Archive for the ‘Business Ownership’ Category

Kind of a long one, grab your coffee…

I am sometimes amazed at customer service. I’ve rarely gotten just “okay” service from a company. It’s either excellent or it downright stinks. I was reminded of this last week while on the way to visit a client’s office; I was just getting over being sick and had already pushed it back a day so I was already crazy… and then I ended up stuck on the side of the road on a busy stretch of the interstate with a flat tire. Those that know me well know that I do NOT like my car to not move. It sends me into a near tizzy. Add the 18 wheelers whizzing by at 90 miles per hour and I was gnashing my teeth pretty bad. Luckily we have roadside assistance. I pay Sprint PCS each and every month for both of our phones so that if we break down, they will come deal with it. It doesn’t even matter if we aren’t in OUR car, just as long as we have the phone.

Let me first say that I’ve been with Sprint PCS for forever. Literally. We first got them when we were living in Hawaii, so it’s been over a decade. As a general rule, I love them. They’ve always given us great customer service. Until last week. I realize that the representative for roadside assistance is only trying to do their job and get their form filled out, but – let me ask you, the blogging public – do you know what cross street you are at when you are on a random stretch of interstate in a town you aren’t familiar with? I gave them the last Exit number I saw. But, this guy would not listen that I was on the FREEWAY, there is no cross street. I see nothing but cars and a frontage road. I’m not lying to the guy. Anyway, it took him 10 minutes (and me making up a cross street knowing the tire dude would call me anyway) to actually tell me “okay, now let’s get you entered in and get someone out there”. What? I’ve only had to use this service a few times, but I was very disappointed. I may look at other options.

The ONLY thing that saved Sprint PCS was the guy who came to help. He was honestly one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. If you are ever broken down or anything near Georgetown, Texas, let me highly recommend Tip Tow. I was off with my spare and made it to my client’s office only 45 minutes late, not too bad.

I’ll also stop to give a plug to the Georgetown PD. Two of them stopped in the space of the 30 minutes I was there to just make sure someone was coming and see if I was okay. And they were NICE. One was even laughing because I had moved to the passenger’s side and had my seatbelt on (seriously, those big trucks just fly)

My next stop was to find a tire place. I see a Goodyear sign, so Lamb’s Automotive won so I stopped. Again, wonderful service. The gentleman that helped me was nice, told me why I needed 4 new tires and an alignment and even offered to run across the street to get me a bottle of water because their fountain was out of order. Seriously, who does that anymore?

That’s it. I’m moving to Georgetown. Okay, probably not, but…

The bottom line is that what could have been a horrible day dealing with horrible customer service and me with a migraine ended up being saved just by a few people that were willing to smile and be nice. I didn’t even groan when I had to hand over the credit card for the tires. I need to remember that myself; I tend to answer the phone pretty abruptly this time of the year (if I see another W2 I may scream). Maybe I should smile a little more

.

Candy won’t toot her own horn, so I guess I have to.

Anchor Advisors, a small business consulting firm, recently quoted Candy in their article Budget for Success in the New Year.

Want to work from home?

Sure! Who wouldn’t? But as anyone who has ever wasted days on the Internet looking can tell you, legitimate work at home jobs are hard to find. Now imagine being a teenager…

Yea.

One enterprising teen, not unsurprisingly the daughter of a virtual assistant, has decided to make legitimate work at home opportunities a reality for teens and college students.

Her press release about the site’s launch is here.

Or, go straight to the source, workinmyroom.com – a site dedicated to offering pre-screened, legitimate work at home opportunities to the next generation.

You all know I work at home and I was sitting here today (yeah, on a Sunday) catching up on some paperwork, when I see some squirrels outside. They are out there quite often, and like the birds in the Spring/Summer, I really look forward to them, watching them run up and down the tree, I’ve even caught them playing a couple of times. Or fighting. Well, I’ll pretend they were playing…

Anyway… I wanna see – what do you see at your desk? Just a screen? A pretty picture? What defines your day, what do you see just off to the side of your monitor? Show me!

I managed to grab a few shots today… My monitor sits a foot or so away from a window and the area between the screen and window frame, I can see this beautiful tree – and also when my kids are home from school and playing, I can watch them on the playscape… anyway…

So, here’s one of my little buddies…

You can see on the left the dark area there is actually the edge of the window frame, oops!

He’s a little out of focus, but at least you can see him up there… he perches there to store his loot and stare around waiting for a blade of grass to move so he can scurry away. Jittery little guys!

I have to just tell you guys real quick about Kylie… whom I call “The Pink One”. She’s this lady from Australia who I first met at a VANA chat. We were looking at each others websites. Hers was pink. No, I don’t think you understand. It looked like a bottle of Pepto Bismal had exploded all over my screen. It was PINK. Did I tell you that I hate pink? I do. I hate hate hate hate pink. She’s since toned it down so it’s not hot pink, but she’s still pink.

I’ve been following Kylie’s career since then and she’s a pretty funny lady – smart too. And she doesn’t mind that I poke fun at her pinkness At any rate… she has decided she wants to come to the IVAA Summit this year. Then she looked at the prices. Ouch! So, she decides to be enterprising and is taking donations to get her butt there. Check out her blog here. I thought, wow, how inspirational! A ticket from Australia to the US is pretty pricey and she really wants to come, so I think it’s a great thing to at least show how serious you are about it.

I hope she makes it. I’d love to meet her – pink or not.

I was at an online networking group tonight in a chat room and we were looking at each other’s websites. See. People make the big mistake of asking me what I think. Why is that a mistake? Well, because I tell them. Heck, sometimes they don’t even have to ASK and I tell them. It’s hard, you put yourself out there and someone finds fault. I know. I’ve been there. My website is FAR from perfect (my web designer keeps after me to let her change it, but I dunno – I’m one of those people that doesn’t like my cheese moved!)

I’ve had good results overall. Tonight wasn’t too bad. I told a fellow VA that she might want to have her web content looked at – having a professional rewrite my content so it was interesting made a huge impact in my business. She seemed to take it well – after she informed me she was a copywriter! Oh vey! BUT I do have to say that I think writing for business and writing for the web (marketing) is two totally different animals. Heck, blog writing is different in and of itself.

But I’m left wondering… do people REALLY want to know an opinion or do they want to only hear that it’s fabulous? I had one lady really get all bent about it. I had to remind her that it is only an opinion.

Another VA shared that she asked for opinions and there was something obviously wrong with the project she was showing around, but it went through quite a few people before one spoke up. She wished someone had something sooner.

I do believe that, in business, we have to have a thick skin. I consider myself fairly successful in this VA thing, and part of that is that I can “take it”. That’s why, while I will mentor someone now and then, I have to make sure they understand that. It’s not personal, but I am pretty straight forward about stuff.

My point? Don’t ask unless you really really want to know

Cuz I’ll tell ya! *laugh*

“I don’t need to reconcile my account, I click that download button and it does itself.” I hear this from time to time and I just have to shake my head. People always assume that the banks are correct, but this simply is not always the case. I was reminded of this today when I was doing a bank reconciliation for a client. Oh, there’s sometimes an error of $0.50 or so, but this one was $11,000.00 – and NOT in the client’s favor. Ouch! That’s money they earned. If they weren’t reconciling their accounts on a regular basis, this very well may never have been caught. Amazing, right?

Not really. It happens every single day. “Back in the day” it was common because of the human factor, humans entered the data and mistakes were made. Nowadays, it’s mostly done by optical readers or MICR readers if it’s encoded. But the harsh reality is that the technology is not perfect. Mistakes happen.

Bottom line – make sure you are reconciling your accounts and do it monthly, you never know….

Sunday I had the great pleasure of attending Maker Faire here in Austin. What the heck is Maker Faire, you ask? It’s this festival of sorts where do-it-yourself types come out and show us what they got… and they got some cool stuff! Okay, and some really weird stuff too. My son got to make a transistor thingy (yes, the technical term) on a business card. We got to see the coolest new toy, Pleo, in person. We had a chance to paint a pumpkin, see robots – a lot of robots, play video games by jumping on a trampoline, finger paint on a touch screen, and yes folks, I got to see the EepyBird dudes do their Mentos and Diet Coke fountain show – and may I saw it’s awesome.

Okay, some of it was serious inventor type stuff, some of it was just downright silly. I mean, really, a robot thespian that sings “The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Music”? Cool, but useful? I hated that movie the first time I saw it! But that robot was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It’s a robot! That acts! Probably better than some actors out there Plus if I’m gonna get a robot, I want it to do my filing or laundry or fetch me a cup of coffee (with sugar and cream, darn it!)

But, you know, the first guy we saw when we came in probably made the biggest impact on me as far as work-related thoughts that swirl in my head… his name was John Funk and he is making a movie, folks. His movie is called Mary Lou Turbine and the Quest For the Dark Planet. Say that 10 times fast, I dare ya.

I’m not even 100% sure what the movie is about – and I even watched the trailer. But he has basically made or made use of old toys and stuff – I take it this is some sort of “no humans in this movie” thing – yeah, there’s a name for this, but whatever. Anyway… what struck me was this. This guy has been working on these elaborate scenes (seriously, I wish I had a picture of his city scape – amazing workmanship) for *YEARS*. How many people do you know that find a dream, a dream that probably makes his friends go, “Huh? You build toys in your garage for your movie? HUH?” and keeps following that dream after all this time?

Yeah. That many, I thought so. So, Mr. Funk, my hats off to you. Everyone should have a dream in their lives and in their businesses and follow it. I think your movie is sci-fi – not something I watch on a regular basis, but you know what? I’ll buy it when it comes out because darn it, I think you were a pretty cool dude and you made me smile.

One more thought… if two guys can make a name and business for themselves simply by dropping candy into a bottle of soda and letting themselves get soaked by all of that… anything really is possible. Go for it. Follow your dreams. I’ll show up next year to cheer you all on.

Home-based businesses are coming out and coming clean. More and more home-based are becoming “transparent”, that is admitting that they are run from home, sometimes with kids underfoot.

There’s a spiffy article in the New York Times on the phenomenon and growth of home-based business, that you can read here. You may have to register, but it’s worth it.

Home-based businesses are no longer minor. According to the article, HBB represent a half a trillion dollar economy.

Me? I think it’s great. I work hard to maintain a professional image, but also make no secret of the fact that I work at home. Of course, this is easier for me as a freelance writer; people tend to assume I am home-based.

Don’t be ashamed to admit you work at home – half the businesses in the country operate that way.

There was a recent discussion on a listserv I am on talking about how much personal information we should share with clients, each other, the general public, etc. I try to keep things professional, yes, but I like to think people realize I’m a human too, just not someone that moves numbers around all day *laugh*. I’m also pretty open with my life. If anyone wants to find something out about me, it’s not that hard

Having said that… at the risk of over-sharing, I wanted to share kind of a cool thing that is happening in my life right now. We owned a home several years ago, but it was a money pit and we eventually sold it to get out of it and vowed to never buy a house again. Plus I don’t like fixing stuff when it breaks – I just pick up the phone and call someone. I still do that actually.

Anyway, so we are living in a 4 bedroom home that I just love (see that picture over there? Look at all those bookcases! They are full now of course – about 600 lovely books) and my son absolutely loves his school and we have the best neighbors in the world and we have this amazing backyard. It seemed so silly to move so we had every intention of staying here forever… until the landlord told us he was going to sell it. Talk about panic!

So… we are buying this house. I wasn’t all that thrilled about it to be honest at first given the nightmare that was our first home. But then I realized. Oh my goodness. We are able to BUY A HOUSE. Our income in our business is such that we can afford and the bank approves of us having a mortgage. I realize this is not a big deal for some people, but you know… I think it’s pretty cool. What a measure of success for me. Oh, I still have a lot of places I want to take OffAssist, but this is for sure a major milestone. Tom and I run this business together. It IS our income and we are good at what we do. It feels pretty darn good to know that we are actually making a living doing what we love and doing it ourselves.

Have a great weekend everyone… and thanks for letting me babble