Carnival of Capitalists – Downunder Edition

Role up! Role Up! to this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists  (being hosted from Sydney, Australia).  I am your host, Leah Maclean, and I hope that you enjoy the 42 submissions to this week’s carnival. Take a moment to not just read from your favourite category but take a browse around some not so familiar names and topics.

For those of you not familiar with Working Solo, its mission is to help small business women demystify technology and use it for their business growth (and not hide from it).  Officially the title I use is Online Business Manager; clients though often refer to me as their tech-chick. This blog provides tips, techniques and commentary on small business technology and life as an entrepreneur (sans jargon).

Women of the Carnival

As a specialist in working with women business owners I wanted to kick this week’s carnival off with a spotlight on the female bloggers who make up the carnival.  They are only a small percentage in terms of numbers but  are more than able to hold their ground in terms of experience and wisdom.

Rosa Say, chief thought provocateur at Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching, is leading a discussion on reinvention this month and her contribution is a challenge to HR professionals.  Rosa believes "In their fervent wishes to be a service department they’ve
unfortunately become doormats, far too complacent about asserting their
ideas and assuming their responsibility for leadership."

Káren Wallace at The Clearing Space challenges employees that want an opportunity to excel to "give the employer an offer to ‘watch me take this job and run with it – I’ll dazzle you!’."  You will find it a far better opportunity than witing for your employer to make that offer to you.

Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroad Dispatches has been noticing that there is an abundant and fertile renaissance emerging.  She predicts that beauty, abundance, mystery, presence, play, laughter, and imagination will be just some of the burgeoning trends of successful ventures of the future.  She points to Apple as a new renaissance company that’s been lauded as a "corporate work of art."

Nina Smith sounds like she is speaking to me in her post for the carnival this week.  On her Queercents blog she encourages us to touch things only once and get things done in order to "refresh" our productivity.  My take away from the post – "if you touch it, move it to the next step".

Becky McCray presents some tips on How to grow word of mouth referrals over at Small Biz Survival. The key? focus on the people as individuals.

Entrepreneurship and SOHO Issues

David Maister asks Can You Say No? in order to support the strategies of your business.  David challenges all businesses to consider how they will make money …
"there’s a difference between "Let’s make money by
delivering on our strategy" and "let’s make money any way we can."

Scott Allen at About.com’s Entrepreneur Guide says that it’s not the end of the road when you do some research
you find that someone else has already created a business around the
idea for your new business. Scott’s advice "Don’t be discouraged by competition – just use it to your advantage."

Jim Logan pondered this week if there was a cure for poor vision.  "The problem with visions and vision planning is people have a tendency
to seek the way things look-n-fell in the future – the size of the
organization, the amount of money made, the products and services
offered". Definte food for thought.

Andrew Trinh is asking us this week to not worry if our initial business products are utter failures. The reason : with failure, comes understanding. The best businesses we see today had
early product failures; but instead of shutting down, they used
failures as opportunities to build future–and eventually,
successful–products.

Wayne Hurlbert has been doing some gardening at Blog Business World this week.  As his post suggests "Vegetable gardens are not likely
the first thing that springs to mind when you think of planning your independent business".

Over at FiveCentNickel, a "30 something family-man" shares the result of his investigations into his taking a home office deduction on his federal taxes.

Branding

The crew at Wordlab get a special mention this week – instead of just submitting their post with remarks that focused on their post they took the time to consider whether the post would fit with my approach as a femal entrepreneur.  Congratulations Wordlab on demonstrating the very successful business building technique of focusing on your reader/customer!  In fact I do appreciate their post "33 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" as an example of great storytelling and its impact in creating brand loyalists.

William A. Trent at Stock Market Beat  offers his thoughts on the release of the new Microsoft operating system Vista. According to Trent
"To ship or not to ship? For Microsoft it’s more than metaphysics."

Customer Service

Will Crawford at The Integrative Stream talks about  A Lost Customer Service Opportunity
and how some unpleasant news (and a bit of theft) leads to some
thoughts on the value of customers and how to best hold on to them.
Will offers a great message not just to T-Mobile and other telcos but
to every business – "Customers in that  kind of situation represent an
opportunity, and not just to bill for calls to Pakistan!"

Career Management

David Lorenzo at Career Intensity asks a challenging question in his post on Reinvention – "What do your business partners and customers think of you?  What do you think they would say about you if you weren’t listening?"  Whatever the answer is David says "the solution is simple".

David Foster at Photon Courier shares that there is a strong demand right now for people – both sales and
"creative" – at web-based advertising firms. But asks, "how sustainable will this
demand be?"

It seems that Bill at Ask Uncle Bill is like most uncles – in that you can get some great wisdom even when it is wrapped in humor.  Bill provides us this week with a list of 10 career strategies for getting ahead (including sucking down).

FMF (the author’s nom de plume) at Free Money Finance offers 2 simple pieces of advice to  Maximize Your Career Earnings – Go to college and maximse your career.

Leading Yourself, Others and Your Business

David Daniels at Business & Technolog Reinvention has been finding leadership and business lessons in movies (and golf) this week.  He points out that "we need to create an environment where everyone pushes to deliver to their peak potential. Anything less is a Leadership Lay Up".

Michael Wade at Execupundit all too clearly reminds us of the employee you will never forget and offers 7 management ground rules on what you were missing in the first place when you hired them.

For the Big Picture Guy, D-Day, a day of reckoning and dreaded resolve, arrived at The Small
Office. There were a few unfortunate glitches but, overall, the
lay-offs went like clockwork. Careers ended "at short, precisely-timed
intervals".

Jack Yoest, in his usual stylish manner, reminds us that 85% of communication is non-verbal
and provides some very high profile examples of sartorial statements
that speak louder than words. (And I would keep your hat on Jack – for you a
little less Capone and Abramoff and a little more Yoest).

Now who would have thought that a cat would have so much insight into process improvement?  K T Cat over at The Scratching Post encourages those engaged in process improvement to actually follow through on the improvement rather than just moving from one improvement technique to another.

Yet another ghost author (we can see the writing but can’t identify the person) is over at  Personal Development for Brains and this weeks offers us a way to throw away the calculator by learning vedic mathematics.

Retail Strategies

Greg Manter at the Retail Store Blog provides a lesson on how to draw people to your store by looking at the many promotional methods and new business ventures of Hooters.  A very clear lesson is that they apply "a simple strategy well carried out".

Technology

Leon Gettler at Sox First tells us that it’s not just the telcos who are handing over customer data to security
agencies. Other companies that
possess large amounts of data on their customers are now being
approached by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. All this has implications for businesses that are supposed to protect not
only their interests but those of ther customers as well.

Torabisu at The Cernos Blog provides a brief summary of how O’Reilly is
attempting to claim the generic term Web 2.0 as their own, the
backlash it has caused, and how lawyers might be for business.

Economics and Markets

Josh Cohen at Multiple Mentality shares an interesting perspective on price capping in his post "About capping gas prices, and capping in general".  He suggests that "when prices are capped, retailers tend to charge the full amount
because they can, and because they’re not free to run their businesses
the way they feel is best" versus letting market forces determine the price.

The editor of Blawg Review pointed this week’s carnival in the direction of
Donald J. Boudreaux,
George Mason University’s Chairman Department of Economics, guest blogging at Overlawyered, and the letter sent to the Wall Street Journal, exposing (or so he fancies) an especially egregious instance of  misunderstanding the U.S. trade deficit.

RJH Adams at Capital Chronicle presents on Global liquidity and the rise of non-US influence and offers several pieces of data to support his comment that "Today’s context remains such that the weight and volatility of foreign official assets continues to demand investor attention".

Scott Peterson at Red Cloud Research believes the international system for handling derivatives trades is weak in
comparison to systems used to handle stock and other securities trades. This is not well known and anyone interested in understanding
what might happen with derivatives in the event of a market crisis
ought to be aware of this.

Frank at InvestorGeeks asks the question "Is Vonage an attractive buy?"  Like all good InvestorGeeks he downloaded the prospectus and did a bit of poking around, a bit of
thinking, and discovered some very interesting things in only a short
amount of time.

The Canadian Capitalist (another unidentified ghost author) highlights the fact that regardless of the debate amoungst Canadian economists as to whether income taxes were actually cut, most Canadians have
more money in their pockets.

Jim at a Blueprint for Financial Prosperity takes a look at American Express’ Car Rental Insurance plan in detail (because they never have enough information on their website).

In Wedges and Widgets, James Hamilton at Econbrowser
notes that the phenomenal boom of Canada’s oil sands industry
continues, despite the complete absence of any government crash program
to cope with peak oil.

Mike Pechar at Interest Particpant look at the world’s largest retailer has decided to sell its interest in South
Korea to the country’s leading discount chain, Shinsegae Co. Wal-Mart
Korea will receive about $882 million for 16 stores when approval is
obtained from government regulators.

Personal Finance

Henry asks a curios question "What if a stranger owned a life insurance policy on you? It’s real, but is it dangerous?".  In his post "Playing SOLItaire"
he raised an issue that I was not even aware of – life insurance on
stangers.  It begs the question for me which of the parties is the
stranger?

David A. Porter from Pacesetter Mortgage both asks and answers the question "Do I have to sign form 4506 at my mortgage closing?".
According to Dave "The 4506 is the great equalizer.  If a borrower lies
about their income on the mortgage application then that is mortgage
fraud."

Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade takes a look at the available real estate loan types and says that it doesn’t aways have to only be "thirty year fixed" option.

JLP at the AllThingsFinancial blog has put together a online calculator for estimating college tutition.

Starling David Hunter provides an analysis of Wal-Mart Watch’s "A Handshake with Sam" ad that ran in the NY Times this week at high blog, The Business of America is Business.

Mark over at SportsBiz thinkgs that sometimes a little government intervention can be a good thing, as the
phenomenal rise in television rights to the English Premier League
games demonstrates.

More Carnival Action

Blawg Review, the carnival of law
bloggers, is hosting a special Memorial Day issue that business blog
carnival lovers might want to visit this holiday weekend. www.blawgreview.com

Carnival of Entrepreneurship is being hosted by Pamela Slim at Escape from Cubicle Nation.

Carnival of Business ventures this week to Debt Hater http://debthater.typepad.com/

The next edition of CotC is being hosted by the intellectual properties lawyers at Rethink(IP)
www.rethinkip.com

Removing Form Entries from Firefox

Firefox is my browser of choice (I won’t get started on why now but if you are still an Internet Explorer user then I suggest you have a look at it).

One of the time saving aspects of Firefox is the fact that it remembers the data that you entered into all the online forms.  If you are a heavy online user after a while the data that will pop up in the form lists might get a little full.  Of course you can delete the complete history but that will take out all the form fields you want to save time on typing (eg. name, email, etc).  What you can do is just delete all those annoying form entries you mistyped but Firefox stored anyway.

Now you may already know about this little trick but it was a great discovery for me this morning.

The next time you go to a form just highlight the entry you want to remove, then hit shift-delete on the keyboard.

It works for most of the suggestion dropdowns in Firefox.

Tech Tip – Stopping Shuffing Paper

How many times have you printed out a document only to find that the pages have printed from first to last.  Now that might seem logical but when you have large multi-paged documents you then need to spend time shuffling the pages so the first page is not on the bottom of the pile.

Now to many of you the answer to this is straight-foward BUT you might be surprised at how many people I have come across that are still doing the manual re-shuffle.

You can actually get Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat and many other applications to print in reverse order (that is last page first).

In Word all you need to do is hit the Options button once you are in the Print dialog box and check the "Reverse print order" box.

Have a play with this and be ready just to collect your document from the printer and go.  No more paper shuffling!

Top Tips for Hearing the Hard Words

There are times as entrepreneurial business owners when someone won’t love us and our ideas as much as we do.  We will have to hear some hard (and at time harsh) words that will leave us feeling like we have just been run over with a big D3 tractor.

The question is do you just suck it up and take the criticism?  Do you fight back?  Do you ignore it?

Pamela Slim over at Escape from Cubicle Nation has put together a great list of 7 tips for handling tough feedback.

In particular I like #3  …

Be a sieve.  Learn how to take in a big piece of tough
feedback, sift out the pieces that have some use or truth to them and let the
rest flow down the sink. Most feedback has some truth in it that will make you
better at what you do.  The easiest way to do this is to ask yourself “What part
of this feedback will make me better, more successful in the marketplace and
happier at what I do if I apply it?”  Keep that piece of advice and let the rest
go.

#7 “Don’t shoot the messenger, even if you want to” is also good advice (particularly in the online world).

Thanks for the great lesson Pam!

Tuesday Tech Tool – Time Tracking with 88 Miles

If you are a small business service provider like me then keeping a track of the time you spend on projects directly equates to the profitability of the business at the end of the month.  If you can’t accurately keep track of what time you spend for which client then you run the possibility of messing up the end of month invoicing.

For Myles Eftos at MadPilot there had to be a better way than endless scraps of paper and the double entry into spreadsheets to keep a track of his project time.  In order to sorted out his own dilemma he mamanged to provide a very easy-to-use web based "punch-in, punch-out" time tracking tool called 88 Miles.

I have spend some time today entering some projects and tracking some time and have found it one of the most straight-forward apps for time tracking.  It is well worth a try if you are looking for an automnated punch-clock.  At the moment it is still in beta but is also at the beta price – FREE!

Check it out!

(Thanks to Natalie and Tim at Decisive Flow for the heads-up on 88 Miles)

Survey Extended

I order to get the broadest repsonse possible the Small Business Women & Technology survey has been extended for a further 2 weeks.  The survey will now close on Monday 29th May and prizes drawn on Wednesday 31st May.

If you haven’t yet responded, or if you know a small business woman that would love to contribute and be in the running for the great PRIZES then just drop by the Working Solo website.

Is your Computer a Pain in the Neck?

The field of ergonomics has been with us for quite some time now …. but the application of the knowledge though seems to be taking a little longer to catch up (particularly in the SOHO environment).  The set-up of our SOHO workspaces seems to fall more into the realm of what is possible, convenient or affordable.

The computer workspace is one that many small business women are spending a great deal of time at. From some of the responses to the Small Business Women & Technology survey so far the average time on the computer is 24 hours per week). 

Personally I would hope that would take more care and that your computer workspace is set-up for the sake of your physical health and to protect your ability to operate the business. 

According to a recent study by Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of California there is something that you can do to minimise computer-based neck and shoulder injuries that is relatively straight-forward and can be applied with what you have on your shelf now.  (The findings appear in the current issue (May 2006) of the British journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine)

"Computer-related injuries mainly occur in the neck and shoulder region. The elbow and wrist are the second most common area," explained study lead author Dr. David Rempel, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "This study, done in people who spend 30 to 40 hours a week in front of a computer, found that a forearm support can prevent some of these injuries and decrease pain."

(Source : Yahoo News and Occupational and Environmental Journal)

So forearm support is one of the answers to neck and shoulder injuries!  You could go and buy a fancy keyboard that provides special fore-arm support or you can just reach over to your shelf and grab a couple of books to provide the same support.

The recommendation is that the support be approximately 3-5cms above the keyboard (so that your wrists are in a neutral position and your fingers drop down).

I been using a couple of books (by Paul and Sarah Edwards if you must know) for the past few days and have already noticed a marked difference in the tension in my shoulders and neck.

Why not give it a try … you have nothing to loose (apart from the pain in your neck).

Blogs – Business or Personal?

There are times when people have asked me what they should write about on their blog.  As small business owners they want to give a professional image but at the same time recognise that people do business with people they like.

Some small business owners just don’t want to put anything personal up at all – for reasons only they will truly know.

But today I came across a few posts from a corporate blogger (many of which very rarely offer any personal insight) that showed that professionalism is not harmed when the personal, and tragic, aspects of life hit home.

Robert Scoble, noted Microsoft and A-list blogger, has had tradegy enter his life and his blog over the past couple of days.

Most of you are probably here to read about my insider thoughts
about Microsoft or the tech industry, or because I find cool links to
various tech industry things.

But, life is intruding here and it’s my personal blog, not a PR
vehicle, so gotta push those worries to the background and just write
about what’s going on in my life and let the chips fall where they may.

We saw my mom yesterday (all three of the Scoble kids arrived at the
Billings airport at the same time, which was pretty weird considering
we were flying from three separate cities).

When we first saw her, she opened her eyes, stared strongly at us,
and had a tear in her eye. She vigorously squeezed our hands. That
comforted all of us. A little.

Well, I won’t bore you with the emotions I’m feeling. Or the
decisions that are going to start coming at us (we’re meeting with her
doctors today).

There are a number of posts on what he and his family are going through at the moment, and literally hundreds of comments of support and understanding.

Will Robert’s professional standing be harmed by him sharing the personal tradegy that he is experiencing?  I think NOT.  In my personal opinion I will think more of Robert for him being authentic and open.

If you think that personal is not professional …..  I wonder what you think you are going to loose by opening your real-self to those that read your small business blog?

So, with Monday’s Day upon us in Australia and the USA this Sunday, my thoughts will be not just with my family but also with Robert’s.  This will be a particularly tough Mother’s Day weekend for them.

The Life of the Self Employed

There are times when I wonder why I am so passionate about being self-employed.  The wondering doesn’t last long though – I will get a call or an email from a client with a new project and then my imagination kicks into gear on how we could work on this project together.  In the middle of the project I’m clear on why I am self-employed.

It is in the quiet moments when I start the wondering.

But the quite moments are good.  I can go a little crazy and get a little grumpy if I am switched on all the time – the health suffers, the relationships suffer and I don’t think I am much fun to be around.  But for some reason I just love it when I am busy (even if I am a little irritable).

Chris Barrow (a good online buddy of mine) knows what I am talking about, and so, by the look of a recent post of Chris’,does one of his clients.

His client writes :

Now I work until 9.00pm most days, go home to drink half a bottle of Merlot
and crash into bed.

I am working evenings and weekends trying to keep my business on track, as
well as delivering the dentistry.

Last weekend I managed 9 holes of golf for the first time in ages, although I
spent most of my time looking for lost balls.

In the old days, when I returned from a vacation, I would wear my “fat pants”
for a few weeks until I lost weight again.

Now I wear my “fat pants” all the time.”

Check out the full post – it will more than likely ring a few bells for you.

The "flat out or bust" cycle just isn’t sustainable and a while ago I started to make the changes to ensure that I wasn’t going to be one of the "fat pants" self-employed surviving on late night curry and red wine.

So I made a conscious decision to focus on shutting down at 6pm, cooking fresh food that the family and I sit down together and eat most nights of the week.  Even if the kids don’t really care that much (at 18 and 20 it seems they are happy to survive on noodles and hot chocolate), I know that my husband greatly appreciates the human side of me more than the entrepreneur.  We even get to talk about the things when we sit down to eat together.

The email will wait for tomorrow.  The clients still want me for the projects even if it takes an extra couple of days.  The 7kgs I have lost by being a trainer for our local rugby league team (all that running on and off the field dealing with injuries and water can do wonders) has given me an energy to think that I am up for this self-employment capper for at least another 15-20 years.

I might even get a game of golf in sometime soon – a whole 9 holes and not just 20 minutes belting the cover off the balls at a driving range.

Wednesday Tech Tip – Key Words for your Website

Do you know how your website ranks in terms of keywords that people are searching for?

Do you know how much competition there is when people do search for the phrases that are associated with your business?

If you are interested in these sore of statistics then check out NicheBot – www.nichebot.com

Not only does it do keyword discover searches but also provides -

WordTracker · Overture · Thesaurus · Keyword Analysis  · Google Ranking

You will find both free and fee based searches at NicheBot.  It is worth a visit if you are trying to understand more about how people will find you online.

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