Category Archives: operations

How To Build A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

Posted on by
Reply

In today’s hyperactive markets, small businesses need to move quickly. They need to be ‘agile’. (My Code Year lessons are sinking in!) And a big part of the ability to be agile today is to plan, plan, plan.

On the marketing side, we’ve been taught to utilize a marketing plan to help guide our upcoming decisions based on previous learnings of the marketplace. In other words, what happened and do we want the same thing to happen in the future?

We’d build the marketing plan with an overview that looked something like:

Continue reading →

Do You Want This Guy On Your Team?

Posted on by
Reply

There’s this guy who is looking for work. Actually, he’s being pushed out of his current organization. He’s basically been isolated from the rest of his team but they won’t fire him. The whole thing is really odd.

He made some comment or did something benign, but his boss thought her authority was being challenged. So now he’s kind of stuck. Looking for work.

Continue reading →

Does The Freemium Model Extend To Services?

Posted on by
6

Borrowing a quote from the Freemium entry on Wikipedia via Fred Wilson:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

Fred uses the word “service” but if you look at the post the above quote comes from, service relates to a product or web service.

I’m wondering, if you’re a talented person with an entrepreneurial vision with limited coding / product-building experience / skills, can you instead shift the focus of the business model above from products to services?

Continue reading →

Meet with Ease

Posted on by
Reply

Frustrated by missed meetings, employees began voting down the ability to connect with prospects and clients. The frustration was easily understood – different timezones coupled with different calendar / reminder applications was creating havoc with everyone’s calendars.
 
By utilizing an online scheduling system, employees were able to shift their focus from integrating calendars to supporting the challenges customers and prospects were facing.
 
Utilizing a free* service called Tungle, support personnel provided their available times in the local timezone of the customer / prospect.
 
This system is providing a number of benefits:

Continue reading →

What Do I Need To Get Online?

Posted on by
Reply

Follow up on yesterday’s post, where do you start if you’re looking to get online?

Firstly, congratulations on making the big step – These are exciting times!

Next, listen to the Wall Street Journal. They have a good, albeit a bit confusing, article “A Web Presence Without A Website“. If you take out the confusing part (no website, but a blog site, etc.), the underlying goal is to get started somewhere.

Regardless of what you call it, you’ll have to start somewhere. My preference is to first walk through a single non-website/blog site activity:

Continue reading →