Archive for March, 2009

Working with Informal Advisors and Mentors

March 25th, 2009 by Greg Head | Comments Off

Many entrepreneurs and CEOs ask me if they should create a formal Board of Advisors so they can get advice from experienced leaders or well-known figures in their industries.

The most common reason to create a formal advisory board is to allow you to promote the stellar credentials of your advisory team to the world. In return, a well-known advisor will typically get something valuable for their advice and use of their name – stock options are a typical form of payment.

Before you get formal, I recommend that you make the most of individual relationships with informal advisors and mentors. There are plenty of experienced business leaders who will gladly discuss and offer perspective on the big questions of your business without having a formal relationship or even payment.

You should cultivate at least ten trusted advisors and mentors that you can call on occasionally to ask for advice on the big questions in your business. These informal (unpaid) advisors may include successful leaders in your industry, a former boss, coworkers, other CEO’s, parents or friends.

Networking and cultivating these relationships takes work, but experienced advisors can provide valuable perspective and guidance when you need it.

Keys to working with informal advisors:

  • Learn from successful people. You should only ask qualified and capable people to offer advice, not just anyone who has an opinion. Learn from mentors who are successful in their field, capable of understanding your situation and who have offered to help at some time in the past.
  • Share your problems and your personality. Advisors are the most helpful when they know you very well and are familiar with your situation. The more they know about you, the more they can help.
  • Ask for advice. Most experienced businesspeople will respond with gusto if an earnest entrepreneur they know politely asks for their time to offer some advice. “I’m working on a big idea and I would like to run it by you to see what you think, if you have a few minutes for a call or coffee.”
  • Be considerate. Advisors and mentors will continue to provide useful insights if you appreciate the value of their time and show respect for their advice. Pick up the tab for lunch and send a nice thank you note after you meet.
  • Don’t abuse their generosity. An occasional lunch meeting is fine. Calling every week and taking too much time will burn out your network. If you ask an advisor to do actual work for you, then you should start paying them.
  • Take some advice. Not every recommendation should be acted on, but if you ask for advice from qualified people and never take it, you are not learning from the mistakes and experience of others. They will also stop helping you – what’s the point of their effort?

Remember, one of the best things these people offer you is an outside perspective. They are not working all day and all night in your business. You probably lost perspective the moment you got crazy about your business idea long ago.

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Create Websites Using CMS Platforms

March 14th, 2009 by Greg Head | 6 Comments

It used to take considerable expense to create a high-quality company Website, even for small businesses. I just finished a project that confirms that popular and inexpensive Website creation  tools are taking much of the development cost and complexity out of building Websites. This is clearly the way that Website creation is going for Websites of all sizes.

school_website_screen

I created an entire Website with a CMS

Take a look at the new Website I built for the school that my children attend. This was a project I volunteered for a few months ago. The previous Website was outdated, incomplete and difficult to update (so difficult that there wasn’t much updating). They really needed a useful new site and I had a little experience with Websites, so I took it on. I started working on it at night and on weekends. Four months and a chunk of my spare time later, the new site was turned on this week.

Total Cash Cost to Build the Site – $350

Using popular tools, I spent a lot less for a much better result than I was expecting. Here’s an honest accounting of the expenses:

  • $5 for a domain name I used while working on the site
  • $25 for the cool homepage slideshow software
  • $40 for a nice pre-built Website template design from Joomlashack
  • $15 for several coffees for my web developer friend who contributed a few hours of light technical assistance
  • $250 for a graphic designer to improve the images in the site template
  • My time? Well, that was priceless (meaning “free”). It was truly about 120 hours of my time for research, meetings and emails, writing, editing and reviewing.

Not including my time, this site cost less than $350 to build. It could have cost $100, but I splurged on graphic design help to improve the template with better pictures and colors. Custom Websites like this cost between $5,000-$10,000 for the programmer or designer’s time, but now they can be built with free Web-based tools that we non-programmers can use ourselves. That’s a big deal.

Web Content Management Systems = Website Creation Platforms

The free, web-based software I used to make the school Website is called Joomla. It is one of the popular Website creation tools known as Web Content Management Systems (CMS). Joomla is a free open-source Web CMS that is ideal for smaller Websites, but there are here are hundreds of CMS tools for any size project. The most popular CMS for blogs is called WordPress (it’s the one I use to create this New Avenue Website). There are more powerful CMS tools, like Drupal, that allow easy content editing for big, custom sites. All these CMS tools allow non-technical people to create, edit and manage content on their Website almost as easily as editing in their word processor.

Joomla, WordPress and other popular Web CMS tools each have large active communities of developers and users who add value to the base software. For Joomla, there are many additional resources available to provide tools or assistance:

  • Hundreds of useful software plug-ins called Joomla Extensions that allow you to add features to the base system
  • Thousands of third-party Joomla Templates that are complete, pre-built Website designs for free or under $50
  • Millions of posts in the Joomla support forum where every question imaginable has been asked an answered by other users

Joomla uses standard Web technologies, so any Web developer can adjust, improve and extend anything in the Joomla system. The combination of the software, the active community of users, and all the add-on features and templates makes it a “platform” for building Websites — not just a single application from a sole vendor.

You may be thinking that free open-source software platforms aren’t ready to run “real” Websites for serious companies, but these systems can do the job quite well and already are used by thousands of companies. I have been in the software business for 20 years and I am impressed with this software: Joomla never crashed, it had all the features I needed in the base software or as add-on extensions, and every support question I had was answered by quickly searching in the support forum. What more could you want?

The more people use these tools, the better the platform gets. The blog revolution has been powered by these easy-to-use tools. The same revolution is coming to the creation of larger Websites.

Now You Can Do It

Web CMS tools are capable and cheap, but that’s not even the most exciting part of the story. The big news is that now regular people can create high-quality Websites without the expense and frustrations of using Web programmers to create custom Websites. We are free at last!

Web CMS tools allow you to add new Web pages, edit the text and images on a page, add new menu items, move things around and manage other site options. This means the Website can advance quickly since we can easily create new and useful content for our audience. To show you what it looks like to work in a Web CMS, below are pictures of the WordPress screen for this blog post and the Joomla screen for one of the school pages.

wordpress_screen_shot1

WordPress Screen - click to enlarge

joomla_screen_shot1

Joomla Screen - click to enlarge

All big revolutions in software occur when new tools enable the individual to create something incredible all by themselves. From the early days of spreadsheets and desktop publishing software, to today’s web search, YouTube and blogs, the world changes when everyone can do it, not just big companies with deep pockets. This is what is happening at last to the creation of larger Websites.

The Hard Part of Creating Websites

What’s the bad news here? Well, the technical side may be easier than ever, but it’s still up to actual people to create the content, organize the information, design the look and feel, and make it all useful. The brainpower and time is the hard part. It always has been. My technical buddy installed Joomla and the pre-built template in 15 minutes.  I spent 120 hours on the rest of the site, and I’m a quick learner of software tools.

The technology is not the problem. As Pogo said in the popular old-time cartoon, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Here’s a rough estimate of how I spent my time to build the site.

  • Strategy and Planning (10 hours) – reviewing other sites, planning, tracking tasks
  • Research (10 hours) – exploring and investigating to find useful tools and tips
  • Meetings and Emails (15 hours) – planning with  school staff, requesting information
  • Website Setup (20 hours) – creating menus, configuring options, adding features
  • Writing Web Pages (60 hours) – writing the actual pages (each page took between 30 minutes and 2 hours to create), getting feedback from others, revising and proofreading
  • Adding Pictures (5 hours) – reviewing and resizing pictures, making slideshows

If I had to do it again, I would use the same tools and I could do it in about 75% of the time, taking out the time to research and figure things out for the first time. If you divide the time between a few people, it would be very manageable for most schools or businesses.

Now the school has a useful Website that provides complete information to parents and students, connects our active school community with pictures and news, and attracts new students and donations.

The best part? Students, parents, and teachers  are asking for useful improvements and new capabilities for the site, all of which are pretty easy to build. The school Website will be twice as good next year — powered by the people.

6 Comments POSTED in Marketing Tactics that Work

Tech Innovation at DEMO 2009

March 5th, 2009 by Greg Head | 2 Comments

Twice a year, the DEMO conference showcases promising new startup technology companies to press luminaries, venture capitalists and industry influencers. Many companies that are now big and well-known were launched at past DEMO events.

I asked someone who was at the conference this week to summarize the  trends and highlight cool companies. Aly Saxe of Ubiquity Public relations is one of the best startup tech PR consultants I know. Ubiquity regularly launches startups at DEMO. Here are her thoughts on the this week’s event:

Update from DEMO 2009 from Aly Saxe
At DEMO 2009, innovation is alive and well, but it’s coming more in a trickle than steady stream. Usually a theme emerges from each DEMO event. Last year, it was “freemium apps,” before that picture sharing technology, before that enterprise security. This year it’s a little cloudier – literally.

The big theme is that all of these new applications designed to make our lives/work easier now live in “the cloud,” not on our desktops. For those who are a little “foggy” on cloud computing, it simply means that the software that resides on a vast server farm somewhere, not on your computer, and is accessed via the Internet.

While this year’s roster of presenting companies feels considerably lighter than previous years (only 39 companies compared to 68 last year), there are still some noteworthy startups to mention. Here are the companies/products I thought were the coolest and have the most potential to be successful:

Always Innovating – This company’s small Touch Book tablet computer lets you email, browse sites, play games, and watch videos from anywhere – just like with your iPhone or netbook (tiny laptop). The cool differences are that the Touch Book is extremely light (less than 2 lbs), the touch screen can be taken off completely, and the technology is based on open source software and hardware. You can even mount it on your refrigerator as a magnet.

Asourion Mobile Address Book – This is a very cool app for iPhone users. You can link contacts in your address book directly to Flickr photo sets, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of those listed in your contacts. The company will also release an API that allows developers to link additional social networks to the contact lists. See your friends and colleagues social pages instantly, anywhere, anytime, right from your address book.

Skout – The last time I went to a bar and experienced a cheesy pick up, Clinton was president and “ladies night” meant $1 beers. I’m not in their target market, but Skout Out got my attention. They have developed a fun way to use technology to make money off of drunk singles. (There are worse business models.)

Here’s Skout’s self-described product description: “Skout Out is a dating tool that helps singles find and flirt with others in their immediate vicinity. Leveraging LBS and 42″ touch-screen plasma displays, people looking for love only need their fingers to flirt, send virtual gifts and even music to the people that dazzle them. Skout Out currently interacts with hundreds of thousands of Skout users via their iPhones, cell phones and laptops to find love on Skout’s mobile dating service.”

Not surprisingly, VCs say investing is still happening but they’re being more cautious. Also, Chris Shipley, the long time executive director of DEMO, is exiting this year. For those of us who have been attending DEMO for years and gotten to know this incredibly kind, dedicated and insightful person, it’s a sad departure.

The overall tone of DEMO this year is reflective of a lackluster time. Everyone is trying to keep it going – we’re staying optimistic and we’re going for it. But compared to shows in earlier years, DEMO 2009 has the gusto of a light breeze on a mid-July day in Phoenix.

Aly Saxe
Ubiquity Public Relations
aly@ubiquitypublicrelations.com
(602) 268-6849

2 Comments POSTED in Growth Strategies