As I mentioned before, traditional business marketing is changing. TV, radio and print media are in decline, because more and more of our time is spent online, the convergence of all these entertainment technologies has been going on for over a decade now and for the time it all seems to be IP - Internet Protocol centric.

What has that to do with my small business(?) - you may ask. It is actually crucial for your small business to understand this trent so you can act on it and actually save some money, by not wasting it on the wrong advertising medium.

Your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business, may have the greatest product or service, but if you can not make people find you and your products, your small business and business start-up is in trouble, before you even started. There are many parts to the successful small business puzzle and to prevent business failure - blogging could very well be one of them.

Every small business website should have a blog connected to it - needless to say that every small business without fail should have a website. It does not matter if you work globally or locally, a website and blog is a must, not just a nice to have.

A small business blog will help you with the following:

• providing a platform for your small business to interact with your customers
• getting real time feedback from your clients
• provide additional information about your business, services and products
• get your story told your way, offer some control of public opinion
• create buzz about your business and products

It is easy to get a blog with your website hosting company or from WinWeb - you can be up and running in minutes. Hosting your own blog can be more technically demanding, but above all it will waste a lot of your valuable time - writing the articles (posts) for your blog is important - not running your server and blogging software.

Remember nobody is going to tell your story for you and nobody can tell your story better than you yourself.

A lot is being said and written about Business Planning, but when you read the articles you often find it is not a business plan but a strategy plan. I have written in the past about business plans being not very helpful, one of the reasons is that before you do the plan you need to have a vision and strategy.

A complete business plan should consist of of three parts:

1. Vision - is the first step in the “entrepreneurial” process, it does not talk about sales, turnover and cost. It talks about a vision for the “whole” business for the future - 10 to 20 years ahead - it is the long-term goal, view or ideal that drives you small business or business start-up.
2. Strategy - the strategy is the articulation of your vision for your small business in which you put down the practical steps by which your small business is to achieve your vision, based on your current situation. The “strategy” plan has a 3-5 year time horizon.
3. Plan - your plan is only concerned with the next 12 month and is a “tactical” plan of how your small business is going to achieve your strategy.

The Vision & Strategy planning is also refereed to as corporate planning and looks at the business ( including small business) as a whole - it is not a plan for, rather than about the whole organisation. It is often said that only bigger business does this kind of planning - that is utter rubbish - you do it when you set up your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses, as well - you have a vision. You may not write it down in a formal way, but you a have a vision and a strategy to achieve this vision:

….. I’m going to be the number one melted cheese pie producer in the world, I’m doing it by using my mum’s secret ingredient…….”

or

“….. I’m going to be the best IT consultant in the world by given the best customer service anyone has seen……”

or

“…… I’m going to be the biggest start-up and small business infrastructure provider in the world, I’m going to do it by offering unrivaled software and 24/7 support at the lowest price possible and combine it with real live services for the small business and the business start-up community ….” oh, hang on, no sorry that one is gone already

I think you should write yourself one of those sentences and then do a 12 month cash-flow based on this, if you then add a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats) analysis to your plan - your are ready.

Even if you have already started your business - remember most businesses get started accidentally - it is never to late to get a piece of paper and write your vision and strategy down, it focuses the mind. Look at it every time you find it hard to make a decision - it will help.

When I talk here on my blog about outsourcing, bootstrapping or in my company to my fellow directors about more profit, sales, customers and all that with less time, then I’m really talking about improving business efficiency.

I even often misleadingly use the word “grow”, when I really mean efficiency. I’m not one of these people who thinks, that every business wants to grow in size - no, in profit, turnover and efficiency - YES! In todays networked world it is possible to “grow” your business virtually and increase your efficiency at the same time - rather than “grow” your fixed cost structure and decrease efficiency.

Here I just want to talk about which steps one might take to a more efficient small business:

1. look at you business critically and understand what your core business is
2. focus on your core business and objectives, do not waste time with non-core activities - outsource those
3. re-evaluate work processes, remove non-value-add activities, work out how to do that
4. re-evaluate your outsourced activities, are you getting a professional and efficient service
5. check your clients perception of your small business, ask for feedback

The drive for efficiency is an continuous effort in every business, not only small and start-up businesses, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses. It is this kind of thinking that will determine success or failure of your small business venture.

How efficient is your business - to think about that is a much more fascinating way to spend some “free and quiet time”, than watching television - it’s more exciting and rewarding too.

I have been writing about virtual assistants and virtual workers for quite some time, explaining the benefits of outsourcing to virtual assistants and workers for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses.

But I never really wrote something about what it means to have a virtual small business team, which is part of WinWeb’s Small Business Infrastructure approach - so here it goes, a virtual small business team is:

1. a collection of people working together in different locations, countries and time-zones
2. a “network” of people working together using advanced online technology
3. some teams my be project specific and/or limited in duration(time)

Not always do people only work virtually together, some times the meet - even if it is only socially. Under 1. many combinations are possible:

• different time in different locations
• same time in different locations
• same time in same location
• different time in the same location

This all really means one thing - anywhere at anytime! How virtual is your team or in other words how mobile and flexible is your small business. You should think about these issues in the planning phase of your business start-up.

Have you thought through all the possibilities for your small business outsourcing and bootstrapping or how much more green and eco-friendly your small business or start-up would be?

You may have heard about the 80% - 20% rule? It basically means something like you make about 80% of your turnover with 20% of your clients. I guess you would also agree with e that these 20% of your clients are very important to your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business, so what are you doing about that? You should do about it is learn about Key Account Management.

What is a key account? They are the customers that keep your small business revenue growing, look at some of the attributes of an key account:

1. Provides your business with consistent and high value business
2. Is looking for a long-term partnership with your small business
3. Is of “strategic” importance to you or your business sector
4. Offers you increasing sales for the future
5. Is one of your most important customers.

You need to develop and maintain an value adding relationship with your key accounts, because they offer you a constant revenue stream of high quality and reliability - best of all a growing revenue stream. This in turn allows you to plan your business better (cash-flow) for the future, while reducing your sales cost.

Get the picture - these customers are among the most valuable assets to your growing small business or business start-up.

I did not want to publish another small business checklist this week, but for obvious reasons I decided otherwise - I also altered the usual title to fit the occasion - here goes ……

Your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses - and Skype - will not survive without customers, and you need to get across to them how much you value them - you need to have a clear and consistent internal and external communication strategy. Here are some pointers:

1. Deal with the problem - customers who know that their problems are taken care of are likely to be more satisfied with the service and will be happy customers for the future.
2. Be sympathetic - some customers could suffer a great deal of inconvenience and stress, as a result of the problems, you need to address these issues head on.
3. Appoint an incident communicator - for constant and timely updates on the progress of resolving the issues.
4. Keep to deadline - if you set deadlines by which the problems will be solved, make sure you keep to them, otherwise you will loose trust and goodwill.
5. Build Trust - if the problem takes longer to resolve, propose smaller steps to resolve the issue any lost trust by your customers will return step by step.
6. Don’t create a vacuum - by not communicating with your customers. Otherwise you will learn they can talk your problem up and up, creating another problem.
7. Train staff - make sure you have trained staff to handle your customers complaints and problems.
8. Build understanding - by openly discussing your problems with your clients so they know what to expect.
9. People - avoid putting the wrong people on the helpline.
10. Resources - make sure your customer care department has adequate resources.

Have a look at my earlier post on “How not to do it!” - I’m stunned that a company like Skype can get it so wrong, IMO. Your business is build on trust and relationships, especially in these community driven times - neglect these simple rules at your own peril.

For more of my checklists see the Small Business Checklists category and as always please add to my list with your comments, tell us what works for you.

One for the weekend - had a bad day so-far or yesterday maybe? You should read the Dumb Little Man Blog with todays offering:

9 Ways to Have a Better Day than Yesterday

I love the post give it a go - you’ll like it!

A couple of days ago I mentioned the excellent posting from Kathie ” Virtual Assistant or Virtual Worker” followed by my own post of yesterday “Grow your small business - success or failure will follow“. This all leads us to the next question what to do when you decided you are going to get help for your small or start-up business.

Kathie highlighted two options, the virtual worker - who like her husband works as a contractor or the virtual assistant who takes care of certain work on a timeshare basis for an indefinite amount of time. The only other option is employing staff full time into your business.

Virtual Assistants will enable you to outsource - what I call non core business processes, like bookkeeping, call handling, typing, etc. - to a professional person, well equipped to perform these tasks for you in a cost-effective manner and I do not mean cheap, I mean cost-effective. It is also noteworthy that you will not have to provide office space, work-tools, computer, heating, etc. for virtual assistants, as they usually work from home. look at it this way, you are getting a professional on a timeshare basis, and believe me when I say, having you phone answered in a professional manner makes a lot of difference to your business, or keeping up with your bookkeeping, so you know where you are - this all will make your business much more professional. Businesses and people like to do business with professionals.

Virtual workers can be from a “Temp-Agency” or a from contracting firms. These relationships are for finite projects or to fill a cap, due to permanent staff illness on a temporary basis - they are limited by time or project. So again you can afford to bring in professionals, to perform tasks for you or your clients.

Both of these relationships are good for your cost-planning because they are not fixed, permanent costs, they are variable cost, meaning, when the project is finished the contract for your temp-workers, contractors finishes too. If times are harder for your business and you need save cost it is often easier and faster to terminate a virtual assistant - but remember to explain your decision, so that when your small business is doing better again you can start working with your virtual assistant again.

Employing people full time should only be considered for “essential, ongoing and full-time” work, this way you can provide a more secure workplace for your employee and look forward to a peaceful and unstressed work environment.

Building a support network community for your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses is essential to your survival. Remember, the contractor you hire today, may hire you tomorrow on a project he or she is working on - networking is the way to go.

As a side effect of Skype’s Login Problem our own users experienced long login times. We log our clients into skype during the login in process into WinWeb’s OnlineOffice.

BTW, that has been changed now, so I will no longer delay the login to our console. But this demonstrates the inherent danger of mash-up in the online software industry (SaaS, Web 2.0). You not only mash-up functionality, but possibly also the problems.

Something to consider, when you consider the pros and cons of mash-ups. The silence of the pro mash-up community to this outage is indicative of these unresolved issues.

My Skype has been logging me in and out all morning and it is showing “only” 3.3Mio users online - where have all the other 5 to 6Mio users gone?

And even when I’m online I only see a fraction of my contacts even-so they are online. Hope these guys let us know soon what is going on? Have not seen any statement?

UPDATE 10:36-BST: Online again, and so are also over 1Mio users - now back to 4.3Mio. Sorry I was too optimistic - I’m offline again?

UPDATE 10:48-BST: Online again, but lost 1.1Mio users again, can see only one of my contacts? I guess it’s official - problems at Skype! And I’m off-line again!!

UPDATE 10:58-BST: Online again, seems every ten minutes, but now only 2.7Mio users - soon there will be nobody left. I’m offline again!

UPDATE 10:59-BST: Skype admits login problem - they are not specific about it!

“Due to Peer-to-Peer network issues there are problems with Skype login. This issue is being investigated. We will give new updates when the issue has been resolved.

We apologize for any inconvenience.”

UPDATE 12:20-BST: Now we are down to 1.8Mio users. With only about 20% of its users showing online I think it is fair to say that Skype is down - a sad day for Skype and for us too - as we use Skype in our OnlineOffice console.

UPDATE 14:15-BST: Nearing the singularity - 764.324 people online and falling fast - the meltdown continues. Slowly I’m beginning to get worried about Skype - the US is about to wake up to the fact that Skype is down - now the homepage is no longer loading. No news from skype.

UPDATE 14:30-BST: Villu Arak from Skype says:

Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience.

With “some of you” he means over 90% of you - this is not the way to deal with this - what do they think nobody is going to notice they are down - give me a break. What a support and PR disaster - I guess not without reason has he filed his post under “Milestones”.

What is the problem anyway - a software problem or a peer to peer network issue - which one is it, or is it both problems, are there any other problems or is it something else altogether???

Just let us now - if you know - so we know what we are looking at!

UPDATE 16:35-BST: Reading some of the comments to this post and calls from clients, I would like to add the following:

• we (winweb.com) will not stop working with skype in the future and I think anyone should consider what skype has done for all of us in the past,
• my concern here is the way this situation is handled not with the service skype has provided, my clients are loyal skype users and deserve more communication from skype,
• I just hope nothing more sinister than, a typical screw-up, hardware failure is to blame for this,

So just let us know what is going on, read some of the comments here and elsewhere to realize how important the skype service is to some people.

UPDATE 17:32-BST: My interview with the AP- Associated Press/ Matt Moore on the Skype outage.

UPDATE 07:00-BST, Aug.17th: Situation much as yesterday - after hitting about 10k users online yesterday - we are now back to 1.9Mio users and I’ currently online. Rumors are flying about a possible external hacker attack (-> see comments below) - Skype’s last announcement on the website at 05:30 GMT:

Hello everyone,

Skype is currently working on resolving the sign-on issue. We’re fixing our networking software and monitoring the clients getting online with increased success.

Please see our Heartbeat blog for ongoing updates.

And the messages are still a little confusing but we are being updated on a regular basis - very good guys, I knew you had it in you. Sten seems to be doing a good job, as what he says can be seen on the “ground”. Back to 2.5Mio now - as he says things are improving - I can see two of my contacts again.

I hope I will post my last update on this post next!

UPDATE 11:45-BST, Aug. 17th: Despite Sten’s promise no update - no service, even-so I’m connected, but to what(?) I do not know - I’m still on- and offline all the time - no change then.

I hope my staff is watching this, for when this happens to us - trust me it will happen to us one day - and when we say we are going to make an update in about four hours - we better do it. We owe that to our customers.

UPDATE 12:20-BST, Aug. 17th: Villu posted a few moments ago:

Hello all,

As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.

An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.

Believe it or not, that is good news in a way “…nor any form of attack..”, I am happy to live for another day or so without this “great & free service” - mind you I have SkypeIn & Out, in short I’m a Skype junkie - but if this would have been caused by an external attack I would have been worried for the future.

I will make this my last update for now - as I feel you’ll be better served by going onto the Skype Heartbeat website, since they seem to update us all on a semi regular basis - I will only be back if there are “other & unforeseen” developments. Leaves me to wish the Skype boys & girls best of luck to get this fixed ASAP.

Moving On - waiting for my button to turn green.

UPDATE 16:40-BST, August 17th: Unfortunately Skype has decided not to communicate with it’s customers & clients. The situation is not improving - online, but can’t see anyone - about 2.2Mio users showing.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.

This was now about six hours ago - no improvement, no update - they should update us at fixed intervals. I would think Skype can get one person to keep it’s customers informed. What is going on - are we being told the real story? I’m beginning to wonder!!!

Needless to mention here that their own deadline - 12 to 24 hours - is up and gone.

Judging by same of the comments on my blog and others, things are getting pretty unpleasant out there - why is Skype behaving this way, when it is all so avoidable - any idea?

PLEASE NOTE: may I remind my readers that I approve your comments on an individual basis, there is a line I’m not willing to cross, so please don’t waste your and my time with abusive comments, they will not get published. Nobody understands better than I do, what Skype’s service has come to mean to us all - but that does excuse abusive messages.
I thank you all for your comments.

UPDATE 18:10-BST, August 17th: Not much change, no news, 3.5Mio users show online, service not available, get online and offline all the time, like I said, not much change.

I’m still stunned by this utter PR and customer support disaster so I decided to do one of my Small Business Checklists for my usual readers and on this occasion for Skype, it is about Handling Customer Care.

Maybe someone in Skype is still reading blogs, if so have a look at it - PLEASE.

UPDATE 21:20-BST, August 17th: There is no news from Skype on their Heartbeat website, the last message was over 10 hours ago, unbelievable. However I have found an article in the New York Times with some more insight. It reads something like this:

…… But they said that while they had pinpointed the source of the problem, they still did not know why it had resulted in a network failure, and they could not ensure that the service would be running smoothly again by Friday.

“There is a chance this could go on beyond tomorrow, but it’s our hope that it’s going to be resolved,” Kurt Sauer, Skype’s chief security officer, said. “What happened today was caused by a unique set of events, the genesis of which is not entirely understood ……

It gets more and more interesting, they say it’s a login problem, yet I login, but get no service - even if I see other contacts? Is that a login problem??? What remains is that I’m still stunned by their unbelievable customer service.

UPDATE 04:30-BST, August 18th: At 01:44 AM this morning Skype reported that all is back to normal, good news:

Hello again,

We are pleased to announce that the situation continues to improve. The sign-on problems have been resolved. Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational. We know what our faithful users have been going through and we thank you for your patience and kind support.

If you are one of the minority who may still be experiencing problems, please be patient. You do not need to adjust or restart your computer. Skype will start working for you very soon.

We will issue a further update when we know that Skype is functioning normally, or if there is further material news.

We’ve commandeered extra supplies of pizza and coffee, and we can promise that the Skype people aren’t going anywhere until they’re happy that everything is back to normal.

(Posted at 00.02 AM GMT)

(Update at 1:44 AM GMT: Please ignore the “Problems with Skype login” text in the Heartbeat status box above, next to “Sign-in and registration”, as well as “P2P network core”. The text should read “All working normally”.)

It is showing over 4Mio users online, could not test it as most of my contacts are in bed and my staff in Australia is on weekend leave - so that will have to wait until the morning.

Let us hope that this is the end for most of the users and that this is not the end of the matter for Skype, and that they will perform a post-mortem in which the will establish a proper “Incident Management Plan”, especially in relations to it’s customers.

Here a link to my interview with Juan Perez of the IDG News Service for PC World and others.

And now finally ….. moving on.