For over a decade I worked in a job where I traveled 9 – 12 days each month; 40% – 70% of my days were spent somewhere else.  It seemed normal to me, most of my peers were doing it. If I wanted my career to go anywhere it was clear that travel was a part of that.  My boss and all the executives at his level were “Platinum” frequent flyers, it was part of the job.

I have now gone nearly a decade where I have only had one assignment that I had to fly to perform.  I recently had lunch with one of my colleagues from those days of heavy travel. He’s still traveling a lot and despite the fact that he had a heart attack, he’s overweight, puffy, and his joints are stiff and sore. It got me thinking about the long-term health effects of business travel.

When I traveled for business I ate almost exclusively in restaurants, and often indulged in foods or drink that I wouldn’t have at home.  I exercised less, stayed up late.  That’s just the physical challenges.  There’s also isolation, loneliness, stress of performing at a high level in unfamiliar environments and with people you may not know. The isolation isn’t just on the road, being gone a lot puts a lot of strain on your relationships at home, and with friends in your home town too.  You are not part of the community in the same way that you could be if you were home. Not everyone who travels experiences all of these issues, but I would say that everyone experiences some of them.

Businesses are talking a lot more about their corporate responsibility; they are trying not to externalize the costs of their environmental impact, provide workers compensation to offset the cost of injuries, and try to engage our communities to “give back” to those who help enable our success. In that context maybe business travel isn’t the world’s greatest threat, but the cost of business travel is extremely high, and I’m not sure we are doing enough to avoid it.

I know there are times when you have to be there.  Yesterday I lamented the ability of people who work behind a computer screen all day to build relationships, I know there is nothing like sitting face-to-face.  But if people saw business travel for the health threat that it is, I think that some creative ways could be found to avoid it. I’m not saying we need to eliminate business travel, but I believe it can be reduced or limited.  What if there was a rule that an individual couldn’t travel more than 5 days a month, or 20 days a year?  We’d get really picky about when it was important enough to get on a plane.  Sometimes it would be worth it, but other times…

Study after study tells us that healthy workers are more productive, we know that one of the most influential factors in your health is the community of people you hang out with.  If business owners really care about the health and well being of their workers (and themselves) then making an effort to reduce business travel is essential.

I know there are healthy people who travel a lot.  There are also people who smoke and don’t get cancer, but when we see someone who smokes we want them to stop.  I think if we are honest with ourselves we don’t need a government funded research study to tell us that extensive business travel is unhealthy. It’s time to make a decision to do something different, to find different ways to work, and ways to diminish the impact that working has on our team’s health.

What do you think?  Is it time to get off the plane?

My College Computer

I’m of the first generation of college students who brought computers to college and when I started my first job I was the only one in my department who had a computer on my desk.  In fact I was hired because I knew what to do with one!  We had a fancy network too, it was called the sneaker net.  Yep, if I wanted to move a file from one computer to another I copied it onto a floppy and walked it over there.

Now I carry a computer in my pocket that’s so advanced it can’t even compare with the power of that college computer; and I can reach the Internet from anywhere. I can drive down the freeway and listen music streamed over the Internet on a  radio station created just for me (really, check out Pandora, it’s the bomb).

I’m a huge fan of technology and all that it enables us to do, I love being able to work from a park bench, or coffee shop if I want to, I love being able to have a great bookkeeper who lives in Austin, Tx, a writer in Springfield, IL, and clients across the country.

Still there are changes that technology has brought that are less charming.  When I started in business we knew that in order to make a sale, in order to build a relationship, we had to go meet someone.  Social Networking is great, email is very convenient, but I still believe that we do business with people we know and like.  There’s nothing like the 3D, real-life, meatspace to push that relationship forward.

When I started in business we used overhead projectors and slides to make a presentation.  They were a pain to make, and took a lot of time, so we only had a few.  Now presentation software is so easy we end up with presentations with 40 slides and 100 words per slide.  One of my favorite bosses would make us put our last slide up first, if he agreed with our conclusion he would tell us to sit down, he didn’t need to hear the rest of the presentation.  If not, then he’d listen and see if he was convinced.  With slides you had to think on your feet, rearrange things and respond to your audience. Presentation software seems to make everyone expect to sit and be entertained/informed, instead of participating in the presentation.  This is a big reason that I only speak with a flip-chart today, no projector, no slides.

The business leaders I learned from were a cautious lot, they wanted facts and not opinions.  They wanted to really understand something before approving it. Today that seems to be coming back into fashion.  We went through a decade where almost anything sold, and half-baked ideas were the norm.  But it seems that time has past, and the caution that I learned from my mentors is back in fashion again.

Yep, things have changed a lot in the last 20 years.  I wonder what the next 20 have in store?

Best iPhone Apps for Business (plus some extras!)

While there are lots of posts around about people’s best or favorite iPhone apps, I’ve been thinking lately how much I use my iPhone for business. Yes, I play games, and make calls, but I really do a lot of work on my iPhone these days.  With so many apps in the app store it seems like it’s easier to “discover” new apps from friends than it it is to search for new apps.  So in the spirit of sharing here’s my top 10 apps for business.

Social Networking
Tweetie for Twitter – A reliable app and beautiful interface.  I know a lot of people like other apps, and want groups and other features, but I can’t get away from the simple elegance of Tweetie (I use it on the desktop too.)
Facebook official app – Yes I check FB way too much, I find myself liking the iPhone interface better even than lite.facebook.com.  Best hidden feature, you can download people’s facebook pictures to their contact in address book.
LinkedIn – I use this a lot for people search.  Sometimes I schedule a meeting then weeks later I can’t remember who I’m meeting with; this saves me.

Tools
Constant Contact – I used to just fire and forget with email campaigns.  Now I check the status of my campaigns, see what people are clicking on.  I can even add someone to a list right from the phone.  I recently sent out a campaign and I noticed very low click-through; I went back to see that the links were broken.  It allowed me to get a “fixed” version out right away before most people had opened the “broken” version.
WordPress – I’d never write a blog post with this app, but I can correct typos, approve comments, shift a post from draft to publish, etc.
FreeConferenceCall.com – Great service, I use it all the time. The app makes it even better, control/mute each caller during the call, manage recording, etc.

Files
Air Sharing – This is the the app you didn’t know you needed.  It turns your iPhone into a mobile file storage, like a thumb drive you never lose. How does it work?  It connects your iPhone easily to any wifi network and makes your unused memory and any flies you’ve addd accessible to any computer on the network (you can require a login if you need to).  Great for forms or presentations or other files you want to have with you and available to share with others. It also enables you to view all types of files (PDF, iWork, etc.).

DropBox and Box.Net are similar apps, in that they let you easily move files from your iPhone to another computer, but they use a big hard drive in the sky as the intermediary.  Each require you to have an account, but they provide 1GB – 2GB for free, then charge for larger accounts.  Both are dead simple to use for sending files to clients or team members.

Getting/Staying Organized
If you are a big GTD type of person OmniFocus and Things are the big apps, both sync to desktop apps and keep you working at the office or on the go.  If you just want a simple to-do list, Todo will sync with iCal, Outlook, RememberTheMilk.com and other tools.

Miscellaneous
I use the Amazon app to store books I hear about (on my wish list), order supplies, and check prices.  The best hidden feature; you can upload a picture of an item and Amazon will find it for you in their store and create a link to the items page so you can buy it.  Fantastic!

How many times have you been making an appointment to meet someone in a neighborhood you don’t know well and you need to find a restaurant?  Urban Spoon lets you pick a neighborhood, price and even ethnicity and it will give you alternatives complete with reviews and user feedback.  Makes finding a spot dead simple.

I’m not the only one writing on this topic, if you want to see a couple of others:

Open Forum: Top Apps for Small Business

Small Business CEO Blog: Top 5 Small Business iPhone Apps

The fun part is to learn from all of you, so what apps do you use for business?

Photo Courtesy Stuart Pllbrow

As we saw in a prior post, Budget problems abound.  Our Government budgets are in deficit, many personal budgets are in deficit, is it any surprise that our business budgets may need some attention too?

Budgets involve much more than a once-a-year commitment. For real value, you have to review it every month. Now that we have a couple of months of data to look at, let’s go over how you might do that!

First, let’s look at where  you hit (guessed right) and where  you missed (guessed wrong)? The difference between what you budgeted and your actual results are known as “variances”. Run your finger down your Income Statement and look at what categories had the highest “variances”. (Better yet create a budget report with budget in one column, and actual in the next column, then subtract Budget from Actual, the result is a variance column.) What happened here? Sometimes it’s just timing, an item that only occurs once or twice a year and it showed up all in one month, but you budgeted a little each month. Other times you will find places where your spending is just a lot higher (or lower) than you thought it would be. Why is that? What changed? You need to think about changes you want to make to get back in line with your budget.

Next let’s look at the important numbers. Are your sales over or under budget? Again, why? Did you get more leads than you predicted? Is that going to continue, or was it due to some kind of one-time event (trade show or promotion)? Are you closing them at about the rate you expected? Is your average sale higher or lower than you thought?

If your sales are under your budget, then you need to make sure that your expenses are under budget too in order to protect your profits. Do you need to reduce expenses to align them with your sales performance? This is always a judgment call. How do you decide that it’s time to make cuts, or more sales are right around the corner? Evaluating your budget and results monthly forces you to look at the data and decide. If month after month you are behind, it’s time to make some cuts.

Now that you’ve reviewed your major categories, let’s look at other assumptions. Are you thinking about hiring new people? Are the sales there to support new hires (or leads to support a new sales hire)? Thinking about more office space, or investing in new equipment? What are the key indicators that tell you that those investments are needed? Are you hitting those numbers consistently? Then invest with confidence.

If you are consistently looking at your numbers, and really looking at why they are better or worse than your projections, you create a frame for any decision in you business. It can even set your priorities. If sales are behind, you need to address that. If they are ahead, but profit’s not, then expenses are out of control… You get the idea.

Your budget provides you a measuring post by which you can compare your actual results and decide how you are doing. It also provides you with a tool to play “what if” and decide if you like the results.

What numbers do you look at that tell you how your business is doing?

Washington Post graph of Federal Deficit as a percentage of GDP

We are surrounded by budget crises these days. There’s the City of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority, the State of Illinois, and of course, the Federal Government. Hearing about these financial crises can be discouraging to business owners. Is this the new “normal,” where it’s ok for expenditures exceed revenues?

If it were “normal” for businesses to consistently spend more than they made, they wouldn’t be in business for very long. With that in mind, is there any advice you can offer our elected officials on how they can balance their budgets? Let us know what tactics you would take if you were in charge of balancing a governmental budget.

I’m often quick to criticize an ad campaign that makes no sense, or that treats it’s customers poorly; so when I heard the new DEXONE  commercials I had to take a minute to praise a well thought through campaign.

Dex is a well known publisher of yellow page directories, a business that has been getting hammered in the last few years as a larger and larger percentage of small business ad budgets have switched from yellow pages to online. How does Dex respond?

First, they repositioned themselves. Their new ads don’t present them as directory publishers, they are “marketing consultants” helping small business people to sort through the wide variety of options that they face in trying to reach their prospects. No one wants to talk to a yellow page salesperson, but everyone wants help with their marketing!

Second, instead of fighting against the Internet as a marketing channel they have adopted it as a product that they are selling. Now I’m not making any comment on the how good their product is, but their ads position them as experts that can help the small business owner “get found on the web” something that most small businesses need a lot of help with.

The thing that makes the ads most compelling to me are how they put the prospect, the small business owner, at the center of the ad. Dex really listened to what the small business owner is thinking and feeling and by expressing that in their ads, they gain instant relevance with their target demographic.

Is there some part of your offering that is becoming a commodity? How can you do a better job listening to your customer, speak in their language and attract more prospects?

Leaders are readers, or so the saying goes.  I frequently get asked what books I would recommend to improve the skills of founders of creative service firms. These are my typical recommendations.

E-Myth is the classic work on running a small business.  Michael Gerber has some crucial insights about how to structure and organize your small businesses to so that you can run your business instead of having it run you.  If you feel like the whole business depends on you, and you can’t get your employees to take responsibility this book has the answers.

Jim Collins is my #1 most favorite business author.  Built to Last & Good to Great are must read books for every leader in business.  I think that Built to Last is the best of his books, it’s clear and actionable, and holds terrific insights into how you can create an enduring great company. There’s also a great monograph, Good to Great for Non-Profits, highly recommended after you’ve read the books themselves.

David Maister is the unchallenged guru of professional service firm management.  As with Jim Collins it’s hard to pick favorites, but I find clients are most often impacted by the business development lessons in The Trusted Advisor.  True Professionalism can be a terrific book to take younger professionals through to help them to orient themselves to what the job of a “professional” is.  Managing the Professional Services Firm is a more advanced work, more applicable for larger firms, but with lots of meaty lessons. These books are must reads for my team members.

Vern Harnish’s The Rockefeller Habits, has a great structure for how to run a business well. He has the best system for reporting and a meeting rhythm to keep all the parts of your business connected and well fed with information.  It’s short, but packed with practical information.

Lastly, Crucial Conversations by Patterson et al is a terrific book about how to have conversations when the stakes are high. So many of our conversations with employees, partners, prospects and clients get emotionally charged.  Each person is bringing in their own story about what’s happening and what should happen.  This book can help you to keep a clear head and communicate effectively even when others can’t.

Lastly, there are a number of Harvard Business Review articles that have been as useful and powerful to me as any book, Who’s Got the Monkey for managing tasks with your subordinates, Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time is important work for keeping you fueled, and energized for the long haul.

This is quite a reading list, and of course it’s not exhaustive, just my favorites.  What books, articles or Web sites keep you up to date and growing?

Did you know that fear makes you stupid? Fear is perhaps the most powerful stupid drug that the human body has ever felt.  When we are afraid our reasoning and thinking is disabled by our body and instead we are thinking with our brainstem, basically reacting to reflexes instead of acting.

You know who lives with a lot of fear everyday? Business owners. I know, I’ve seen it in their eyes and heard it in their voices.  They are afraid of all that is out of their control.  Customers and clients, employees and partners, the government regulators and tax collectors, lenders, investors; there are so many forces that bear down on a business owner it’s easily overwhelming.

If these fears aren’t enough, there is one fear that almost every business owner I’ve ever talked to has that is bigger than all the rest.  We all feel like frauds, like we were lucky to get this far.  Yes, we worked hard, yes we are smart, but really… Someone’s going to find out that I don’t have a license for this, that I’m not trained for this, that I can’t do this and they are going to take it all away.

It’s true.  Almost every business owner I’ve ever talked too is secretly afraid that they are doing it all wrong, that they are screwing everything up.  That they are making big mistakes, that they will never recover from.

What makes it worse is that the people around the business owner most likely look up to them for their risk taking ability, for their courage and strength at taking on new challenges.  No one sees the fear that’s inside. So it stays there, inside.

But it is there and it’s making you stupid. What does that worry do for you? Does it motivate you, or hold you back?  Does it make you too cautious, or too reckless?

You have worked hard, you are smart enough, and experienced enough.  How do I know? No one is that lucky.  If you have gotten this far, you have what it takes.  I know that you could have made some better decisions along the way, and you could have done more at times.  But think about your employees, do you think that they make mistakes sometimes?  How much does that bother them?  Are they losing sleep over those mistakes? So they are making mistakes and sleeping well and you are making mistakes and not sleeping?

What’s the difference between their mistakes and yours?  When they don’t know something, or make a mistake, they can get help.  Their boss (or you) might bail them out, or show them a different way to do it.  But if you own your business, who do you ask?

Find someone who can help you out.  Don’t go it alone. We are pack animals, find a tribe who can point you in the right direction. Who is excited when you succeed, and disappointed when you fail?  Who knows all the risks you have taken?

Because there is one thing that fear will never get you, in fact that fear will keep you from ever achieving.

Peace.

Something is shifting and I think it’s just the current incarnation of the shift that’s been in progress for a long time, but it’s getting faster, and spreading wider.

9 years ago when I started Anchor Advisors, Ltd. I noticed how easy it has become to start a business.  You go to VistaPrint and choose a business card, find a template for a Web site that looks good with the card you choose and you are in business. Total cost, 10 hours of my time, $0.  The friction, or barriers to entry for creating credible collateral were very low.  Once the business got going, I eventually designed a card, and got a professional Web site, but why invest the money until you know it’s a going concern?  The production value of the templated solutions was “good enough” to get started with, and it took no time or money to execute.

Then came Blogs, and YouTube, then Facebook and now Twitter.  More and more of what we read and look at is created by amateurs.  The production value of most of the blogs that I read is low, they are produced by their owners with little or no help from “professionals”.  The production quality of the most popular videos on the Internet is basic.  We don’t have our blog posts edited by professional writers, we don’t have our tweets crafted by a copywriter.  More and more creative content is being made in some form of DIY manner.

And the tools to do that are expanding as well; the Flip camera makes video easy to shoot and even edit.  You can edit your photos using online tools without even buying expensive photo editing software.  OK, nothing makes writing easier, good writing is still hard, but at least Twitter has forced us to keep it short!

Phil Johnson posted an article on the AdAge Small Agency blog about this trend and how it’s forced him to create a whole new department in his agency that’s focused on lower budget, quicker turnaround, higher volume content to feed social media.

Is this the erosion of the creative class?  Have creatives lost their place as the crafters of communication and design?  No, there will always be a need for elegance, effective design and well written copy.  However, there is also a tolerance, even an appreciation for the unproduced, unvarnished, amateur production as well.  Lowering the bar has resulted in an explosion of content being created, and much of it is DIY.

The really excellent design is going to be reserved for only those projects with large impact and budget.  Company identities for successful going concerns, packaging for consumer products, annual reports, etc. will always deserve the value of a professional design.  It might even be valued more as it “stands out” from the crowd of amateur produced stuff we look at all day.

But there is also going to be more and more content created by amateurs, and the are going to want their stuff to look and sound good.  Teaching basic design and writing principals to the masses represents a huge opportunity.  Creating tools to enable easy, high quality DIY content is another.

It’s a brave new world and I don’t think the trend is going backwards any time soon.

How do you see this trend impacting your business?

Photo Courtesy of Leonardo Pallotta

RESOLVE.  Strong in the face of uncertainty, forceful in doing good work in turbulent times, unflinching in making the changes needed to thrive in the environment we find ourselves in. Bart Clevland chose it as his word for 2009 (see his post on the AdAge Small Agency Blog) but I’m thinking about it for 2010.

We need the type of resolve that Bart saw in 2009, but in 2010 I also think we need RE-Solve. If we look in the dictionary we find that resolve means “making an earnest decision”, but it also means “convert or transform”, “separate into constituent or elementary parts”, and ” deal with conclusively”.  It’s in these contexts that we need resolve in 2010.   We need to conclusively deal with issues in our business.  We need to convert and transform our business by breaking it down into component parts, parts that we thought were solid,  and rethinking and re-engineering them.

Most of us are running businesses with some success, we have survived the turbulent “first few years”, we have found processes and ways of working that achieved some success, but in 2010 we may need to re-solve some of the problems that we thought we have put behind us.

We knew how to attract and close business in 2008, but we may need to sharpen that message, improve our positioning and really target a specific issue/problem, or demographics/psychographic to stand out from the crowd.  We may even need to reconfigure our whole service offering to take us out of the mob of competition and into new markets or services.

We knew how to manage our people in 2008, but we have cut their salaries, given no bonuses (and for some no raises), their healthcare costs more and we need them to achieve results more than ever before.  Now is the time to increase transparency, give your team members access to information and processes that they have never seen.  Engage their best thinking not just in producing good work, but in producing a great environment within the constraints that we have.

We knew what our role was in 2008, but now we see CEO’s drastically shifting their roles (one example).  This is a time when leadership is at a premium, can you lead your team through this?  When you need to be the chief rain-maker and create an environment of engagement, transparency, and trust; it’s a lot to ask; but its got to be done.

2010 is bringing change, like every year before it, and it’s time for a clean slate.  Time to start fresh and RE-solve some of the basics.  It was fun the first time, I’m sure it will be fun again (and again)!