Archive for September, 2009

In my earlier post on June 10, 2009 I shared an example of what ROI looks like. In this post, I am writing about if ROI is not seen as ROI, how your possibilities get killed even before you start to act on them. This happens when customers confuse the ROI (Return on Investment) with the ROC (Return on Cost).

ROI is a constitutive component of how we measure Value; so needless to say, it is a critical part of how we choose to transact (or not), in any situation. Then there is the Investment which is a critical part of the ROI. The biggest pitfall is how this shows up for your customers. Consider this example:

You are at the crossroads of your career. You work very hard at your job, day in day out… day in day out… day in day out… you get the picture. The more hard work you put in, the more of the same results are being produced (e.g. getting only a 2-5% raise year after year after year… ). There is no certainty of the promotion you’d hoped you’d get in your upcoming review. You met your goals, you fulfilled your promises and all that happens at the time of review cycle is you’re told the company did not meet its numbers so you’ll just get a 2% raise or worse, nothing at all.

At this point, you say “This is not working”. I need to go learn some new things. I need to look for where I can get more education… different education and with that you set out looking for it. Then you come across two choices; one education costs $20,000/year and the other $2,000/year. This is the crossroads at which you make a choice and the importance of this choice is huge because it will have an impact on perhaps your entire life.

The choice is made in how you think about this. Before I go further lets clearly distinguish that the “I=Investment” IS NOT “C=Cost”. Cost is usually thought of as something you have to pay in order to get something else RIGHT NOW. Investment is thought in the context of something you have to pay in order to get something bigger (than what you paid) in the future .

Most people look at the ROI as the ROC and that conversation closes the opportunity there and then. So, when you are talking to your customers about the value of what you are offering, make sure you CLEARLY bring forth that the price tag associated with your offer, is not a COST to them, it is, in fact an INVESTMENT, that they are making into a future possibility that will MORE THAN cover the investment they are making at that point.

If they still insist on looking at the “I” as the “C” ask them a simple question: “It is clear that you have considered the Cost of doing this. Have you considered the cost of NOT DOING IT!”

Try this in your next conversation. It works in bringing forth the ROI very clearly… and the results will show for themselves.

This article was contributed by Himanshu Jhamb, co-founder of ActiveGarage (The company behind 99tribes) and co-author of #PROJECT MANAGEMENT tweet. You can follow Himanshu on Twitter at himjhamb.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Compensation, cost, himanshu jhamb, investment, Money, offer, raise, Return on Investment, Transaction, value

Have you noticed how on occasions you may have done something and it occupies your mind for days wondering what the outcome will be? It continues to consume your thought when you are at an unrelated place doing something else. Have you noticed how your body tenses in response to the thoughts of situations you are not in? All these are reactions to thoughts you are not in a position to act  to rectify or change. Often these are related to actions and situations that are in the past.

All this does is rob us of valuable limited energy and time we have to think, which in turn reduces our ability to act and take care of what really matters to us.

I was recently back in South Africa with my laptop and thought it would be a good idea to catch up on my e-information habit after 10 days of abstinence.  I was told that where we were staying had a high speed broadband internet connection and I couldn’t wait to get on (with) it. So I connected my laptop and then the world seemed to stop… everything just seemed to take forever.

It felt like someone had sold me out on a dial-up camouflaged as broadband, but the speeds were 300/800kb. My analytical mind persisted… the next thought was: “Maybe speed is just relative to what you are used to”. For those on dial-up it would have felt very fast, where as my 5/15Mb home connection made it feel ridiculously slow. I began to ask myself how do they work with this connection, this must be costing so much in productivity?

As I got more and more frustrated with the experience I started to turn off all the ancillary messengers, auto update and other background tasks running on my computer. It took a while but slowly it began to feel like the connection was representational of what I had become accustomed to in the USA. It wasn’t the connection that was the issue but how I used it that made the difference!

I like to think of our brain as being a bit like an internet connection, we are given a set amount of bandwidth that we can utilize at any given time, but we decide how we utilize this bandwidth and that is where the power of our judgment comes into play. For most of us, I speculate, we do not even think about the consequences of our thoughts, it just happens much like we breathe and our heart keeps pumping. Making the best use of our brain’s bandwidth is critical to ensure we make effective actions, which is what ultimately determines our future.

Here are some actions to help manage these bandwidth thieves:

1. Start to notice when you are being gripped by these interrupting thoughts – particularly those beyond your control, relate to situations that have already occurred or will have little consequence on your future.
2. Make an assessment of the impact on your future – spend a short time, no more than 15 minutes, concluding what you should have done or will do in a particular outcome. If it has no impact on your future then be at peace with your decision, close the thought and agree with yourself this is what it is. If it does have an impact on your future then it is a thought you need to act on. You need to find help if you cannot resolve it yourself.
3. The next time the thought enters your head – you revert to your conclusion from step above. Do not reevaluate your conclusion as that is just adding fuel to the fire and ultimately utilizes more unnecessary thought.
4. Be at peace with yourself and your decisions – it is highly unlikely others are affected the way you perceive the situation. Do not worry, worrying has never solved a situation to date only action has!

Think of your brain as a pipe through which you have to pour water, the more water through the pipe (representing active thought to produce action) the more effective you will be in your life. Do not let residue build up in the pipe that slows the flow of thoughts, especially when this residue produces no actions towards your future.

Make every thought count, keep thinking about the future!

This article was contributed by Guy Ralfe, co-founder of Active Garage and co-author of the upcoming book ProjectManagementTweets. You can follow Guy on Twitter at gralfe.

Tagged as: Action, active garage, brain, Brain utilization, decision, Effective Thought, effectual thinking, future, Guy Ralfe, Speed, Thinking, thoughts

There are a lot of definitions for business. But I am interested in just the simple and fundamental way that we can define a business.

So, what is a business?. Fundamentally, business is ‘providing good help’.

Think about it. Every human being needs help. Otherwise he or she cannot survive.

Some of you may disagree.

Before you say anything, let us look around in our life. Notice the help we are receiving almost everyday. The jobs we have, the house we live in, the mail we get are all provided by someone else. As human beings, we need help.

The best way to get help is to give help. We work for someone to provide our services and they help us back by giving us money.  When we need help, we typically look for the best help that we can possibly afford.

Over time the market in which we provide “help” keeps getting bigger and bigger with each new radical innovation. When cars became mass produced, people could travel long distances to get the help they needed. This changed the way people used the marketplace. If they wanted a job in another part of town, they could take it, since they had a car to drive to that part of town. If they wanted to buy something which was available in another town, they could drive and get it. When Airplanes were introduced, people could travel around the world to provide their “help” or get the “help” they needed.

In the very old days, a person with a skill could provide help to others living in the same village, for example a blacksmith could provide his service to people in his village. As the tools of transportation and communication evolved, many more people were able to use his services like those in the neighboring villages. Today, with the advent of the internet and the economy changing from an industrial to information age, a guitar maker ( in crude terms, a modern day blacksmith ) in any part of the world can sell his handmade guitars to anyone in the world. Rick Toone does this. I am sure without the Internet, he would not have a large enough audience for his “help”.

Even when we play online games or want to watch a movie, we are looking for the best game or best movie, Since we cannot personally make a game or movie, we are looking for help to be highly entertained. There are free games and free movies but ultimately they exist because both the provider and the consumer get benefited in some way. When you visit Disneyland , you want the best entertainment (help) and Disney can provide that in return for the money (help) you pay to enter.

So, as entrepreneurs, what can we do?

The bottom line is this: As long as we can provide good help, we have a high chance of succeeding as people are always looking for better help.  With the world as our market, there is a high probability that we can find a large enough market that needs our help.

—-

Vijay Peduru is an entrepreneur in the bay area and is the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup. His interests are bootstrapping, leadership and spirituality.

Vijay Peduru is an entrepreneur in the bay area and is the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup. His interests are bootstrapping, leadership and spirituality.

Tagged as: active garage, business, economic shift, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, good help, help, helping others, marketplace, networks, radical change

No one wants to see your Demo

by Wayne Turmel, September 21, 2009

“Product Demo” is part and parcel of the sales cycle. You have to show your wares to your customer. But very often demos tend to be only that – showing what you have. Instead, we should this opportunity to understand and address the customer’s concerns. In this article, Wayne suggests ways to make the Demo more valuable for the customer and there by making it more productive for you, the sales persons. more…

Is Open-Book Management Right For Your Company

by Robert Driscoll, September 22, 2009

In this article, Robert provides a high level overview of the fundamentals of Open-Book Management, its benefits and the applicability of this methodology to your environment. And, if you chose to implement it in your organization, this article provides you four critical steps that will help you be successful in this endeavor. more…

Fishing For Success

by Guy Ralfe, September 23, 2009

You can’t catch fish without a hook in the water! There are numerous variation of this simple proverb that has profound implications in life and in business. Bottom line, you need to build your social identity and give a chance for people to recognize you. In this article, Guy narrates a personal childhood experience that may help you etch this truth in your psyche. more…

Are you diving deep into the matters?

by Naveen Lakkur, Septemberr 24, 2009

What you hear may not necessarily be true. What you see may not necessarily be true either. Only when you dive deep into anything can you ascertain the truth. In this article Naveen suggests ways to recognize our deficiencies in this area and how to address them. more…

Protecting Your Invention Before You Patent

by Thomas Frasher, September 25, 2009

In a continuation of his previous article, Thomas provide valuable dos and don’ts regarding the use you lab notebook to document and protect your inventions. In patent law it is generally the first to conceive of an idea that is awarded the patent. A properly kept notebook is often the first documented evidence of a concept, development or process. So, get into the mindset of writing to the future in addition to the present. more…

Documenting Inventions

In my last article is wrote that a laboratory notebook is an effective method for ensuring that you protect your intellectual property during development. This article comprises guidelines to help protect the integrity of the contents of your notebooks such that the contents are without reproach.

In patent law it is generally the first to conceive of an idea that is awarded the patent, a properly kept notebook is often the first documented evidence of a concept, development or process.

Generally speaking it is adequate to have a small drawing and some descriptive text to document a concept. The lab notebook aids with extending that concept in a protective manner.

Guidelines:

1. Take your notes contemporaneously with your development, as close to the time of your research or lab work as possible.

2. Remember that you are working to make sure that someone with your skill level can recreate what you’ve done, solely from the notes in the notebook.

3. Very few people organize their notebooks efficiently, with the possible legal outcome in mind. Remember: the lab notebook is your first line of defense.

4. If you need to have a blank page for some reason, draw a diagonal line and write “Void” on the line, initial and date the line. It is best however to avoid blank pages.

5. VERY IMPORTANT: IF you make a mistake, do not scribble over it, draw single line through the error and initial and date the line. you can do this for large areas by lining through at a diagonal and, again initialing and dating the line. At no time is it acceptable to remove any part of or all of a page. This will call into question the contents of the notebook as a whole.

6. When spanning multiple pages use “(Continued)” or “(Cont)” at the top of the page to denote a continuation from the previous page. If you are continuing something from an earlier page use “(Continued from page #)” or “(Cont from #)”.

7. Avoid fragmentary notes, make sure you use as complete a description as you can.

8. All entries are either in ink or printed and attached to the page with tape or glue. If attaching a page to the notebook, draw a line across the boundary of the attachment and the page and initial and date the line, this ensures that the date of the attachment is in congruence with the dates in the notebook.

9. Your writing must be legible. If someone else can’t read it, it must be redone. If it is illegible it might as well not exist. Remember you are writing to the future in your notebook, it must be clear.

What To Put In the Notebook:

1. Table of Contents. Leave room at the front of the notebook if there isn’t an explicit table of contents. Keep this up to date. This helps with finding information quickly in the event of a search through multiple notebooks (a very common occurrence).

2. Include a list of your assumptions as you begin.

3. Include any formulae or calculations that are important to your work.

4. Data, drawings, sketches, processes, procedures, notations, corrections, part numbers, assemblies, code snippets, tests, test results, etc. In General your thinking.

All of the above items are relatively easy to maintain once you get the mindset that you are writing to the future, in addition to the present.

Go get a notebook, set down and innovate, create and invent! It’s fun!

Image Courtesy: Paul Watson on Flickr

This article was contributed by Thomas Frasher, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Thomas on Twitter at tfrasher.

Tagged as: Copyrights, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Intellectual Property, possibilities, Return on Investment, Strategy, technology

“Not necessarily what you saw is True; Not necessarily what you heard is True. Only when you think and dive deeper you will know the truth”, is the essence of one of the songs I had enjoyed during my childhood days and it lingers in my memory even today.

This is applicable and useful in several aspects of our day-to-day life. Sit back, think and answer the following questions:

• Have you judged and evaluated people based on their first appearances and later found that it was an opportunity lost because of your misjudgment?
• Have you formed opinions about people based on what you had heard about them from someone and later when you came in contact with them, you realized that the opinion you had earlier formed was totally off the mark?
• Have you experienced that, in the spur of the moment, you said something and later ended up kicking yourself for having done so?

It’s normal if you have experienced any of these. Having recognized it, it might be useful to dive a little deeper to find out how your results are in different areas of your work/life:

1. If you are achieving great results – then it means, your ability to dive deeper into matters that’s important to you is strong.
2. If you are suffering/struggling/helpless/feeling lonely – then, it might be a good idea to watch on your ego meter
3. If you have no clue what this is all about – then it might mean that you are a strong believer of ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ or perhaps you’re just ignorant that you are ignorant!

It doesn’t matter where you are now. What matters is that you dive deeper with every matter that matters to you.

I could relate to the essence and the importance of diving deeper into matters that matter to me when I heard this story:

A lady in a faded grey dress and her husband, dressed in a home-spun suit walked in timidly without an appointment into the Harvard University President’s outer office. The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn’t even deserve to be in Harvard.

“We want to see the President Eliot” the man said softly.

“He’ll be busy all day” the secretary snapped.

“We’ll wait” the lady replied.

For hours the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn’t and the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president..

“Maybe if you see them for a few minutes, they’ll leave” she said to him. The President Eliot, stern faced and with dignity, strutted toward the couple.

The lady told him “We had a son who attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus.”

The president wasn’t touched….He was shocked. “Madam “he said, gruffly, “we can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery.”

“Oh, no,” the lady explained quickly” We don’t want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.”

The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, and then exclaimed, “A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical buildings here at Harvard.”

For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased. Maybe he could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, “Is that all it costs to start a university? Why don’t we just start our own?”

Her husband nodded. The president’s face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford got up and walked away, travelling to Palo Alto, California where they established the University that bears their name: -Stanford University, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.

Most of the time we judge people by their outer appearances, which can be misleading. And in this impression, we tend to mistreat people by thinking they can do nothing for us and lose out on potential good friends, employees or customers.

If only we can remember to dive in a little deeper; we stand to cross the elusive chasm of our own shallow opinions and make it to the other side where we can experience a whole beautiful world of life filled with success and happiness.

—

This article was contributed by Naveen Lakkur, President and CEO of Compassites Software Solutions Pvt., Ltd. Compassites is an ideation company, specialized in translating ideas into business realities. Naveen’s reflection of thoughts on Startups and Leadership is shared on Start2Lead

Tagged as: active garage, chasm, compassites, diving deeper, Eliot, harvard, Ignorance, Leland Stanford, naveen lakkur, opinions, stanford

I used to crew for my uncle, who fished in game fishing tournaments. We would launch around 4:30 in the morning and finish with a lines-up at 3:00pm which made for long, hot and tiring days especially when the tournament lasted seven days and the fish were not very hungry for your bait.

One of the ways to fish for game fish  is to first catch a live bait fish to then use it as bait for a bigger fish. The challenge is catching and keeping the bait fish alive; sometimes it would die early and you would need to go fish for another, or a shark would attack your bait and leave you with half a fish again requiring you go and fish for another bait fish. In the heat of the day when you have not had a bite for hours (sometimes days) on end, or you have lost many baits, it is hard to remain motivated about rigging up the rod and casting out to try and catch another bait fish. It was often easy to think maybe we would be better off packing up and going in to shore. It was at these times that my uncle would always insist that we put an extra rod in the water, or at least always have a hook of sorts in the water and he insisted we fished the whole open fishing period. His saying was “you can’t catch a fish without a hook in the water”.

I can still recall the time during one of these quiet periods without fish for ages we dropped a line overboard and it spooled off the reel and fell deep into the water. I got up to sort the rod out and in reeling it up we caught the elusive bait we had been so desperately trying to catch. We went on to win that tournament with a great 384 lbs Marlin caught in the last hour of the day.

In business and society today there are plenty of people telling you how little chance you have of succeeding. My personal favorite is “statistically there is very little difference between having a lottery ticket and not having one at all – so don’t buy a lottery ticket!”. What everyone fails to see is that compared to not having a ticket, having one ticket has an infinitely better chance of winning the lottery. Just like if you don’t have a hook in the water when the one fish feeling hungry comes past, your single ticket might just be the one that gets called in the lottery.

Business is social and you have to participate to build identity and trust; if you are never putting yourself out there you will never know what could happen. Put another way YOU are actually not giving people a chance to recognize you and help you.  That is not to say that what you desire, happens but by continually making offers or sounding ideas in the marketplace you create situations for yourself that didn’t exist before. That is the space that might get you introduced to someone, might expose you to some technology, might ignite a new project or it might just spark something else you never imagined. These are all big MIGHTs but invariably they offer the positive possibility that something may result. Doing nothing, means you guarantee that situation stays the same or worse you guarantee that the situation is in control and not you. Now is an important time to assess our actions and make sure we are not causing our own concerns?

As with fishing you need the bait to fish for the big game, which is where the prizes are. In a marketplace being crippled by insecurity, making a move could be the glint that  opens up future possibilities – go fish it’s a far better proposition than sitting on the shore!

This article was contributed by Guy Ralfe, co-founder of Active Garage and co-author of the upcoming book ProjectManagementTweets. You can follow Guy on Twitter at gralfe.

Tagged as: active garage, competition, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, fishing, Guy Ralfe, Identity, Marlin, positive possibility, possibilities, Trust

Open-book management (OBM) has been around for over 25 years since Jack Stack implemented it at Springfield ReManufacturing Corporation in 1983 and wrote, “The Great Game of Business”.  The concept is simple, yet implementing it can be overwhelming and it could be years before a company starts seeing significant results.  Some have called OBM the most important management trend in the country.  Others see it as a possible threat to their business as proprietary information is shared with employees that could be spread to rivals, and if business is bad, could be demoralizing to employees.

So what is OBM and why implement it?

Open-book management is:

Giving employees all relevant financial information about the company so they can make better decisions as workers.  This information includes, but is not limited to, revenue, profit, cost of goods, cash flow and expenses.

The basic rules for Open-Book Management are as follows:

• Give employees training to understand the financial information
• Give employees all relevant financial information
• Give employees responsibility for the numbers under their control.
• Give employees a financial stake in how the company performs.

Companies that practice OBM teach their employees how to read and understand the company’s financials and get them to think like owners.  Not only are employees focused on increasing top line revenue, but decreasing expenses that are under their control, in turn having a more significant impact on the company’s bottom line.  A study done by The National Center for Employee Ownership in 1998 showed that companies that implemented OBM grew 1.66% faster than their competitors, and 2.2% faster if the companies created an employee stock ownership program (ESOP). 

Simply providing your employees with an ESOP will not guarantee increased revenues or profits.  Think of how many companies that have done this with little success such as United Airlines, Enron and WorldCom.  Granted, there were several breakdowns in all of these companies, but most of them operated in the labor tradition where most executives believed their employees disliked their work, were task oriented and couldn’t think for themselves, worked for only pay and security, felt they needed to be closely monitored and told what to do.  In this type of environment it’s an us versus them atmosphere between management and the company’s employees. 

There are four critical steps if you are wanting to implement OBM within your company:

1. Develop trust between management and the company’s employees.  Trust by management that their employees will make sound decisions with the information that is provided to them and trust by employees that their management is providing them with accurate information. 
2. Determine what the critical numbers that need to be measured are, both on a macro and micro level, and create a line-of-sight for what the company is striving for.  This will help employees understand how they individually can impact the organization as a whole. 
3. Eliminate the bureaucracy that can develop within organizations and in turn flatten it as much as possible to allow for employees to be heard, for information to flow more efficiently between management and employees and more importantly, for decisions to be made quickly.
4. Both the company’s management and its employees need to be patient and persistent as improvements will not be seen overnight.  Both sides will also need to be diligent in ensuring that in order for OBM to continue to prosper and succeed, they must keep their commitments to each other in improving the company’s financials and work as a team.   

I’ve had the pleasure of working for a company that implemented OBM, Atlas Container Corporation, and when implemented properly as it was there, it is an amazing thing to see and be a part of.  OBM is not for every company, but in today’s tough marketplace, it is something that, in my opinion, every company should look at.

To learn more about OBM and how it might help your company, please visit the following websites:

http://www.greatgame.com/

http://www.inc.com/guides/finance/23178.html

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, Business Management, business planning, entrepreneur, execution, http://activegarage.com, leaders, Leadership, management, open-book management, Robert Driscoll, sales, Strategy, www.activegarage.com

I have bad news for anyone who does product demos over the web: No one wants to see them. Seriously. Once you realize that it will be much easier to sell your software.

To clarify: They might have signed up for a demo OR they might have clicked a box on your website asking you to please schedule them for one OR they might have even agreed to watch it to learn what you’ve got, but they probably “want” to see it like you “want” to go to the bank on a long-weekend Friday. The point is: Yes, it does serve an important function but it’s no one’s idea of fun.

Understanding what customers want in a demo is critical in changing the demos from time-consuming events that are a necessary part of the sales process to a step in a shortened sales cycle that helps customers get on with their lives and makes them glad they met you.

Here are some tips – I apologize for any hurt feelings:

• Customers have only one question on their mind- “Can this thing solve my current business problem?”. If the answer is yes, you’re on your way to a sale, if it’s no, don’t waste their (and your) valuable time. Ask plenty of questions before you start presenting, even if it means you never get to actually demo the product. And don’t take all day getting to the stuff they care about or you’ll lose them.
• Buyers don’t care how cool your technology is This one is a little hard to take, especially since many of us doing demos built the products in question and are quite impressed with it ourselves. The genius of your algorithm or the glory of your GUI means nothing if it doesn’t help the customer in some way: either it helps  them generate more revenue, lower their cost or simply makes their job easier. Lots of us like to show off all the features because it’s “value added”. Since it’s not valuable unless the customer says it really is, in most of the cases it’s really “time added”, and not “value added”.
• Don’t talk like a programmer Odds are that early in the sales cycle the person watching the demo is not as technically adept as you are. They are probably not even IT people – they’re in Finance, or Sales or even HR- whichever group is actually going to use it.  Use a “programmer-to-mortal” dictionary if you have to and use their language not yours.
• They need to know you understand their issues Two things will help put them at ease.
  • Tell success stories that relate to their business. If they’re a small business, don’t just tell them IBM uses your product and loves it (they’ll think you’re too complicated and expensive). Conversely if you’re selling to a big enterprise, don’t just tell them about the little company that uses it (you won’t scale to their needs). Make your success stories relevant to their business.
  • Use their examples. If they are in HR, show them how to do the task they need done. Don’t use a sales example to the IT group. And if they call it a “screen” instead of an “interface”, you can too.

No one signs up for a web demo with a Slurpee ,a  jumbo bag of popcorn and a comfy chair. They want their questions answered, their problem solved and their lives back. You probably have better things to do, too.  Stop treating demos as presentations and more like sales calls and you’ll go a long way in achieving the purpose of the demo!

—
This article is contributed by Wayne Turmel, the founder and president of GreatWebMeetings and the host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show podcast. You can follow him on twitter at @greatwebmeeting.

Tagged as: active garage, buyers, customers, demos, effective demos, Greatwebmeetings, internet, products, programmer, success stories, value, Wayne Turmel, website

Documenting Inventions

by Thomas Frasher, September 14, 2009

In another installment of the series about protecting your intellectual property, Thomas explains the basics of documenting inventions. Some simple things you can do will go a long way and it can be done without breaking the bank! more…

5 Ways to Lose Your Customers and What Not To Do

by Robert Driscoll, September 15, 2009

Too often we talk about how to get more customers. We think about sales and marketing strategies that work best to improve revenue. But too often, it is also not uncommon to forget to do things that will cause you to lose customers. more…

“Reasonable Compensation” for the sole practitioner in Business Valuation

by Steve Popell, September 16 2009

The most frequent approach to valuing a sole practitioner’s private practice is the “Excess Earnings” Method. While the excess earnings method itself is quite straightforward, determining what constitutes reasonable compensation is anything but.  Even “experts” can draw vastly different conclusions on this topic. This post demystifies this question and clarifies the process. more…

Let the Games Begin!

by Deepika Bajaj, September 17, 2009

Gaming is popular on social networks like facebook, myspace and bebo. The intent of gaming and social media is to bring SOCIAL back into the game. Read the article to find out how social networks are integrating with games. more…

Remote is Not as Far as You Think!

by Himanshu Jhamb, September 18, 2009

Technology has made our world really small. But internet technologies can also make you distant! There is a growing trend of companies allowing and encouraging people to work from home. This could be challenging. This article explains the ABCD… of how to be successful in this configuration. more…