Elie Kochman on Business and Networking

One of my readers was kind enough to send me a link to a piece of software he’s been working on for about a year, and asked if I could provide some feedback. I did what I normally do when I get such requests – I went to his site, spent 3 minutes browsing, and decided that it was worth a second look, and for multiple reasons.

Why write a review?

There are two reasons that I decided to write this review. Normally, I choose to review sites I’ve discovered, products that I like, services I think would be of use to my readers. This service certainly matches that criterion.

The second reason is because of what Edward Lejun, the founder of Setster, wrote to me. He explained that he’s worked on the product for about a year, is looking to expand and add new features, and was wondering if I could help him out. As a fellow entrepreneur, I’m happy to oblige, to help another entrepreneur reach success.

The Product

Setster is an online appointment scheduler, which can be added to sites, and allows you, the visitor to the site, to book appointments by seeing the schedule and selecting an available slot. Based on the type of appointment you request, an appropriate amount of time is allocated.

This product certainly has a variety of applications, from making medical or dental appointments, to scheduling dates. This is precisely the type of service I would want if I were running an office and didn’t want to hire an appointment secretary to schedule my day. It lets clients know your availability, it allows you to control your exposure, and clients in general would like to know that when they call, you’ve blocked your schedule to give them your undivided attention.

The price of the service is pretty good too. There’s a free plan, which allows a single user to book up to 10 appointments per month. Upgrading to Pro Personal gives you an additional 40 appointments at $9.95 per month ,while upgrading to Pro Business gives you 300 appointments and 5 user accounts for $29.95 per month. Changes to your account level can be made at any time, subject to certain conditions.

The balance is pretty good, although a change I would recommend is to remove the limit on the Pro Business account in terms of how many appointments are allowed. As a business owner, that’s not something I want to think about (although 300 appointments works out to about 2 appointments per user per day, but in a doctor’s office, for example, that might not be anywhere close to enough).

Because the service was built with the Intuit Workspace, there’s good integration with other Intuit products, specifically, Quickbooks Online. This also will help Edward Lajun reach a large number of potential clients, so growth should occur as long as he maintains the quality of the application.

Where I think the product could use some help is in terms of what information is provided when an appointment is booked. Currently, there are a limited number of fields. Perhaps adding the ability to attach a file to the appointment would be useful, so that additional information can be provided if necessary.

All in all, I believe that Edward Lajun and Setster have built a viable product that will save its users money and hassle, and it’s merely a matter of good exposure that will propel them to great success.

I came to a realization last night that my various commitments will eventually cause time to run out if I’m not careful, and I suspect that I am not alone in this situation. In fact, anyone who is working a full-time job alongside some moon-lighting, factor in a family, and some time for friends, not to mention some relaxation time, and your day becomes filled up pretty quickly.

This is nothing new, and in truth, I’ve discussed this issue in the past several times. However, last night some parts of my personal schedule slipped, and in hindsight, there was no reason for it.

When relaxation takes priority over responsibility, trouble is in the making.

If you find yourself spending time relaxing when you could be completing a chore, and find this habit repeating, you need to take a step back and evaluate your behavior. When you find yourself spending time that could be spent with family with your nose stuck in a book, or eyes glued to a screen, you need to stop and think about what you’re doing, about what opportunities are being wasted.

Success is more than just making money. Success is when you achieve happiness in your life as a whole (and yes, money might be  a part of that). The best way to be happy is to be around happy people, and to interact with them. If that means that other aspects of your day need to be compromised, then so be it.

The sooner you come to this realization, the sooner you can re-evaluate your days. How much time do you spend doing each of your daily tasks? Is your time being used as effectively as possible? Could you possibly save some time by being better organized?

For this reason, no matter how simple your day is, try to keep an agenda of what you need to do. Include tasks such as spend time with your family, or spend time relaxing by watching TV or reading a book. But try to stick to your schedule, or you may find that it’s those things which are most valuable in the long run which suffer the most in the short term.

If you pay attention to news from Toronto, you are likely to know about the various publicity problems that have been plaguing the Toronto Transit Commission, a.k.a. the TTC. A favored target of negative criticism for many years, their recent cost overrun with a street car line coupled with a fare increase, followed by major service disruptions, all paled to the recent images and videos of various employees not working when they should be – sleeping, grabbing coffee, or just plain being rude. Capping this is the fact that Adam Giambrone, the current chair of the TTC, is running for mayor in the 2010 elections.

The picture that triggered the controversy

In reality, not every employee of the TTC is rude or incompetent. In fact, most are pleasant and do their jobs well. Having been a rider for many years, however, I can relate to all the incidents reported in the news, and can think of my own stories of gross incompetence by a TTC employee. As a result, hearing about recorded incidents of such incompetence strikes a chord with me and other riders, who immediately sympathize with the rider who took the picture.

There are, as a result, many lessons to be learned from what is happening now with the TTC, which is the point of this article.

First Response

When an incident affecting the public perception of a company occurs, it is necessary to provide a response to the public in order to limit the potential harm that can occur as a result of the incident. Here’s what the TTC had to say about the sleeping collector agent:

ATU 113 Statement on picture of TTC Collector

TORONTO, Jan. 22 /CNW/ – The following statement is issued by Bob Kinnear, President of ATU Local 113, which represents Operating and Maintenance employees of the Toronto Transit Commission:

There have been many media enquires about a picture taken at 10:00 p.m. on January 9 of a TTC Collector described as “sleeping” in the booth. The TTC is conducting an enquiry on this and until this is completed the union will have no comment on the matter except this:

Whatever the outcome of the enquiry, it is very discouraging that the picture taker and, apparently, other customers, made no attempt to determine if there was anything wrong with this TTC employee. A simple knock on the glass might have determined if the Collector was, in fact, asleep, or whether he was unconscious as a result of some medical problem. The reports that passengers were laughing at him as they passed by the booth makes this even more disturbing.

The union will comment further at an appropriate time.

This response is problematic for several reasons – it places blame on the public for the actions of its own employees, and makes assumptions that no one did, in fact, try to wake the sleeping agent. I don’t know whether or not anyone did, but the first statement released should have started with something more along the lines of:

Sleeping on the job is not considered to be acceptable by the TTC except in extenuating circumstances. We are investigating the incident, and will keep the public notified of our progress.

What this statement does is not accept fault for what happened, but explain that if the story is in fact as described by the rider, action will be taken accordingly. This is the first part of response to an incident – making assurances about the internal policies regarding the behavior triggering the incident, and indicate that the incident is being investigated. Placing blame before the investigation is complete is unacceptable (in either direction).

Second Response

Within a little while, perhaps as a result of the bungled handling of the first incident, a video of a driver taking a 7 minute break during his bus route for use of the washroom and to get a coffee was posted on YouTube. This was quickly followed by several more videos and pictures of similar incidents.

This time, the response from the TTC was better:

A TTC bus operator has been suspended pending an investigation into the circumstances surrounding a video purportedly recording the operator taking a seven-minute washroom break and buying a coffee at a doughnut shop at 3:00 a.m. last Friday. As the matter is under investigation, Local 113 of the Amalgamated Transit Union will not be commenting on this incident or on any other matters that may bear on it.

Here, the action is directed against the employee. Granted, in this case, the driver in question was reported to have been verbally abusive to the rider, as well as allegedly making statements that the union would protect him. However, the union was learning from the first incident to not comment at length until more information is available.

Had this been the response to the first incident, perhaps there would not have been the level of public outrage, and perhaps the second incident would never have gained the level of attention that it saw.

Chain Reactions

The problem currently facing the TTC is actually quite difficult. While understanding what led to the current scenario is simple (a bungled first response followed by a second incident before the tumult over the first had died down), figuring out what to do now is much more difficult. This is the problem with chain reactions – once it has been started, breaking the chain is quite difficult.

This is the age of information freedom and social media. You need to act, not react, and you need to relate to the masses, not inform them. People expect interaction, not information. When something gets out of hand like this, you need to rein in control and start working to resolve the problem without letting it get worse in the process.

In the specific example covered in this article, the first thing to do is to make a very public announcement about a zero tolerance policy – if future incidents are reported, they will be dealt with immediately and severely. While this isn’t to mean that it’s blanket approval for a witch hunt, it needs to tell the employees that while discipline may have been lax in the past, it will no longer continue that way, and the union will not be able to protect them any longer from the result of gross misconduct.

Next, they need to look to the reactions to determine the root causes of the negative publicity. Fare hikes during the worst recession in decades is obviously an unpopular move, but if the result was better service, it might have been overlooked (not likely, but it’s possible there would have been less negative feedback). As such, they need to listen to the feedback and try to find some ways of visibly improving services.

The Lesson

What can be taken from all this is that when the public is against you, it’s more important to look at the source cause of the problem, rather than deal with the various symptoms as they appear. Failure to do so can result in the appearance of additional symptoms faster than you can deal with them, and get the public completely against anything you have to say, whether justified or not.

Frankly, I was expecting something a bit more sophisticated.

As the leader of a business, whether it’s just you and your goldfish, or you and 100 employees, it can be lonely at the top. After all, you’re the one who’s put in more hours, taken more risk, than anyone else around you. You may have more at stake in your business than anyone else. You have a limited ability to communicate with those around you.

In such an environment, how do you stay motivated, how do you push yourself to keep going?

It’s not where you come from, but where you’re going that matters.

To stay motivated, you need to focus on the goal, not on where you came from. Sure, there are lessons to be learned from the past, but they won’t keep you on the road, and they won’t get you to your goal.

When I was a teen, I went hiking with my father in the White Mountains in New Hampshire one summer. After climbing to one peak, we decided to cut short the hike because of the time, and headed down to complete the hike. When reaching the bottom, we followed the trail, reading occasionally from the trail guide for the landmarks we should be seeing.

After hiking for a while, we reached what seemed to be a dried riverbed, which was not on the description of the trail. There was a sign, however, pointing into the woods, indicating a ski trail. Although the ski trail appeared to be non-existent, we looked at the map, estimated that we were about 3 miles from the road, and figured we would take the chance and hike through the woods.

Needless to say, that was a bad choice. The road curved near where we were, and rather than being 3 miles from the road, we were about 6 miles out. The result was that we had to spend the night in the woods (this is black bear country) until morning, before we were able to continue to reach the road.

What kept us moving forward, however, was that we didn’t focus on the past. Sure, we should not have left the trail. We should have read the guide more carefully, and would have realized that we were actually supposed to hike along the riverbed (the mile markers were incorrect). But that would not have gotten us out of the woods.

In order to succeed, you must look forward toward your goal. As long as you know where you’re going, you can find the strength and motivation to get there.

What is the most interesting connection made through your network that resulted in a contract or a sale? We all know the benefits of networking, but I was wondering just how remote a connection other people have found to have landed them a job. I’ll start by giving two personal stories.

My Current Job

When I graduated university, I didn’t have a job, and spent several months teaching part-time at a community high school. During that time, I got engaged, and at the engagement party, the father of my wife’s close friend heard I had a degree in computer science. He gave me his e-mail address, and suggested I send him my resume. I e-mailed it that night.

Three weeks later, I was called for an interview, and then a week later, for a second interview a few weeks after that. Two days before the wedding (it was only a 4-month engagement) I was informed that I got the job, and would be starting a month after the wedding.

Landing a Contract

The second story happened more recently. I did some work for a client for about 15 months building a fully customized inventory management system. I was at an engagement party for a friend, and another guest was chatting with the groom, and asking him about what he did. He mentioned that he worked for my client, and in an off-hand way, said “Elie would know, he wrote our software!” The guest turned to me and asked me what I did, which I quickly explained. A month later, I was hired to build a catalog of 200K files for a community organization he represented.

What’s the most interesting connection you’ve been involved with?

Building a business on loyalty

In my recent posts on questions to be constantly asking yourself as the owner of a small business (10 Questions to Keep Asking About Your Business and  Readers Respond: Questions to Ask About Your Business), the area I seemed to miss was in regard to employee satisfaction. Yet, this is a critical component to the success of your business, and deserves a significant amount of attention.

As a small business owner, you have few employees, and know each and every one of them by first name. They are, in essence, the family of your business. However, unlike your biological family, who are always part of the family, these people can come and go as they please. As a result, it is up to you to ensure that they stay around. The most effective way to do that is not to pay them more.

Money will only buy you so much loyalty. Think about the recent recession, in which businesses were forced to cut costs in order to survive. At times like those, a business that has been buying the loyalty of its employees will find that this is an expensive endeavor, and attempt to cut expenses. If money was the only incentive for loyalty, then the employees will leave at the first opportunity.

As a small business, then, loyalty must be earned. This is done by providing each employee with what makes them truly happy. While a nice paycheck helps, other factors can come into play.

If you have an employee who is creative, are you providing an environment in which they can express themselves?

If another employee likes challenges, are you constantly pushing them to expand their horizons?

Each person has a different issue that they find to be important. As the owner of the business, it is your responsibility to determine what those issues are (if you aren’t sure, you should ask each employee what is important to them in a workplace besides for salary). If your employees are happy and motivated, then you will find their loyalty to hold strong through the thick and thin.

Working holiday

Christmas and New Year’s fall on Fridays this year, which means for many people, they are not working from Thursday afternoon on December 24 until Monday morning, January 4. That’s 10+ days of not working. Even for those who do go into the office in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, there is little work getting done, as people are in the holiday spirit.

As a small business owner, though, you may not have the luxury of being able to take off 11 consecutive days. My own plans include a significant amount of work to get done while everyone around me is in party mode. No, I’m not being a party-pooper, but when I have some time to spare, I’m getting projects advanced, meeting with what clients are available, and setting myself up to have an easier January by being prepared.

If you are able, then you might want to consider joining me in this. Sure, you can’t work with your suppliers (they’re on vacation somewhere warm), nor with your clients (they’re busy closing out the books for 2009). But you can work to figure out where your business is going, and how you can adapt to changes. The good thing about getting a break like this is that it lets you catch up, while the world around you slows down to party.

It’s a once-a-year opportunity to get ahead. What are you doing to help yourself for next year?

With all the buzz about entrepreneurship, and running your own business, many people are getting ready to succeed at starting a new business and working for themselves. However, all the effort they are placing in preparing for this may be for naught – as George Bernard Shaw said, Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. The effort put into getting ready to do anything is not nearly as useful as the effort put into doing it.

Chris Brogan of social media fame writes:

I think we’ll see more solo people tucking in with bigger organizations. I also think we’ll see smaller groups banding together to form stronger groups, not just in marketing, but in any of the newer businesses out there.

This is reality. There is safety in large companies, in that they are better equipped to handle fluctuations in the market, in the demand for their products. A small business which does $50,000 in sales per month is going to be much harder hit by a 20% reduction in sales one month – a large business can absorb that more easily (at least in the short term).

What does this have to do with preparing to succeed? The fact that many people (myself included) do not want to live under the fear of their business going under. We like the security, we like shifting the risk to someone else. Therefore, before we dive into a new venture, we will work as hard as possible to reduce the risk as much as possible. But as Robb Sutton says, ‘One Day’ is too late.

At some point, you need to jump, you need to take some risk. All the time spent preparing could be better utilized by doing. Take the following as an example:

On the CBC show Dragons’ Den, Claire Copp of Vancouver, BC came on the show looking for an investment in her software product, Trader II. One particular point that Claire made was that she had been working on this program for 20 years and had yet to sell a single copy. Now, there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from her presentation, but I’m just going to talk about one. Claire Copp had spent 20 years preparing to succeed, instead of going out there, finding out if there’s a real demand for her product, how much people would pay for it. (As a side note, if you search for “Trader II” Claire Copp, the first two results are Dragons’ Den, and my other blog where I posted a review of the episode.)

Of course, Claire is an extreme case, but the lesson remains. If you want to succeed, then you need to act now. If you keep waiting until all the risk has been removed, you may find that you’re left with nothing at all.

It’s that time of year again. With the holidays fast approaching, it’s time to think about where you’re going in life, whether that be personal, professional, or any other aspect of your life. Many people make New Year’s resolutions, but how many of you actually follow through on those resolutions?

Some people dream of success, while other people live to crush those dreams.

What I did last year was to post some of my professional resolutions for all to see. Whether or not that was a good idea is debatable. There is a study that shows that the more you share, the less likely you are to do. I don’t agree completely with that study, and so I’m going to do it again.

First, however, a follow-up to the goals for 2009:

• Only one of my contracts from the start of 2009 is still in development, and it is scheduled for completion with two weeks.
• I have not picked up one new contract per month, however, the past 3 months have been very good to me with 2 new clients and one returning client.
• I haven’t taken any courses this year, but am in the process of learning PHP and the Zend Framework.
• I have continued to use C# for some development, and am increasing my level of proficiency.

All in all, I feel good about what I’ve accomplished in 2009. While I haven’t met all my goals, I did strive to do so, and had I met all my goals, it would be an indication that I had not set my sights high enough. So, without further ado, here are my goals for 2010:

1. Learn PHP and Zend to a degree of proficiency whereby I can construct an entire website based on those technologies in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. in under 250 hours for a fully-functional site, and not including the design of the interface).
2. Launch the product I’m currently working on, Client Data Tracker, to beta in January 2010 and live to the public before the end of March 2010.
3. Continue developing my consulting to the point that I am putting in 30+ hours per week in billable time on various projects.
4. Complete the work required for KNIRL.COM and get the site up and running.

These are my goals that I’ll be using to measure my success against in 2010. What are your goals? How do you intend to measure success?

The Federal Trade Commission (U.S. agency for my non-American readers) released its official guide to those receiving goods or services in exchange for endorsements. According to the official title, it affects advertisers, bloggers, and celebrities endorsing a product (click here for the full report). The guidelines include, among other things, that the person making the endorsement disclose that they are being compensated for what they write. The details are a bit vague, but we can be sure that over time, the FTC will continue to refine this guide until it is a full-fledged regulation.

There are multiple potential impacts to this, some for good, others, not so much.

First, I held a debate a while back over whether or not bloggers should be disclosing that they are being compensated for the reviews they give (which is the basis of the FTC guidelines). The conclusion we reached was that while bloggers should be pointing out somewhere that they receive compensation for their reviews, they should not need to disclose this on each individual review they write. This lets their readers be aware that they may be biased on this account, and to value the review accordingly.

Second, there are tax considerations – when you receive compensation for work done, you have to report that as income. Robb Sutton pointed out to me in his article, published yesterday, that in the U.S. this reporting is only required if the paying company provides the appropriate paperwork. I find this to be a little odd, since in general, you have to report income regardless of whether or not the employer is filing his paperwork correctly, and I therefore suspect that it is only a matter of time before this ruling is changed to match.

Jeremy Schoemaker writes about this as well, and points out who was the cause of such regulation. The regulation is aimed to prevent a company from creating a fake blog where they review their own products. Since they would now have to report the compensation taking place, readers would then be aware that the site is merely a front for the company itself.

Except the regulation doesn’t quite pull that off. The company can now pay someone to set up a blog for them where they review the product and admit that the writer was paid for the review. This will cost them a small amount per review. Alternatively, they can risk running afoul of the FTC regulation by not admitting the bias, and be fined $10,000.00 [per violation]. However, this sum is not enough to stop a company from using fake blogs to advertise their products – such a site could easily generate $100,000.00 in profits from sales to its readers. Combined with the fact that the FTC will be unable to catch every violator makes this risk acceptable to some.

In summary, while the regulation in general is a good thing, it is not clear that the FTC has a road to its goal (namely, getting rid of fake blogs reviewing products and making outrageous claims). As the regulations and guidelines are refined, we’ll see if the FTC can figure out how to get where it’s going.