A few weeks ago Mike was interviewed by Tom Raftery on PodLeaders.com. PodLeaders is a blog dedicated to interviewing thought leaders. The podcast itself is great if you want to learn more about our philosophy or are trying to evaluate if FreshBooks is right for you because Tom asks a lot of questions from a prospective client’s point of view. Anyhow enjoy.

p.s. As a side note, Tom (the interviewer) is the founder of a tech conference - IT@Cork Web 2.0 Conference, like Mike is a founder of Mesh Conference…small world.

The much anticipated release with the ability to send your invoices with the US Postal Service is coming on Wednesday.  This morning, we are sending out an email to all of our newsletter subscribers detailing what is to be expected with this release.  Here is an excerpt:

FreshBooks and its mailing partner are happy to announce the
release of the new service that enables you to send your
invoices with the US Postal service, enclosed with a return
envelope. You can try out this service for free by sending
yourself a demo invoice once you login to your FreshBooks
account.

You can mail your invoices automatically with the purchase of
FreshBooks stamps. One stamp lets you mail anywhere in the USA
or Canada and two stamps will send the invoice internationally.

To celebrate the release of this service, FreshBooks is
providing introductory pricing. Take advantage of this sale
while you can by logging into your account and purchasing
stamps.

There are a few other cool things included with this version, so give the email a read.  If you do not receive it, let us know.

The posts from Jim Logan on his Cash Flow Blog have not been particularly frequent, but when he does post, he is right on the money (no pun intended). Today he has some interesting advice to level out your cash flow, try sending out invoices at different times in the month:

Something I like to do is stagger my receivables, with some invoices payable in the first two weeks of the month. This levels the flow of money into my business, making it easier to budget and pay personal and professional invoices of my own.

When you have a million and one other things to think about with your small business, staggering your receivables is probably nowhere near the top of the list. Luckily FreshBooks makes that very easy to do when you have recurring profiles or invoice items already created. You can simply edit the dates on your profiles, or create a new invoice with a few simple clicks.

You can read more about Jim’s blog from the posts: Streamline Your Collections, and Time to Pay Trumps All.

So what is PageRank?

There are many factors which contibute to how well you rank in Google’s search results… your PageRank plays an important one. PageRank is Google’s way of measuring the value or importance of a webpage. It is based on a scale of 1 - 10 starting at 1 (low in importance) and increasing exponentially in importance to 10 (high importance). When one website links to another, it is essentially casting a vote for this website saying “I’m going to link to this website because I think it has quality content”. Google’s automated spiders pick this up and base the importance of a web page on these inbound links. The more quality inbound links a website has, the more important a website looks to Google. To see the PageRank of websites in your browser I recommend the Google Toolbar.

Now that you have the skinny on PageRank, here is a tip that will help improve your websites PageRank.

Hopefully your website can be accessed with or without the “www” in the URL. Unfortunately Google sees the two different URL’s as different webpages.

example:
http://www.freshbooks.com/ and http://freshbooks.com/

When someone links to your website, you do not always have control over the URL they choose to use.  They could include the “www” or not. Because of this inconsistency you could be splitting the number of inbound links to your website thus splitting your PageRank. The key is to be consistent and consolidate to one URL. One workaround to this is to redirect to a single URL. There are different methods of doing this depending on the technology your web server is using. A common and simple way is to manipulate the .htaccess file (this can only be done on web servers running apache). This is the method we use here at FreshBooks. If you go to http://freshbooks.com you will be redirected to http://www.freshbooks.com. Here is a thread that will get your started. Please consult with you web host to see if you have access to manipulate your .htaccess file.

Please be careful when editing your .htaccess file. We at FreshBooks take no responsibility in you bringing down your website :).

Following up on Levi’s last green office article, here are some additional energy saving tips that any office can try:

• Turn down the lights.  Some times our office gets a little too hot in the summer.  We turn down some lights instead of turning up the AC.
• Don’t use a screen saver; put your monitor on standby mode instead.  Most computers running on Windows or Mac lets you turn your monitor to stand-by-mode when it’s been idling for too long

Thinking about buying new office Equipment? Here are some tips:

• Avoid buying your traditional CRT monitor and get an LCD Monitor instead.  They eat up about 30% less energy and produce less heat too.  They’ll even go easy on your air conditioning.
• Thinking about buying a new desktop computer? If possible, consider buying a laptop instead. Besides being portable and mobile, they are also very efficient in their energy use.
• If you are planning to replace a light bulb, buy a fluorescent light bulb instead of incandescent light bulb.  “About 90 percent of the electricity used by incandescent bulbs is lost as heat.”
• Buy multifunction (printer, photocopier, scanner and fax all-in-one).  This will save you money and will reduce the energy burned during idle periods.

Remember, you are not only helping environment, you are saving money!

In today’s Toronto Star piece, Tyler Hamilton is introducing an element of fear and doubt for many new web service users and blog readers:

Could Wikipedia have defended a mass attack that was secretly organized, that struck at hundreds of pages at the same time that relentlessly sought to alter thousands of online factoids? I don’t think so. Will it happen? Is it happening already? Has it happened?

I am sure that he is not intentionally trying to scare people out of reading blogs and using new Web 2.0 services such as Wikipedia and Flickr (and FreshBooks for that matter), at least I hope not, but I am afraid that is exactly what this article could be doing. He is seeding that tiny speck of doubt in the reader’s mind. If the reader is new to all of this Web 2.0 stuff, it is possibly enough for him/her to stop reading and using blogs and wiki’s period. Thankfully I think most people know better, but I wonder how many people he has actually turned away.

The question I have is why? What is the point of instilling doubt and fear into these readers? Since Tyler has a blog of his own, I am a little confused with this article. Is it because first and foremost he is a writer in a traditional newspaper and feels threatened by the blogging community? I kind of doubt it, but then again I haven’t met Tyler, so perhaps he is scared of the bloggers.

Either way, I really hope he hasn’t frightened anyone from engaging the blogosphere and sampling all the fantastic new Web 2.0 services now available, because as it stands now, there is really nothing to fear. Or should I say: the only thing to fear, is fear itself!

For my virginal blog post I would like to express why as a developer:

Working from home is da Bomb:

1. Tunes cranked (k-os, Billy Talent, Three Days Grace) - who am I gonna bother?
2. Minimal interruptions (mind you, no kiddies)
3. Afternoon siestas
4. Traffic commute - no thanks
5. Clothing optional
6. Gym on the 33rd floor of my condo building makes it easy to get in some mid-day fitness
7. Roll out of bed, check email - Bam! I am working within 5 minutes
8. No need to make small talk with fellow workers when tired or a little under the weather
9. Stocked fridge 10 steps away
10. Can work anytime I feel motivated 24/7

Put these together and I get: Freedom and Increased Productivity.

I think it was Peter Drucker who asserted that management is a necessary evil, so the less that you can get away with, the better. It’s a wonderfully refreshing perspective, especially when you consider the high-minded rhetoric that often accompanies management books or advice in business magazines. If you consider management a noble calling — as opposed to a pernicious evil — then it may seem that more of it is better… especially for the one doing the managing. But not for the managed.

For small business, highly agressive and controlling management can be an enormous time waster. 37signals’ new book, Getting Real, that I reviewed recently at /Message, is a great example of practical anti-management advice. The authors argue against meetings, bloated staff, and constant intrusions.

For those who aren’t quite as revolutionary as Jason Fried and his partners at 37signals, I am offering a single insight to help moderate our natural tendency to over-manage people, and a simple metric to determine whether staff are in a role that causes over-management.

First of all, let me quote the great software economist, Barry Boehm, who in his magisterial work on that subject stated the obvious: human intellect — I.Q. — outweighs all other factors, combined, in the productivity of software developers. He then set about examing all those other factors, since we cannot increase human intellect. We can, of course, try to hire the smartest people possible, and move people into work commensurate with their abilities.

So, I offer this simple model for management productivity (which means as little management overhead as possible):

1. If the staff member responsible for some function, role, project, or whatever, can proceed to accomplish the work based on a relatively high-level strategic description of what is necessary, then that person is likely capable of more responsibilities or a wider involvement in the business.
2. If it proves necessary to outline a plan of action for the staff member, but they are then able to accomplish the work, then the person is probably in the right job, or at least a role that matches the person’s current capabilities. Note, however, than management overhead is going up considerably — which is just pseudo-economic speak for wasting time of “managers.” In this perspective, however, I define manager as someone who should be doing something else but has been trapped into wasting time in oversight.
3. If outlining a plan of action for the staff member doesn’t work, then you will be forced to actually break the project (or whatever it is) into a series of steps, and then confirm that each is accomplished before letting the staff member proceed ahead. Such people are really over their heads, and some action needs to be taken to change the scenario. It is not reasonable to just suck it up in this case, except in the boundary case of training new employees.

This third form of management is a pathology, not a strategy. If you have instituted this sort of management discipline, you are either a control freak or you need to hire smarter (or at least more accomplished) people. Note that everything above holds with groups or project teams.

Get over the self-delusion that you are more important if people bring “important” decisions to you on a regular basis. Redefine the work so that individuals or teams can move ahead without undue supervision, and make sure that only really extraordinary exceptions lead to your desk. And, even then, that situation should be considered an opportunity for others to grapple with the factors involved, and to learn how to make such decisions. This minimizes future management time wasting.

The work of a small business leader (or a larger business leader, for that matter) should be focussed on the things that will push the business forward, and that doesn’t include deciding what sorts of pencils to buy, the specific language in a marketing slick (an area that I have seem many small business CEOs drown themselves in), or even the terms of an average sized deal. If you let them, the details will own you, and your staff will never learn to take the reins on even the smallest “important” thing in the business.

So, get over it, and push off as much as they can take, not as little as you feel comfortable giving up. Yes, there will be goofs — oh, you never goofed? Did you learn from them? — but people are remarkably resilient when working in a context that doesn’t punish sensible risks or simple errors on the path to gaining experience.

My sense is that the productivity gain for the business leader (or leaders: there are usually several in all except the smallest business) by decreasing management time drastically will trump all the minor improvements of more pedestrian time management.

For those of you who need help managing your sales prospects, the team at PipelineDeals.com and FreshBooks have some news:

From the PipelineDeals.com blog ThinkPipeline:

Initially motivated by some early customer suggestions, we gave some serious thought towards the problems small businesses face today. We clearly identified some areas of opportunity where we felt there were inefficiencies for folks. Admittedly, Pipelinedeals is focused on the business development process - managing your future revenue opportunities. What happens after you successfully close a deal? It is time to begin providing your product/service for that Client and invoice them for your efforts. (Hooray revenue!) When we prioritized our list of natural partners, invoicing was top on the list. Takes time, not necessarily fun, and not why you went into business. FreshBooks run by Mike and Levi in Toronto was the clear leader in this market. We were able to arrange a breakfast meeting in New York recently and we found that our two companies thought a lot alike and had similar business models albeit in different but complementary spaces.

Over an omelette it was clear that Pipelinedeal’s customers had a definite (and a previously expressed) need for the ability to invoice clients. Additionally, FreshBooks customers were in need of managing their sales process. FreshBooks and PipelineDeals needed to find a way to talk to each other - it was a no brainer. Together the two companies have laid out a loose plan of weaving our two applications closer together:

Step 1 - “Baby Step” - Look for co-branded landing pages on Pipelinedeals introducing Freshbooks.
Step 2 - “Up the Ante” - Look for some in app mention of Freshbooks inside of Pipelinedeals.
Step 3 - “Take it up another notch” - Install and “Export to Freshbooks” Button in Pipelinedeals.
Step 4 - “Nirvana” - Immediately upon setting a deal status to “Signed”, Client Info sets up an account in Freshbooks.

From what we can tell, we are the first two independent online SaaS vendors to move down a serious integration path. Both companies are excited and look forward to the benefits this integration brings to our customers.

Thanks to Mike and Levi for believing in Pipelinedeals!

JP and Nick it’s our pleasure – thanks for putting our API to use and making this happen.  If you haven’t already checkout PipelineDeals.com.

Michael is currently on vacation, but I don’t think he would mind me posting some useful ideas for his Green Office theme.  I came across an article in the Toronto Star by Shelly Sanders Greer (I can’t find it online, please help me out if you find it, its entitled “Energizing, naturally”) that has some great ideas for utilizing alternative green energy.  The article mentions a Canadian Tire website (www.canadiantirepower.ca) that summarizes renewable energy systems and gives prices for these products that can be purchased online or at their stores.

I am pretty excited about this article and Canadian Tire’s initiative because with all the talk and discussion going on about global warming and the cost of energy, there is very little in the way of suggestions for what the everyday consumer can do.  My fiancée and I saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” a few weeks ago and we were very impressed (and depressed, and scared frankly) with all the proof of global warming and how catastrophic it is going to be, but unfortunately there was very little in the way of suggestions and ideas on what we can do, and how we can reverse this trend.  Finally, here are some small items that anyone of us can afford and that will actually help with the problem.

If you can’t find the article, here are a few of the items Shelly noted:

• Solar panels selling for between $350 and $1,000
• Wind turbines selling for $800
• Power inverters for $200
• Solar radios for $15 (at www.eddiebauer.com)
• Mini solar panel and light (at http://www.mec.ca/) …this is a humerous one, can anyone tell me why you need a light powered by a solar panel?  Something smells fishy there!

None of us here at FreshBooks have tried out any of this new technology, but I am hoping we can at some point.  If anyone out there has tried this stuff, please ping us.