BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

The trade-offs that small businesses are making are wrong. Well, most of them are. Look at the picture on the left and it will get obvious that you can’t just tweak one of the parameters without compromising other two.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Sometimes, during negotiations, when clients ask me how much would something cost I say I can do cheap, good, fast – pick any two. What should come to no surprise to anyone is that clients almost always pick “cheap” first. Then they add “good”. Then, after some thinking, they say “and I don’t want it to drag into next year”. It’ not just that this is “crisis” and people are short on cash. It’s the way of thinking of small business owner. Guess what’s wrong with this picture?

You think nothing? Alright, read on.

First of all – once any business you’re dealing with (and we are talking about B2B here) hears you pick “cheap” first – they think you are cheap and rightly so. What you probably missing is the departure of their train of though. If you are cheap – they better off try their chances somewhere else where they can make more money. Oops. You just lost a valuable partner, future investor or a bunch of referrals.

Second – when they hear you pick “good” as a second, they immediately project this on your product or service. If “good” comes second for you when you are getting something for your business, it means you are not making goods or services good in the first place, you are making them cheap. And if they turn out to be good – it’s an added benefit. Oops again – you just did more damage to your image or brand than all your competition together.

Third – when they hear your projected time line is “sometime before next year” – they get a really good understanding of your take on schedules and deadlines. That is – if they are still listening at this point.

You can see that a natural response from most small business owners is damaging their reputation – in both short and long term. Even though there is no right answer to this question (strictly speaking), any business owner who want their business to grow should know how to answer that. How? Next post would elaborate on that.

Ever since the beginning this blog was about technology. Only recently did I change it to cover first marketing, then small business as a whole. But almost all the posts of past decade are one way or another are about technology and its applications. So here’s my own little list of technologies – tools, services and gadgets that I loved using in that past decade and still using to this day.

Gmail – beats everything I have been using so far. So much so that I am slowly abandoning Outlook and converting to 100% Gmail user. In fact, any work related e-mail I send from Outlook gets CC-ed to Gmail account.

WordPress – again, slowly but surely this becomes the platform of choice for blogs I write for, as well as web sites we are still building from time to time. One of the main reasons is the automatic upgrade feature – when you take care of number of web sites, manual upgrading is too cumbersome.

Joomla – an excellent choice for content management system for any medium to large size web sites. Was our platform of choice before WordPress. Still works the best when paired with VirtueMart e-Commerce system.

HTC – as a provider of smartphones’ hardware. I’ve been using HTC devices for almost 5 years now, if not more. Starting from HTC’s BlueAngel to TyTN every single piece of hardware was awesome.

IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad T series line – my first two laptops were from Compaq and they were both horrible. So horrible, that I stopped using laptops for some time. At some point later I tried IBM’s ThinkPad T line and never looked back. Lenovo, after IBM shrugged their laptop manufacturing off their shoulders, aren’t dropping the ball with T line either, so I am looking forward to my next purchase of their T510 that’s due some time in February.

iPhone – as an entertainment center that allows you to make and receive phone calls it beats anything else. The phone part is still stuck somewhere back in 90s, but with the help of either Google Voice or Ribbit I am sure one day I’ll be able to sort it out.

Google Reader – my first source of news. Honestly, I am subscribed to a bit more feeds than I have time to read, but still it does a great job of keeping me up with anything I might want to know.

Pandora – hands down the best online radio you could imagine. I remember how much I was upset when Pandora was only working on iPhone of all the AT&T handsets. I also remember how pleased my wife was when I showed her how it works and how she can listen to the music of her choice and never get bored again.

Firefox – remains my primary browser since version 1.0.3, if not earlier. I am using Chrome or Flock (which is also based on Firefox code) as secondary browsers when I need to be logged into two Gmail accounts simultaneously, but main tool always was the Firefox.

UltraEdit – the default text editor for anything text or web related. Syntax highlighting, tabbed windows and anything you might ever want. Been using it for way too many years, each time I tried to use some kind of alternative I just kept coming back to UE.

Photoshop – it’s the only tool that still makes me feel like I have no idea on what I am doing. The more I learn it the more I discover things that just seem alien to me. Yet, it’s the only image editing software that does all I need to do – from photo editing to overly complex 100+ layers PSD files with custom web design we give to our clients.

Trillian – the all-in-one messenger solution. I used Trillian since their version 2, then moved on to Miranda (which is like Lego for messengers), but once Astra was out I switched to it immediately. For some reason this piece of software is so pleasing aesthetically that it makes me want to work more.

Skype – I purchased phone number in my area code, and using it for any conversation that is longer than 15 minutes. Just a note – between 12:15am and 12:45am this New Year AT&T’s network wasn’t letting me place any calls at all (I actually had zero bars on my iPhone at that moment). At the same time, calls placed through Skype went through just fine. Simply indispensable tool for both business and personal use.

RoboForm – an excellent password keeping tool. Unfortunately since I am using too many computers, keeping RoboForm gets prohibitively expensive, so I moved on to LastPass recently. It’s a bit more annoying than RoboForm, but does the job and is free.

Nikon D70s – I own this camera since it was released and just can’t force myself to upgrade to anything else. It just feels right. As of right now I probably shot over hundred thousand images with it – and that is given the fact that I am not a professional photographer.

Canon A series cameras – the love started with Canon A95 and carried over to A720IS I currently own. It fits in any pocket perfectly and is pretty good for the cases when full DSLR is an overkill. I am yet to see a better camera line that’s both affordable, portable and gives results of such quality.

Netflix – I’ve been a member for a few years and it’s been another great source of entertainment. Their shipping times have greatly improved recently, sometimes I am able to fit two shipments within a week.

Google Docs – I was a slow adopter mainly due to other people not getting the concept. But once I started using Docs with internet savvy business owners, they proved to be one of the most valuable tools.

Let’s see how many of these will survive in 2010.

With only about 12 hours of year 2009 left to spend, I guess this would be a good time to wrap up. Since my latest trend was to change this blog’s focus from smaller, more often posts to larger posts made more seldom and random. Hopefully by next year I will find a balance between the two, as I get a lot of things I want to share but not that much time to do it.

2009 was a good year in terms of learning from our own successes and failures. A lot of things got tested, some of them got broke and we saw what needs work, what has to be done to improve ourselves and things around us. We got our priorities right, we got our work laid out in front of us and as the old Soviet saying goes: “Goals have been set, tasks have been determined – get to work, comrades!” So, we are at work to make 2010 better, improve on our success and make our failures affecting us less. 2009 clearly showed that our existing approach to work with clients is definitely a success, since even in these harsh economic times we got our old clients as well as new ones come to us with more work than ever before.

2009 was also a good year to assess our own strengths and abilities. Like any business doing their regular SWOT analysis, we did ours and realized there is a lot of potential, there is a lot more that we can offer our existing clients as well as new ones. So one of the goals we set for 2010 is to refresh our strategy and our competitive offering. More things coming through the pipeline, so stay tuned.

Have a happy New Year!