Tag: business

Survivor Bias – the danger of learning the wrong lessons

How the wrong lessons can be learned from listening to the winners

A recent blog post by Chris Guillebeau on his terrrific Art of Non-Conformity site looked at the value of qualifications.

Chris’ post is a great read and it’s obviously worked for him, though we always should keep in mind with these stories that we’re reading about someone who has managed to make it work.

We all have a lot to learn from Chris and other success stories however the winners’ tales are only half the story; that for every success who dropped out, started a business or travelled the world and did well there are many more who – for whatever reason – didn’t.

That’s part of the equation of risk, that for every success there are failures. For risking failure, the successes are rewarded – despite the best efforts of our political and corporate leaders to engineer away the risks and leave only the rewards for those best connected or placed to take them.

For every winner, it’s also worthwhile listening to those who didn’t quite succeed. The lessons from “failure” are probably stronger and just as enlightening.

Taking a jump, quitting your job, starting a business, becoming a freelancer or travelling the world isn’t for everybody. Many of us are happy staying in the cubicle or the workshop or the village and leading a comfortable, secure and safe life.

Societies need a balance of the risk taking adventurers and the anchors of solid, secure working people. Neither is wrong, neither is bad and a balance of the two is essential for a healthy, prosperous and sustainable society.

It’s not to say we shouldn’t take risks, just understand the dangers are there and your appetite for living with uncertainty before making a big step into business, travel or whatever it is where you see the opportunity.

Do you have customers or just users?

Are subscribers, visitors and users really supporting your business?

“I was on your mailing list for general info, for spams and scams etc which were helpful. Suddenly it changed and now the business format is not useful to me” said an lady when unsubscribing from one of my newsletter mailing lists.

The lady concerned had been on one of the mailing lists for over ten years and, once upon a time, had been a paying customer for my old business, PC Rescue. Although we’d only earned a $100 off her and that was seven years ago.

While it’s sad to lose a subscriber – you don’t run a service business for twelve years without caring about those who use your services – the question is was the lady really a customer?

This is an important distinction where many of us are giving away much of our knowledge for free; are our users really customers?

For the social media and web2.0 sites, this is easy; users are the raw material for their aggregated and segmented data feeds and audience, the customers are the advertisers. This is just a modern twist on the broadcast model that sustained the radio and TV industries for most of the 20th Century.

Many of those social media platforms aren’t making much money from that data and there’s a good argument those who are have been wildly overvalued by investors.

The value of user data, whether it’s aggregated or identifiable appears to be nowhere as high as most of us think, unless you intend to rob your users’ bank accounts.

Overvaluation of your customer, or user, database is a common problem for smaller businesses too. If you’re the local plumber, computer repair guy or coffee shop then the value of any mailing list is probably way overstated – the only metric that ultimately matters to the business is how much money you’re making from the customer.

If you care about the people that you deal with, this may be a hard reality to face but those who visit your shop, subscribe to your newsletter or download your free e-book aren’t your customers, only those who are prepared to pay are.

This is something we have to understand in this era of abundant free information and online services. The challenge for most of us is how many users we can convert from being window shoppers and freebie seekers into customers.

Is the social media business model dying?

Have the social media companies reached their peak?

Is the social media business model dead?

The frenzied rush to release new features such as Facebook’s latest changes, along with Google’s updates to their Plus platform, may be the first indication the big social media business model is broken.

Driving the adoption of social media services has been the value they add to people’s lives; MySpace was a great place to share interests like bands and music, Facebook’s is to hear what was happening with their families and friends, LinkedIn is for displaying our professional background and Twitter keeps track on what’s happening in the world.

Now the social media services want to be something else, Facebook wants to become “a platform for human storytelling” where you’ll share your story with friends and friends of friends (not to mention the friends of your mad cousin in Milwaukee) while Google+ wants to become an “identity service”.

The fundamental problem for social media services is their sky high valuations require them squeezing more information and value out of time poor users by adding the features on other platforms; so Facebook tries to become Twitter while Google+ desperately tries to ape Facebook and Quora.

Adopting other services’ features is not necessarily what the users want or need; you may be happy to follow a Reuters or New York Times journalist on Twitter for breaking news but you, and them, are probably not particularly keen on being Facebook friends or professionally associated on LinkedIn.

If it turns out we don’t want to share a timeline of our lives with the entire world but just know how our relatives or old school friends in another city are doing, then the underpinnings of the social media giants value may not be worth the billions of dollars we currently believe.

This isn’t to say social media services themselves aren’t going away, it could just be that the grandiose dreams of the online tycoons where they become an identity service or a mini-Internet are just a classic case of overreach.

For Google and Salesforce, whose core businesses aren’t in social media, this could be merely an expensive distraction, but for those businesses like Facebook it could be that Myspace’s failure was the indicator that making money out of people’s friendships isn’t quite the money maker some people think.

Losing sight of what matters

Are we losing focus of what matters in our business?

Last Night Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt testified before a US Senate antitrust committee on the search engine company’s market power.

In opening his testimony, Schmidt alluded to Microsoft, saying “twenty years ago, a large technology firm was setting the world on fire. Its software was

on nearly every computer. Its name was synonymous with innovation.

“But that company lost sight of what mattered. Then Washington stepped in.

It’s an interesting and probably accurate perspective given how Microsoft has effectively lost its way for the last decade – although given Google’s urge to become an identity service and its buying a mobile phone manufacturer doesn’t auger well for their focus on the core search business.

Losing of focus of what matters is a problem for all business owners. We’re busy, it’s hard winning orders, getting paid and keeping customers happy so we lose track of the reason we went into business.

For most of us it was because we had a great business idea or a belief we could have a better life being our own bosses.

That latter objective is often the first one lost, usually we find ourselves working harder, taking fewer holidays and seeing the family less than if we’d stayed in a comparatively safe job with BigCorp.

Great ideas can also be our undoing – if you’re constantly having brainwaves, you find you have lots of ideas but no time to execute on any of them.

Similarly, one great idea that turns out to be dog can be bad news as well. Often, we’re loath to admit we’re wrong and hold onto a failing business idea long after it’s shown not to be viable.

Probably worst of all is when we violate our own values; many of us went into business because we didn’t like the values of the corporation we worked for.

Then one day we find we’re screwing subcontractors, that we’re leasing an expensive car the business can’t afford while cutting staff benefits and we’re tying up customers in legalistic contracts in attempt not to deliver the services we promised.

Just like the big company we swore we’d never become.

If you’re a big company with a lucrative business niche – like Google or Microsoft – you can get along quite nicely with the rivers of gold flowing subsidising your indulgences and distractions, most of though we don’t have that revenue buffer protecting our assets.

The cost of losing focus is a killer; even if it doesn’t kill our businesses, it will destroy our souls.

Are you keeping focus on why you went into business?

ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

How the Internet’s name wars can affect you

The online empires want our names and identities, are the real costs of social media now being exposed? Our September ABC Nightlife spot on September 22 from 10pm looked at these issues and more.

Paul and Tony discussed how Google’s “Name Wars” or “nymwars” came about, why social media sites like Facebook and search engines want you to use to use your real names.

The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, more details of Tony’s programs can be found there as well.

Is this a good thing or are there costs we should consider before handing over our intimate details to a social media or free cloud computing service?

Some of the topics we covered included;

  • What are the “name wars’?
  • Why do companies like Google and Facebook want us to use our ‘real’ identities?
  • How can they use the information they gather?
  • What problems does that cause for Internet users?
  • Can these problems spill into real life?
  • Are all web services doing this?
  • What are the risks to businesses using social media?
  • Is this the real cost of social media?

Some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

The cost of lunch: Google and Information Revenue
Google’s real names policy explained
Google’s Eric Schmidt on being an “identity service”, not a social network
Google’s company philosophy (note item two)
Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is

We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 20 October and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

Cloud computing and Small Business September Digital Day

How can online tools help grow your business?

As part of the NSW state government’s Small Business September Digital Day for Startups and Growth Businesses, we’ll be looking at exactly what cloud computing is and how it can help businesses.

Some of the services we discuss in the presentation are listed in the Netsmart’s web post on the 5 essential cloud computing tools for business. Although there’s many more we’ll mention that can help organisations of all sizes.

Given the time constraints and the event’s focus is on the specific social media and cloud computing tools available to small business, much of the background information to the Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business session is available in the previous series of posts about cloud computing previously done for the 2011 City of Sydney Let’s Talk Business series.

Detailed information from that presentation can be found on the following pages;

The networked business Part 1: What is cloud computing?
The networked business Part 2: The benefits of cloud computing
The networked business Part 3: Managing risk in the cloud
The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

All of the tools discussed in the Small Business September presentations are available in our ebook, Online Business Essentials which is available for all subscribers to our newsletter.

If you’d like to see the presentations themselves, both The Networked Business and Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business are available through the Slideshare service.

Seats are still available for both of the Digital Day presentations at the Telstra Experience Centre, Level 4, 300 George Street, Sydney. The Start Up session begins at 8.00am and the presentations for growth businesses begins at 1.00pm.

Come along if you’d like to learn how social media and cloud computing can help your business improve productivity while building an online brand.

The quiet revolution

Productivity gains of the 1990s were based on accessible computer technology, are we about to see a cloud computing revolution in our workplaces?

Earlier this weekPricewaterhouseCoopers released their Productivity Scorecard, which showed Australia’s business efficiency isn’t improving as fast at it once was and the country’s relative performance is steadily slipping down international tables.

One of the notable things in the PwC report is the massive growth of productivity in the 1990s, a point emphasised by the accompanying paper on business productivity in a presentation by economist Saul Eslake last month to the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Economists attribute most of this late 20th Century growth to deregulation and privatisation by governments in the 1980s and 90s but the driving force was really computerisation that allowed most businesses to do much more with less.

Immediately noticeable for an Australian walking into a British, European or Japanese office during the early 1990s was the lack of desktop computers.

Australian businesses adopted technology a lot quicker than their counterparts outside of North America and this alone was probably responsible for the country’s relatively good productivity growth in that decade.

The arrival of computers – followed by desktop printers and Internet access – suddenly gave small businesses access the means to do jobs that even the biggest corporations had struggled to do previously and drove a rapid reorganisation of most offices.

Everybody from secretaries to architects and graphic designers to lawyers – even economists – suddenly found they had the tools at their fingertips to do work they could have only dreamed of prior to 1990. This drove massive productivity gains in businesses of all sizes.

From 2000 onwards, things became tougher as the easy gains had been made and the incremental improvements in technology, such as smartphones, cloud computing and web publishing didn’t have the same substantive effect the early PCs delivered with spreadsheets, word processing and desktop publishing.

The real challenge we now face in business – and government – is to start harnessing cloud computing driven online services that promise to deliver similar productivity gains to what we saw twenty years ago.

We have the tools; online office apps, Customer Relation Management services (CRM) and sharing platforms all deliver major improvements in the way we work within our businesses and with external partners like contractors, suppliers and event clients.

One of the most powerful aspects of cloud computing services is reduced capital cost meaning reduced barriers to entry into markets we previously may have thought were safe.

This easy access into established sectors is one of reasons the retail industry’s giants are now struggling as online competitors can setup cheaply and quickly while offering better prices and service.

Retail is only one of the more obvious sectors being changed by these technologies and as the decade continues we’re going to close to every industry be radically changed by low cost computers accessing the Internet.

As business owners and managers we need to look at our own processes and systems with an eye on how we can improve workflows and customer service within our organisations.

Those of us who manage to get these new technologies are going to reap the benefit of the next productivity wave, those who don’t are going to go the way that many uncompetitive and slow to respond industries did in the 1980s.

Re-evaluating social media

How are you using social media services in your personal and business life?

We often forget the Internet as we know it is less than thirty years old and many of the social media tools we use have been around for less than five.

In such a new field, we’re all learning and experimenting which means some tools become essential while others are recognised as yesterday’s shiny toys.

As the depth of the name wars and the related privacy issues become apparent, it’s worthwhile re-evaluating how we use these services. Here’s how I’m now using some of the online social media platforms.

Foursquare

I quite like Foursquare, the idea of knowing which friends are nearby when you’re out on the town is great. But as someone who has a dismal social life, it was wasted on me.

The gamification angle is interesting, but the privacy implications of the service make me uneasy. I’ve stopped checking in and will probably close down my account pretty soon.

Empire Avenue

As a sociological experiment on the rampant egos and deep insecurities of the social media community, Empire Avenue is wonderful. Otherwise, it’s just another spammy online application trying to harvest personal information – I came, I saw, I decided life was too short.

Quora

On first glance, Quora looked good, but the changing of posts by moderators concerned me, the cliqueiness of users was the killer and I closed my account. I suspect Google Plus will kill this platform.

Google Plus

Apart from being a Quora killer and having some interesting collaboration feature, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to use Google Plus instead of Facebook.

While it’s in its early days, I’m finding it less than compelling while Eric Schmidt’s claim it is an identity service rather than a social media platform deeply unsettles me and makes me less likely to engage in conversations on the service.

Facebook

When Facebook first became available I was intrigued as able to connect with relatives along with past and present friends always struck me as being one of the Internet’s killer apps. As various business features evolved, it was clear Facebook was a serious online tool.

The problem with Facebook has been the way strangers become friends, not to mention how acquaintances and relatives have a habit of posting private things you don’t particularly care to know about, along with the wave of invites to games and applications that come and go.

Overall, I’ve been using Facebook for business purposes rather than sharing private information for nearly two years now. That works, but it isn’t the intended use and I’m probably not getting the maximum benefit although I am preserving some modest degree of privacy.

Linkedin

As a means to establish your professional credibility, LinkedIn is unbeatable. For those with a lot of time, the various professional LinkedIn groups can be a valuable way to show your industry knowledge.

One thing that surprises me is how many people notice your status changes so it is certainly a good way of keeping your business network up to date with what you are doing.

The concern with LinkedIn is similar to Facebook and Google Plus in that there’s a lot of market intelligence being gathered on our professional networks and the recent attempt to ‘enhance’ social advertising around our online personas does not fill me with confidence that LinkedIn is the best platform to be displaying our professional abilities.

Twitter

I’ve had a turbulent relationship with Twitter and it took me three attempts to really see the point. I’m still careful about what I post and who I follow.

However Twitter has become my main news source and I find it keeps me ahead of the major media outlets. For this reason alone, Twitter has become the social media service I use the most.

What occurs to me in writing this is that these social media tools are really about listening, not talking or marketing. Perhaps that is the point we’re missing in the noise generated by these services, that listening is where the real power lies in these online platforms.

The six tools I’ve listed are just a small subset of a massive range of social media services, I’d be interested in hearing which ones you find useful and why.

A Capital Question

How do we raise money for a new business?

How do you raise funding for new venture? Business coach Lindy Asimus asked over the weekend. It’s a question that perplexes many people starting out a new enterprise or trying to grow an existing one.

The real question though is “how much capital do you need?” Being undercapitalised will often stunt a venture’s growth and is probably the reason why many otherwise excellent business ideas fail to achieve their potential.

How much money do you need?

While business plans are often disparaged, one of the great advantages of doing one is the budding entrepreneur gets an idea of the capital required along with the cash flow required to service any debts. Even if the business plan itself is filed away and never looked at again, understanding the upfront cash requirements can help avoid some nasty mistakes.

The other key factor is the business itself, if you’re buying a fast food franchise, setting up a store or fitting out a restaurant then there’s going to be some big upfront capital costs involved before you start trading but there is more to it than just the immediate cash needs.

What is the type of business?

A business’ capital needs are going to vary with the type of business and the objectives of the owners, not just in size but also in type. As business writer and educator Steve Blank says, there are six types of startups and for certain types an equity investment from say an angle investor or venture capital company will be more appropriate than a bank loan.

For small businesses, the type that Steve Blank describes as “work to feed the family” businesses, a bank loan that can be paid back out of cashflow is going to be the most obvious way to fund an enterprise while it would be rare a venture capital investor would even answer a phone call from such a business.

On the other hand, a family member or friend might be interested in taking equity in such a business, the old “families, friends and fools” is a time honoured way of setting up a venture.

Government grants

In these times of rampant corporate welfare for big banks and major corporations, it’s tempting to think the government may be able to help the small businessperson. Sadly most of the grants available are small sums for specific purposes like export programs or hiring trainees, they aren’t designed or intended to provide entrepreneurial capital.

Bootstrapping and “sweat capital”

Most businesses though are best served by “bootstrapping” and “sweat capital” for most, particularly in the service sectors, funding your business out of cashflow and the hard work of the founders is the way to grow a viable enterprise.

The term “sweat capital” refers to the founders working hard and capitalising their businesses from the sweat of their brows while  scrimping and saving every penny. Most founders of successful businesses have stories of spending years expending that “sweat capital” while living on cheap pizzas or packet noodles.

Bootstrapping, funding your business through sales, is the other great capital source. In many ways, this is the best form of capital in that it proves a business is viable and doesn’t involve signing over assets to banks or giving equity away to investment partners. Again a well thought out business plan quickly shows whether this is feasible.

So the question of capital is complex, but having enough is always the biggest struggle for those starting a business.

Of course it is possible to have too much capital and we might talk about that in another blog post.

How Google’s identity obsession hurts

How the search engine giant is damaging business and its own reputation

Imagine giving a presentation at a conference where you fire up a live demonstration of a product you’ve been urging the audience to use and the audience start giggling.

You turn around to find a bright red message at the top of the screen stating your account has been suspended. It wasn’t there the night before and you certainly didn’t receive an email warning you this had happened.

Embarrassing or what?

That happened to me with Google Local earlier this and the many stories like it illustrates a serious management problem within the world’s biggest search engine company.

Local search – where businesses can be found online based on their location – is one of the main web battlefields with Google and Facebook, along with outliers like News Limited and Microsoft, are competing to get business of all sizes to sign up.

Recently though Google seems to be going out of its way to squander the massive opportunity they have in this sector despite the CEO, Larry Page, identifying local services as one of their priorities.

Despite Google’s intention to promote Places – as their, and Facebook’s, local search platforms are called – many businesses are finding the company’s arbitrary and often incorrect application of its own rules and Terms of Service difficult to understand and use.

“I have found that with the ‘moving target’ Google is presenting to businesses” said Bob, a commenter on one of my blogs, “is paralyzing them from doing exactly what Google wants, which is updating and providing fresh content on their listings pages.”

In many ways, this is a small front on the “nymwars” that has broken out since Google introduced their Plus social media service and started enforcing their “rules” on “real names”.

Unfortunately their real names “policy” – and I use inverted commas deliberately – is vague and arbitrary with users finding their accounts suspended despite signing up with “the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you” as required by Google.

Account suspensions are wide and varied; some people, quite legally, have a name without a surname, others have a combination of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, while others have simply fallen foul of the computer and Google’s secretive bureaucratic culture.

This secretive bureaucracy would be funny if it wasn’t so downright hypocritical. Any correspondence with Google about account suspensions either on Places or Plus is signed off by an anonymous functionary from “no-reply” email address. So it appears real identities, and accountability, don’t extend to the company itself.

Last week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, announced Plus is not a social media platform, but an “identity service”. Good luck with that, Eric as your staff’s arbitrary and often incorrect interpretation of the company’s own rules doesn’t engender confidence in any identity verified by Google.

That announcement by Google’s chairman should worry investors, as this is a company that is first and foremost an advertising company powered by the best web search technology.

Management distractions such as becoming an “identity service” or buying a handset manufacturer distract focus from the core business and result in the mess we’re seeing around business and private accounts.

For the moment, Google Places remains a service that businesses must list on given the visibility the results have when customers search the web for local services and products.

If you aren’t already on Google Places, do sign up but make sure you get your listing right first time as editing your profile once it’s up risks your account being suspended or cast into “pending” purgatory.

Should you have already an account, leave it alone as any change risks coming the attention of Google’s anonymous bureaucrats.

Hopefully, this madness will pass and Google will clarify their policies, ground them in the real world then enforce their terms fairly and consistently. Until then, you can’t afford to rely on your personal and business Google accounts.

Online tools to turbocharge your business

Flying Solo’s Independents Day looked at how the web can help business productivity.

Flying Solo’s 2011 Independents Day conference featured our Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business.

We looked at some of the most popular cloud computing, social media, productivity and collaboration tools that can help a business make more money and grow faster.

Most importantly, it shows how business owners can free up some of their most valuable asset – their time.

Some of the tools we discussed include the popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and how they can be used for customer service and market intelligence on top of being marketing services.

We also looked at how collaborative and cloud computing services can help small businesses work together and improve the ways consultants can work with big business clients. In many ways, collaborative tools like Google Apps, Zoho and Dropbox help build team and deliver projects more effectively.

The Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business presentation itself is available on Slideshare and if you subscribe to our newsletter, you’ll receive a free copy of the accompanying Online Business Essentials e-book.

Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business

The web’s big weakness

How a hands-off customer model may doom many of today’s social media and web services

There’s a fundamental flaw in the way the tech industry does business, that weakness could be what ultimately kills many of today’s new media, web and social media services.

AirBnB, an online home share service, is one of the darlings of the booming Silicon Valley start up sector, having recently being valued at $1.2 billion after a successful capital raising.

Like most Web 2.0 and social media businesses, AirBnB’s advantage is in the low operating costs where customer support is left to the service’s peer review and social media communities while AirBnB pockets a commission for simply making the connection between the landlord and tenant.

The flaws in this “all care, no responsibility” model became apparent last month when a lady posted a description of her house being ransacked by an errant housesitter she found through AirBnB.

AirBnB’s management responded to the article with assurances they were helping and working with their affected customer, claims which were promptly contradicted by the original victim.

To make matters worse, certain prominent members of the Silicon Valley investment and blogging communities alluded she was lying or was “batshit crazy.” Now that other stories of bad AirBnB tenants are appearing, the view this is simply the untrustworthy word of a deranged customer affected by their first such incident is looking hollow.

Failing to deal with customer problems is not unique to AirBnB, hiding behind impenetrable layers of “support” backed up by user hostile terms and conditions is familiar to anyone who has had to deal with an online service gone wrong.

Last month Thomas Monopoly found he was locked out of his Google account and had it not been for the intervention of a senior Google employee, Thomas’ problem would probably still be stuck in an endless feedback loop.

Exactly the same problem has been encountered thousands of times by other users of web mail, social media, online auction and matchmaking sites.

Many of the people running these services retort their products are free so users get the support the support they pay for – an argument conveniently overlooking that most “free” web services are based around selling customer data – but even this does not justify delivering the basic services users have been lead to expect, regardless of what a 5,000 word user agreement states.

Today’s tech startups, and many of their big established cousins in the IT industry, have the idea that customer support is an optional extra and an expense to minimised or outsourced.

In this respect they are not too far removed from dinosaur car manufacturers or some of today’s less dynamic retailers offering little in the way of customer service or after sales support.

That way of working has died as consumers have been able to go online to vent their dissatisfaction, strangely today’s hot tech start ups seem to have missed this aspect of the revolution they have helped start.

Ignoring consumer problems is exactly what’s bringing traditional businesses unstuck in the online world. The funny thing is it might bring many of the online business undone as well.