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.

There is an interesting article on Small Business Branding blog – “10 Critical Questions To Ask A Web Designer”. The post is wrong on so many accounts, it’s would have been easier to ignore it altogether. However, being a lead to a Zealus web design studio for so many years I can’t help but notice how irrelevant most of these questions are – and here’s why:

1. What skills do you or your team posses? HTML, CSS, Drupal, WordPress, MySQL, PHP, CGI, Ruby on Rails? – author argues that by listening to the white noise the project lead makes while trying to answer your question you will be able to pick something useful. Wrong – you won’t. If he’s technically savvy he (or she, doesn’t matter) will sink you in the sea of gibberish technology talk, and if he’s not – he will sink you even deeper in semi-technology blabber. Point is – you will leave thinking that you have talked to a smart guy while in reality you have learned nothing.
What you should be asking – what’s the technology called, how widespread is it, how mature is it. These are the things you can understand, remember and cross-check after the conversation. What’s important – you will be able to make a business decision based on things you can comprehend.

2. How quickly can you provide a first draft of the site and how long does a job like this normally take? – author argues that such preliminary estimates can help you manage your schedule. Wrong – before signing the contract all dates are so grossly underestimated that you really have to live outside of the reality to base anything but future negotiations on those dates.
What you should be asking – how long projects like these take typically? What are the pitfalls, what could drag the project, how to prevent dragging from happening.

3. What is your working procedure and how will you communicate your progress? – if you are working with freelancers they most likely have no procedure in place and if you have with some established group they will tell you about project status reports even before you have to ask. The reason being that people who’s been around long enough know that if they fail to communicate properly they fail to get paid. So they will make damn sure their client knows all the hard work they put in, they will create a dashboard with tasks, timelines, heck, you might even see Gantt chart!
What you should be asking – what is the phone number of the person responsible for the project. One single person has to be responsible, if there is more than one – walk away.

4. How much support comes with this package deal? – obvious statement that no one works for free is obvious. Make sure you ask this question before negotiations begin, otherwise you can negotiate that sweet low price only to find out that support costs painfully extra. Unless you’re dealing with “Cheap web sites for r$499 per 5 pages” type of designers – there is no point in asking this question aside from the other negotiations.

5. What kind of after support do you offer? – same thing. Best thing to do is negotiate a support contract for some period immediately after launch so you will be covered in case something comes out immediately after your web project is live. In addition to that you might want to get a per-incident support after initial support contract is expired.
What to ask – nothing, keep negotiating.

6. What is your normal procedure if the job does not turn out satisfactorily? – author is then ventures on a journey of how everyone is spoiled by generous refund policies. Well, you just go and try to get a refund from anyone, I just want to watch how easy it would be. Speaking of service contracts, I may not live long enough to see the end of it anyway.
What you should be asking – nothing, just get a copy of the contract BEFORE you sign in and show it to your lawyer. It just another one of those things you want to negotiate as hard as you can. We have actually dropped a number of contracts because we could not successfully negotiate this single point. Everything else was set, but because client wanted a full refund or had some other crazy idea about how he gets all of his money back at the end when he tells us he doesn’t like it – it was dropped. It’s cheaper than a lawsuit anyway.

7. What software or technology will you be using to build my site and will I be able to use and update it myself? – the tragic story of a person who was asking for white noise in question #1 and ended up with useless application without anyone around to support it. That’s the illustration right there why pretty much everything that post is telling you is wrong.
What you should be asking – see question number 1: how widespread this technology, how mature is it. Is is Open Source or is it proprietary (former is better than the latter, unless you’re talking about Flash which is a whole another can of worms altogether).

8. Does it cost extra for this software or does anything you recommend to build this site going to require additional license purchased? – this is the only sane question in the whole ten, however, the justification is flawed nonetheless. As with any contractor, he brings his own tools. If your project lead is a geek he will force you into buying the top-notch hardware and software so that he could play with new shiny toys that he otherwise could not afford. If your project lead is a sales agent she will sell you whatever she will make the most of. Either case – you loose.
What you should be asking – is for a detailed chart of costs, including anything and everything your project needs to be completed successfully. Let your future contractors know that you have such and such assets and if anything needs to be purchased – it has to be put on that chart. Time, licenses, hardware, image and sound rights and royalties – everything goes there. This way you can cross-check with other contractors and actual vendors to see who’s charging you and for what. It’s your money, don’t waste it.

9. We would like the domain name administrator to be in our representative’s name and email. Can you arrange that? – unless you trust your contractor sleep in the bed with your husband (or wife) – never ever even mention this to them. Spend as much time as it requires, but BUY THE DOMAIN YOURSELF! Do not give access to your domain to anyone else, if there are any modifications – learn how to do them yourself or register a domain with registrar who has telephone support – like GoDaddy. You can rebuild the site in months, but rebuilding a reputable brand name, replacing domain that all your customers know can take years.
What should I ask – can you develop on test platform and them move the site to our domain? But any decent developer should do that anyway.

10. Can I see a portfolio of previous sites built. Or is there a demo of a site similar to what you will be building us? – this should be first question that you ask a contractor (designer, programmer or whatnot). Why is it #10 – I have no idea, I guess just to reiterate how much wrong is with initial post. In addition to portfolio (if there is any) you should briefly explain what you are trying to do and how does the designer see it solved. That should be the first thing – before you put anything else on the table.

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.

Acquisitions are nothing new. Your lawyer will call my lawyer or leave a message on my machine – or something like that. The problem starts with smaller acquisitions, where lawyer’s service would cost just as much as the cost of acquisition itself.

Last couple of days I was involved in the sale of my client’s web site. He sold his Russian food web site to another entrepreneur who already owns a brick and mortar store plus couple of related web sites. Obviously I cannot disclose the amount, but let’s just say it’s not large enough to think about involving lawyers.

The way the sale was proceeding was a good example of lack of knowledge on the part of small business owners. Small business owners don’t quite realize what is being sold and bought during the transfer of rights to the web site and it’s domain name. Some people think that the actual CD with web site code and database is the object of sale. Some think it’s a domain name. Some think it’s the login and password to administration area of the web site.

In either case while being the web master for the web site in question I became a third party who revised the contract, got the CD with latest back up of the web site code and database, passwords to admin area and e-mails.

Domain name and hosting transfer are still pending, as the client who bought the web site doesn’t clearly understand the difference between the two.

It should be a common knowledge already that the less the client pays for your service, the more of your time he/she consumes. Usually this happens because they try to save every penny and argue about minor things that naturally should have been let go. However, by concentrating on such minor issues, the client totally misses the major stuff that needs his/her attention.

For example, let’s take an online store. By being a royal pain in any place you can imagine the client takes about a week to decide between the two offered ways of presenting a single product on per line in the store (a decision of two hours at most, really!). Then we, thinking of a better way to promote the product the client sells, offer an addition to the store that (by our calculations) should increase product exposure by large volume. It’s a trendy perk, not many stores have it, so it would naturally rise confidence in web site. Client impolitely declines, since it will be more expensive and push us to complete the project. Which we, of course, did.

On the closure meeting that lasts two hours instead of 40 minutes client politely listens to the presentation on how to use their store (almost without taking any notes), after which goes on about how he wants us to change the design since “we never discussed that there would be only one item per line”. That is – after they have agreed on the draft, confirmed (no less then two times) that no additional changes are necessary and that web site will look exactly like on the picture. And after the week-long heated discussion on how to present single item per line in a best way. They delay the last installment. We offer that they keep the last installment and go with another web design studio, since they are dissatisfied with the job we did (although we did everything according to the specs, offered additional functionality and features, accommodated their shoe-string budget and so on).

Now, I am not writing this to bash clients – they are in their right to make mistakes. They probably just need to learn how to take responsibility for them, but that’s not my concern. The more clients come in our way the more I see a trend where people who pay more money for essentially same product (i.e. web site – in any of its form) take less of your time by managing important parts of their web sites and leaving technicalities to us. After all – that’s exactly what they are paying us for. People who can afford to spend more money value their time and our time more then those, who spend less. In different terms – they know how to delegate responsibilities because this makes them more money. This knowledge, as far as I understand, comes after certain level of acquired business experience. What’s cause and what’s effect – knowledge or money – I think is obvious.

So the next time I see this client (hopefully it won’t be as painful as it was last time) I will give them couple of links to a good articles on delegating responsibilities. No matter how much hard time our clients give me, I still believe in educating our customers. Can’t vouch for this particular case, but the general trend says that it helps.

Many resources recommend having a blog and creating content in order to position yourself as an expert in the field. Blog attracts attention to the product you are selling giving it a contextual boost from the content you are writing. In most cases, people who know the most about the product or service are those who run the business. They are so busy creating the product or service, dealing with clients and suppliers or whatnot that they simply don’t have time to create quality content.

Sure, you can hire a blogger, ghost writer or just an English-major intern to write stuff for you. Problem is – he doesn’t know the product. He doesn’t have the feeling for the product, like the owner has. There is no passion, no interest (except for being paid) and no understanding of how to present your product to the readers. Those readers, who later may become customers. It’s all about presentation, after all. So blogging becomes new sales tool that the owner doesn’t have time (or some times skills) to use.

What we recently started doing is we offer our clients to keep their blogs for them. We know the product, since we worked on presenting it for so much time. We know the target audience, since we’ve been talking to them since the launch of client’s web site. And we have interest in promoting clients’ businesses, since it means more business for us.

Everybody wins. Except for the guy who’s hands are full already.

Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a statement that basically says “your software is badwe know better”. Alright, we thought, and ventured to check on Google. The result was astonishing – the difference was 0.6%. Either Google is very good at serving ads that are traceable, or Yahoo/Overture isn’t being honest. Or both.

Flags of the countries… with clients’ comments… Click here.