Top Ten Reasons Small Businesses Fail - part one

Procrastination

You're only as good as your word. Missing deadlines, arriving late for meetings, forgetting to follow up or follow through - these are all symptoms of procrastination, and key factors of Small Business failure.

As a Small Business owner, operator or employee, you cannot afford to slide down procrastination's slippery slope. Since word of mouth is the most effective low cost marketing strategy (and a rich source of revenue and referrals), you must be perceived as someone who:

• Keeps their word
• Honors their commitments
• Values their customers' and clients' time

You may be familiar with the expression "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail". Here is its procrastination-related corrolary: "If you fail to show, you show to fail". Free yourself of the voice in your head, which is telling you some variation of the following: "I work for myself, therefore -

• Noone is the boss of me
• I set my own schedule
• My time is my own
• Why must they nag me - I'll get it done (eventually)

The phrase "it's only time" is a complete falsehood: time, to a great extent, is all there is. As an independent entrepreneur, or as an employee, you either bill for time directly, or the time required to perform your task (or make your goods) is a major factor in your compensation. Time is, in many ways, your most valuable asset.

Timeliness is also an aspect of quality, which is a perception in the client's or customer's (or employer's) mind, NOT an objective quality of the work performed or goods created. As a computer service professional, a hard-won lesson is that the job isn't done until the client perceives it as done. I could have fixed it weeks ago, but if I wait for weeks to tell the client, only at that moment is it done as far as they're concerned.

And let's face it -- the person paying for the job, not the one performing it, is the one who must be satisfied. Don't take too long to understand that, if you want to stay in business...

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Series inspired by "Top Ten Reasons Why Small Businesses Fail" by: Connie Holt, E.A. cholt@henssler.com
The Henssler Financial Group Position Paper
© 2004 The Henssler Financial Group | www.henssler.com

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For Rapid Development, Slow Down

Another conference call in our quest to a 14 Sep website launch. We've really established a successful workflow, which will server me well as a model for future client relations. One of the first things we established was the need for more meetings before actual launch day:

•  Look & feel, navigation, initial site layout - 22 Aug 
•  Roles & workflow; preparation for transfer to live site - 26 Aug

We quickly decided on the overall color scheme & font selection. The font, not a standard web font, will have to be imported - which means I will have to learn how to do that. More homework, but then that's why we're applying the Pareto principle with our conference calls.

The generous nature of the Open Source community provided us with a template acceptable to our end goals and compatible with our color scheme, boosting our progress and reducing the design effort by... well, about 80%.

Image via Wikipedia
Having done her homework, she provided two reference sites that gave me a good idea of her internal picture of the finished product we're aiming for.

The key thing I'm learning is that it's possible to not be in the same room, but to really be on the same page. In fact, the screen sharing sessions coupled with the telephone calls, with her on speaker phone and me wearing an earbud, actually helps us focus by removing visual distractions and eliminating the need to "shoulder surf" while attempting to share the same computer screen.

We're each in our own work environment, on our own computers. And we're both focused on the task at hand. With each "meeting", we get a clearer picture of how much work we've done (the demo site looks more like the finished product), of how much work we have left to do (the demo site doesn't work like the finished product) and how best to close the distance (we have a finite number of days until actual launch day).

Spending hours on the phone, taking the time to talk things through, being able to review the same computer screen together, is what enables us to get so much done so quickly. In many ways, the cell phone and screen sharing will end up being the real technological heroes.

That is, assuming we have cause to celebrate.

Back to work. More to come...

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Rapid Development

14 September.

It helps to have a deadline. An internal sense arises that helps steer me away from false starts and time-wasting fascination with useless details.

As a techie, it's easy to waste hours with the "gee whiz" aspect of things that won't actually be used in this phase of the project. A deadline helps set a time limit on mental wandering.

I just recently completed the second conference call with the online magazine publisher who is my website client. Our first conference call, last Tuesday (10 Aug), I used the free "DimDim" screen-sharing service (I do not name these things) to show her the prototype Drupal website, and a variety of themes so we could get a baseline of the "look and feel" she desires.

This week, she e-mailed me PDF samples of her magazine for an idea of the fonts and color scheme, and we discussed various aspects of the behind-the-scenes pre-construction concerns such as:

• What information would we collect from people who visit the site?
• What content will be visible to everyone?
• What "premium" content will only be visible to those who sign up and log onto the website?
• How will the site integrate with social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter?
• How will we catalog and categorize user information and site content so that we can cross-reference information, and present customized views to each user?
• How will the website communicate with off-line site members (email/SMS/twitter/et al)?
• Can/will there be Google Apps integration?

and so forth. A dozen plus years of corporate IT support taught me that to successfully complete complicated projects quickly, the 80/20 rule means

80 percent of the effort is the work done in the first 20 percent of the project

It's all in the advanced planning. Drupal, like Joomla! and Wordpress, give Small Businesses the ability to do nearly anything that can be done with a website, cheaply and easily. Cheaply and easily, that is, if you plan what you want the site to do first, then determine what information and configuration you'll require to accomplish that.

This means you do the heavy lifting -- database mapping, form building -- before you worry about things like appearance and layout. Once you make sure everything works properly, you not only can take your time arranging it, but you'll find it's easy to arrange things when you're not inventing them at the same time.

By taking this top-down approach, we ended our call with a series of milestones mapped to the calendar:

• Look and feel final conference - 18 Aug
• Soft launch (moving site to production server) - 28 Aug
• Meet with site editor & content contributors - 1 Sep
• Content freeze and performance shakedown - 6 Sep

A pretty aggressive schedule, but the only way we can actually launch a site that doesn't exist yet is to determine precisely the tasks and sequence of actions required, and strictly adhere to a no-nonsense schedule. Which you don't tend to do when the due-date is months away, or more.

It helps to have a deadline... or so goes the theory...

More to come

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