Posted by Kyle on 24th, 2008
If you’re considering starting a new web business, or, in my case, purchasing an existing one, you’re going to want to do a little research first. Buying an existing site (either the domain name or the business that goes with it) is an investment you don’t want to just jump into. A site may seem to have a lot of value, when it turns out it’s crap. Or it may turn out that the idea is good but there’s just no market for it right now. So how do you figure out what a site is worth? Full Story →
Posted by Kyle on 23rd, 2008
Let me start with a little background info. My family has been vacationing in Eagle River, Wisconsin for four generations, since roughly the time of the Great Depression. It’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been (sorry Florida, Switzerland, New York City, it’s true), and if I ever get around to having kids I’ll be bringing a fifth generation up there with me. We do a lot of boating and skiing in the summer and recently started snowmobiling there in the winter (it’s the snowmobile capital of the world… true story).
It was through snowmobiling that I first stumbled across SnowConditions, a site that tracked the conditions of snowmobile trails in Eagle River, provided trail maps and had a few webcams. It also happened that the site was for sale. I thought it could be a fun hobby and would give me an excuse to snowmobile and write it off as a business expense (note to the IRS: just kidding… sorta). Someone’s gotta report the conditions of the trails, right?
To Buy or Not to Buy
I started doing a little research and decided the site might be worth more than just a hobby after all. The domain name was a good one, and I had been reading more and more about flipping websites for serious profits and snowconditions.com seemed like a good place to give this concept a try.
I’ve never been one to rush into things, and I’m definitely not one to throw my money around. I decided to take it slow, develop a plan, research the market, the competition, and set some goals. If I felt, after all the research, that I could make a good return on my money (without it consuming my life), I’d buy the site.
Building a Business
After doing the research, I decided the site was worth buying and moved on to negotiating a price and a contract.I started to draw up the makings of a business plan, a marketing plan, and various other plans.
At the same time I started thinking about the design: logo, website, business cards, and whatever else I thought I might need. With an internet business (or any business, really), particularly in marketing, you’re sellilng an image. If your image sucks, so will your sales.
There will be plenty more to come as I get deeper into this venture, so this is just the introduction to the Building a Web Business series. Here’s what’s coming up (links to these posts will be added as they’re completed:
- Researching the Business (How to Tell If a Business is Worth Buying)
- Developing a Plan (Deciding What Exactly You’re Doing)
- Designing Your Business (Looking Legit Even if You Don’t Feel Legit Yet)
- Marketing Your Site (Telling the World What You’re Doing)
A quick disclaimer: I don’t consider myself an expert on any of these topics. I’m just describing everything I do as it happens, and sharing the advice and resources I come across in the process. I’ll share the opinions of actual experts as I come across them. Then, if I make a boatload of money, I’ll call myself an expert and charge you for my advice. Until then, we’ll just have to wait and see…
To follow this series as it unfolds, why not subscribe to this blog? It’s quick and almost totally painless.
Posted by Kyle on 1st, 2008
As you may have noticed, this blog has been pretty dormant the last couple of weeks. That’s because I have been working on a new project and considering a new direction for this blog.
When I started this site a few months ago, I had a pretty well-defined plan: I would write about whatever topic in the business field caught my interest that day, millions of readers would subscribe and advertisers would throw heaps of money at me. So far none of those things has gone according to plan. The site has lacked focus, and sometimes for a week or two at a time I would find very little of interest to write about. That wasn’t helping anyone.
The New Plan - A Case Study
As I mentioned, I’ve been researching a new venture, and pending approval, will be launching it within two weeks. This venture will involve taking an existing, very under-utilized website, and building a business around it from the ground up. I intend to focus most of my posts over the next few months on the process of overcoming the problems a web-based small business must face, including:
- Market Research
- Logo and Corporate Identity Design
- Website Design
- Marketing and Sales
- Developing Good Content
- Search Engine Optimization
As this venture progresses, I’ll discuss my experiences, the sources I use in my research, the advice I’m given, and the barriers I (hopefully) overcome.
Check back over the course of the next week for updates…
Posted by Kyle on 7th, 2008
Wasting My Time
Last weekend I had the pleasure of traveling to the San Francisco area to work with a few clients. I absolutely love that part of the country, but getting there and back from Chicago is a real pain. Very few carriers seem to offer direct flights, so I always seem to get stuck in LA or San Diego with a layover. This time, I flew Frontier Airlines, so I had to pass through Denver. We had 30-40 minute delays going both ways, which no one bothered to explain or justify.
Ordinarily getting by with just a 40 minute delay would be a blessing. Not so when you only have 30 minutes to make a connecting flight. The connecting flight, of course, left on time. Without me. So I found myself at the Denver airport at 9:30 Friday night not sure how I’d be getting home. I was also scheduled to leave for vacation at 8:00 the next morning. From Chicago.
After confirming that I had missed my connection, the gate rep referred me to the Frontier customer service counter, which had a line of 20 other angry looking travelers waiting in front of me. I decided to try to book another flight through their 800 number while I was waiting in line. Fifteen minutes later I spoke with a rep on the phone who informed me that rescheduling a missed flight (regardless of fault) by phone carried a $100 surcharge. I promptly hung up on her and decided to wait it out in line.
Making Up for the Inconvenience
Frontier knew they had screwed up and had seriously inconvenienced those of us trying to make tight connecting flights. They probably also knew that first-time Frontier flyers (like myself) may be inclined to fly with another company in the future.
so what does Frontier think its customers’ time is worth?
- A free hotel room for the night at the Crystal Inn (one of the nicer hotels I’ve stayed in - I kept the Bath & Body Works soaps and shampoos…)
- A $9 meal voucher for dinner that night
- A $5 meal voucher for breakfast in the morning
- A $150 flight voucher to be used toward future flights
- A sincere apology from the service rep who booked my 6:00 flight to Chicago the next morning
Was I still mad? Sure. It set my vacation back by about four hours, I was only able to get 3 hours of sleep that night, and I was cranky as hell all day. But will I fly Frontier again? Yes. Once more at least, since I’ve got a $150 voucher to use. But if they screw me over on the next trip, that’s it for me.
A Lesson in All This
Airlines are particularly good at calculating the value of customers’ time. The 25 minute delay of that flight cost them over $200 for each customer that missed a connecting flight - and there were dozens of us. They could have simply said “sorry about that” and sent us on our way, but the effects of that approach would have cost them far more than $200 per person in the long run (see my post on customer lifetime value). They’d rather pay to make it up to you and hope you come back and have a better experience next time.
This is a lesson airlines have learned better than many other businesses: if you inconvenience your customer or your product or service doesn’t meet their expectations, you’d better find a way to make it up to them. How you do that depends on how badly you screwed up and how much you value your client’s business. At the very least, you have to set things right and fix whatever went wrong. And for god’s sake, apologize, and mean it! If that’s still not enough, offer a free product or service upgrade that will convince your customer that you’re worth continuing to do business with after all.
It’s a whole lot cheaper to keep an existing customer (even a disgruntled one) than it is to find a new one. Keep yours happy.
Posted by Kyle on 28th, 2008
I was just reading a post on IttyBiz about those days where, for whatever reason, you just don’t want to deal with the customer. Maybe you didn’t get much sleep the night before, or maybe one of your customers just rubs you the wrong way. Whatever the reason, sometimes we all slip and forget who’s paying our bills.
I’ve certainly been there.
What Was I Thinking?
I was working with a client to put some of their company training online. After I had finished the project, I got a call from my client, which went something like this:
Client: “I was reviewing the training and found typos and errors on these five pages.”
Me: “Okay, well we can fix that. It’ll probably cost about $X to get it taken care of.”
Client: “You’re charging us to fix your typos?”
Me: “No, I’m charging to fix your typos. What you see online is copied and pasted directly from what you provided us. We don’t proofread your content - that’s up to you. If you want us to proofread your work, that would cost $X.”
I never heard from him again. As far as I know, their training content remains unchanged, typos and all. When I think back on that conversation now, several years later, I think “Wow, what a colossally stupid thing to say.” I was busy. I had other projects to worry about. Bigger clients. Bigger problems. SO WHAT? This is someone who had come to me and said “I need to do this, and I’m willing to pay you to do it.” Even if they’re not a top priority, I should treat them like one.
If I Could Travel Back In Time…
What I should have done is pretty clear. It would have taken me (at most) 30 minutes to make the requested changes. I should have told my client I’d be happy to make those changes, free of charge, but informed my client that, for future reference, it is our policy to take content and put it online exactly as it is submitted to us.
In fact, even before that I should have run a basic spelling and grammar check on the entire document. Then I should have informed my client that I made these 10 changes (free of charge) and wanted to verify that they were in fact errors that needed to be fixed. That would have allowed me to subtly show my client that I’ve got his best interests in mind. A little goodwill goes a long way. Since then, this has become our standard policy.
As a business owner sometimes you have to step back and remind yourself that it’s not about you, what you think, what makes your life easier. You have to look at every part of your operation and say “Is this in my best interest, or the customer’s?” Ideally, it will be both, but when a conflict arises, your operations need to favor the customer.
Ever had a day like this, where your frustration spilled over onto a customer? How’d you make it right? Or was the damage already done?
Posted by Kyle on 20th, 2008
I’ve been reading Carl Sewell’s Customers for Life, which focuses on the value of a customer over the course of a lifetime. Sewell runs a chain of car dealerships in the southwest. His philosophy is that you can either sell a customer a Lexus for $40,000, or you can go out of your way to completely satisfy that customer, ensuring that he’ll keep coming back to you in the future. Sewell has calculated that the average customer for life is worth over $500,000, more than 10 times the value of any single, one-time customer (in some industries, customer lifetime value can be closer to 1000 times a single purchase price). Full Story →
Posted by Kyle on 10th, 2008
Adobe Delivers
If you haven’t heard about this yet, it’s worth checking out… Adobe has released a “cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash®, and Flex technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop” (more info). In other words, web developers can use the same web tools like Dreamweaver and Flash to develop feature-rich desktop applications.
Full Story →
Posted by Kyle on 7th, 2008
The Kaizen Concept
The Japanese term “Kaizen,” which translates as “Improvement,” is part business management system and part deeply-rooted philosophy in Japanese culture. Popularized by Toyota, Kaizen stresses that continuous, incremental improvement is at least as critical for a business as periodic, large-scale innovation. Full Story →
Posted by Kyle on 29th, 2008
Organizing your Time: The Problem
I was working with a client recently who was having some problems synchronizing schedules internally. My client is a small consulting company with about ten employees who evaluate EPA and OSHA compliance for their clients.
Employees of this company regularly travel to visit with clients nationwide, and each employee tracked his or her own travel schedule individually using Outlook’s calendar. As a result, any time the company needed to schedule something that required the attendence of all employees, they had to ask each employee for a list of dates that would work. Full Story →
Posted by Kyle on 20th, 2008
I just saw Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness for the second time this week, and I had forgotten what a powerful movie it was. Or maybe I just wasn’t in a position to truly appreciate it when it first came out. It’s like studying Shakespeare in high school: at the age of fourteen you can’t even begin to appreciate the language or relate to the feelings in his plays (years later, that hasn’t improved much). But with time comes perspective, and I saw this movie in a completely different light.
Hey. Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something. Not even me. All right? You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period. - Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness
Full Story →
