Since the earliest days we’ve reached out by phone to survey FreshBooks customers and understand the benefits our service delivers. One of the first things people told us was “FreshBooks has changed my behavior”. To this day this comment scares me - bad software changes behavior. Inevitably though, the next thing they’d say is “now I send invoices as I do my work because it is so fast and easy - I don’t put it off till the end of the month anymore”. This insight still blows me away.

I call this changed behavior “continuous invoicing” and it has some amazing benefits:

1. Get Paid Faster - think about it. If it is mid-month and you just finished a job and you wait until the end of the month to invoice, you are going to send the invoice two weeks later and therefore get paid two weeks later. Contrast this with sending the same invoice right away, and you get paid two weeks sooner.

2. Collect More Money - if you invoice soon after completing your work, your work is fresh in your mind you will invoice for more dollars. When you wait to invoice you tend to forget some details. On top of this everyone undervalues their own services, and this effect increases over time. Between these two things you will wind up billing for less. Everyone will - it’s human nature. So, invoice immediately and you will bill for more money.

3. Improved Client Relations - when a client receives an invoice soon after their job is completed, the value you offer will be fresh in their mind. If you’ve done a great job (and we trust you always do!) that great work will be top of mind in your client’s consciousness. As a result they will get right to the process of paying you. When you send an invoice 2-3 weeks later, the context of your great work is lost and may seem far away to to them. So, invoice early and make them happy to pay you.

These are the benefits of continuous invoicing. Looking for a painfully cheesy catch-phrase that’s worth it’s wait in gold? “Remember folks, invoice early and invoice often.”

So there I was in McDonalds (shhhh, don’t tell) and I’m waiting in line and, honestly, I’m starting to get a tad cranky because well, if it’s called “fast food” shouldn’t it be FAST!

Well, on this particular occasion it wasn’t all that fast and my hunger pangs, magnified by the seductive smell of the fries, got me into a hyper critical state and I’m thinking all sorts of negative thoughts until I start to observe what’s going on around me.

Heck, from what I saw, those counter folks were doing things right. You might have some issues with the food itself, but the service and the sales techniques…those were right on target.

Here’s what we should learn from McD’s:

Do You Want Fries With That?

When you order a burger and the counter person asks “Would you like fries with that,” you’ve experienced a marketing tactic called cross-selling. This strategy encourages customers to purchase additional products and services that are related to the item they are already buying. Cross-selling doesn’t just work with fast food; it’s also a highly effective technique for any type of sales. Here are a few ideas to help you achieve cross-selling success in your business:

Service with a Smile

The success of cross-selling depends not only on the quality and value of the product, but also the customer service provided. Customer service begins with the very first encounter, either in person, through email, or on the phone. It’s true that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Every customer should always be greeted with enthusiasm and respect.

Listen to the Customer

Many sales opportunities arise by just listening to the customer. The simple skill of listening demonstrates that you are helpful and approachable. A good salesperson should be able to take information from the customer and inform them of all the products and services that would be benefit their needs. Customers appreciate being informed of additional products and services that could provide an added benefit to the item they already intend on purchasing.

How Well Do You Know Your Product?

Product knowledge is the key to successful sales. Successful salespeople know every detail of their products from how they work to when to use them. It’s essential that this knowledge be relayed to the customer to help them understand why they can benefit from your product. The product you are cross-selling should either be related or complementary to the original item the customer purchased. It’s unlikely to sell an add-on product or service that offers no additional value to the original product.

Don’t Forget to Ask

Many customers walk out the door without ever being asked whether they could benefit from related products. It should go without saying, but it is necessary to ask the customer whether they are interested. Even the best products and services won’t sell themselves. Sales must be initiated.

Follow-up

Numerous cross-selling opportunities are lost because the salesperson didn’t take the initiative to contact the customer regarding their original purchase. A quick follow-up call shows the customer that you truly care about their needs and not just the initial sale. This is a perfect time to find out whether they could benefit from related products or services. This simple act will open the door to a long-term sales relationship.

FreshBooks is in the market for a couple of crack web developers, and if you connect us with a winning candidate, we’ll write you a cheque for a $1000 CDN (we figure it’s better to reach out to you folks than recruiters, and we’re thinking giving you some incentive to BCC your entire address book (hint, hint ) is not such a bad thing).

You can read the web developer job description here. To be clear the role is full time on-site here in beautiful Toronto Canada, and we only hire outstanding people with amazing attitudes.

If you want to learn a little more about the culture and characters here at FreshBooks, check out this “hiring video” (shown below as well) or check out our Roadburn RV trip.

Thanks for any and all assistance you can provide.

P.S. We’re also hiring a seasoned agile web development manager. If you help us fill that role, same bounty applies.

Designing for flow is something we strive for here at FreshBooks, and every time we roll out a release, we get a little closer to achieving our design ideals with respect to designing for flow - it’s a never ending project.

In the last release we were able to kill off our “default terms” preference for estimates and invoices — so now instead of having to go to “settings” and set your “default terms” you can set those terms *in context” as you create your first invoice.

One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave. OS X users have our time-tracking widget to take care of one task, but that leaves out some popular operating systems — and a lot of FreshBooks features beyond time tracking.

Enter Prism, Mozilla Labs’ browser integration experiment. Prism, based on the Firefox web browser, lets you run web applications like FreshBooks (or Gmail or anything else on the web) in their own window and process, acting like a desktop app unaffected by browser restarts.

Getting started with Prism is easy: download the version for your operating system, install, and run. It’ll ask you for the URL and name of the Web app you want to encapsulate, and where you’d like a shortcut to the new “program” put. Put in your FreshBooks login page URL, name it “FreshBooks”, choose a shortcut location, click OK, and then run the resulting shortcut, and next thing you know, you’ve got a standalone FreshBooks app. Here’s a screenshot of me tracking time in a FreshBooks Prism window, while I do important corporate intelligence work in my browser:

If I were to quickly close the browser when Levi came by my desk expecting me to be working, the time tracking window (and the minimized FreshBooks main window) would stay running!

Prism is still experimental software, but it’s held up well while I’ve been trying it out (although I’ve heard that the Firefox 3 extension is less reliable than the standalone installer). As long as you’ve got Internet access, it makes web-based apps feel like they’re local, letting you restart your browser at will without having to wait until you’re done with your invoicing, mail, instant messaging, photo editing, and everything else you end up doing on the Web.

With Macs now controlling 14% of the US market share (up from 9% in 2006), it’s clear that the world is quickly going Mac.

This is especially evident here at FreshBooks. When I joined last year, we were a strictly PC/Windows shop. Since then, we’ve added 6 iMacs to the grid — and more are on the way.

Resistance is futile

I, for one, welcome our new Mac overlords. To help kick-start the indoctrination process, I’ve begun using an Apple keyboard with my Windows box here at work. Sure, the buttons don’t match up perfectly (where’s the print screen button?), but with a few easy steps, you can re-map your Windows keys such that you’ll hardly notice.

Introducing AutoHotKey

AutoHotKey is freeware software for Windows XP that lets you create easy-to-write scripts that define alternate key mappings in Windows. You can do the same by hacking the Windows registry yourself - but that’s just plain silly.

The script

After you’ve installed AutoHotKey, download this script and run it (either by double-clicking or right-click -> “Run Script”). This will load a set of pre-defined rules that will make your Apple keyboard operate like a Windows one — but way sexier.

Here’s the rules I’m using:

; Swap Windows (Command) and Alt keys
; These button locations are reversed on Mac keyboardsLAlt::LWin
LWin::LAlt
; Map F13 to Print screen
; Mac keyboards don't have a print-screen button!
F13::PrintScreen

To have this script run every time Windows boots up, save it in your Startup folder (Start -> All Applications -> Startup).

That’s it! Happy typing.

This is my first in a series of posts about ways for service-oriented professionals (FreshBooks types) to prosper in a down/recessionary market.

First things first: you need to understand the market’s dynamics and market momentum.

Bear markets, recessions, bad times — they are (usually) preceded by good times, and it’s the good times where things begin to go bad.

Recessionary Psychology

When things are “good” (meaning business is booming), businesses don’t fixate on risk — they become desensitized to it. Human nature tricks people into believing that things will tend to stay as they are today. So when times are good, people tend to believe things will stay that way. Worse yet, people want to believe it — so denial can become a factor. As a result people tend to become overconfident and brazen; survival instincts become dulled.

The trouble is, change is constant — things are always shifting beneath the surface, and markets always cycle given enough time. Therefore when you think things are great, it’s precisely the time to start planning for the bad times.

Recessionary Dynamics

In service-oriented industries — especially in creative industries like film, marketing, etc. — growth leads to hiring because the business model scales with headcount. The growth and hiring is caused by positive things (new customers, increased demand, etc.) and the drive to add staff, in an effort to adequately service and onboard customers and projects, becomes the modus operandi.

Trouble is, growth leads to greater operating inefficiency in people powered organizations. Businesses need more support staff to help enable the contributors who drive the business — and it’s a vicious cycle.

The long and short of it is after a long period of growth starts to draw to a close, and the new work begins to dry up, growth slows, revenue flatlines and organizations are far less efficient than before the growth began.

Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, and this is a generalization, but it’s the experience of most businesses. There is no rocket science here, it’s all a cycle. It’s happened before and it will happen again.

The writing is on the wall

During each of my last two trips to NYC I hung out with creative professionals (creative directors, film people, developers, designers) at barcampNYC and at Media Bistro events and some other conferences. People at each of these events were talking about layoffs in their offices. In the bar at the Hilton I could not help but overhear an improtu interview going on. These are the unmistakable signs and it’s late in the game frankly. In my opinion, professional employment in NYC is a leading indicator. People in NYC are wise to the downturn. They’re making plans and you can too.

How to take advantage of a downturn

Now that the table is set and you understand the market dynamics at a high level, we’re good to go with what it means as a creative professional and how you can take advantage of the changing market.

Parting note: never forget change is opportunity.

Folks…just a quick note to say I’m getting really psyched about meshU. In fact, I just bought 5 tickets. Here’s a post I wrote about the event on the mesh conference blog:

As you may know by now, we’ve added a third day to mesh called meshU (for mesh “University”). meshU is more a “workshop” oriented event than mesh. meshU is happening the day before the main mesh (Tuesday the 20th of May) and the content will be divided into three streams: design, development and “management” (as it pertains to web projects).

Today I’m pleased to announce that Daniel Burka has joined our roster of ace speakers for meshU. Who is Daniel Burka? Well for one - he’s Canadian. It might also interest you to know he is the creative director for Digg, and a co-founder of Pownce and silverorange. He is going to give a workshop on Iterative Design Strategies at meshU - a topic near and dear to my heart, and something hugely valuable for anyone who is building web projects that are intended to thrive long after they launch.

I often think of meshU as a great event for the people who help the attendees of mesh (marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, media folks) get their web projects built (designers, developers and project managers). So if Daniel’s workshop doesn’t sound quite right for you, please be sure to mention meshU to the people who are building your website (assuming you have one), because it’s surely for them.

The meshU site is definitely a little sparse right now, but the quality of the workshops is going to be amazing. And, it’s an event for only 150 people. Tickets are $239 CDN which is what I’d be willing to pay for Daniel’s workshop alone.

meshU is happening in Toronto this May 20th, and if you are in the area and you are building stuff online these days, I hope you’ll consider attending.

My name is Michael Dowling, and I’m a co-founder and developer of WeGoAll, the fraternity and sorority website design specialists.

“FreshBooks has helped WeGoAll to automate our entire client billing process.”

We’ve done the Excel thing. We looked into trying to use a built-in recurring billing feature in different payment gateways. We also thought about devoting valuable time and effort to creating our own in-house invoicing system. None of that was flexible, professional, nor cost-effective enough for our company. Then we found FreshBooks.

FreshBooks has helped WeGoAll to automate our entire client billing process. We have several different recurring billing schedules including yearly, monthly, and quarterly. With FreshBooks’ recurring profiles, we finally have an invoicing system that makes managing our accounts feasible.

To us, the most beneficial part of FreshBooks is the ability to send out snail-mail invoices.

“With the click of a button, FreshBooks can send out invoices to the client’s mailing address, including a return envelope to make paying their bill more convenient.”

Because our clients are primarily fraternities and sororities, our contact information for these organizations is always changing. The one thing that doesn’t usually change is the chapter’s mailing address. With the click of a button, FreshBooks can send out invoices to the client’s mailing address, including a return envelope to make paying their bill more convenient.

FreshBooks is a great invoicing system, and we recommend it for any business that wants to look professional and get paid on-time.

When you log time in FreshBooks, every once in a while we’ll hit you with an offbeat “humorous” success message. For example, we most often return a message that says, “hours logged”. Occasionally you will get a “bingo!”, or a “pow!” or “hours flogged”. We recently got a complaint that the funny stuff does not come around too often in the forums, so Daniel started a thread asking for messages “suggestions”.

Well…long story short, Erin from BrightMix upped the game and went ahead and built a GreaseMonkey script that allows you to build and customize all your messages.

How to get your own custom messages:
Step 1: Use FireFox
Step 2: Download GreaseMonkey
Step 3: Download the Script
Step 4: Add custom messages to script as needed

Go here to read the post and download the scripts. Thanks Erin!