We’ll be in Late…We’re Golfing

I’ll tell you something, when you run a small business, people work hard.  Our group is no different.  I’ll tell you something else: I have never regretted a single moment that we have dedicated to spending time together out of the office.

So, on Tuesday August 1, 2006, we will not be answering our phone lines or replying to email until approximately 11:00 AM EDT.  Why?  We are human and we are going to be spending a little quality time as a group.

We’ll post some results later tomorrow (my money is on Joe), but I’d expect any scores we do report to be high…

UPDATE: 11:14 AM EDT – we’re back.  Call or email if you need us.  Levi brought home the bacon.  We played “One-Putt Poker”.  Basically you start with two cards.  You earn a new card for each green you one put, two cards for birdies and eagles.  Final results after 9 holes:

1. Levi: Flush on eight cards.  He had three aces too. [WINNER]
2. Daniel: Pair of 10’s on three cards.
3. Mike: Pair of six’s on six cards.
4. Joe: Pair of six’s on five cards.
5. Jeff: King high on five cards.

Kathy was sorely missed. 

Additional notes: Joe, Mike and Levi all registered a birdie.  Levi also got an eagle (wow!)…and no…we were not playing mini putt…

Thanks for following along at home, and congrats Levi!

FreshBooks Forum Hits 100

Congratulations Nicabar, you are our 100^th user to sign up to our forum.  Our forum has been growing steadily since its June debut and we just hit 100 users today.  This is just a reminder to all our users that we still have 3 fantastic custom login pages to give out for our first three members to reach 100 posts on our forum. 

Here are the top 10 members in race for the custom login pages.

1. Slayer in the lead with 18 posts.
2. NorthIowaWebsites in second place with 16 posts.
3. Jvs in third place with 10 posts.
4. Mthorn trailing with 7 posts.
5. Niyogi with 6 posts.
6. Cemper with 6 posts.
7. Ilya with 5 posts.
8. Vmg with 5 posts.
9. Loewendbs with 4 posts.
10. Basquen with 4 posts.

As you can see, it is still a pretty open contest. If you have not signed up for our forum, just sign up here and you will automatically qualify for our contest.  Introduce yourself after signing up to get started.

The Death Of Marketing, The Rise Of Innovating

In another example of how conventional wisdom about business is being upended, many companies are apparently jettisoning from the traditional function of “marketing”. In today’s New York Times, the results of some recent research by Strategy + Business suggests that “marketing” is being rethought, and recast as innovation:

[from Falling Short Of Greatness by Paul Brown]

The consultants note, however, that there is hope that the situation will improve.

Last year, Coca-Cola said it was eliminating the job of chief marketing officer and would be combining marketing, innovation and strategic growth into a single job.

The consultants wrote, “Coke followed Pepsi, Intel, I.B.M., Samsung and other pioneers in explicitly linking the marketing function and the growth imperative.’’

The erosion of traditional marketing — the end of conventional PR, the replacement of broadcast messaging with conversations, and the growing need for companies to be nimbler and more adaptive — is accelerating. This is perhaps more evident in small companies, where marketing has long been an afterthought: “We’ve built the product, I guess we better get Marketing involved and print some slicks for the trade show.” Rethinking of the functional organization is long overdue, and its time to get rid of the silo of marketing, divided from other functions, and move over to an organization that mirrors the critical processes in the business.

My experience is that marketing in many companies — as the researchers at Strategy + Business discovered — is lamentably bad. Let’s just put a bullet in it’s head, and focus on what should be pushing our businesses forward: innovation. It’s unlikely, however, that someone that has been acting as a “marketer” for years will be the right person to push innovation. The skills needed to be the head of innovation transcend marketing, and likely incorporate product development, strategy, and business development. In a large company, this innovator may be responsible for research, and handing off promising ideas to the larger company to turn into fielded products.

But no matter how this shakeup of the conventional organization is realized, one thing is for certain: the days of marketing are numbered.

FreshBooks Screening – Two Thumbs Up!

What a great surprise. Today, Mike and I were on a call with a company that we are planning to integrate with (Pipeline Deals) when we happened across this action packed movie of FreshBooks Version 3.2.

Check it out if you have a moment (it runs about 2 minutes). Kudos to Molly (I think that’s who it is) at Screeniac.

The only downside to screening a web service is that things can change very quickly (we upgraded to Version 3.3 only a few days after this was recorded). We actually spent a lot of time putting together flash demo’s of our application last year and canned the project for that exact reason.

FreshBooks Hits 70,000 Users… and some random facts about the number 7

The FreshBooks user count has surpassed the 70,000 mark and is on a steady climb. It only seems like yesterday, since i’ve updated the user count ribbon.

I couldn’t dig up too much on the number “70,000″, but here are some interesting facts on the number “7″ (ya I know, it’s not 70,000 but close enough):

• 7 is the fourth prime number
• 7 is our magic number in web design (i.e. no more than 7 main navigation tabs at the top)
• 7 is the atomic number for nitrogen
• Seven is character from Star Trek Voyager. Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One is a human liberated from the Borg collective
• 7 x 13 + 2 is the number of people that Jack Bauer has killed in 96 hours of 24.

Green Office Initiative

Last week I posted about a project I have undertaken. What I am aiming to do is find ways that small professional services companies (i.e. web designers and consultants, many of which are home-based) can operate their offices in environmentally friendly ways.

Fundamental to this whole process is how you look at this exercise. Relative to most companies, our company does not put much stress on the environment. This is true of the offices of most FreshBooks users as well. But consider for a moment the cumulative impact of the thousands of FreshBooks users out there. All together…the impact is HUGE. Like a Fortune 500 company.

So, the first step in my project is to validate the need for the project and determine what impact small office has on the environment and I am going to be doing that with the help of a Toronto based non-profit called Zerofootprint. I met Zerofootprint’s executive director, Deborah Kaplan, at a dinner put on by Taking IT Global. (Very cool community of 100,000+ youths worldwide who are changing the planet. Check them out.) Deborah was really neat and energetic; we followed up after the event and that led to lunch last week.

I told Deborah about my project. As it turns out, one of the things Zero Footprint does is help companies offset their environmental impact. They do this by:

1. Quantifying the impact.
2. Calculating the offsets required to balance it.
3. Buying offsets on behalf of companies.

So you are probably wondering: what are offsets? In a nutshell, an office like the FreshBooks office uses resources like paper (for example). Paper requires trees, electricity and lots of water to make. Fuel is burned in the transportation of that paper to an office. Zero Footprint helps companies quantify the amount of resources required to operate their office, then calculates how to replenish the resources used. For example, they calculate how many trees will need to be planted to account for the paper used. They calculate how much water was used and then how you can take action to protect a watershed that will produce the same amount of water. Once Zerofootprint knows the amounts, you get a total for your offsets. You pay that total to Zerofootprint and they buy your offsets on your behalf.

Sounds like this might get expensive, right? Wrong. The replacement value of a tree is about $4.00. Apparently one tree makes about 8,000 pieces of office printed paper so the amount of paper we use will likely be about $5.00 (10,000 pieces) in offset/year. Incredibly low, no?

Over the coming months I am going to go through the audit process so FreshBooks can earn our Zerofootprint badge. The badge demonstrates we have a zero operating impact on the environment and I’ll chronicle the audit process here.

So, let’s work together. Let’s make that massive collective company green and raise our own awareness of the impact we do have.

Gotta Love PayPal

Running through a few of my posts over the last few months I realize that I’m coming across as fairly negative towards PayPal (PayPal Has Dropped the Ball, Is PayPal Dropping the Ball), even though those posts are directed at their operation of the VeriSign payment gateway service, it still sounds as though I hate PayPal. One of the reasons I have had the hate-on for PayPal is probably jealousy, kind of like all those Mac users who love to hate Microsoft and PC’s. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough PayPal love-ins, so here goes:

PayPal is unbelievably useful for small business owners. Here are five reasons why:

1. It is very simple to use and easy to setup.

2. You do not need a merchant account – if you don’t know what a merchant account is, consider yourself lucky. Getting one is like a combination of getting your teeth pulled and applying for a new passport if you can’t find your birth certificate…painful, excruciatingly slow and the requirement for your first born to get accepted.

3. It is cheap – ever since PayPal lowered its discount rate (from around 4% to something like 2.9%), PayPal is very economical for a small business with relatively small amounts of monthly transactions.

4. It is secure – since day one, PayPal has prided itself on being at the forefront of fraud and security. Since it has always been a consumer targeted service they get all kinds of questionable merchants, so they have had to be at the leading edge of security.

5. It is flexible – although it may be kind of confusing at first, PayPal actually has a lot of options for small business owners that caters to their requirements. You can choose from a regular account that accepts only payment from other paypal accounts, to a premium account that accepts credit card payments, to Website Payments Pro that is essentially a payment gateway with a built-in merchant account, but unfortunately not yet available in Canada. You can use it to accept payment with their vanilla solution, or use a service like FreshBooks that has it completely integrated.

The fact of the matter is that PayPal is extremely popular, a quick look at all of the FreshBooks small business users shows that a whopping 30% of all active users are completing transactions with PayPal, compared with the next leading gateway Authorize.net at 6%.

Through all the whining and complaining about the PayPal service, let’s face it, millions of small business owners out there are getting a lot of benefit from PayPal and I am sure there are millions more who will use them in the years to come.

On Advisors: We Do Everything We’re Told…Eventually

When you work for someone else, you have a manager, and in many cases, a mentor.  When you work for yourself, by default you don’t. 

Many entrepreneurs foolishly think they can solve every problem themselves.  I see this differently.  While entrepreneurs are, by and large, intelligent and driven, learning how to solve problems takes time – in some cases it can take years of experience to learn how to solve a problem.  I think every entrepreneur – even an entrepreneur running a business as “simple” as a home based web design studio – should seek out at least one or two mentor/advisors.

We have been working with advisors since day one.  You can learn more about them here.  In fact, I like to say “I collect advisors” and we are constantly refining our list of go to experts.  Over the years our advisors have told us MANY things. In some cases we apply advice immediately, but often we have to shelf it because we have other things to address first.  They tend to agree. 

If you run your business long enough, you get to start executing on the higher order advice your advisors have given you…and the best part about that is, once you do start executing on their advice – or more to the point, you start thinking about executing on it - no matter how long ago it was given, you know you are on the right path.

As an entrepreneur you need sign posts to let you know you are on the right path.  Sign posts can be a source of energy and inspiration too.  Advisors are a great source of sign posts and knowledge and advice.  Seek them out.  Use them and grow yourself and your business.

Good Web Design is Not Guesswork

I’m currently advising a client and helping get a project off the ground.  It’s not a FreshBooks project, and it does not take much of my time, but I am excited about it.

The project is currently in the “design” phase…and really that means we are laying out the pages.  Now laying out the pages intelligently is a VITAL part of good web design.  Most business owners, nor developers, want to spend the time or money to do it right…that’s because they undervalue the process…or in many more cases, the web designer has no process.

I want to tell you about a process you can use to design your pages.  Your users will benefit from the time you invest in page layout, and so will you because it will reduce the number of changes you need to make later to get a page right.  Also, your site will be more successful so your client will want to invest in additions and that means more revenue for you.

The first thing you need to know is that every page is unique.  Each page should aim to meet it’s own set of goals.  The most important part of doing excellent page layout and design is correctly identifying those goals.  Those goals are to achieve subject to context.  For example, on the home page a visitor wants to learn about you generally (”Why am I here?”) and understand the unique benefit of your company (”What’s in it for me?”).  On your contact page your visitor ought to be able to reach you by phone, email, mail and/or fax easily.

So…commonly designers will wireframe a page before designing it.  Excellent.  This wireframe stage is the time to identify the goals of each page, and the  context of each page.  Look at this graphic to see how I do it:

The work starts on the right hand side of the page.  First you identify the mental context your users will be in.  This is important.  Take a second and make believe you are a site visitor and try to imagine the experience.  It is not an easy thing to do the first time, but it gets easier.  Given the psychological context of the visitor, list your priorities for the page GIVEN that context. Then RANK ORDER those priorities.  Once you have a rank ordered list of the things the page has to do, drop everything but the top three or four priorities because YOU CAN’T DO EVERYTHING on one page.  Now you have a clear set of things that need to be on the page, and the priority each one requires.  NOW start making boxes to place things in your wireframe.  With that in hand, graphic design gets a whole lot easier and your visitors wind up a whole lot happier.

Here is a great article about home pages from a truly excellent design resource for web designers - A List Apart.

Way Back Machine is WAY out of Date

So I need to make a correction…The RackSpace design critique I posted recently is now out of date.  The design I ripped has been replaced by a much better design.

Blogs and web links in general do not always do a good job from a “historical accuracy” perspective because the pages you link to often change.  For years I have used the WAY BACK machine at Archive.org as a standing record for website content revisions.  I planned to use it to update the Rackspace post (past, current versions), but was alarmed to see the records now stop at July 2005.

I hope this is not a sign of things to come, because the web needs a service like this…lawyers use it for copyright dispute resolution…but I have a bad feeling that it might be the begining of the end for the WAY back machine.