Essential tools of Business - The short version

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     I am clearly a little bit of a tech geek.  My entire business life is wrapped around helping people find a way to manage and use technology well.   I find there are lots of tech tools an EBOS (Executive, Business Owner or Salesperson) should never be without and even more they should never be allowed to have.  Many of these tools are free, or relatively inexpensive.  Some things are really clear and obvious such as a car or truck depending on the business you're in.  In the book The Millionaire Next Door , Ford F150s were listed as the most common vehicle of the millionaire class.  Since I've been driving an F150 for almost 15 years now, this one is obvious to me.

     The first F150 was a crew cab, three door 2 Wheel drive, typical contractor white.  My current F150 is a super crew with a carpeted bed and shell.  It is a “Lariat” edition fully loaded leather, six disc CD changer, overall a pretty nice truck.  As I read the book the millionaire next door, the F150 just seemed like the obvious choice and I kind of found a strange that it even made the book.  By the time I finished the book, I realized the whole point was not to teach me or other small-business owners, rather is was to teach people that wanted to become small-business owners.

Remember your customers.

As Valentines Day quickly approaches, I realize I missed a few days last year like Fathers Day. I though it would be a good time to remind ourselves that besides saying I Love You to our significant others on Valentines Day and Thank You to our Dads on the third Sunday in June, we also needed to remember to thank our customers.

In today's economic climate, many people are cutting back on sales gifts and thank you cards as a cost saving measure. This is the wrong place to start cutting costs. Our customers are the people that pay us and therefore feed us. We need to remember them, and remember to thank them for their support and business.

May The Best Car Win.

If you have been watching anything on the news, you know that Chrysler and GM are still in deep trouble.  Ford has been buoyed by the fact that they didn't take any government money and they picked a great CEO.  A comment that I didn't think made sense during the congressional hearings came from a GM exec that is no longer at GM because President Obama had him removed.  He said something to the effect of “Our problem isn't that we don't build good cars, it is that we build cars to good.”

Customer Service on the Web, Be clear and easy.

While on the face of it customer service on the web may seem like a ridiculous concept.  If you think about it from a different perspective you might realize just how important customer service over the web is.  Just like an automated sales force, your web presence represents your company.  Much like direct selling, one slip up and there are 30 more vendors in line waiting for your customer.

Even ultra high end retailers like Tiffany’s have at least a dozen strong web competitors.  I bring up Tiffany’s for many reasons.  Years ago a friend gave me some great advice saying “You can’t go wrong with a blue box” when I asked what I should get my wife for her birthday.  How right she has been.  While overseas on an extended military tour, my wife had all the burdens of our business, home, pets and all the other things that we take for granted in our lives.  I decided for our anniversary to surprise her with a small grouping of gifts.

Want to get organized? Start with your keys.

Getting organized is one of the most difficult tasks to get started and easiest to finish.  Our ability to organize and maintain organization is a key component in maintaining high-performance productivity.  It only takes one minute to put your keys in the same place everyday.  If you misplace your keys and spend 20 minutes finding them just once a week, you are 13 minutes ahead every week.

Think about saving 13 minutes a week just for organizing keys. That is nearly one work week a year spent finding keys.  So let's look at this a different way.  For those of you that lose your keys on a fairly regular basis, just organizing your keys give you a week off from work.  With that week saved you could take a vacation and not lose any of the work or income for an entire year.  Imagine that, a week off every year just because you organized your keys.  Or on the other hand, you could get one week better productivity with 50 work weeks the year, just organizing your keys could increase your income 2%.

Don't hide, ask.

When you aren't happy with a product or a service, what do you do?  Are you a screamer?  Do you yell at the desk clerk for a discount because your room didn't have enough soap?  Do you think the world is full of idiots?  Are you like me and just walk away vowing never to come back?  I have on rare occasion blogged about my issues with other business and only once did I ever hear about it.  Intuit had a rep track me down to help fix my Quickbooks issues.

Are you choosing success today?

This holiday season has been different for everyone.  New home construction in our area has come to an almost standstill in the new economy.  Two years ago, the builders that we worked with were closing a house a week or better, in 2009 it bottomed at one a month with one builder closing his doors and retiring.  Right now we have three new home construction projects on the board for the next two quarters.  Two years ago, that would have been a weeks worth of work on the big board.

How do you call?

Are you still answering a phone with a cord at home or is your cellular your primary means of communications?  We live in the age of the virtual phone.  You can live anywhere in the country and have any area code for your phone number with just a few clicks of the mouse.  In our office we have a mix of everything, my house almost as much.

We use a couple of standard VoIP lines to give us some flexibility in our calls and on our toll free numbers.  We have 4 Skype(tm) numbers connected to a Vosky server, and finally a real copper wired phone line as a back up.  We haven't used it in a year.

Don't Let Flat Be Your New Up.

It seems like you can't open a magazine or newspaper that has a business related topic without seeing “flat is the new up”.  It seems like the catchphrase of the current economy.  The first time I heard it last year I was saddened to think this is the new standard.  Our business grew 8% in an industry that was shrinking over 70%.  How did you do.  

Small Business Accounting Made Easy

Tax time is near and that pile of receipts in your shoe box is only going to fade a little more every day.  Now is the time to use a simple system and get your home and business accounting in order.  You need to clean up that box before April 15th anyway, so as the saying goes, it is time to swallow the big frog first.

As with all successful ventures in life, a little bit of work each day or each week makes the work a lot easier.  The hard part is creating the habit every day or every week in order to get the job done.  You eat a roast one bite at a time, so why do you try and handle a years worth of receipts on April 14th while you are hold with the Turbo Tax support line trying to figure out why the installation didn't work.  Lets start by eating last years roast now, and get started on our 2010 roast also.

Two Lessons on Life

Lesson 1, it is your fault.  The economy, my employees, my landlord and my banker are not at fault I am.  No matter what is happening in your business life right now, there is a series of decisions you made some time ago to get you where you are now.  What they are I can’t tell you, and if you look and think hard enough you’ll figure it out.

Lesson 2. Success and Wealth are two totally different things.  We may make them related in our minds however they are not unless you make one a part of the other.

Personal success can bring happiness and inner peace.  These are the “I did it moments” of our lives.  Many times they don’t bring money.  In second grade I beat Jeff Vasil in a 50 yard dash.  I didn’t get any money and man was I a success that day.  Success really is an internal event. If you don’t feel it, it isn’t success.  We can look at someone and call him successful, but is he?  How do we really know?  It could all be a shell and the person is miserable and broke.

Car Rental Ratings 2009 (The cars, not the companies)

 Now that 2009 is behind me, I took a minute to think about every car I rented, and boy has this been quite a travel year for me.  As businesses start to look around and ask the question, “So, Now What?”, I have been on the road more than planned.  A big part of being a road warrior is knowing how to get from the airport to your real destination.   Trains, buses, taxi's, limos and rental cars all can meet the need depending on where you are going.

As an airline pilot twice a month, there isn't a lot of wiggle room.  You stand there and wait for whatever the airline told you is your form of travel.  If that company doesn't show up, you can take a cab and hope the airline pays you back.  As a business adviser and owner the rest of the month, the cost of transportation is part of the fee I charge my clients.  Since I own the company I have a lot more flexibility in what I do as long as my wife sees the price after we get paid.  My basic plan is easy.  If I have more than 8 hours of time to kill or my wife goes with me, then I rent a car.  Sadly that is most of the time I travel.  I also carry my own portable GPS since I can pre-program the routes or places I want to go before I start the trip.

The Star of the Sierra's

Most of my Christmas breaks are spent in Truckee California with my family. We have friends all around the Reno and Lake Tahoe Areas. In the winter time there is plenty to do, ski, snowboard, snowmobile and eat like a champ. It really is a great place to take a week or two out of the office. Everyone tells me I need to “recharge” once in a while. With all the pain from skiing, I don't know how anyone can call this a “recharge” but OK, it is still better working here in the Tahoe area than the office. Of course there are shows and casino action if you some how have any energy left after beating up your knees on the moguls or handling a snow mobile for the day.

Clean and Green are we ready?

For years I have confused people, recycling and badmouthing electric cars at the same time. As a fan of diesels and the idea of a positive energy fuel such as bio-diesel, I have never liked the idea of all the hazardous waste produced by the electric car.

Every electric car is filled with plastics which are difficult to recycle, heavy metals in the batteries do all kinds of wierd things to the environment and I still don’t believe that brushless motors are 100% ozone free. You can smell the car running and it smells like an electric motor.

I would maybe settle for a diesel hybrid but fuel is still so cheap in the US, all of our hybrids are gasoline powered. Of course our newest vehicle in my personal fleet is a TDI diesel. You could say I became a diesel fanatic when I bought my first German Golf Diesel in 1987. 50 MPG in 1987 was an amazing thing, especially when you consider I ran that car flat out at 84 MPH everywhere I went until my insurance threatened to drop because of all the speeding tickets.

Are you ready for LED Lights?

If you have been following my blog, you know that I have gone to the fringes on saving energy.  As humans we are clearly smart enough to do better.  Over the last two years I have finally found a dimmable Compact Florescent Light or CFL that works like a champ.  The only thing we haven't found is one that is in a daylight or natural color.  The bulbs that we found in the daylight range reacted very poorly to dimmers.

For the sections of my house without dimmers, we found that the Lights of American PAR 38 bulbs with 60 LED's worked nicely and provided a semi-focused spot light.  Every other LED bulb that we tried failed within a couple of days.  This week I installed three Four Seasons 120 LED 8 watt bulbs next to the 3 60LED 5 Watt bulbs in my car port.  The Four Seasons 120 LED lights put off a very nice slightly blue daylight color light.  Additionally they have a fluted lens so they have a smoother transition of light closer to a flood light instead of a semi-focused spot.


We have just started testing these, and so far they are working great.  Keep up and I will let you know how they do over the next three or four weeks.  Past history has shown that LED either fails quickly or doesn't fail for a long time.

I also noted that LOA now has a candelabra base LED that is just 3 watts.  Since all of my candelabra fixtures dim, I will wait for a CFL to fail before we try these.  There are two lights in my bedroom that don't dim I may try them in.

Race Time ReVisit

This is a repost from my old blog, and is fitting since we just lost two drivers for the Race February 20-21, if you know anyone, send them to www.rustbucketracers.org for more.

This weekend was a nearly perfect ending to four months of work and preparation.  You see, nearly four months ago we were accepted as a team in the 24 hours of LeMons Houston race.  When I found out about the race, it looked like a fun way to race cars like I had in high school and college.  The premise is simple, buy a car for $500 and make it safe to race.  That's it, then you go race.

Since the event is so long and fatiguing, a minimum of four drivers and up to six per team are allowed.  I came up with a theme, game plan and car plan.  I decided to attempt to race a $500 diesel and after 5 weeks of looking only found one Mercedes 300SD.    The idea of a turbo diesel running on WVO or waste vegetable oil seemed like a great way to start out in this race.

Who you calling a "Tree Hugger"?

Over the years I have been accused of being a “tree hugger” more that once. Personally I associate the term tree hugger with the nuts that spike trees and hurt loggers, stage sit ins to save some worm or sit up on billboards fasting until some developer stops bulldozing land. Being called a tree hugger seemed like my friends were calling me crazy or something.

When I was growing up in Southern California, I remember smog alerts and days where the sky was so brown we couldn't see the valley from our home in Tarzana Hills. The area I lived in has a little pull off area that is featured in movies like “Valley Girl” They must have filmed right after a Santa Ana wind blew all the smog to Lancaster. I can't remember ever seeing stars at home in Tarzana. Surfing at the beaches of California meant coming home with tar spots all over your feet from the oil wells off the coast and scrubbing off the oily layers off goop that would stick to the Zog's Sex Wax on your surfboard. When my parents couldn't take it any more we would get on the Catalina ferry boat or drive up to see our family friends, the Bushnell's, in Bass Lake California which is just outside Yosemite.