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Peri on December 7th, 2011
I’m working on a questionnaire for a local business publication, and one of the questions is what “commonly accepted business wisdom” do I think it’s time to retire. Here’s a draft of my response, which I’m still tinkering with:
Contrary to common opinion, starting a business does not have to be risky, it does not have to consume your life, and it does not have to achieve major profits and growth in order to be successful. Many people have radically upped their quality-of-life quotient by opting out of the 9-to-5 routine and pursuing modest businesses that required very little capital to start, and with few or no employees. When run well, with simple organizational and management systems, these small businesses can be quite lucrative and manageable, even for a solo operator. Yes, there is a tradeoff to running a business with modest growth goals: It is harder to take time off, and long-term profitability will be more limited. But the flexibility that’s afforded by micro-businesses is of huge value to many people, and many consider this trade-off well worth it.
What do you think? And what conventional business wisdom do you think is outdated or just plain wrong? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts!
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Peri on October 5th, 2011
Ten years ago today I parted ways with the last job I’ve ever held as an employee. Since then I’ve juggled a crazy mix of clients and projects (a mix that happily has grown much more focused over the years); written three books; got married to my best friend; had two insanely awesome kids; escaped the big city for the magic of the desert; traveled as much as I could afford; played more music and finally joined a band; oh, and so much other stuff it’s all just a lovely cacophonous blur. I would write something more meaningful about it all but instead I’m going to finish up a playlist of kickin’ tunes, whip up some dip and chips and have a dance party tonight. Whee! I suggest you do the same. Find something to celebrate — c’mon, it’s Wednesday!
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Peri on October 4th, 2011
Here’s Part 2 of my interview with Leila Johnson, co-owner of DataScribe, about the challenges of integrating and using technology within a small business. Please enjoy.
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Peri on September 30th, 2011
My mind has been working overtime lately on the difficulties many entrepreneurs have with using various types of technology in their businesses, from implementing (and using) bookkeeping software to figuring out what types of databases or other applications to use such as project management software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, or point of sale (POS) systems. I thought it would be a swell idea to talk with my friend and fellow entrepreneur Leila Johnson, who with her husband Brett Johnson owns DataScribe, a Web technology and communications firm. Even more swell, we recorded our chat on video (thanks Turtle!) and Part 1 is available up above (I’ll post Part 2 in a couple days).
One reason I’ve had technology on the brain is that I have a coaching client who has been struggling mightily for many months with a fundamental task every business owner needs to tackle: implementing a bookkeeping system, which generally means installing bookkeeping software, setting it up (creating accounts and expense categories, e.g.), and entering income and expenses into the system. (Check out a piece on financial management I wrote for Entrepreneur.com last fall.)
Read more…
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Peri on September 4th, 2011
OK, I haven’t actually run any actual numbers on this. But in reading (again) about the imminent demise of the US Postal Service, I had some thoughts on how this quasi-public business maybe could work:
First and foremost, totally jack up the price for sending paper mail — to, say, $1.25 per standard item and up. Hell, why not $2? Doesn’t it seem amazing to you that you can have an actual, physical envelope delivered to a specific doorway, in many cases overnight, for only $0.44? I have no idea what the real price point is for the USPS for performing each standard mail delivery, but I have to think that it’s way more than $0.44. I say: Just price standard mail to cover costs plus a healthy profit margin, let the market shrink to what it will, and then continue on as the reshaped-yet-still-publicly-supported mail system. Raise the prices for packages too, but really just let paper mail prices spike high.
C’mon, we all know it: Most paper mail contains information that can be transmitted electronically. Why shouldn’t paper mail be an essentially premium service, something used mostly by people with money — in fact often used to send money-related documents with sensitive financial information? (Of course even these will likely be mostly transmitted electronically eventually.) I for one would love to get less paper mail, and I know many of the earth’s forests would probably second my vote. Read more…
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Peri on June 21st, 2011
Work and family have eclipsed blogging (again). But I do have a new piece up on the Huffington Post about getting over your fear and loathing of building simple business systems. Here’s an excerpt:
It can seem like such an insurmountable burden to develop business systems, operational policies and procedures — including finalizing them in writing, which is an essential step — but the thing is, you don’t need to do this for every single aspect of your business. Here are some quick tips about how to tackle a little system-building without feeling overwhelmed.
Read the rest at The Huffington Post.
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Peri on April 13th, 2011
As of late I’ve been pretty deep in a geekified wormhole evaluating various solutions and applications for streamlining my life and business organization. In a nutshell, I’m outgrowing my fairly basic systems of to-do lists, calendars, etc. which are spread across various Excel sheets, spiral-bound notebooks and emails to myself. It’s worked for me for a long time, but in these crazy days of always having more to do and less time to do it, it’s just stretching thin. So with some trepidation I have entered the world of productivity and time management applications.
In the past I’ve spent a fair amount of time and resources looking at (and in some cases using) project management software for business projects (Studiometry, Billing, Daylite, Bento, etc.) but I’ve never really checked out productivity or time management apps until now. For various reasons I feel ready to take the leap — but I will say that researching the possible solutions is incredibly time-consuming. Whew!
I’m by no means done, but I did find a cool product that I thought I’d share with you today: TodoMapper. For reasons I’ll describe in a moment it won’t work for me, but I think it has a lot of potential. At a minimum it would be fun to play around with, even if it couldn’t play a major role in organizing my life and business. And maybe it will be developed down the road, so if you’re interested in productivity or mind mapping software, keep an eye on it. If new versions give it even just a few critical features/functions, it could really be great.
Read more…
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Peri on April 11th, 2011
There are so many of these visualization apps these days I can’t really keep up. But I stumbled across Wordle today and came up with the following visual for the words used at this very blog:
Cool!
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Peri on April 4th, 2011
Late last week I saw a post on Facebook about a video circulating online of GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons shooting and killing an elephant in Africa. I didn’t want to watch the video which was described as graphic and disturbing, so I did a quick Google search and found enough articles about it to know the video was legit and the elephant episode did in fact go down. Parsons had already issued a statement to the effect of, “Yes I killed an elephant and knew it would turn into a kerfuffle, but so be it. That’s the kind of guy I am.”
As I dug a little deeper I learned that Parsons is also the kind of guy who likes ogling scantily clad women in his video blog and endorses (or at least apologizes for) torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. Because I like to give credit where credit is due, I’ll give Parsons some points for not backtracking and trying to pretend that the elephant video is anything other than what it is, or that he is anything other than an elephant-killing macho ex-Marine who thinks it’s cool to lure people to his blog with a “smoking hot crazy blond” [sic]. With those points (OK, maybe just 1) duly given, I have to say I was pretty wowed by what an unabashed creep this Parsons is.
Things got really interesting from a PR point of view when the elephant video went viral, PETA announced it was transferring all its domain names from GoDaddy, and numerous businesses and organizations called for a boycott of GoDaddy, the behemoth of domain name registrars. Then Namecheap.com had the brilliant idea to offer a BYEBYEGD promotion, slashing its price per transfer to $4.99 and donating $1 for each transfer to Save the Elephants. Judging from the comments at Namecheap’s Facebook page and other blogs reporting on the elephant fiasco, GoDaddy appears to be bleeding customers by the gallon.
Read more…
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Peri on March 31st, 2011
In honor of its 40th anniversary (“Demystifying the law since 1971″), Nolo is featuring a series of blog posts on how various areas of the law and business have changed in 40 years. My post went up last week; an excerpt and link to the full post is below.
Note: If you’re thinking about becoming self-employed, do yourself a favor and check out Nolo’s website. Not only are their books, software and other products the best DIY business/legal resources available, they also offer tons of free info at Nolo.com. All bias aside I’m a Nolo evangelist because I’m a total geek for quality how-to information.
1971-1941: Small business ownership is within anyone’s reach
My first real experience with a small business start-up was in 1991. I had recently graduated from college and my boyfriend at the time was starting a weekly newspaper. I helped him out with about two other folks—a key person being our tech guy, who put the whole paper together on a Mac Quadra (if memory serves me right) which had something like 4 MB RAM and 25 MHz processing speed.
The things we could do with this computer were mind-blowing for us. Our ability to format text, manipulate photos and create graphic artwork on the computer made it possible to start an actual newspaper on a shoestring. Just a short 10 or so years prior to that, the equipment, specialized labor and time necessary to start a publication of any sort would have required major start-up capital and significantly more risk. In the 1980s and 1990s, technology was having the same effect in an increasing number of businesses, fields and industries—and within a short decade or so, every industry and business had been radically transformed by technology.
Read the full post at Nolo’s blog.
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