BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Imagine you are running a small retail store. And the online storefront as well, where you sell exactly the same stuff you sell in your brick-and-mortar. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but main issues you’ll be working with are:

• keeping track of the inventory (N units in stock, X units on order)
• keeping track of sales receipts (since you have cash/credit you have to learn what the heck is accounts payable and accounts receivable)
• keeping track of employee hours worked or units of work completed (like packages prepared and shipped or units assembled)
• keep track of all your money movements, including both direct and indirect costs (like paying salary to employees and paying handyman to fix your delivery truck, or paying your smart-ass business consultants to improve your business), i.e. all of your costs of running business
• keep track of your customers’ records, personal requests (if your business is of such sort) or general requests (for certain merchandise)
• keeping track of long term projects not directly related to running a store, like marketing (ads in newspapers, AdWords campaigns) or IT (web site redesign, integrating store’s POS with online ordering)

I’m sure there’s so much more than this, but I just want to stop here. So far we have operations, sales management, human resources, accounting/finance, customer relations and executive management. Did I miss anything (ah, yes, legal, let’s just skip this for a moment) else?

Now, from my experience pretty much all the business owners are keeping all this in their heads. Their bookkeeper does their bank reconciliation once a quarter or once a year. Their full time store sales person probably remembers what needs to be ordered by week’s end. She also knows most of the customers by face and name and sort of knows what they like. And every night the owner pulls cash out of the register together with thick pack of credit card receipts to try to make some sense out of them before the store opens tomorrow morning.

Sounds totally wrong? Or too familiar? That’s what I’m getting at!

Over 80% of business owners don’t go above Excel sheets in order to keep track of all of the above information. One spreadsheet – inventory, one – list of vendors, one – credit card transactions, one – payroll. And these are very well disciplined businesses, because about 60% just don’t keep track of everything. About 20% of business owners don’t keep track of anything at all, judging about their current situation by the current balance on their bank account. And that, mind you, could be a personal account, because they aren’t incorporated, just d/b/a.

Why? Because they don’t know any better. And they don’t want to pay for it, because the money’s tight, the crisis is upon us and there are more important things to do. Nobody wants to spend their time and money on something they can’t immediately use or profit from. And that is totally understandable and just as well totally wrong.

Keep reading, this is just the beginning

Anyone who ever worked with customers knows that customers are ignorant. They don’t care how, what or when, they want their instant gratification now. Now, damn it! I mean NOW! Certain providers are happy to oblige, some would spit in customer’s soup to return the favor, some would turn such a customer away and ask not to come back ever. Everybody’s got their own favorite story to tell.

However, there’s another trend, that you may observed if you stick with your clients long enough, especially if your relationship is more or less successful. It’s the trend of ignorance rising, based on belief that you, the service provider, can solve any problem out there. From e-mails bounced off to Sun stopped rolling around Earth. And the better you do your job, the more unreasonable client’s demands become. While working as a systems administrator awhile ago, I have experienced this firsthand. Once you fixed something unbelievably hard once or twice, clients start thinking you can fix internet for them, no less. With them just asking.

Recently, one of our clients asked us to route a few common e-mail  pointers to actual people’s mailboxes. Immediately they started having, what they called, a “spam problem”. As in: “After he did this we started to have a spam problem”. Inclined to say the famous “welcome to the real world, Neo”, I tried to educate client’s staff on what is spam, how it originates and why I can do absolutely nothing to stop it, except for a set of measures that will definitely reduce it, if applied properly. Client wasn’t interested in spending any time on implementing spam protection (not to mention implement any of the commercial tools), while his staff is forced to use web mail instead of any other e-mail client. I still did what I thought I should – turned on SpamAssassin on the server to at least mark the most obvious cases of spam, so they could bulk-delete them and explained how to use filters in Outlook. Not that I expect any significant improvement of the “spam problem” for that particular client, but too I can’t be very pushy.

One of the reasons, as I see it, for not adopting any solution whatsoever, is that instant gratification thing:

What? You can’t turn off the spam? What about that solution? Still not 100% proof? Then I don’t want any solution at all!

While this approach works perfectly in 10022-SHOE zip code, it doesn’t really work in a world of Bayesian approach to catching spam. The only way to do this is to hire an interpreter from SHOE-ish to English.

Plenty of web developers have these clients that client (rarely – a few clients) that call 30 secons after their web site isn’t active. It is often hard to say on such a short notice why the client’s web site isn’t working, especially when the statement goes like “Nothing is working“, “We can’t use our web site” or “Can you please fix the web site already, it’s doing something wrong“. Of course I understand your frustration, but I might as well be checking that right now but still have no answer for you. Even worse, there might be a problem on a client side, that prevents him or her accessing certain features and it takes quite some time to figure what exactly isn’t working, why, how to fix it and how long it takes. Also, calling every five to ten minutes to talk about the progress may seem productive, but in fact each 5 minute call increases issue resolution by 30 minutes on average. I’ll be more than happy to keep you posted by e-mail or IM, this way both of my hands are dedicated to fixing the issue.

However, I believe clients (being the small to medium businesses) are perfectly capable of executing a few steps on their own. After completing the following steps of what I call a Troubleshooting Checklist a client’s call will have much more information for me so I can address exactly the issue they are having.

Troubleshooting Checklist

Step 1. Check your internet connectivity. Close your browser, type a few of your favorite URLs or just go to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft’s web sites. If you can’t get anywhere, chances are – the problem is with your internet connectivity.

Step 2. Use another connection to get to your web site. There’s number of technical reasons that non-technical people may not fully understand (and shouldn’t really bother to, in my opinion), but the truth is – if your web site looks dead from your PC, but works perfectly fine from your Blackberry – there’s something wrong with your internet connectivity.

Step 3. Flush your cache. We might have migrated to another server, our provider might have changed something unbeknown to us (yet), so your cache may me old. Reboot the PC and/or router if you’re using one in your office.

Step 4. From my experience with over 20 various models of routers and modems from pretty much any manufacturer on the market – hardware do act up from time to time. You may need to reboot the PC, router, modem or all of the above in order to get going. Try it before calling, it may save you a lot of time. Also, check if your cleaning lady accidentally pulled the plug on your modem. Things happen.

Step 5. Ask around if anyone was trying to login multiple times from your office to any of the services and failed. Our firewall might have blocked you after certain number of failed attempts, so you might have locked yourself out. Yes, the fix is on our side, but if you ask before you call we can fix it faster.

Step 6. If only one machine has the issue while all others work just fine – it’s definitely something on your side. Keep looking or call that guy who set up the network.

Step 7. When calling be prepared to outline all the steps you or your workers make to reproduce the error. If we can’t reproduce the error – we may have a very little idea how to fix it. Even if we do we will have to rely on you to let us know if it has been fixed. Overall it takes a lot of time to communicate back and forth, so the better we both get prepared, the faster the issue gets resolved.

Step 8. We try not to keep track of your passwords. In fact – we shouldn’t even know them. So if the issue requires us to login somewhere, make sure you have the password handy. Better yet – change it before we start working on the issue to something simple and change it back to something complicated once we’re done.

Step 9. If there are any other projects or ideas you think you should discuss – write them down and make a separate call. While resolving an issue (which may span across multiple accounts, not just yours) personally I can’t dig deep enough into idea to provide any meaningful feedback. However, when the issue is resolved I will be more than happy to assist you.

This may not sound like much, but it allows to minimize the damage and speed up the process dramatically. Feel free to chip in yours in comments.