Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: small business

  • Facebook’s advertising struggle

    Facebook’s advertising struggle

    Facebook is further restricting the reach of brands on their social media platform reports industry news site Ad Age.

    It’s not surprising that Facebook is doing this seeing their stock is currently trading at 120 times current earnings and sixty times estimated revenue. The income has to come from somewhere to justify those prices.

    The social media service is quite blunt about it’s objectives in making brands pay more to get their message out on Facebook as Ad Age reports;

    “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

    Facebook’s idea of a meaningful experience though might be very different from its users, who are showing their irritation with the service messing around with their news feed. It remains to be seen just how interested those posting on the site are in clicking on sponsored or promoted posts as opposed to finding updates from those they care about.

    For smaller businesses, Facebook’s moves make it harder to use the service as an effective marketing or engagement platform as it means stumping up substantial amounts of money to get your messages in front of your customers and friends.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out for Facebook and the social media marketing community. It may mean that social advertising is monopolised by big brands while small and local business finds other channels to get their message out.

    One thing is for sure though, the idea that social media would replace the news media is beginning to look shaky as people’s feeds start to be dominated by messages they don’t want.

    The next few years promise to be interesting for everyone in the social media industry, particularly Facebook’s shareholders and advertisers.

    For smaller businesses, it’s clear that Facebook is no longer a cheap marketing platform.

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  • For God’s sake get a website

    For God’s sake get a website

    The annual MYOB Business Monitor was released earlier this week with the depressing news that half of the Australian businesses surveyed didn’t have a basic website.

    MYOB’s survey reinforced the finding of PayPal’s Digital Literacy Report a week earlier that found only 34% of Australian small businesses list their contact details online.

    This is madness – over a decade ago consumers moved online and now with the mobile internet any business without a website is almost invisible in the marketplace.

    What is really dispiriting about these reports is that listing with the various online services and setting up a website is not hard, at worst it should take half a day for a simple site and to complete Google Places, Facebook and Yellow Pages listings.

    The easiest way to create a website is to setup a free Blogger page, it takes about twenty minutes and is more than adequate if you just need a site that lists your services, location, contact details and phone number.

    While Blogger is good for the basics, it does run the risk of locking a growing business into Google’s walled garden which is why WordPress is the better alternative for more advanced companies or proprietors.

    Most readers of this site already know how important an online presence is for any organisation, but it’s almost certain that everyone knows a business owner who doesn’t have a website.

    If one of those business owners is someone close to you, then the best thing you can do for them is to sit down with them and setup their basic online presence.

    Unless you think it’s time they went out of business. In which case you won’t have to wait long.

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  • Surviving in business by executing a pivot

    Surviving in business by executing a pivot

    One of the key skills in running a business is knowing when to change direction, to ‘pivot’ in the language of Silicon Valley.

    Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing Jonathan Barouch, founder of social analysis company Local Measure about the service’s pivot from Roamz.

    I’ll be writing that interview up in more detail in a few days, but Jonathon’s observations about pivoting businesses reflected my own business experiences.

    PC Rescue was born out of a pivot and its ultimate demise was due to the failure of the company’s management, and my own, to move decisively when it was clear the business wasn’t working as planned.

    The founding of PC Rescue happened out of a virtual assistant service my wife an I set up in 1995. We’d been victims of the curiously insular attitude of Australian managers towards employing expats and starting our own business seemed to be the right option.

    So Office Magic was born.

    Office Magic was a good business, but in talking to clients it became quickly apparent there was a bigger need for computer training and repairs. Most small businesses were struggling to find reliable techs to help them out with their IT services.

    So Office Magic pivoted into PC Rescue.

    For  the next ten years PC Rescue was a profitable business, the problem I had was the classic small business proprietor’s dilemma – I couldn’t get the right people.

    The staff and contractors I had were good computer techs but I couldn’t find one with the skills or motivation to take over the day to day supervisor role so I could work on growing the business. I was stuck in the trap described by Michael Gerber in his book the e-myth.

    Originally, PC Rescue’s business plan had been a five year strategy — two years validating, two years executing and one year exiting. The exit I particularly liked was creating a computer support franchise operation.

    This didn’t happen because the company lacked the human capital required;  my wife and I lacked the management resources to move PC Rescue to the next stage.

    When this became apparent we should have pivoted the business. We didn’t because I was too busy with the day to day stresses of keeping customers and staff happy.

    Eventually we achieved an exit of sorts, ten years later than intended and not in a satisfactory way. The business remained under capitalised and the new partners turned out not to have the expertise or drive required to grow the operation.

    Which make Jonathan’s pivot of Roamz so much more interesting. He listened to customers, looked at the direction of the industry and realised where the company’s strengths lay.

    Rather that doubling down on a model which was struggling, he took the business in a new direction.

    Having that flexibility is probably one of the greatest assets for small and startup businesses as larger corporations struggle with executing massive changes.

    As markets evolve and the rate of economic change accelerates, having the skills and mindset to execute successful pivots could be the difference between survival and failure for many big and small businesses.

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  • Little shots at the moon

    Little shots at the moon

    Today I wrote a story for Business Spectator on the Google Loon project, a pilot program to see if high altitude balloons can provide affordable internet access for the developing world.

    What really fascinates me about Loon and the projects in the Google X program is the concept of the ‘moonshot’. Google explain it on their solve for [x] website.

    Moonshots live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; instead of mere 10% gains, they aim for 10x improvements. The combination of a huge problem, a radical solution, and the breakthrough technology that might just make that solution possible is the essence of a Moonshot.

    Great Moonshot discussions require an innovative mindset–including a healthy disregard for the impossible–while still maintaining a level of practicality.

    Missing in that definition is the concept of risk – it’s easy to propose a radical, audacious solution to a problem when it’s not your money or career on the line.

    On the other hand, most organisations that have the resources to experiment with breakthrough technologies stifle any thought of true innovation or radical solutions.

    The advantage Google has is that parts of the organisation encourage those moonshots, although there are divisions of Google which are just as bureaucratic and staid as a chartered accountant’s or quantity surveyor’s office.

    Interestingly Apple were the reverse with only one guy allowed to do moonshots and everyone below him followed him either to the moon or hell, as this wonderful story tells.

    Which brings me to the little folk – the startups, small businesses and backyard inventors who don’t have the resources of Google, Apple or the US space program.

    For that matter there’s also the writers, painters, musicians and other artists who are risking everything for their vision.

    Everyday these people are risking everything for their little ideas as their homes, livelihoods and sometimes their relationships are on the line for their one big idea or audacious vision.

    These are the real risk takers and every day they are taking little shots at the moon.

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  • Is Small Business Whingeing its way to irrelevance

    Is Small Business Whingeing its way to irrelevance

    “Is small business whingeing its way to irrelevance?” first appeared in Smart Company on August 16, 2012.

    Last week, TripAdvisor announced the results of a worldwide hospitality survey. One of the things that leapt out of the survey was how large hotel chains are using social media while smaller Australian establishments are languishing.

    Following on TripAdvisor’s survey was the release of accounting software company MYOB’s regular index that showed businesses are retreating from the online world with reduced usage rates of social media, eCommerce and online payments.

    At an Australian Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney on Tuesday, MYOB’s CEO Tim Reed and Google Australia’s Tim Leeder discussed small business and the web with their Getting Australian Business Online program missing its target of 50,000 sign ups since its launch in March last year.

    The fact more than half of Australian businesses don’t have a website despite free services from Google, WordPress, Weebly and a host of others indicates a deeper apathy among small businesses towards a whole range of issues.

    Earlier this year the New South Wales state government abolished the popular Small Business September program with barely a squeak from the SME sector, with some small business groups actually welcoming what was a dramatic cut to support programs.

    Compare this to the Olympic athletes, not only do we see the AOC coming out swinging with demands for more funding but the yachting team are staging an effective campaign to reinstate NSW government programs to support their sport: The total opposite to the small business community.

    Small business, on the other hand, rolls over and accepts cuts to programs, poorly thought out regulations and government procurement policies that favour multinationals over local companies which are capable of the job.

    When small business is given a chance to have a voice, the community blows it with whingeing. At the NSW Small Business Commissioner’s roadshows earlier this year it was notable how much time was spent whingeing about group buying services, traffic clearways and council permits for coffee tables rather than sensible and achievable wins for the SME sector.

    So it wasn’t a surprise that the result of that roadshow was the cutting of useful programs and little effective change.

    The best example of this whingeing rather than action is the current campaign to increase the GST threshold and abolish penalty rates.

    Instead of focusing on the real problems facing businesses such as high rents, profit gouging from distributors and poorly thought out state and federal regulations imposed by both sides of politics – the small business and retail sectors manage to demonise their staff and customers and increase the suspicions of consumers and workers that they’re being ripped off by big, bad employers.

    In reality, the shopkeepers and other small businesses are struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing economy. They are feeling those changes earlier than the rest of the economy because they don’t have the cushions of fat margins, political connections or guaranteed incomes of the corporate, public or political sectors.

    Those struggles will give the small business sector an advantage over the bigger and slower groups – having adapted to the changed economy, those smaller businesses will be stronger and fitter than their bigger competitors.

    Chris Ridd, of cloud computing accounting service Xero, one of MYOB’s biggest competitors, puts this best.

    “Technology is an enabler and can actually help small businesses gain efficiencies, reach new customers and generate new revenue streams. Why turn your back on the one thing that can turn your business around.”

    It’s the proactive business people adopting new technologies who are going to thrive over the next decade. Whingeing about TripAdvisor, the GST or dumb government policies isn’t going to save an enterprise that’s become irrelevant.

    So make sure your website’s up to date, check what customers are saying about you on social media or review sites and have a look at those cloud computing services that can improve your business’ profitability and efficiency.

    The time to do it is now, before your business becomes irrelevant.

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