Too Many Friends

I’m almost afraid to open Facebook now because there is just too much awesome there. Despite my best efforts to keep Facebook strictly for social applications outside of business, I’ve friended many of my business contacts and that’s where I need to go for their updates. Unfortunately, many of my friends are profoundly cool and always have something interesting to share. If I start in on reading the updates, the odds of my getting sidetracked from whatever I am supposed to be doing by some interesting news or bright shiny object proffered by my friends approaches 100%. So while I have activated my social and professional network on Facebook and stay abreast of their news and my industry, the way it is set up conspires against my making it productive.

LinkedIn is no better. Of my almost 400 contacts, my relationships with about 300 of them are totally irrelevant to my business. There are maybe 50 contacts of whom I have virtually no recollection whatsoever. They might have been a sales rep for a company I was considering doing business with or someone I met one time at a trade show. So while I know a fair amount of people on LinkedIn, many with fairly responsible positions in the industries in which I work, I am still bombarded with questionably relevant updates, events, questions, and invitations pleading for my attention, demanding an extraordinary amount of sorting, prioritizing and weighing to make sense or derive value from.

I know its old school, but I believe the premise of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and countless other commonsensical business books . You have give real, quality time and attention to the people in your network to develop business. If I apply those lesson to today’s social networks, I find myself needing to focus on the contacts closest to me. Close, meaning I could call them up out of the blue just as easily as sending an email. Close, meaning that they like me, respect me, and would likely help me if I asked. Secondly, I’d like to focus on contacts that are relevant to my business. Relevant, meaning that they could influence, recommend, specify or purchase what I am selling or put me in touch with someone who could. When I apply these filters to my contact list, I find that there are mighty few people in that close and relevant category. That may be why growing my former consulting business by gathering relationships in and participating with social networks proved so challenging.

Looking forward, I can only see my Facebook and LinkedIn update stream of posts, events, and links getting larger and more peripheral to my business. If I am to harness the power of social media to make my business network a real generator of new business, I need an application that will sort, classify, analyze and prioritize my contacts on the axes of closeness and relevance and allow me to engage them in the context of that relationship and in support of getting more of them into the close and relevant productive zone. Perhaps that will help me navigate my way around those bright shiny objects that my friends throw up to distract me. You may have guessed by now that that may be one of the features of the application on which we are working.

Sabin

Mailbox Full

Ajay Kulkarni has an excellent post in Techcrunch which showcases some email apps that help deal with irritations like bacn and bring social data into the mailbox. I took a look at every one of them because making my mailbox work for me has always been a challenge.

“Can you increase my email account size limit?” At about every job I ever had, I have needed to make this request of the IT administrator, usually sooner rather than later. The 1 or 2 GB limit is easily breached by a few dozen emails containing a creative package from a designer or a weeks worth of furious PDF back and forwarding. I always felt a bit sheepish about making these request, and the unsympathetic responses of IT administrators never helps. They are generally solicitous with helpful suggestions along the lines of deleting old mail, using folders, auto archiving... All great ideas outside of the fact that I use my collected emails as a kind of universal business database. They constitute my task manager, CRM system, project management system, and time tracker. Perhaps most importantly, they act as a notary/recorder that tracks and confirms delivery of important communications and keeps an exact copy of what was sent to whom and when. The entire database has to be available for search, usually with several years’ worth of data, for this to work. Clearly this is not what my Outlook application is designed to do. I’ve been using it in a profoundly wrong way for a very long time. Feeling like a Luddite. What’s more aggravating is that my co-workers never seem to run into this problem. My assessment there is that they aren’t dealing with the file sizes associated with creative work.

Recently I have been talking to a lot of service professionals: architects, producers, management consultants and so on. I’ve asked each of them about how they use their email systems and have been surprised to find that many of them are doing what I do and grappling with what I grapple with on a daily basis. Most daydream about efficiencies gained by filing their communications into folders, or using the task and calendar functions more consistently. Most also need some kind of project management tool and an accounting tool to help organize their communications.

Gmail has taken away some of the pain with its faster and more comprehensive search and larger inbox size limits. With 25GB, I don’t have to worry about headroom but this reprieve has given me the bandwidth to take a fresh look at how I use email and think of ways to improve the process. What if the email, chat, SMS or Skype communication was the atom in project management and not the task? In every project, each task is concluded with a communication of some kind. A piece of code is checked into the repository, and you notify the collaborators. A comp of the brochure is finalized and the file is sent by email to the client. If every significant task ends with a communication, the right time to categorizes and file that communication is at that mini milestone rather than later in a housekeeping session. I can imagine an email interface where, when I hit the send button on an email, the application looks at the content, recipient and attachment and prompts me to do all the housekeeping tasks that I rely on to organize my projects. If the name of the file attached matched a client or job name in QuickBooks or Basecamp, the application would ask whether I wanted to update the time tracking or milestone progress on those records. Rather than having to rely on unlikely diligence around my work habits to consistently initiate communications within a project management application or fill out time tracking and billing information after the fact, this dreamy yet hypothetical application would be able to intelligently associate the communications with the appropriate accounts and prompt me for confirmation and amendment.

Notes From A Small Island

My business sometimes feels like a small island. I occupy it, pretty much, alone and gather what I need to sustain myself by cultivating its opportunities with the time I have available. When things go well I get exciting projects and I find myself fully absorbed in a different business. It’s like leaving my own island and pitching a tent on somebody else’s and there in lies the problem.

My most recent opportunity is with Naumu. I am working on their brand identity and messaging as they hurtle towards the exciting, January launch of their beta offering.Naumu is building a place where people, like me, with small businesses can stay active in business development and lead generation while focusing on serving current clients. The are addressing the major frustration and the highs and lows of delivering creative services and finding yourself pulled of track towards your own long term goals because of the need to become so absorbed in your clients vision. I am looking forward to having the ability to consistently activate my existing networks and connections so that I can plan my work and see further down the line towards the kind of growth that I want for my company. Just thinking about that makes me feel like possibilities will open up while I continue to do what I love and what I am best at.

Sara

What is a Small Business?

I need to know because we are designing a tool to help small consulting businesses connect with prospects and grow. You might ask the experts at the Small Business Administration. The SBA is the sole government standard setter regarding how big a business can be and still be considered small. Government size standards have settled on $7.0 Million in Revenue and 500 employees being the upper limit for most industries. Specific industries, however, like Pipeline Transportation and Ammunition Manufacturing can have up to 1500 employees and $34.5 Million in revenues respectively. How is a business with 1500 employees and $34.5 million in revenues “small” by any stretch of the imagination? Clearly some political horse-trading around government concessions for tax, loan and grant qualifications went into those definitions.

For a startup business focused on the small business market like Naumu, the SBA definitions aren’t very helpful. When I think of small business I think of a small design studio in coastal city creating websites. I think the Australian TV comedy “Very Small Business” got the characterization down almost exactly right with its eponymous “Worldwide Business Group” consisting of just one man publishing a portfolio of magazines until he hires his first and only employee.

We need to clearly focus on a discreet set of US firms which share similar challenges and opportunities, business processes, and needs. Although it would be great to be able to say, “We’re building our tool for small businesses.” The target is so large and diverse as to be pretty much meaningless. Ditching the SBA definitions in favor of stricter criteria of our own devising gives us a definition of “small business” that better jibes with our internal picture of the archetypical vision of small business for whom we are designing the tool. The kinds of things that are standing out for us as useful criteria are: number of employees, how firms bill their clients, and whether they sell goods vs. services. When we apply these filters to the Census data of firms in the US, a startlingly clear set of businesses emerges. This set of businesses looks a whole lot like the Richard Florida’s “creative class”, or rather that part of it which decided to go into business for themselves.

Sabin