Late last night I received an email from the Google Voice Team:
Subject: You’ve been invited to Google Voice
From: Google Voice [voice-noreply@google.com]
To: josh@lostinmadison.com
You are invited to open a free Google Voice account. To accept this invitation and create your account, visit
*Activation link… sorry can’t show you that*
Read more…
Most of you are aware that I have and occasionally do tech support, web design, web hosting and consulting on the side from time to time. In fact as you are aware this was the case when I lived in California.
Maybe here is where I should clarify things a bit. While in CA I had my own company (Martinez Tech Consulting), during that time I was approached by two people during a “Shasta Technology Meeting” this was back in 2002??? Anyhow, because of my want to expand and the promise of more business I soon entered a partnership. Let me preface this whole thing by saying this. I WOULD DO THIS WHOLE EXPEREANCE OVER AGAIN IF I HAD TO. It really did open the doors to more business, however several factors stacked against me.
When entering the partnership I agreed to a minority share of the company (essentially) 40/60 because of some of the talks we had before entering into the partnership. We acquired several decent size accounts and were doing fairly well, but in truth we were not making enough for the amount of overhead that came with some of the partnership terms. With that said, I will own up to 40% of those issues, after all that was the split.
After some time together it began to become painfully obvious to me that in order for me to make a real living at this I would either have to attempt to take back over full control of the company or ???. During several talks with my partners I expressed a want to do just that. Each time one of my partners was 100% for it, the other never would give me a serious answer, always playing the teacher and wanting to “explain” things to me about … well I never was quite sure what the hell he was attempting to explain to me to be honest. Basically he just filibustered the whole time the discussion came up. It became obvious me taking back control of the company would not happen. We parted ways, me with a contract and a semi non compete clause and them with the company.
Shortly after I moved back here to WI. AGAIN SOMETHING I WOULD DO OVER IF I HAD THE CHANCE. Here I tucked in under my brother in laws roofing company as the office manager. I want to make this very clear also, I have learned a million times more about business and sales in the last few years then I could ever learn in school, I have no doubt! I am not saying that there is nothing more that I could ever learn about business or sales, quite the opposite, I think if you are not constantly learning or trying something new then you will soon fall by the wayside.
All along my adventures I have never let go of my technical side, I moved more to remote support AKA virtual support (where I log in remotely to fix issues) and web design / web hosting. I started a simple company back here (Mad City Computing) where I only serviced accounts that I earned from personal connections or word of mouth. It is far from anything substantial at this point, basically extra pocket change every once in a great while if you will.
I am now ready to start making a go at being serious about my own company again. However I should DEFINATELY clarify this point. I am going to cherry pick accounts no exceptions, you see I have a full time job, and I have NO desire to give it up. In fact quite the opposite, I love it! I am left with quite a bit of free time though and was thinking, why not spark my money making hobby back up into a real business again?!
What is the difference this time than the first? Well a ton of new experience and the fact that I am a little older and not so much of an arrogant bastard. What happens if it starts to eat into my “normal” job? I am not sure at this point, maybe I will hire someone part time to pick up the slack, but I will find a way to keep my hands on both my current job and my business to what extent I am unsure of at this time.
All of this leads to my title “Company Name”. I am in search of a good, solid company name. Here are my requirements:
1: Must be a “global” name. I want the ability to be anywhere in the world and this name not appear to limit me to a specific region, state, or city.
2: Must be able to get a .com domain name for the company name.
Pretty simple right? Sure……….
This also leads to a few other items:
1: Catch phrase or tag line for the company name.
2: Logo for company.
Don’t think all of this is that important when starting a company? I simply point to Jellyfish.com who was purchased by Microsoft. I had a meeting with a part investor in Jellyfish.com at one point about something unrelated to this and was told that they (Jellyfish.com) had spent over $500,000.00 (yes that is half a million) in researching the perfect name, logo, tag line and such. This along with actually executing a well thought out business plan (A major key point obviously) made the unknown company very well known. So well know Microsoft purchased them for the small sum of $50,000,000.00 (Yes FIFTY MILLION US $$).
Now reality sets in and I fully do not expect to ever be purchased for that sum of money. However, it does prove that EVERY aspect of your company is VERY important, even down to the name, logo, and tag line… Don’t think so? Talk to Nike, Coors, the NFL, Coke, McDonalds, Microsoft…. the list goes on.
2. Task Management.. Well kinda..
I love post it notes, in fact I should own stock in them! Most of the time these handy little yellow notes are good enough for the obscure items I need to remember with in a day or two. Where they fail me is when I need to arrange a group of items I need to take care of that hinge on other things being done first. More often then not I will have four or five categories of “Action Items” and in each category I end up with normal need to do items and items that I need to do once I have done what I needed to do… I will pause here for you for a minute… OK you with me again? Good. Basically I need a good VERY SIMPLE project management program or a very detailed task management software. To date all the project management software I have found all work really well, for larger projects, some of my projects may be done in a few days, few weeks or farther out. I finally found what may be my task management solution for now. www.hitask.com. This allows me to create a simple project (group may be a better name) and then create tasks that I can share with people and put them in the group I want. The only thing it doesn’t do is allow me to have sub-tasks. I really hope they add that. Anyhow more about hitask in a future review.
3. CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Your joking right?!
QuickBooks definitely is NOT a CRM software. But you already knew that. So on my hunt for CRM software I ran across things like ACT!, SalesForce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and many others. If you know anything about these companies you realize that I need a way to track future and current clients, all conversations with them, get sales data reports, invoice clients… the list goes on. There are free versions of some of these solutions but they are typically limited to use with one company and one user. I need to be able to hold company data from multiple companies (basically the ability to switch company databases) and have multiuser support, and since I am wishing it would be sweet if it could all be accessed from the internet so that business could occur anywhere. By the way, if you are in the market for any of these things in that above list expect to spend anywhere from $300 per user access license or a set monthly fee per user all the way up to $30,000 – $40,000. No that’s not a joke! I still have not found the solution for me, that’s where item four comes in. Again.
4. Being a web application developer. Screw that I can just build it!
Ya, that about sums up the solution for most of my problems to date. This is a great moment to bring up this fact. If you are like me and have the ability to program some of this stuff and are feeling the need to. Let me just remind you of one thing. Once you make the switch to your custom application YOU are now responsible for all that data, and all the future data your system will be holding. I am very aware of this and was before my projects began. However my need for something tailored to my situations finally drove me to accept that responsibility. To this day I would not have done anything different.
5. Being the funnel. BOTTLENECK!!!
It happens a lot trust me. At some point during that week or that day I begin to feel like progress on key items has fallen to the side of just doing business for that day. I start to put out fires and then before I know it my day is gone, at least all the fires are out though. This is where I have to stop and reorganize myself. The trick to being a funnel and avoiding the bottlenecks (as much as possible) is to stay as organized as possible and accurately prioritize your “Action Items”. This is where my task management needs are vital. I first quickly look at my list of projects and find the priority one. I make sure all the tasks that need to be done now are taken care of then determine if I need to add new tasks or if its time to move on to something else in that project that needs to be done. If not, I set that project aside and find the next project in line and so on. Remember, if your the funnel there is only so much output you can do before the stuff on top starts to overflow. The key point is to stay as organized as possible and manage your time wisely and efficiently. If you still find you are not able to keep up, it may be time to hire someone to help you. If so then COOL! It’s time to double your production and hopefully business as well.
6. Insomnia. the necessary evil?
Possibly… At least that is how I deal with some of it. Lets be honest though, that’s not healthy. I will admit there are just those times that you can’t rest. Maybe for days at a time, but you do need to take the time to recharge at some point during the week. It could be sleeping all day, going for a drive away from everyone, vegging out in front of the TV all day or just relaxing at home with a beer and the BBQ going. I do all these things, and most of the time I do them alone. Partly because I am single and partly because I just really enjoy the silence.
Well that wraps up my bitching about my big pain. Sorry so long winded, just a lot on my mind at the moment.
Josh-
Inevitably there comes a time in every small businesses life where some of it’s needs start to become a big pain. I have been dealing with some of these big pains for quite some time now in my own personal work environment.
What is my big pain? Well to be honest it’s a combination of a few smaller pains. They are:
Some background:
I work for my brother in law who owns two companies. One company is a roofing company where I act as an office manager. The other company is a small manufacturing company where I act as the office / operations manager. In this company we have two fairly new to our industry products and more coming soon. Both companies are in the same location.
When I started work here about 3+ years ago the roofing company did everything on paper. The manufacturing company did not exist yet, however an idea that was soon to be one of our products was in the late creation early R&D process. I had never worked in either industry before this point in my life. The pain hasn’t started yet, don’t worry.
1. QuickBooks? God I hate QuickBooks!
I am sure that statement has been muttered by lots of small business owners/employees’ past and present.
First I attempted to use QuickBooks for our roofing company but began to feel that it was very cumbersome in some areas and seriously lacking in others. To me it was simple, I just needing to create an invoice, monitor the AR, keep client information, and track service history. My sister and our accountant take care of the financials so I didn’t really need to monitor all that stuff. Sounds simple right? WRONG! Some of you can attest that in QuickBooks if you are not set up from the beginning 100% correctly you are just flat out screwed, and even if you are you can quickly end up screwed anyways.
After a few days of searching for an adequate solution item number four on my list came into play. At the end of the week we now had version one of our invoicing software. Well maybe it should be called version .001 because all it did was invoice and track AR. This software is now about 3yrs old and has been revised thousands of times and I have coded thousands of lines to tailor it more and more to our business and being web based we can access it from almost anywhere.
The next encounter with QuickBooks came after we set up the second company and started to need a way to invoice and track AR for our product. QuickBooks functioned well in this isolated type of usage for me. It did exactly those two things flawlessly, and later on I found some other cool reports I could track from it as well. Trust me, I know I was not even close to using QuickBooks to it fullest potential.
About 2.5yrs later I began to run into issues with QuickBooks again. Well in truth the issues were not with QuickBooks, they were the fact that my needs were growing and now I needed a better way to track sales, AR, Reports, Customer Data, Sales Rep leads and information. I again started to write a web based solution for our specific needs regarding this. This year will be our first year using this software and like the roofing software it will continue to change and get better each year.
I am sure that QuickBooks is a very solid piece of software when used as intended by people who know QuickBooks. I personally have never had this program actually be my solution, I have tried to us it 4-5 times (a few times before this) and my personal needs always began to fall out of QuickBooks scope of support.
Part 2 of “When small business becomes a big pain” to follow in the next few days.
