Business

In January we helped Mark Levison's Agile Pain Relife consulting make a very successful Typepad to WordPress transition. Behind the scenes there is a very interesting design case study, we'd like to share.

The main aim was to move the content from Typepad webblog to his new business domain. Mark's company focuses on the business of "relieving software development pain". He came to us with a great domain and a catchy name for this business: Agile Pain Relief Consulting comes from.

Mark chose the WooTuits theme, which we thought was a great fit. He didn't ask any significant modifications. The challenge was to adapt it to Mark's consulting firm's business goals. At Foliovision, when we talk about customising a template it goes far beyond simple changes like background colour or the size of the font. We start with a template but seek to end with a unique site which look like a custom design.

We firmly believe that getting one's logo and branding right is the starting point for a successful design. Mark didn't have a budget for the logo work so we agreed to do a new logo ourselves which Mark would purchase if he liked it.

Keep reading How much is a good logo worth? Case study: Agile Pain Relief

We use primarily use

Keep reading Paypal for our smaller transactions at Foliovision ($1000 and under). Some customers complain. They’d just rather not do business with Paypal. In these cases, we do have bank accounts in three major jurisdictions but it does slow down transactions and increase transaction costs on smaller invoices.

I tell them there is just no other payment service which works well for small international payments.

Precautions we take:

• we don’t confirm our bank account numbers which technically means that Paypal can’t withdraw funds from our bank accounts.
• they do do it anyway, but in our case it would be illegal and there’s a very good chance that the bank would go after Paypal for the money themselves if Paypal did manage to snooker them into giving them cash.
• we run a balance under $2000. Over that and the money gets shunted off to one of our bank accounts.
• we are very good customers. We send lots of sales through and we buy lots of goods too. Occasionally we even have to switch currencies. Paypal makes a fortune off of Foliovision. We even introduce lots of new customers to them as well.

In general, limit liability and make yourself valuable. I recommend you do the same.

But then I go and read a post like this one about how Paypal single-handedly nearly ruined the Macgraphoto graphics bundle (sorry to have missed it Jacob: great idea for a themed bundle!). And I think we haven’t done nearly enough and that we are playing with fire.

Paypal sucks but so does Digital River and Google Checkout is no great shakes either

One of our clients was recently lured into paying to pitch to a group of investors.

Their product is a good one. I can’t say much, but it’s in the financial servies industry. Instead of spending their time and money to get the product really into action, they decided to go the angel route.

Madness. The finished product langours instead of making them the money they should be paying. They asked me if they should pay to pitch. I said no, make your company pay each day.

It turns out that the venture capital shark pool is even worse than I expected. There are dozens of these organizations out there looking to suck the blood of the innocent or hapless entrepreneur. These bastards are out for as much US$25K of your money to pitch to disinterested middle-level brokers and junior bankers.

Keep reading Paying to pitch to VC’s or Angel Investors

I’ve been reading Jack Welch’s Winning.

Though Jack Welch is one mean and selfish man, Winning is a challenging and rewarding testament to Neutron Jack’s way of doing business. Welch’s philosophy of promoting the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% in a large company is unbelievably Darwinian, even cruel. Welch even runs his personal life the same way – at sixty years of age he writes about co-author and third Suzy "having taught me the meaning of love". Frankly, Welch has grown up children – it’s a bit late to be discovering love. Rediscovering would have been far more tactful.

But let’s leave the man behind and return to Welch’s Spartan philosophy of leaving the crippled employees on the mountaintop to perish in the night.

When you read his book, however, you can see how this would work in a company which hires just extremely competitive types. Such people enjoy seeing others thrown down the well. It’s a bit of the mob waiting for the witch to be drowned. Welch is appealing to primal nature here, the law of the jungle. The hunter who cannot run fast enough is culled from the tribe and the tribe is stronger as the weakest members can neither survive nor reproduce.

Keep reading Work Life Balance from Jack Welch: A Review of Winning

Sift CEO Ben Heald

So these guys over at Sift Media are heading for £3 million of advertising revenue this year. Probably worth hearing what their CEO has to say about online publishing. The first question is a bit silly:

What levels of participation inequality do you see from forum and community users? What can publishers do to tackle that more effectively?

Ben Heald takes a valiant stab at it:

You probably get about 10% of the audience that you are sending your emails to, contributing to the content in some way.

I don't think usage levels have changed that much. It matches the dynamics of a conference, where out of an audience of 100 people, you will get ten asking a questions and one or two people speaking to you after the presentation. I don't think that will change. We won't all become avid contributors to forums. Some people just want to take stuff.

His answer is basically right - participation will not be level - but at the end he goes seriously astray: "Some people just want to take stuff."

Keep reading Paying B2B writers | Reward Models for Online Publishing

Is it possible for the medium sized guys to make money?

You bet.

Network Solutions, bought for $20 million in 2003, was just sold for $800 million three years later.

And amazingly enough, this deal was done by a Persian – Iranian American Jahm Najafi.

So do the Iranians know how to play a poker hand?

It certainly looks like yes. No wonder the Israelis want the Americans to bomb the Iranians to smithereens. Competition isn’t fun.

Anyway here’s Najafi’s story:

Keep reading Network Solutions bought for million, sold for 0 million three years later

We've been contending with a pricing model for our clients at Foliovision. As Foliovision has grown outside its old bounds as a single person company doing relatively contained projects, our rates have had to rise.

It's not such a problem as we are a lot more productive.

There are two primary models: flat fee and pay-per-hour.

In principle, flat-fee is more profitable (if you charge $1000 but through automatisation can get your time to render the project down to 2 hours from 12 hours you've just made $500/hour instead of $80/hour.

On the other hand, we mainly do made-to-measure work. There is rarely the opportunity to automatise to that extent. We get exponentially better results in our markets than the competition so made-to-measure clearly works.

With made-to-measure work one can spend more time quoting and negotiating spec back and forth than working.

Gradually the client can grow to hate your emails demanding expansion of project scope and budget. Generally the (busy) client would prefer to pay more for something delivered with no hassle, complete and working. Then he or she only pays once for the project, instead of twice.

Twice is their time spent micromanaging what ends up costing more or less the same anyway.

Keep reading Pricing a Project: Hourly Billing versus Flat Fee

Contrarian business advice from Trizle is always a thrill.

For a taste, Why You Need a Chaotic Business:

Order = Bad Advice

The dude’s well-intentioned “let’s-order-everything, cuz-we’re-like-the-world’s-nerdiest-businesspeople” mindset stands as one of the several “bad, bad, bad” advices we received when we started.

Why? The mindset drives you to do nothing. Nada. Standstill. Blah.

• Instead of moving forward, you’re documenting.
• Instead of increasing sales, you’re recording every little detail of your past order.
• Instead of improving employee morale, you’re entering data of past employee feedback.
• Instead of fattening your bottom line online, you’re trying to perfect every freakin’ detail of your freakin’ website that’s going to take a freakin’ looooong time.

I think the Trizle guy has the E-Myth myth guy clearly in his targets. Michael Gerber is obsessed with turning every company into McDonalds, turning every company into a turnkey franchise.

Keep reading Chaotic Business versus the E-Myth