The holiday season is upon us – there’s no question. Despite the almost unbearable absence of snow in Toronto so far this December, I know the holidays are here because of the steady trickle of emails and cards that are arriving in my mail boxes wishing me the best of the holidays.
Yesterday we received a package we were not expecting. It included the following card:
The card (in case you can’t read it) read as follows:
“Happy Holidays FreshBooks!
We stopped invoicing with QuickBooks mid-year and since then your service has given us back a minimum of 18 man-days of productivity.
Keep up the good work and we wish you continued success in 2007!”
This note (complete with a decorative purple bow) came in a large box from UPS that included a wonderful assortment of ornate boxes from Chicago based chocolatier Vosges: one box of exotic truffles, one box of exotic caramels and one box of caramel toffee. Want to know the kicker? We don’t even know which FreshBooks customer sent them!…though we do know they are a fan.
So…thank you secret admirer, wherever you are…! Between this, and our 2006 customer survey results, the gifts have arrived early for team FreshBooks. Thank you everyone and happy holidays from the FreshFolk here at FreshBooks.
My friend and fellow Canadian entrepreneur Austin Hill sent me the following note:
Hi Mike,
I’m working on a project related to my new startup called Gifter.org and I would really appreciate you putting the word out to your friends or on your blog about it. We are going to raise $1 million dollars for charity. If you have friends that you would help us share this with, it would be really appreciated. Especially if you could ask some friends to vote for us on Digg or Netscape, so we can get some more attention for this worthy cause.
In lieu of sending holiday cards this year, we have decided to run a social giving experiment called the Million Dollar Blog Post. You can go the post, and make a wish for the world. We are arranging for $1 to be donated to charity for every wish left in the comments of this post. Feel free to share a few wishes with your friends, family or co-workers, or in your case if you think it would be of interest to your listeners let me know. We would like to collect a million wishes, and a million dollars (for charities). We aren’t sure how long this will take, but given the speed at which ideas spread on the Internet, we are optimistic about our goal.
Just go have a moment of fun and make a wish for the world on us. Project Ojibwe has donated to the following charities so that you could make a wish for the world. (Our next sponsor has another sample here)
If you are interested in sponsoring someone else’s wishes, the instructions on how to do this can be found here. It can be a great way to promote to the world what you care about.
Happy holidays, and I look forward to reading your wishes.
-Austin
I’m headed off to post my wish right now. I hope you will post your wish too.
We like to be sure to post at least one new entry to our blog every day. Often it takes over an hour to get a post up. Last week I shot Levi an email, here’s what it said:
I need you to write a blog post. Please help me – I’m too busy today.
Here are the constraints. Make it about SAAS and have it live in 20 minutes.
That should keep it manageable. Feel free to shift the topic if you want to, just thought that the suggestion might help.
Levi, who has written classics such as, “Snakes on a Plane for Dummies” and “Is PayPal Dropping the Ball?“, read my email, took 20 minutes and wrote this post. I have to say that it was not up to his usual standard, and it was my fault. You have to be inspired to write a post …or at least a post you release publicly. I forced this one.
In running FreshBooks, we rarely make decisions like the one I made in this case. The ability to avoid forced decisions is something that makes small businesses and freelancers special – if it doesn’t feel right, you just don’t do it…you listen to your gut. Usually, the bigger an organization gets, the more “forced decisions” and “forced actions” you can expect, and the outcome can be lame and vacuous. Bo Burlington describes this phenomenon as “losing your mojo” in his book Small Giants.
Don’t let this happen to you. Let your fellow procrastinators…uh…hard workers know if you have any great last minute, relationship-saving gift ideas of your own.
I hope you all have a peaceful, happy and healthy time during whatever you may be celebrating this month – Bathtub Party Day, Christmas, Eid’ul-Adha, Hanukkah, Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Kwanzaa, Omisoka, St. Lucia Day, Winter Solstice, Wright Brothers Day or whatever else I may have forgotten
I am a big believer in business intangibles contributing heavily to the success of a business. Running a business with ethics and the community in mind are intangibles that may initially seem like a “nice-to-have”, but in many cases it will the be the X-factor for success. For a small business, this concept may be hard to prove, but we can look at a number of big businesses that have proven out this concept in spades.
I have come across two such businesses recently.
The first one I discovered one night when I caught the tail end of a Colber(t) Repor(t) (side note: everytime I hear Stephen Colbert pronounce his name and the name of show I crack up. I love watching the beginning just to see if he’ll pronounce the T in Report…still waiting). Jeffrey Swartz, the CEO of Timberland was a guest and he was raving about his company’s ethical policies. What I love about this is that I am a big Timberland fan, I love their shoes and I recently picked up a Timberland jacket that is designed just right, the pockets are perfect which is a big thing for me.
Both of these businesses are competing and succeeding in a more and more difficult and competitive clothing industry. They both put ethics and community in their mission statements and from the news stories that I have read have an excellent reputation for this.
I believe that we will see more companies with a strong focus on ethical operations succeeding and beating out the competition. If a small business has these ideas ingrained in their philosophy and principles, they will be starting with a solid foundation for success.
It’s time for this month’s edition of ReFresh. Last month, I posted my picks of the five most humorous blog posts. This month I will post the top 5 FreshBooks blog posts with the greatest number of comments. If you are an active Blogger or just starting out, check out the following blog posts and see for yourself why they generated the most feedback.
“Everyone has their own reasons I guess. Macs are easy to use but not any more easier than Windows XP . Are Macs really more stable? I’ve heard horror stories from both sides. Are Macs that much faster?”
“We’re going to tell our active users their industry average AND their own average, so they can see how they stack up. “If everyone is getting paid faster than me, why is that and what can I do about it?” Good questions.”
“We run an office and a technology company and I find faxes a pain. They come in and they need to be sorted and stored, so they take up space and paper. I also find maintaining our fax machine a pain.”
“Until now I had no hard evidence or obvious indicator that this was going to happen, I was just going on my gut instinct. Today I’m afraid my spidey sense may have been right.”
“Ironically, part of our infrastructure (we are Raid 5) was designed so that this kind of maintenance would be seamless. So with the above counsel from our managed hosting provider RackSpace, we elected to proceed with the maintenance. Then trouble and pain set in…”
When you run a small business or you work in teams, you have a lot of decisions to make. Reaching conclusions can be really challenging sometimes and exchanges can get heated.
Here at FreshBooks we are consensus builders. Ideas come from anyone and everyone, and no one’s point of view is a safe from attack. This way of decision making can present challenges though, mainly because it is impossible to get everyone to agree all the time. So, one thing we learned a long time ago – back when it was just Joe and I building the business, and both of us are fairly determined to see our points of view through – is we learned to say, “Ok…let’s sleep on it”.
We resort to “let’s sleep on it” as soon as we feel we have exhausted the productivity of a conversation. This happens frequently in meetings and via email discussions. Recognizing that moment when your discussion ceases to be productive is a skill and it can be honed over time. For us the upside of “sleeping on it” is that invariably we come – as a group – to the right decision the next day…which may be a mix of two or more points of view. Better still when we do decide, everyone feels they had some ownership of the outcome.
In decision making it is rare that you have to make a decision RIGHT NOW, so don’t be afraid to sleep on it.
A few weeks ago we asked people who use FreshBooks to complete a survey. Those who did, and gave us their contact details, were entered into a draw to win a $50 (USD) gift certificate to Amazon. Using a random number generator, Corky Peavy from PVco was selected as the lucky winner. Congratulations Corky!
Here are some highlights from the survey:
Avg. # of hours you spent invoicing/month before FreshBooks: 8.05
Avg. # of hours you spent invoicing/month using FreshBooks: 3.23
Put another way, using FreshBooks, it takes less than half the time (60% less!) to do your invoicing each month.
Avg. # of days it took to get paid before FreshBooks: 22
Avg. # of days it takes to get paid using FreshBooks: 14
That means the money you’re owed by your clients is in your bank account 8 days faster (39% faster on average). A few other stats:
61% of respondents collect more money using FreshBooks
43% of those respondents said they collect more than 15% more money using FreshBooks.
98% would refer – or have referred – FreshBooks to someone else.
A very big thank you to everyone who took the time to answer the survey questions.
If you’re not using FreshBooks yet, sign up for a free trial to see what it’s like to save time, get paid more and faster, and look even more professional.
Including Sundays, there are eleven shopping days left.
Worthy of James Bond: a bottle opener cleverly disguised as a computer mouse.
Never run out of impluse power again. The Solio’s hybrid charger stores power from the sun so you can recharge your handhelds at any time. Small and lots of colours.
There will be one more Christmas list after this one of gifts and ideas that require no delivery time, just in case – and I know it’s a long shot – you’ve left your shopping until the very, very last minute.
Jeffrey Eisenberg, co-founder and CEO of Future Now Inc., shows us how easy it can be to implement persuasion architecture, what crucial changes we need to make about how we think about visitors to our web sites, and answers your questions.
Here are some notes and timelines from the call:
(1:35 – 5:10) Discussion about the word “user”; increasing usability used to be an easy way to increase conversions.
(6:53) What are the biggest ideas you’re offering to people who have goods or services that they’re trying to sell?
(7:08) The word “user” is a bad word – people are people, buyers. How you sell is irrelevant to them.
(8:22) People have become in charge in a way they never have before; they are evaluating, communicating, looking at your products/services which have to become more and more transparent.
(9:00) It used to be: the more you advertised, the more you sold. Now, people want more information before they buy. For example, car buyers want to know why certain decisions were made in the design of a car before they purchase.
(9:45) 87% of car searchers start online, less than 1% buy online. People are not going to manufacturers’ sites, they’re going to other sites, looking for the information the business itself isn’t giving them.
(10:00) This is critical: if you sell goods, there is someone out there talking about your goods. If you sell services, you may be hesitant to put prices on your site. If the price is going to be an obstacle, it’s going to be an obstacle no matter what. If you haven’t built up the value of your services already, you’re not going to do it with someone over the phone.
(11:00) Clicks are decisions – people make conscious decisions to click.
(11:51) There is a concept that people think in terms of web “pages”. People don’t read pages, they read from hyperlink to hyperlink. When you design a site, think in scenarios, and how people will engage from hyperlink to hyperlink along the path that they want to go down.
(12:47) If you’re still designing pages you’ve missed it by a million miles. It’s the context of that page that matters – the anchor text versus where it’s pointed to, and if where it’s pointed to answers the question that the hyperlink implicitly asked.
(16:14) Rethink the buying process. The simple idea is this: we’re focused on the way we want to sell, but customers are focused on the way they want to buy. Every click they make is a conscious decision to find out what’s on the other side.
(17:08) If we’re dealing with people who are making a conscious decision, we at Future Now Inc. ask 3 questions to frame a scenario that works for them:
1. Who is the person that we’re trying to persuade?
2. What is it we want them to do?
3. What would motivate them, give them enough confidence, to do that?
(20:20) This is the essence of persuasion architecture, and it really is that simple. You can apply this to a PPC ad or landing page – does the headline, content deliver?
(20:41) Tailor the way you design your site, the way a sales associate would tailor their presentation to different people.
(22:52) Understand the context of your offering within the marketplace (including competition and the customer feedback that’s out there).
(24:19) Psychographics: description of the 4 different archetypes of how people make decisions (competitive, methodical, spontaneous, humanistic).
(26:30) There aren’t that many ways of making decisions, therefore they’re predictable. Instead of talking to everyone (aiming at the middle), Future Now Inc. designs for the extremes, the outside corners, so people in the middle will find something and be able to segment themselves.
(28:13) Creating personas.
(32:35) Adding demographics to the 4 archetypes.
(34:08) Small companies can be more nimble; larger companies will have a harder time writing the necessary content and being transparent.
(35:25) Blogs give you the opportunity to say something – odd angles of approach – that you may not be able to put on your web site. This allows you to frame information in a different way.
(40:13) Poor assumptions about the leaky bucket theory described.
(43:13) Definition of reputation: the way search engines look at you. If you’re doing SEM to bring in traffic, and not doing anything to make it worth a search engine’s visit to be there, you’re working really hard for nothing.
(46:17) How do I get more people to fill in my contact form?
(47:17) Ask yourself: why aren’t people confident enough to fill in the contact form? You are probably not giving them enough information on your site. Get specific: what you do, how you do it, who you do it for, price, what you don’t do.
(51:58) What are some cost effective ways to capture feedback from customers about what is not working for them?
(53:11) Ask the people who buy from you what difficulties they had and bought anyway. There are no tools that substitute talking to real people. Don’t lead them, let them ramble on, even if it hurts. They’ll tell you what you need to deal with other people.
(54:51) Can I have Mr. Eisenberg’s email address to find out about his new services for small businesses coming out in January 2007?
(55:26) Future Now Inc. is going to be providing some services around Google’s web analytics multivariate testing ability. Because there is no defined release date from Google, it will be best to visit the site to find out more about this; here are Future Now Inc.’s contact details.
Future Now’s publications (Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Call to Action)
Persuasive Online Copywriting is out of print. Try Amazon or your local library.
Next podcast:
Craig Fitzpatrick, CEO of Devshop, will outline project management techniques specific to software development projects that will help reduce risk, meet deadlines and improve client satisfaction. Sign up here.
Have questions or comments about this teleseminar? Let us know what they are in the forum.
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