Is Your Business Website Missing the Boat on Smartphones?

Even a casual survey of small business websites reveals the painful fact that many, if not most, are still not mobile friendly. Websites appear that require extensive finger gymnastics to uncover basic information, where is the business located, what are its hours, what kind of services does it offer. Continue reading

Who Says Content Is Not Still King on the Web?

“Content is King!”

This phrase, now seemingly completely worn out in the ever newer world of Web 2.0 going on Web X.0, is really still true. Now, in the world of increasingly flashy Web production values, it is time to resurrect this slogan and put it into action in your business. This is especially important for small business people who cannot afford the “finer things” on the Web. Time to take a look again at your value to your customer niche and bring back content, real, genuine, authentic in all its quirkiness, your content.

Jessica Beinecke - OMG!Here is an example of a young woman, Jessica Beinecke,  teaching idiomatic English to learners of English in China. She is now reaching millions of people. And, she is doing this with no other production equipment than a laptop computer and some lights.

Why is she so successful? Watch.

‘OMG!’ Exports American Slang to China – from The News Hour – Friday 02/10/2012

and here is her lesson for Valentine’s Day.

Bad Things Do Happen – Are You Prepared?

Do You Have Insurance?

How many times have I asked clients, “Do you have insurance on your business assets? Do you have liability insurance? Key person insurance?” For many small business people these questions are a combination of absurd and uncomfortable. Frequently I am brushed off with, “I can’t afford that.”

Can You Afford This? Continue reading

Podcast – Seven Reasons to Add a CFO – part-time or full – to Your Team

7 Reasons why you need to add a part-time CFO to your business team


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This podcast is 7 minutes 20 seconds long

Seven Reasons to Add a CFO – part-time or full – to Your Team

Many small businesses operate with only a bookkeeper and CPA to manage the finances. The owner or GM fills in, or at least think that they fill in,  for all of the duties of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO). As a result owners of these businesses frequently have inadequate financial information to effectively move ahead. And, they are frequently using scarce resources (their time) performing tasks far better done by a professional, experienced hand.

In this time of readily available outsourced or part-time professionals there are very few worthwhile reasons not to have your own CFO. Depending on your size, your CFO might appear once a month or several days a week.

So, let me list a few reasons for you to find a part-time CFO. Continue reading

Microsoft Goes Crazy – the Office Live Small Business tools

Yesterday’s New York Times contained an article by David Pogue, “Mom and Pop Get a Partner: Microsoft”, that announces a whole new suite of services for small businesses from Microsoft. And they are all virtually free. You can set up a website in minutes, purchase your own domain name for free for the first year, get email, use collaborative tools including calendaring, project management, shared documents and more. All of this come with some pretty powerful user access controls so that you can set up teams to collaborate internally or include your customers and everyone sees and changes only what they are supposed.

I would say that anyone in a startup or small business who does not already have a website and these other tools should immediately click on over to Microsoft’s OfficeLive site and check this out. This will require some real work to take advantage of all of the tools available here, but it is not often that such a comprehensive suite is available essentially for free.

If you add a few web-based applications for writing, number crunching, and presentations, clearly we are approaching the new world of cloud computing more rapidly than I had thought. I regularly use  Buzzword for my writing. Others may like the suites of tools at Google or Zoho, for example.