Aspire » 2009 » July

Fun with Wordles – try it out

Shawn Kinkade — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:34:59 +0000

Sometimes you’re just looking for something new to play with – I’d like to introduce you to Wordle. Wordle is an application developed as a side project and is now available as a non-commercial ‘tool’ out on the internet.

The example above uses the lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run (just because it was the first set of words that I thought of that might be interesting.) Wordle lets you enter any set of text as the starting point for your creation and then from there you can play around with fonts, colors, general layouts and a few other things. It’s not complicated, but it is fun to play with.

Wordle for you?

Another idea to play around with is to use your LinkedIn profile as the input for a Wordle that’s all about you. Here’s one that I came up with:

So what does your Wordle look like?

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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2 Desktop Tools that can help you get stuff done

Shawn Kinkade — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:04:24 +0000

photo by flattop341

When your hard drive goes up in smoke you likely will end up losing some data, but you will also need to re-install all of those tools that you use to get stuff done. The basics – Word, Excel, etc. are pretty straightforward, but if you’re like me, you’ve probably collected some more specialized applications that you’ve found just make life easier.

I thought I would share a couple of those here today – these are tools that I hadn’t really thought about using…until I didn’t have them (and then it becomes an issue!).

Screen Capture

I’m sure there are a lot of uses for Screen Capture tools (basically taking a picture of what ever’s on your computer screen to share with others). I use it when I’m updating presentations and potentially as illustrations for documents or blog posts.

As far as I know, there aren’t really any ‘standard’ applications that come with Windows (I’m sure the Mac people have something, because they have all of the cool stuff) but the good news is that there are a lot of interesting choices available and many of them are free.

If you’re looking for a good round-up of choices – this site has a good list of screen capture tools. There’s a premium tool called Snag-it that I’ve used that is excellent, tons of functionality, easy to use, but it costs around $50 – give the free 30 day trial a shot if you think you need a really strong solution.

I also think Jing is really cool but it’s a big solution when all you really want is a quick partial screen shot.

What I’ve ended up using is an older freeware application called MWSnap, it doesn’t ahave a lot of bells and whistles, but it works well, does what it says it will do and I’ve never had any technical issues (not necessarily true for some of the others that I’ve tried).

Print to PDF

Another tool that I find myself using quite a bit is the ability to Print to PDF format. A lot of times you’ll find a document online that you’d like to share or keep and there’s not a good quick way to save it (you could also cut and paste into a word document, but that can take a long time and usually doesn’t work very well).

Printing to PDF is done by an application that sets up as a printer option on your PC – when you choose to print something you select the Print To PDF application instead of your regular printer and you will end up creating a new PDF file.

I’ve now used a couple of different free applications for this – the first one is called PDF995 and is actually part of a suite of tools that can do a lot of really cool stuff that I never even knew was possible (like the ability to append and combine multiple PDF documents together). The free version is the same as the paid version in terms of functionality you just have to deal with a sponsor page view every time you use it. To upgrade to the ‘paid’ version only costs $9.95 (hence the name).

The other app I’ve used for this is called DoPDF, it’s simple, it’s small and it works as promised and does what you expect (and it’s free). You can’t ask for much more than that.

What tools do you find to be really useful? I’d love to get some more ideas on what’s out there, share your comments here.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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Have you ever noticed that Questions are the answer?

Shawn Kinkade — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:21:49 +0000

photo by Bast

I’m going to date myself here, but my parents had an 8-track tape that I used to listen to when I was growing up – it was the soundtrack to Lost Horizon (a 1973 remake of a Frank Capra 1937 film). I don’t really remember the movie being worthwhile, but I remember the soundtrack and several of the songs really well – it’s the kind of music that sticks with you.

One of the ‘stickier’ songs is “Question Me an Answer“.

Question me an answer bright and clear.
I will answer with a question clear and bright.
Even though your answer may be wrong my question will be right.
Question me an answer.
Answer with a question.

It was written by Burt Bacharach and it’s catchy to the point that you’ll regret having listened to it (consider yourself warned).

What does this have to do with anything? If you’re trying to close a sale, then questions are the answer.

Depending on the source of your sales training, this concept comes up quite a bit – it’s the essence behind SPIN selling, it’s a key part of Sandler Training and it shows up in a lot of other sales books.

The basic idea is that if I tell you how great I am (or my product is) then I’m just selling you (and you’re not likely to buy). However if I can ask the right questions and get you to acknowledge that you have a problem that I can solve, then you’ve sold yourself (and you’re much more likely to buy…assuming everything makes sense, you’ve got money, etc.).

What’s Your Question?

This topic came up in one of my Peer Group Advisory Boards the other day (by the way, as a business owner, where do you get your accountability and inspiration?).

I kicked off the discussion with a challenge around the table on what question they could ask their best prospect that would highlight the benefits they bring to the table. It’s a challenging exercise and realistically in a sales discussion you are going to lead up with several questions that are linked together but if you can simplify it down it can become a good touchstone to help get you focused on letting people buy!

As an example, I might use something along the lines of:

What are you currently doing to make sure that you are working ON your business every week (instead of just IN your business)?

Ideally you want the question to be open ended – not something that’s going to generate a quick yes or no. You want the question to generate some uncomfortable response that’s relative to the benefit that you deliver.

I thought Sarah’s response (Sarah is the owner of Dog Eared Pages, a marketing and writing company) was really good:

What’s holding you back from doing the marketing that you should be doing?

Sarah knows that most business owners aren’t doing as much marketing as they should be doing and she offers a cost-effective way to take that off their plate.

It’s not an easy process to come up with questions that really pinpoint the issues that you can solve, and realistically you will have different questions for different people (since they likely have different issues).

However It’s still a worthwhile exercise to come up with some good examples – it will help you starting thinking differently and it becomes a great piece to add to your Elevator Pitch (i.e. I work with business owners that are trying to answer the question “How can I make more money?“).

Share your questions here – I’d love to get other ideas on what people are doing or how they develop their questions.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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What do you do when Old Reliable goes up in smoke?

Shawn Kinkade — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:18:45 +0000

There are some things that you take for granted, sequels are almost never as good as the original, Stephen Colbert is funny and when you hit the power button your computer is supposed to turn on, not give you the dreaded Blue Screen of Death…!

Unfortunately the unthinkable happened to me and it’s been a painful couple of days (so far). I was initially hoping that it might be something minor that could be fixed (although after a couple of hours of trying, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be fixed by me!). So I called my friend Tim New over at Onsite Logic and had them take a look at it.

It’s never a good sign when the conversation starts with “Did you notice that burning smell?”. It turns out that my hard drive had fried (literally) and short of a really expensive procedure all of that data was gone forever – Old Reliable had failed me.

The good news is that not all was lost – I had done a few simple things that kept it from being a major issue.

Back it up!

There are quite a few cool online services that you can use to back your stuff up that I might look into going forward, however my approach was a little more ‘old school’.

I used a combination of an external hard drive and my Dropbox account which I wrote about a few months ago. The external hard drives have really come down in price – I think you can find a 500 Gigabyte drive for about $100 and it just plugs into your PC with a standard USB cable. The drawback to the hard drive for backup is that you need to consciously remember to move your stuff there on a fairly regular basis (if it’s changing). I hadn’t updated for several months, so I will end up losing a few things. Primarily it impacts my music collection (just the few CDs that I added since this spring that I can re-add) and a few other things (mostly photographs, but I still have the original files).

What did work well was that I had recently moved almost all of my active ‘work’ files to my free Dropbox account. It automatically syncs and updates in the background with any changes that are made. It’s free and it’s easy to set up (and it synchs between my laptop and desktop (at least when I had a desktop).

Use web tools!

I was able to configure my Gmail account very quickly so I could get access to my email without really missing anything. I think I would like to mapmy Gmail inbox to my Outlook setup, but I haven’t taken the time to figure that out yet.

I play some games through Steam (an online game repository) so when I reinstall my steam account it will automatically reinstall any games that I might want access to (although any offline save games will be gone…).

Finally – I should have been synching my calendar with Google Calendar, that’s probably been the biggest issue that I’ve had to date, trying to recreate a busy calendar (so if I miss a meeting with you, that may be why…!)

What about you?

Are you covered? When’s the last time you backed up your stuff? Old reliable could burn out at any time, are you prepared? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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Discover what a 'leaky bucket' can do to you

Shawn Kinkade — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:00:18 +0000

photo by peasap

Leaky buckets aren’t very efficient (and it’s really hard to find a good leaky bucket picture…).

One of my clients has long been having a proverbial ‘leaky bucket’ problem with their revenue and they’ve been unfortunately leaving a lot of it on the floor. When times were good that revenue leak wasn’t perceived as that big of a deal – they were still making money, still growing…everything was good. However their business (like most) has been impacted by the economy and when things started to tighten up, those leaks really started to be an impact.

Where were the leaks coming from and what could they do about it?

This particular client does a fantastic job on delivering their product – they are very professional and when it comes to creating what their clients want they have really strong processes and procedures and people that know what they’re doing.

However…(you knew there was a however), when it comes to the business aspect of the transactions, things aren’t quite as polished. We did a quick review of 3 different jobs that happened in the last couple of weeks and found that they were ‘leaking’ around 20% of their revenue, maybe more – where were they losing it?

Lack of Clear Expectations

Because they enjoy what they do and the love to help their clients, they will often jump into projects with a just a handshake and start doing the work. They might throw together a quick Statement of Work, but it’s generally not comprehensive and they feel like they know what the client wants.

A lot of times that might turn out fine, but at least in the examples that we reviewed, the clients came up with additions and changes after the work had been delivered. Since there wasn’t a clear understanding on both sides on what was to be delivered, my clients would go back and do the extra work the client wanted…for free.

Lack of the word ‘No’

In addition to the problem above, there’s a strong culture of wanting to please the customer and do a great job. If that meant going over budget by 20%, 30% or more, then the people doing the work were okay with that.

Of course the people doing the work aren’t the ones that are ultimately responsible for the bottom line of the company, overall profitability and the trying to figure out how to keep the lights on during difficult times.

There’s a distinction between great customer service and giving things away inappropriately. If you’ve got a customer that expects that you should take a loss on their business, then they’re not a good customer – you’re not going to make that up on volume. You can still do a great job for your customers without giving away the farm.

How to fix the leaky bucket…

Here’s what my client is doing – it sounds simple (and it is) but it’s a pretty profound change that will make a big difference.

Process and Gatekeeper

The first thing they’re doing is putting in a gatekeeper when it comes to starting work. They are no longer allowed to start a job without having a complete and thorough Statement of Work that’s been signed off by the client and by an officer of the company. There may still be disagreements on what’s in and out, but it should cut down on a lot of misunderstandings – and ultimately the clients should be more comfortable knowing exactly what they’re getting (and not getting).

Contingency

The second thing they’re doing is to implement a contingency fee on all of the work. By adding a 10% buffer into the original estimate, the people doing the work have the leeway to do the little things that might have been missed up front and not have to worry about being perfect. If the contingency isn’t needed, then it goes back to client – who’s thrilled that they’re getting what they wanted and some money back.

Escalation

Along with the contingency, they are also adding in a new process that if additional work is needed / wanted by the client and it’s going to throw the estimate off by 20% or more, then they have to get approval from company management. This position someone in the company that isn’t working directly with the client to be the enforcer. The reality is that most customers understand when they’re asking for more and either don’t mind paying for it or agree that they don’t really need it. However if they can get it for free they’ll take it. By making it a clear open discussion, then that leak can get plugged pretty easily.

Communication

Finally – the last thing they’re doing is clearly communicating these changes and expectations to their clients up front. Unfortunately they’ve been training their clients for years that all of the extras are ‘free’ so there is some risk that this comes across as a negative impact compared to what the clients have been used to. However by explaining that they don’t want to raise prices but they do want to make sure everyone is getting what’s agreed to up front, most customers should be fine with it.

Profits

The really cool thing about these changes is that all of that recovered revenue will go to the bottom line – it’s found money that they weren’t getting yesterday and it will dramatically help their profitability and at the end of the day it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep.

Do you have a leaky bucket? Have you checked to make sure that you don’t? I’d love to hear other stories about this – share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

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