot afford to trust my domains and domains of my clients to company who can’t forecast their own future within a year or two. Nothing personal, just business – can’t trust the company that doesn’t know what it is doing.

Having said that – I have begun the process of moving my domains away from GoDaddy. First 7 are already on the way to Name.com right now. As you can imagine, transferring some 140 domains away from GoDaddy is a significant expense and is time consuming, however, I feel very strongly about making a move. The process will be gradual – at the end of the month I will move a batch of domains that are scheduled to renew in the next month or two. It will not generate a big lump in GoDaddy’s monthly reports and I probably will not receive a phone call from GoDaddy begging me to return. However, I will feel somewhat better knowing that my money will not fund the idiocy and waste that is SOPA/PIPA.

Happy New Year everyone.

It's the matter of perception - Small Business Blog Lately I have been busy managing things. There are many different things that need managing and it takes different kinds of people to manage certain things. Having said all that, everyone, especially in the small business area, have to know (or learn) to manage their own perception. In other words, you have to know how to control the way people perceive you.

Let’s consider the following example. The company has just hired a technical expertise person, who they call ‘developer’ for lack of a better word. Company itself does not maintain any IT staff, rather relying on multiple outside vendors to provide services. Immediately upon the introduction of the ‘developer’ to vendors they went from happy and content to almost hostile. The obvious reason was that from their perspective the ‘developer’ is going to take away from their plate and take over most, if not all, work some of them are doing. Company’s management happily

Now, had this ‘developer’ been introduced to vendors by using his actual title – which included the word “manager” – things would have went a lot easier. Vendors would understand that the real goal of that person coming aboard would be to manage company’s relationship with those very vendors, having a more streamlined way of communicating requirements and processing feedback. In a way, this person should be a single point of contact between vendors and the company, removing or significantly reducing ambiguity and redundancy in processes.

However, by not managing the proper perception of the role, the company management created an obstacle in their relationship with vendors that wasn’t there before. Had the proper perception management applied – there would be no hostility whatsoever.

Managing the way your business partners and vendors perceive you and people who work for you is an important stage in relationship development. A lot of small businesses miss the opportunity to build on this early on and playing a catch-up game to resolve the issues that should not have been there in the first place.