BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

I still go to college. Partly because I am honorary three times college dropout. Partly because there’s always something new to learn and I am willing to go for it. And partly because it allows for interaction with a lot of different characters, like inexperienced people full of ideas and experienced people who can cool off any hot thoughts – all in the same room.

These days my college requires a lot of presentations – even for something like basic finance class. So our class was broken down into teams and each team was tasked with a boring project to analyze different cases of time-value of money. Our group took a hit early and was one person short, comparing to other teams. That, however, turned into an advantage, because synchronizing schedules of 4 people is a lot easier than it is for five. I can vouch for it, since I was a de-facto team leader, although I had to appoint someone else to be an official team leader

Another team, that was presenting right after us, had a chance to prepare for about a week and a half longer. They didn’t have as much constraints on their time as we did (all members of our team have a full time job in addition to school) nor they had family arrangements some of us have been tied in (babysitters, namely). In other words, they had all the chances to beat us on every single front. They didn’t and the sole reason for it was lack of leadership.

On my part, I did everything I could to make teammates involved into the project. We did a brainstorming session on our first meeting where we laid out the skeleton of the presentation. We put a personality into the project’s presentation that immediately resulted in every member of the team personally involved. I created an outline by drawing sample slides on whiteboard once we agreed on the idea. I created slides for the presentation leaving out empty ones to be filled in by each teammate so that everyone immediately realized their part of the presentation and who goes after who. Everyone worked independently on their part, which allowed some basic task crushing, so when we met next time – we already had 90% of work done, just needing some polish over. Once we started splitting the work, turned out two people have serious issues with stage fright, so I let them speak on the middle slides, while I open up the presentation. By setting up certain pace of the presentation from the start I was able to keep the tempo going for all four of us.

I had a chance to see one of their meetings and they have confirmed they’ve been pretty consistent about them – the whole team was working on a current step, so the rest was put away until current one is complete. The approached stemmed from inability of any team member to act as a legit team leader, delegating tasks to other members and controlling the deliverables. There’s an upside to this approach, of course: all team members are very familiar with every single part of the project. However, this is being offset by team members focusing on the latest problem and forgetting about previous steps; no one is taking responsibility for the parts of the projects or the project as a whole. But what was the most terrible mistake of all is that every presenter on their team got two slides each – dispersed throughout the presentation. One person started on a first slide and later on would come in to comment on slide 12. Second person actually got to talk about slides 2 and 10, next – 3 and 14, and so on. By the middle of the presentation it was impossible to keep track of the subject, who said what and what is going on. Not because they didn’t know the material – they knew it alright, but because there was no leadership in place to lead them through it.

As I have said in the opening of this post – I like going to college because it allows the interaction with a lot of different people. Examples like these clearly show where most of people’s uncertainty comes from. It comes from being afraid of consequences of being responsible, taking charge or making a decision. This is also what makes or breaks entrepreneurs: not the decisions themselves, but the ability itself to choose – with or without having a complete picture and full understanding of how things work.

While doing various demos with clients I can’t help but notice one scary trend. Client usually checks the demo page from his or hers computer, prepares a list of issues and then we meet to go over them. A lot of clients complain right off the start that their web site doesn’t look exactly like it should or behaves strangely. The reason, of course is not the fact that the web sites we designed aren’t compatible with their browsers, but their browsers being dramatically out of date.

There were so many times when this had happened, it actually became one of the internal internet memes. The phrase “but this is a brand new computer, we only bought it year and a half ago” isn’t that funny anymore. People are becoming increasingly overprotective of their computers, calling them their “friends” and “babies” – “my baby is sick, can you fix it”, “my dear friend have been acting strange lately, maybe he’d caught a virus or something”.

Worse yet, when you point to those issues you face further complaints that you are trying to avoid your responsibilities and you should make web site work with any browser on Earth. While in general it is true, the task is all but impossible – try stuffing that intro flash movie down the throat of Lynx and you will get the idea . Or, more realistic scenario – the famous Internet Explorer 6.0, that some people still think is good enough browser. In fact, according to statistics on my most traffic-heavy clients’ web sites the IE 6 is 4th most popular browser, after IE 7, IE 8 and Firefox (all versions).

Unfortunately, quite a few things are simply impossible to achieve in this world. One of them is the browser compatibility. However, there’s a pretty good chance that if you make something look critical and urgent and very important overall – people would listen, look and take action.

So from now on if you venture to this web site using one of the older browsers (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox are supported at the moment) you will see a bright yellow bar on the top of the page saying that your browser is old and needs to be updated with a link to a page where you can choose what to do as well as a link to page where I explain why it is important to keep the browser up to date. If you are using the latest and greatest but just anxious to to see what the page looks like – feel free to look here: http://www.istudioweb.com/browser-information/.

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