However, clearly some people manage to run meetings effectively, or at least in such a way that people leave those meetings with a sense of accomplishment. The tricks include some of the points below:

1. Make sure the right people are invited to the meeting – that is, every person who needs to be there is present, and those who do not need to be there are not invited. It’s not an insult – it’s about respecting everyone’s time and energy.
2. Have an agenda, and stick to it – if you want to accomplish something at a meeting, make sure everyone knows what it is you’re trying to accomplish, and stay on topic. If other items come up during the meeting, put them aside and deal with them later.
3. Keep it short, ideally no longer than 45 minutes – after about 45 minutes, people’s attention begins to wander. If it seems likely that the meeting will last longer, break it into multiple shorter meetings, perhaps with fewer people at each meeting.
4. Avoid touching base meetings – this can be handled more effectively via email, and does not really serve any useful purpose other than to take people away from doing productive work.

If you have a suggestion or idea about how to keep meetings on track, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Meetings… A Necessary Evil?
2. Question: What Plans Have You Made for 2011?
3. True Relationships

If you think that offering excellent reasons for your thinking will change anyone’s mind, you might be new on this planet.

In business, it’s important that you understand this because it relates to how you turn prospects into customers. That is, what type of arguments should you be presenting to convince someone that your product or service is worth spending their time and money on?

The key is that while facts cannot be ignored, they’re also not the most important piece of your marketing and sales pitches. Purchases are driven by emotion, and so you have to connect with your prospects at an emotional level. Sure, you need the facts to back you up, but they should not be the basis of your arguments.

Related posts:

1. Convincing Republicans and Democrats to Vote Against the Party
2. Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts
3. You Have to Love What You Do

My friend asked me, since I’m in the same industry, what I might suggest for her. The truth is, from the description about, there are two possibilities for what’s going on, and each has a different approach.

The first possibility is that her prospects all require her services as well as the complementary service, and will generally only work with firms or freelancers who can provide both. The solution here is simple in concept, though execution can be tricky. Find another business which offers the complementary service, and start sub-contracting that portion of the work to them. In return, that business will send you work in a reciprocal agreement.

While you are unlikely to get an exclusive agreement like this, it can help bring in new business that you would otherwise have never seen, as well as enable you to close contracts that might have been lost.

However, there is another possibility, and it needs to be considered carefully. It is possible that the prospects she has been in discussion with are not her ideal clients. I’m often surprised by how many people in business do not understand who their perfect clients are, and spend great efforts pursuing the wrong types of clients. The perfect client is going to help your business grow in the direction you want it to go. If that client is asking you for something your business does not provide, and does not want to provide, then that is not an ideal client.

In this particular case, I believe the first answer is the better one. Many people in her industry either offer the complementary service themselves, or have a list of providers they use who can. When the menu is lacking, you have to choose to either supplement with an insert from another company, or redefine who and what your busienss is, and what services belong on the menu.

Related posts:

1. Unique Value Proposition Turns into a Business
2. Readers Respond: Questions to Ask About Your Business
3. Benefits of a Mentor

First, my goals for 2010 were accurate as of the time of writing, though priorities changed over the year, and with good reason. To recap the goals, and my current status with them:

• Learn PHP and Zend to a reasonable degree of proficiency – this has gone well, and while I would hesitate to call myself an expert on either, I am comfortable programming a web application using those technologies. I’m still working on getting the turn-around time down, but it’s moving in the right direction.
• Launch Client Data Tracker – this has not happened, because priorities change. The project turned out to be significantly larger than I anticipated, and I put it on the side because I didn’t feel I could do the project justice.
• Continue side development until I’m doing in excess of 30 hours a week of billable time – this has happened, and I’m now working solely on a contract basis. Happily, I’ve been able to leave the corporate setting.
• Complete the work required for KNIRL.com – this has not happened, though we learned a lot of interesting pieces of information and technology working with it.

Overall, 2010 was a good year for business, and looking forward, 2011 looks like it will be even more exciting:

• Launch the product I’m working on for my primary client before the end of the first quarter;
• Learn the intricate details of a fairly large industry to determine how to be able to carve out a niche in it;
• Solidify my knowledge of certain technologies I use frequently to the point I would call myself an expert.

What are your goals? Do you have a way to measure yourself against them?

Related posts:

1. Goals for 2010
2. Goals and Fitness
3. 2009 Goals

In reality, for many businesses, this can break the bank and drive the business under. The reality is, competing based on price is simply a game of chicken – each competitor lowers their price in turn, until the last business standing takes all the customers. This is a very costly way to eliminate the competition, assuming you win, and there’s no assurance that another competitor won’t arrive to repeat the cycle.

That being said, this does not eliminate the offering of discounts or sales, but the reason should not be simply to be competitive. As an example, a chiropracter might offer a 20% discount on your first session because you’re a new customer. A printing company might offer a 10% reduction in the printing price for orders of over 10,000 prints. In other words, the reason for the discount is not in order to be cheaper, but because there’s another benefit to the provider to giving that discount.

Additionally, even if you intend to give a discount to the client, make sure that you inform the client of the value they’re getting before they’re informed that you’ll give them a discount. Once the subject of price comes up, you won’t be able to negotiate based on anything else. As well, if you’ve assigned a particular value to your work (e.g. $75 per hour), then you can always offer a lower price later, but you cannot raise it. If you start negotiating price too early, then you risk being trapped with having lowered your price below what the client would have paid, had you explained the value you provide in advance.

Compete based on value. As a business, you offer a mix of quality, service, and price. If you fix quality and service, then the price you should be offering should be set as a direct result. Offering a Rolls Royce for $30,000 will immediately make the potential buyer doubt its authenticity or quality. If the quality or service is higher, then the price MUST be higher too. Lowering your price will negatively impact your credibility, and thereby be unlikely to benefit you in any way regardless.

Related posts:

1. Differences Between Service and Product Based Businesses
2. Tips to Getting Paid Promptly
3. Unique Value Proposition Turns into a Business

Goals for 2011

As I mentioned last week, goals need to be SMART: Sustainable, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely. In a discussion with a business coach, though, a valid point was made regarding goals. Goals need to be measurable and timely in order to be considered goals. Not necessarily good goals, but they are, in fact goals.

However, when goals have actions attached to their outcome – that is, being able  to take an action to bring the goal to fruition, then they are practical goals. If the goals are not realistic, then there is no chance of them coming to be.

Finally, if a goal is not sustainable, then it is a foolish goal. For example, if a business has a goal of selling a particular number of units, and the product is faulty, maintaining that goal is foolish. It can do more long-term damage than the short-term benefits. Selling 1000 units which eventually get returned achieves nothing.

The reason I asked about having written them down or telling people is because there is a potential benefit to sharing that information. Writing down goals makes it less likely that the details are forgotten (perhaps conveniently). Sharing the goals with other people means that when you see those people, and have to explain why you have yet to achieve the goal, can be a motivating factor.

However, having spoken to several people who’ve made goals to lose weight or quit smoking, they’ve pointed out that if people know about your goal, they can nag you about it to no end. The nagging does not increase the likelihood of reaching the goal, and tends to be more frustrating to the goal-setter than anything else.

If you choose to share your goal, I suggest that you be careful about who you share the goal with, to ensure that it will be someone who will help you reach the goal, not hinder you.

Related posts:

1. Goals and Fitness
2. Business Health Checkup
3. Question: What Plans Have You Made for 2011?

A few days ago, the owner of one of those businesses came over to me to ask if I could take on working for one of his clients, who had been looking to extend one of their websites to a new market. I took a quick look at what was needed, and realized that while part of the project fell within my area of expertise, a major component did not. I was also aware that he had another option – his network of vendors included someone with expertise in this particular area, though that vendor’s prices were significantly higher than my own.

However, I didn’t feel that I could justify working on his project, or at least, not on the portions outside my area of expertise. While I was confident that I could complete the project, there were two reasons not to take on the work:

First, the amount of time it would take me to do the work would be much longer than if he used the other vendor, and ultimately might have cost the client more.

Second, I didn’t really want to learn how to do the portion of the project that I didn’t currently know how to do.

I declined the work, and he asked if I could do the part of the project which I did know how to do, to which I accepted. By declining one part of the project, at the risk of losing the other part of the project, I gained the trust of a client.

Sometimes, the gains of saying no to a client are known almost immediately, and sometimes, you just have to trust that the gains will come. When you inform a client that something falls outside your area of expertise, they will either ask you to do it anyhow, ask you to find someone who can do the work, or find someone else themselves. In any of these situations, you stand to gain – either immediately in the form of being able to subcontract work that you might otherwise not have been able to do, or in the long run with customer referrals.

When you gain the trust of a client, it will last longer than any satisfaction they get on a given project. It will translate into more business, references for more work, and many other long-term gains. But to gain this kind of trust, you need to teach yourself to be able to say no.

Related posts:

1. It Pays to Give Away
2. The Customer is Always Right… Sometimes
3. When You Work for Yourself

The interesting thing to note here is that creating a fitness agenda for a client lends itself to defining a SMART goal. Every aspect of setting such an objective highlights one or more proper goal setting processes.

For example, a common request to a Personal Trainer is to “get into shape” which is not measurable, making this goal impossible to be achieved. By clearly defining what the goal is, for example, to lose 20 pounds, or to be able to run a marathon, a measurable goal is created.

Taking the example from the opening paragraph, this goal is not sustainable. While there are ways to lose that weight in the specified amount of time, evidence shows that without changes to lifestyle, the weight will not stay off.

Removing a target date, though, may make the goal realistic, since it would eventually be possible to achieve that goal. However, since there is no date attached to the goal, it is no longer timely, and therefore is not a real goal.

Realism is also evident in setting fitness goals, with some people setting goals which are not physically possible to accomplish. One needs to look at their own reality to determine what might be a realistic goal for themselves. This is unlikely to be the same as the realistic goals for the next person.

Last, some goals are not actionable, in that they rely on an event outside the control of the person setting the goal to occur – for example, being selected to be part of a particular team. While the level of fitness to be selected might be actionable, the selection itself is not part of a SMART goal since someone else will be making that decision.

In business, goals are exactly the same. They need to be realistic, not idealistic. A classic example of this is with sales projections – many small businesses project to take over an entire market, but this is idealistic, not realistic. A realistic goal might be to become a major provider of a service within a specific geographic region.

Likewise, the goal should be measurable. Carrying on with the previous example of sales projections, the goals should include a way to measure the success of the business in reaching those goals. They should also include a time frame for reaching those goals – 6 months, a year, some fixed period.

The goals should be based on actions that are under the control of the business. Setting a sales goal is only SMART if a means of reaching those goals (for example, increasing the conversion rate on the business website) is part of the goal.

Last, make the goals sustainable. It doesn’t help you in the long run if you misrepresent yourself in the short-term.

Related posts:

1. Question: How do you Measure Progress?
2. Business Health Checkup
3. Goals for 2010

Getting Work Done

Last week, I asked a question about where your favorite place is to go when you need to get some work done. I copied the question to LinkedIn, and was pleasantly surprised to get many answers. While some answers reflected idealism, for example, Hollywood and Disney, most reflected the nature of the question – in your reality, where would you go to get work done.

Interestingly, just before I wrote this article, I got another answer I had not been expecting – 3 AM in bed, because that’s when the best ideas seem to come to mind.

What I was hearing from people is that the best place to get work done is wherever you feel inspired – and it varies between people and between types of work. As expected, those in graphic or creative roles tended to provide answers which had some level of distraction – but distractions that could be controlled (for example, a place with music). Those doing rote work preferred quiet spaces, with few distractions.

Perhaps this is, above all, what causes the designers of offices so much grief. Each person in the office is doing something a little different, and finds different distractions tolerable, desirable, and irritable. Trying to design an office that will be inspiring to everyone working there to be productive can be an exercise in frustration.

While Jason Fried in his presentation wanted to put the onus on managers and meetings, this is really only part of the problem. The elimination of meetings and manager interruptions might increase some productivity, it ignores the fact that each person needs a unique environment to be productive. There are good managers who don’t impede the productivity of their staff, and they too would have difficulty with getting their staff to choose the office as an ideal place to work.

I think Jason makes a valid point that many companies have large numbers of people attending all meetings, where the meeting itself is unnecessary, or could be handled with a much smaller number of people. Yet his approach of banning all meetings one afternoon a week avoids the real issue – that people need to learn how to run better meetings, so that everyone at a given meeting is really necessary, the length of the meeting is appropriate to the decision being made.

In terms of a preferred place to work, though, despite the best efforts of the owners of the business, unless you happen to have a bunch of people working who all enjoy the same workspace, designing the office is an attempt to please everybody, and is more likely to end with pleasing no one.

Related posts:

1. Running Meetings Effectively
2. Question: Favorite Place to Get Work Done
3. Meetings… A Necessary Evil?

There are, in fact, two issues here. The first is how to operate without cash, a function of being paid only after the work is complete. In a service-based business, this is often the nature of the work. While margins should be adjusted to allow for this, with the deposit and each installment covering the costs associated with the next stage of development, and the final payment being completely profit, this rarely happens in the real world. However, that is not the focus of this article.

Instead, I will focus on how to get your customers to pay you in a timely manner, something which I have been able to do with almost every one of my clients. While there have been exceptions, in most cases, my clients have paid me within 10 business days of receiving the invoice, and often at the same time as the invoice is sent over.

First, you need to ask your clients to pay promptly.

It amazes me that some business owners don’t realize this. If you don’t tell your clients when you would like to get paid, they will assume that they can wait until the very last day to pay the bill. Should you want the money earlier, then you need to ask your clients to pay the bill earlier if they are able.

However, this will only work if your clients themselves have the cash flow to be able to pay your invoice on demand. The larger the invoice, the less likely a mere request is to get them to cough up sooner rather than later.

Offer a benefit for prompt payments.

If the client is truly strapped for cash, then offering a small discount (one or two percent) on the amount of the invoice can encourage them to pay sooner. While the savings might not be large, if they are having a cash flow issue, then this can assist them in a small way. Since it’s a discount on the invoice, and not a penalty for late payment, you don’t have to deal with interest calculations and associated headaches.

Arrange payment plans.

Something I offer every client who asks is whether they would like to set up a payment plan. On my part, this involves minimal effort, since my accounting software can calculate for me the outstanding balance, as I apply each partial payment. It involves a little more work for the client, since they have to remember to pay me more often, but often making this offer will ensure that I’ll get the full amount in a predictable time frame.

A client who has a $10,000 bill might split it into 10 equal payments, one each month until it’s paid. I don’t get any extra money, but I also know each month that a $1,000 is going to arrive from that client, and I can plan around it.

Refusal to look at this option can often be the difference between getting paid a bill in its entirety and not getting paid at all. Without offering this, some clients may believe that they have to pay the entire bill at once, and will hold off on paying installments until they can pay the entire bill, which may never happen. By being able to pay an installment, it minimizes your exposure with each installment, and increases the likelihood that the installments will, in fact, arrive.

Stop providing service.

If a customer is continually late with payments, then inform them that they need to pay in advance to get further service. Stop allowing them to run a balance if they cause problems to your cash flow by not abiding by the terms of the agreement. Excuses from the client about why the money hasn’t arrived should be taken with a grain of salt – their problems are not your problems, a lesson I learned the hard way earlier this year.

At the end of the day, it comes down to asking to be paid when you need the money, and working with your customers to ensure that both your needs are being met. Yes, there are cases where this won’t get you any closer, but for the times that it gets you paid faster, isn’t it worth asking?

Related posts:

1. Collecting Accounts Receivable
2. Managing Accounts Receivable
3. Question: Fake it Until You Break It?

As it turns out, when he started drawing Dilbert, he had no experience with cartoons either. Before he landed his first paid speaking gig (which paid him $5,000 for an hour of his time), he had no experience with public speaking beyond a couple generic courses. He recounts many of his successes, and makes the statement:

To put all of this in context, I remind you again that I fail miserably about ten times for every one success. (That’s an accurate estimate. I’ve literally kept score.) The failures always involved activities for which I was completely qualified. Ironically, I couldn’t even “keep my day job.” On the other hand, my successes have all been in areas in which I had no obviously relevant background or experience whatsoever.

This statement is incredibly interesting for a variety of reasons.

First, however, this cannot be taken to mean that if you were to try something for which you have no qualifications that it means you will succeed. In that, Scott is an exception, though I do believe his recipe for success can be duplicated. While Scott did apply himself to a variety of endeavors with no qualifications, he also did not attempt the impossible, merely the improbable.

What Scott is saying here is that success and qualification in a particular area have little to do with one another. While those two factors may not be mutually exclusive, they are also commonly not found to coincide with one another. Simply because one is qualified does not mean that success is probable, and the inverse of that is also true.

The pattern in what Scott has done is that in each case he has set himself against probability, but had a motivation to succeed despite the odds. Winning contests with some element of skill involved is not impossible, even if there are millions of other contestants. It’s unlikely, not probable, but still possible. One can succeed and win.

While I’m sure Scott has not included every endeavor of his in his introduction to his book, he has described a sufficient number to indicate that while he was not particularly qualified to excel at any one of his successes, he was not unqualified either. That is, he may not have been considered an expert in the field, but he would not have been described as incompetent in that area.

Success is not a function of what you’ve been trained to do. You can succeed at something for which you have no background, provided, that is, that you are prepared to apply yourself. The path may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Some things you may find yourself struggling with, but in other areas, where the “professionals” would have stopped, you may persevere and succeed.

Perhaps that’s actually a limitation in an ability to succeed. The more documented a background you have in an area, the less likely you may be to push the boundaries of what can be done. By not being qualified (and recognizing that fact), you prepare yourself for the long, hard road. If you’ve found a way to motivate yourself, to convince yourself that you can succeed, then you may well endure along that path until you do reach your eventual success.

Related posts:

1. Succeed or Fail? Your Choice…
2. It’s Not Nepotism, He’s My Brother
3. Are You Getting Ready To Succeed?

I was forwarded a talk by Jason Fried about Why Work Doesn’t Happen in the Office, in which he discusses where people like to go when they need to get some work done. Interestingly, the answers he got were pretty much anything but the office.

The question is the same as Jason’s question:

Where do you go when you need to get some work done?

Related posts:

1. Question: What Plans Have You Made for 2011?
2. When You Work for Yourself
3. Top Reasons to Work From Home and Make It Work

The first thing that needs to be realized is that getting validation that the idea is a good one has ramifications for how to proceed. Some potential clients can help by working with you to refine the service or product. Other times, you have to go off on your own and figure it out.

One of the biggest mistakes someone new to the business world can do is to go out and try to raise capital. The reason is quite simple – you don’t know yet if you actually need any. Sure, it would be nice to have a budget of millions that you can spend on fancy offices and a huge staff, but do you NEED it?

The first approach, therefore, should be to determine how much of the product or service can be developed with what you have – namely, yourself (and any partners you may be working with). Commonly known as bootstrapping, you should be trying to build out with the minimum amount of resources possible.

If that’s not possible, see what you can get by reaching out to your network. People don’t expect to work for free, but you may be able to barter something of value (and note that shares in your business currently have little value at all) for work.

Don’t forget that you need to be thinking about multiple aspects to your business. You need more than just an idea, product or service – you need to be able to sell it. If there are legal ramifications to that, make sure you work them out up front. You may need a marketing plan, you might need to work out pricing schemes. If you know someone who’s been in business, talk to them – you should try to get a mentor if you can, if only to steer you clear of issues that you might not need to face.

However, start your approach with an eye toward frugality. That doesn’t mean trying to pay less than the value of a given item, but rather determining if you need the item in the first place. There’s a gray area between good enough and perfect, and usually, perfect isn’t worth the effort over good enough (though of course there are many exceptions to this).

Related posts:

1. I Have a Great Idea – What Now?
2. From Idea to Capitalization
3. A Novel Idea

As an example of this difficulty, someone showed up at the office about an hour later than expected. Asked for a reason, the person responded that it was personal. Later on, the boss found out that it was because of a dental appointment. Not terribly private, one might think… except the employee thought that it was.

This is a case of not knowing someone else’ boundaries. I might not think a dental appointment is a big deal to be talked about by others, but that’s just me. My lines, in terms of what’s okay to discuss in the open and what is not, lie in one place, which are unlikely to coincide with the boundaries of the people I talk to on a daily basis.

Additionally, complicating this is the fact that over time, people move their boundaries. Someone I met yesterday might have one set of boundaries now, but a year from now, topics that are currently taboo may be part of our normal conversations.

In the case of working with the boundaries of other people, be aware that if you aren’t sure if you might be going over the invisible line, that you might be, and adjust your conversation accordingly. Tactful people in general are more sensitive to the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) clues people emit when lines have been crossed. But anyone can learn to turn on their radar, simply by understanding that their boundaries are not the same as those of other people.

Appropriateness of conversation is not dictated by one participant alone – it’s dictated by the boundaries of all the people involved, relative to all other people involved. The strictest rules apply – if one participant would find the conversation taboo because of a single other participant, then that subject is off limits.

If you’re not aware of what boundaries exist between two other people, then holding a three-way conversation can be difficult. If potentially sensitive subjects need to be discussed, try discussing them one-on-one first, which will assist in detecting the lines that have been drawn. Additionally, if personal issues are to be discussed, they should never be brought out in public unless you are absolutely positive that no boundaries will be crossed.

Related posts:

1. Understand Bureaucracy
2. Know Your Audience
3. When You Feel You’ve Made It

This came up during one of the sessions, when one attendee asked what it would cost to get a business plan written professionally, and the instructor replied that it cost about $3,000. However, he added the caveat that he would not recommend that an entrepreneur, or, as he called the class, micro-entrepreneurs, have someone else write the plan for them.

This evolved into a quick discussion about the fact that there are actually a few types of business plans, and the course is focused on one in particular. There is the plan that you use to show bankers or investors, for which you might pay someone else to write it to be sure it caters to the expectations of the readers. There is also the formal plan which may be several pages long that you use internally to help you manage and grow your business. Last, there is the brief, informal plan that I feel is the most important for people starting out in business.

The formal business plan has many guises, but it essentially runs through all aspects of any business, and summarizes them as it pertains to your business in particular in a single document. Starting with an Executive Overview, running through Market Research and Cash Flow Analysis, it brushes Marketing, Development, Sales, Distribution, and a variety of other topics. It is, all in all, a fairly detailed and comprehensive piece of documentation.

For many businesses, this document is much more than they need.

That’s not to say there isn’t value in it, but that for starting a business, you don’t need this much. What you really need is the much shorted business plan, the one that can fit on one or two pages. You need to know what it is you’re selling, an example of someone you might sell to (or already have), and a vague idea of where you would like your business to go.

In the class were a few people who had already started their businesses. Some of them described the fact that their business evolved as they found new customers. I don’t think anyone in the room already had a business plan, but I think that some of the people in the room would have been misled into believing that they needed a plan to be successful.

You can be successful running things by the seat of your pants. It’s been done before, and it continues to happen all the time. However, if you don’t run through the exercises that writing a business plan forces you to do (how can you fill out the Market Research section if you don’t know who else is in the industry, and what they’re doing to be successful?) then you strongly hinder your own ability to succeed.

The catch is to not get hung up on the document itself, but all the questions and answers it generates. If you choose to write it down in long-form, it can help you when it’s time to look for outside capital, or if you are trying to get a partner to join you. But it’s not a requirement.

Answering the questions, or at least identifying which questions need answering, is absolutely crucial.

Related posts:

1. Starting a Business
2. I Have a Great Idea – What Now?
3. Writing Proposals

Thank you for ordering with Business X Delivery! Your order has been received and is being processed.

Your order is scheduled for delivery on the following dates between the hours of 9:00 am and 5:00 pm, pending credit approval and inventory confirmation. A contact person must be available to accept the delivery by signing for and confirming the items you have ordered.

Below please find the items you have placed on this order and the corresponding delivery date(s). If there is a problem with your order, you will receive a follow-up contact.

Below listed the details of the order, including the fact that I had requested an alternate delivery address, since I did not intend to stay home all day, and could not recieve the package at work. I took this to be a confirmation that the delivery would be made.

A short while later, another email arrived:

Hello,

Please be advised that we are unable to deliver your laptop to an alternate location other than the billing address. If this is not possible we can have it delivered to a store location so you can provide photo id and credit card. Please advise how you would like to proceed with the order. Your order will remain on hold for 48hrs. Please reference order 1234567890.

Thank you

I was somewhat confused, as I had ordered a desktop, not a laptop, and it was the only item in the order. That is, the store should have known when I placed the order that alternate delivery locations were not supported, and informed me then.

I resigned myself to sitting around all day, and replied to the email that it would be okay to deliver to the billing address. I waited for a confirmation that the package would be delivered, but nothing came. However, past experience told me that deliveries in my area are usually made around 7:30 AM, so I hoped I would be able to go into the office in any case.

When 11:00 came around, and still no package, I began to wonder. The store had not confirmed that my package was no longer on hold, so perhaps I was waiting in vain. However, a quick call to their service line reassured me that it was showing up on their system as “On Delivery”.

The package did arrive eventually, but it also convinced me not to order from this store online anymore. The experience was too broken for me:

1. I should have been told about the issue with delivering computers to anywhere other than the billing address when I placed the order;
2. The email confirming the delivery time should have indicated this as well;
3. The email informing me that the delivery would have to be made to the billing address should have provided information about how to confirm the delivery (there was nothing else in the email, so I assumed I could reply and that would suffice);
4. There should have been a follow-up to my confirmation that delivering to the billing address was okay to reconfirm the delivery date;
5. There should be a service on their site to enter an order number and see the status;
6. The delivery window should be a lot smaller than 9 to 5 – at a minimum, choose morning or afternoon.

Any one of these items on its own would not have been a big deal, but the experience worsened at each turn. Other sites have learned how to make the ordering process as customer friendly as possible, providing information whenever appropriate, and making it easy for people to look up status of their orders, and being clear in all communications.

This company has a lot to learn about caring for its customers.

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1. Response Time and PR
2. Question: Where did you find a mentor?
3. Twitter Strikes Again

There are a few factors to consider here, and unfortunately, few solutions offered. However, bearing this in mind, it can help in alleviating client concerns when planning is done for this dreaded eventuality.

First, many clients will be reasonable if you get sick – it’s a risk they take working with a freelancer, and therefore they have already accepted that this may happen. As such, for non-urgent requirements, a quick email letting them know that you’re ill will usually suffice to remove the mundane tasks from your schedule as you recuperate.

Second, since you may get sick, it is prudent to avoid working to deadlines. With being ill occupying up to 2-3 days, a wise approach would be to target all deadlines to 3 days prior to the client-designated deadline. If you finish early, you can fine-tune for the last few days, or give the client the work ahead of schedule. If it requires an extra few days of work, you’ve built that into the schedule. And if you get sick, that’s okay because you still have some time for that.

Third, when emergencies come up, be prepared to work despite being sick. You might not be able to get out of bed, but your laptop may join you there as you log in remotely to the system and do what needs to be done.

Alternatively, have a network that you can fall back on in case you are unable to work. This network may not be able to help you for major projects, but if you are in a support role with fairly standard emergencies arising from time to time, then if you can find one or two people you can call on in a pinch to backstop you, it would help you in reassuring your clients as to what will happen if you should suddenly be unavailable.

In short, don’t wait for the inevitable to happen to start your planning – as the expression goes, an hour of planning can save you weeks of work.

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3. Willing to Say No

However, part of the certification is a requirement to take further courses, or to attend conferences and seminars. Of course, everything in this case costs more, though some may see it as the cost of retaining currency. However, in addition to the mandatory learning dictated by the certifying body, many of the classes being run in fitness centers require additional certification, from Yoga (which requires years of practice and training) to Resist-a-ball (which has 2 half-day courses to be certified).

Fortunately, the continuing education requirements are designed such that most of these additional courses count as credit toward those requirements. However, when you do the math, it turns out that being certified and being a desired employee are two different things.

To be certified, the cost totals about $1,000 plus the annual membership fee. However, each course runs from a hundred to thousands of dollars. Over the course of an instructor/trainer’s career, the costs of remaining current can be in excess of $1,000 per year. When compared to a university or college degree, it seems to be quite steep. This is further exacerbated by the fact that many people with these certifications will be contract workers, where the cost of maintaining their certification is a noticeable percentage of their annual earnings.

Yet the certification remains incredibly popular, and attendance at the annual conference in Toronto bears this out. Why this is so is interesting – what is the motivating factor for people to pursue a career which, if done part-time as many such people work, will be marginally profitable?

I stumbled upon what might be the answer in a discussion with another member of the family about career options, and this came up. He wasn’t interested in becoming a trainer because of the money, but rather, because he liked to work out. Certified, he could look for a part-time job at a gym in the area (which typically includes a gym membership as part of the compensation) and get a regular work-out. No longer would he be paying to work out, instead, he would be paid to do something he likes.

This is perhaps what is so compelling about this career – people who go into it tend to enjoy their work, and the money is not the point. Though they may not make much money doing it (though some people do quite well if they can find a niche and fill it), they are unlikely to lose money at it. The enjoyment they find in the work itself is the motivating factor.

When looking at work, think about whether the motivating factor is the paycheck at the end of the week, or something else. If you want to be the most successful you can be at your work, find a job where you enjoy the work, and the paycheck is a nice bonus (or, alternatively, is what allows you to spend time doing whatever it is you’re “working” on).

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3. Take a Chance and Reduce Risk

Those who dare are not necessarily the same as people who are reckless. That is, their decisions may appear to be daring, but reflection on those decisions will show that there was a logic to the process. When evaluating options, they look to the benefits of all options, and weigh the risks against them. Choices are made on the basis of potential outcomes, not merely the known outcomes.

Additionally, it can be difficult within a large organization to get decisions made. Those who will follow the safe paths will tend to avoid making decisions where possible, deferring to others. Those who dare will make a choice, which serves at a minimum to drive momentum. The example one author cites is a decision as to which direction to move. One who dares might choose East, then discover that the true direction to move in is North. Having made a decision, though, it provided the stimulus to start moving, even if a corrections needs to be made later.

Unfortunately, such decision makers are often at risk for their decisions. By daring in their decisions, their achievements will be noted, but their failures will speak even louder. Sadly, this can cost an organization such people – it is not a requirement that people be infallible, but that they act responsibly on the basis of what they know, and that they make use of sources of information and opinions appropriately. That is, they should not be acting recklessly, but to err is not the same thing.

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I was asked recently regarding an inherent bias toward hiring people from my community. While many of the people in my office are from my community, there was actually another reason for this that had little to do with nepotism. It was more a matter of convenience, which, after a few years of operating this way, has demonstrated certain limitations.

The convenience is the fact that these people are easy to find via existing community listings and mailing lists. An email to my network can produce several responses with resumes, usually within a couple hours. If background information on a candidate is needed, it’s usually pretty easy to get that information.

However, the cost is in regard to time away from work – as the employees all are from the same community, their holidays all coincide, and they will all have the same restrictions regarding when they will work.

That’s not to say that I would not hire within my community or network, or even that I would not give preference to someone from that group over a candidate from without. However, the evaluation, to avoid the accusation of nepotism, must start with qualifications for the job, and then the cost to the business of hiring each candidate. Only when those two qualities have been met can nepotism raise it’s head to make a choice.

Businesses do not succeed because of nepotism, but rather, despite nepotism. Success is found by hiring the best qualified people, factoring in their existing skills, their dollar cost, the amount of training they will need, and how they will fit into the culture of the business. Hiring family or friends will often (though not always) meet the last of these criteria, but this is only one of several factors to be considered.

Only once all factors have been considered, and the candidates have been found to be equal in all other respects, can you fairly say “It’s not nepotism, he’s my brother!”

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