Vesess

Firstly, Happy New Year from everyone here at Vesess! 2009 was a tough one for small businesses, but we got through it with your help, and are raring to go in 2010. To start the year off with a bang we’ve got an interview with someone who really knows his SMEs.

John Joyce is the one man band that runs The Small BizNest, an outfit that specialises in developing marketing plans for small businesses. When John came to us to have his company’s web presence developed, we had no idea what kind of experience we were in for.

As we put together the The Small BizNest site, we slowly realised that we were working with one of the best marketers in the field. Today, we hope to share that experience with you via an interview we recently conducted with him.

On your website, you say that The Small BizNest develops ‘online marketing eco-systems’. That’s an interesting concept – could you tell us what it means?

The days of outbound marketing are over and, for any business to attract new customers, they must embrace the concept of inbound marketing. Many people mistakenly believe that simply building a website will instantly attract new customers or that just signing up for a Twitter account will generate new business. The truth of the matter is that you have to establish your messaging and then build an entire ecosystem (website, blogging, SEO/SEM, social media, networking, list building, etc.) that will consistently deliver your message to the largest number of “qualified” prospective customers.

You’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the business. What made you choose SMEs as your field of choice?

After a long career working with large corporations, l decided it was time for a change. I was fortunate enough to join GotVMail (now Grasshopper) when they were a small company (less than ten employees) and that experience sparked my passion for empowering small businesses.

How is marketing for SMEs different from marketing for bigger companies?

In most cases, the SME doesn’t have the financial or human capital to effectively and consistently market their business. SMEs need to be educated on low cost, no cost marketing solutions as well as solutions that are as automated as possible so they can focus on their core business.

What do you like most about the work you do? If there is one thing you could change about how the game is played, what would it be?

The most rewarding aspect of the work I do is being able to quickly see results and share in the success of my clients. The greatest challenge is the speed at which technology like search engine algorithms change. Your goals don’t change but your strategy and tactics are always a moving target.

There are tons of publicity firms out there. Why should SMEs come to you?

Marketing, advertising and publicity are all beginning to merge. They are all components of an online marketing ecosystem. I don’t just offer hype or buzz – I build a strategic vision that encompasses all aspects of attracting new customers and building brand equity.

‘Internet marketing’ is a term that’s bandied about a lot these days. What similarities and differences does it share with traditional marketing, and how does The Small BizNest take these into account when creating strategies?

I equate traditional marketing with outbound marketing and, although there are outbound components of internet marketing such as email, it’s no longer an effective strategy. The days of blasting your message to the disinterested masses are behind us and businesses now need to engage in ‘inbound marketing’. We develop strategies that help clients identify (1) who their target customers are, (2) what their needs are and (3) where they can be engaged. The resulting tactics can be a mixture of inbound/outbound and online/offline components but inbound online efforts currently offer the best ROI.

Which Internet technologies have affected online marketing the most, and why?

Search engines, most importantly Google, have really leveled the playing field. More than 80% of consumers use a search engine to research a product or service they are planning to purchase. SMEs are able to create a comprehensive business profile on all of these search engines for free.

I also think SaaS, cloud computing and open source paved the way for the huge number of powerful yet affordable solutions available to SMEs today.

As someone who has a passion for SMEs, what are your resources of choice for keeping up with the latest developments in the sphere? What should new SME owners be reading these days?

Books:

• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – Michael E. Gerber
• Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) – Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah
• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion – Gary Vaynerchuk
• Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust – Chris Brogan, Julien Smith
• Web Analytics: An Hour A Day – Avinash Kaushik

Online Reading:

• Guy Kawasaki
• Chris Brogan
• Smallbiztrends
• Duct Tape Marketing
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Tim Berry
• Seth Godin
• Bizsugar

On a related note, what has changed the most about the SME game in this post-Internet era? What are some of the new challenges a new SME
has to face today?

• The barriers to entry (for starting an online business) are extremely low so there’s a greater likelihood that there will be a steady stream of new competitors.
• There is an extremely steep learning curve when it comes to online marketing due to the complexity of the solutions and the speed at which they change.
• Although there are many free marketing products/services available to SMEs, many of them require a serious time commitment to make sure there is plenty of care and feeding while you grow your ecosystem.

Social media is a relatively new concept, especially to firms outside North America and Europe. What advice do you have on getting the most out of it, especially for firms that are just entering the fray?

At the risk of being self-promoting, the best way to impact your business using social media is to hire someone with social media expertise. Learning the right way to implement and manage these solutions as a part of your overall marketing strategy will save your business a great deal of time and money in the long run.

No, we’re not patting our own backs. We’re just bringing you an interview with the people behind A Good Company, a SME that is doing it right. Read on to see what what Caroline and Micah have to say about design, clients, and their plan to take over the world.

Micah and Caroline, thanks for joining us today. For starters, could you tell us a little bit about A Good Company, and how it came to be?

Caroline: We both went to Otis College of Art and Design, a small design school in Los Angeles. We decided to work on our senior thesis project together, it was us and another designer, our pal Nicole. The 3 of us worked together and had a hell of a time creating www.thegoodsideof.us, where people can share stories of their good deeds.

We both work really well together and during school we constantly talked about starting a company someday, we both have similar ideas of what kind of a company we wanted to create. We even came up with the name A Good Company, during our senior year in college. We thought it’d be funny and also true. Obviously we both care deeply about good design, but what we also want from our company is a business that can be good, and help other business be good. We like the idea that being good is financially sustainable.

So after we graduated college, we decided that we’d like to keep working together. And since at the time I didn’t have a full time job, and Micah was looking for a good reason to go back to sunny CA, we thought that maybe now is the best time to start a business together.

How does A Good Company operate? Do you guys have offices, or do you just work from home? How do you guys divide the work flow between yourselves?

Caroline: We both work from home. And since right now we’re working from opposite sides of the country, we mostly work together through IM. As for our workflow I’m not quite sure, there’s really no rigid rules about it, it’s more like, we each do what we know we can do best at that specific time.

Micah: We’ve worked together really closely for… almost two years, even if it wasn’t always for A Good Company. That thesis project, and school projects, had us working really close, and we got a pretty clear idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been doing a lot of client-talking lately, or programming, while Caroline spearheads a lot of the design and concepting. A lot of times we trade off more menial business work with design work, so one of us is organizing files or setting up tools and the other is gettin’ stuff done. And then we trade chores.

What changes, if any, have you had to make as a result of the prevailing economic downturn, and what advice would you give other small businesses trying to stay competitive in this financial climate?

Caroline: To be honest, I dont think we have made changes at all. At least personally I dont think a bad economy is a reason for us to hold back or anything like that. We’re both generally are pretty good about keeping in budget, for our personal finances. As for the company, since our business doesn’t require us to put a huge amount of monetary investment to it, I don’t think financially the economy has affected us in a big way.

I’m not sure if I’m qualified to give business advice to anyone, but one thing that we are trying to do with our company is to … well not to lose hope. People have said to us, in this economy you want to be careful, you need to hang on to every client you’ve got, just be thankful you have clients at all. Well, I dont think the bad economy is a good reason for us as a company to lower our standards. We still believe that working with good clients whom we respect and trust, doing work that is good, intelligent, and fun, is still what we’re strive for. So i guess if I have to give an advice to people about dealing with the economy downturn: don’t compromise, on anything, we might be in a hopeless situation but we’re not hopeless.

Micah: I don’t really believe in recessions. I don’t really believe in germs, either, but the thing is, we don’t really spend much money. And I’m constantly advocating us making products, so we can be more self-sufficient. My long term goal is to make our client work optional.

Deploying a service as a small business is often a nerve-wracking task. How has A Good Portfolio fared, and what have you learnt from working on it?

Caroline: Well even though we put this project on hold for sometime now, personally for me what I really learned from it is how to be more flexible. Micah has this mentality of “an idea is a dime a dozen”. I, on the other hand get attached to ideas. I’ve always thought this was a good idea and when we had to put it on hold, I was very resistant at first. but we did have a good reason to do it. We realized that this product is not the kind of product we wanted it to be. We were searching for a product that could give us a passive income, something we don’t have to manage. After doing some research, we realize that our target audience, being students, we probably won’t make much money from it. So we put it on hold, because we couldn’t afford to spend so much time working on something that woulnt earn us money.

The reason we revived the project is because Micah has this new take on working on this product. Before, we were gonna have all these fancy features, which we both admit would be really cool to have (templates, customizable fonts, color pickers, etc). The problem was, it’ll take a long time for us to figure out how to build all those fancy things (considering that neither of us are actual programmers, I have 0 programming knowledge and Micah is a hack, though, for a hack, Micah is a genius, if I do say so myself). So what we’ve decided to do this time around is to keep it as simple as possible. We want to build only the things that we absolutely need to launch. Once we have something that’s working then we can add other cool stuff to it, but we don’t want to focus so much on the nice-to-have features right from the get go. First we focus on the essential, and once we have that, we can expand as needed.

Micah: Not that we invented that idea, or anything, but we’re both kind of perfectionists deep down, and I’ve been working hard to change my mindset about that. We were concerned at first that it wouldn’t make us any money, but realized that if we didn’t spend too much time on it at first, it’s not much of a loss. So we picked it up again, made it real quick, and we’re testing it out. But I agree with Caroline, I think it’s taught us to get over ourselves and roll with the punches a bit.

On your website, you mention that you have “big plans” for the future. Mind elaborating? Where would you like to see A Good Company go in the next few years?

Caroline: hmm our big plans… well our long term business goal is to take over the world. But I guess we need to start with small steps.

In the next few years, I’d like for A Good Company to start working with good clients, in every sense of the word. I don’t care about size, they don’t need to be famous or popular. Here’s my idea of a good client, someone who treats us like we’re a partner, like we’re real people, working together with them to help them achieve their goals, be it creating a identity for their company or coming up with a product idea that’ll help them grow their business. A good client would also have the same ideas about business as we do, which means that they want to make their business profitable by using technology, design, science, inventions, and ideas to make a positive changes in the world, big or small. If we can start having more clients like that in the next few years, then I think we’d have no problem meeting our business objective in the long run.

Micah: Yeah, honestly, I share Caroline’s thoughts on clients, but I want it to be a choice – I don’t want to worry about income or making sure we have paying clients. I want us to pick projects we want to work on, based on how much we can do to help the world somehow. Inventions, events, who knows what. A Good Company is gonna be a model for how companies and people can help each other out and make the world a better place, that’s our goal.

A Good Company, of course, like any good company, uses CurdBee to power their invoicing. Here is a screenshot of their Bee deployment at work.

At CurdBee, and at of course at Vesess, we believe that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the future of the web, and featuring them here is one of the most awesome things we do all month. Conducted as a supplement to our CurdBee newsletter, we hope you enjoy this interview as much as we did!

Adelle Charles is a Designer & Blogger, Principal, Creative Director of Fuel Brand Group, and runs Fuel Your Creativity. She is an obsessive email checker and highly addicted to Starbucks. Loves to add “fuel to the fire” any chance she gets. Her dogs Chino and Jameson jot down ideas for her while she’s at work. They are obviously the secret to her success.

What does a typical work day look like for you? Tell us a little bit about your workflow as well.

I stroll in between 9-9:30 (yes I’m late!) with my Starbucks in hand and usually have a couple of meetings to start with and I usually spend a couple of hours answering emails. Then I get down to business being the Art Director for a local news station here in Rochester, NY. After that I go home and work on a number of freelance projects as well as putting time into a company that I’m a partner in called Fuel Brand Group in addition to working on FreshID, another great company I’m involved with.

What tools, both online and offline, do you use on a regular basis? Where does Curdbee fit in to all of this?

I use Yammer, Skype, Tweetdeck, Things, NetNewswire, Dropbox, Textmate. I also use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as well. As for CMSes: WordPress. CurdBee is a great tool that I use to invoice all of my freelance clients.

What do you find most rewarding about design and interaction, especially on the web? Also, what do you find most frustrating about this sphere?

The web is a great way for designers all around the world to meet and exchange ideas and feedback. I find it frustrating because we’re such a close-knit community so ideas seem to overlap frequently.

As a designer and Internet entrepreneur, what are the challenges you see for yourself and the community as you step into 2009?

It is always a challenge to stay ahead of the curve and constantly reinvent yourself and your company so you can consistently produce products and services that customers want.

What advice do you have for newbie designers who are just starting out in the field? What tools, tricks and techniques can they use to stay competitive in the veritable jungle that is the web of today?

Frequently check out other designers’ work and leave comments to get your name out there. You will find that we’re a friendly bunch and will return the favor. Also, I recommend getting back to the basics and sketching everything. It will be a great brainstorming activity and you may be able to get future designs out of it.

Well, that’s it from Adelle! Thanks for reading, and see you next time.