If you spend any time at all online you can’t have failed to notice a whole set of new technologies that make up what is being referred to as ‘Web 2.0’ - wikis, blogs, rss feeds, podcasts. More and more, these are finding application in business. Here’s a simple explanation of two of the most common Web 2.0 technologies being promoted as useful to small business,
blogs and wikis.

BLOGS

Contraction of ‘web log’, a blog is a diary of the writer’s thoughts but with entries displayed in reverse chronological order.
Communication is two-way – readers who have joined (subscribed to) a particular blog can post their own responses and thoughts on the stories the author has posted there.

Examples: The Consumerist, Small Business Trends, Small Business Brief, Sales Team Tools

Business applications

• Inexpensive marketing
• Build web traffic
• Low cost alternative to creating and maintaining a website
• Chance to communicate in an immediate and personalised way with customers and prospects to get new ideas as well as feedback on products and service
• Keep employees informed about business related developments

   What it takes

You need to publish well written, informative content on your blog on a regular basis to enjoy the maximum search engine optimisation
benefits of blogging and keep readers coming back. More time will go into
responding to the comments you receive and checking up on the links you have provided to other sites (users will stop reading your blog if they regularly find dead links in your stories). It also needs some clever  marketing to get noticed and attract subscribers in the first place. You could use your customer list to let people know you have started a blog, make prominent mention of it on your website and list with a blog directory. Also put a link to your blog in your email signature line and mention it in forum discussion replies.

WIKIS

A wiki is a website whose information can be added to, removed or edited by visitors. It derives from the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’.
Think of a wiki as a shared whiteboard and filing cabinet combined. Wikis
present a powerful opportunity for collaboration among employees and can be used to create a valuable organisational knowledge base of information people find it helpful to have handy ranging from policies and procedures to a list of product serial numbers or a directory of client websites. A wiki can be for purely internal use among employees or open to the outside world so customers and prospects can view and add to what is there as well.

Examples: SmallBusiness.com, HTC Smartphone Wiki, Corporate Underpants

Business applications

• Useful repositories of information your people may need easy access to
• Support for collaborative projects – keep all documents in one place accessible to all project members
• Allow customers to generate content for you, for instance a bookshop could host readers’ reviews
• Create a virtual call centre to answer customer FAQs
• Gather customer comment on products and services

   What it takes

Open access to wiki content (although some content can be locked down and untouchable) means that data is easily vandalised by removal of content or deliberate addition of misinformation. Some sort of editorial
control and content review process is recommended to keep information up to date, relevant, correct, and to prune out problematic content such as defamatory comments and advertising for other sites. It’s better to avoid this intervention as much as possible. Let contributors know the rules up front by posting a ‘terms of service’ policy outlining what is acceptable.

If sensitive information is included in your wiki, such as employee details or product designs and other intellectual property, then implement a strict gatekeeper policy to control who has access to what. Employees will need some encouragement to start using it. You’ll have to market it to make customers and prospects aware of it.

Franchising is possibly the most successful business model ever invented. The survival rate of franchises is far higher than that of stand-alone businesses.

Is it possible that there is a lesson to be learned from the way in which franchises operate that could be applied to small independent businesses to improve their profitability and likelihood of survival?

The answer is an emphatic YES.

The fundamental principle of good management that franchisers have put to such good use is available to any business owner – it’s SYSTEMATISATION.

Think like a franchiser

The key to systematising your business is to think about it as if you were turning it into a franchise. Entrepreneurs who set
out to turn their business into a franchisable operation know that the core thing they need to get right is to develop foolproof operating procedures. The franchisor isn’t going to be there to watch how each one of their agents prepares and cooks the pizza or washes and grooms the family pet.

Central to franchising is the repeatable production of a high quality product or service experience for the customer without the oversight of the franchise manager. The only way a franchisor can guarantee that happens is to train their agents to go through every process in a systematic manner.

If it’s preparing a sandwich, then everything from the way to cut the bread to how and when the condiments are added is dictated and taught from a system developed by the franchiser. The success of individual franchise outlets is the best  advertisement for the soundness of this approach. Systematising is the approach you need to take with regard to every
aspect of your business if you want it to stand as solid as a franchise. Start by focusing on one particular aspect of your business and think through the entire process so it can be handled efficiently and consistently by everyone who has to perform it.

Systematise the right things

Any process can be systematised but the place to start is with those that deliver value to the customer and to your business.
A telephone enquiry from a prospect, properly handled, can result in an impressed customer and an order. So systematising telephone calls would involve providing employees with a script that required the phone to be answered without delay, described how to introduce oneself, how to handle likely enquires, how to take an order and get all the relevant information first time, how to deal with transfers to another person and how to ring off courteously. 

Systematising a towing pick-up would cover not just the mechanics of a safe hook-up but how to treat the customer so that they are happy with the way their vehicle is being treated (no greasy hand prints on it, provide a business card with contact details and so on).

After you have thought each process through in this way, write it down. Then work through any problems or exceptions that you
can think of and write down a plan to deal with these situations as well.

First things first

Systematising may seem like a daunting job but not every process needs to be done at once. The key processes for your  business are those that touch on product quality and customer service standards. Get those right first.

Back office routines that don’t directly touch on these such as handling payroll, bookkeeping and marketing can be considered
later. Some processes can be systematised simply by buying a training package, for instance, telephone technique. Others can be systematised by creating templates, standardised forms and checklists so all team members go about a task in a consistent way. And some processes, such as payroll, may be better off being outsourced to ensure they are done in a systematic manner.

Write it down

Systematised processes don’t stay that way for long unless they are documented. Set up a simple operations manual which details the tasks that make up each of the key operations or procedures of your business. The objective is to write your manual as if it were going to be used by a ‘franchisee’. It should explain an operation in sufficient detail that an employee could follow it unaided and get the right result.

Franchises are successful for a very simple reason – each one has identified a set of customer winning practices and developed operational methods for consistently replicating them. Any business prepared to exert the necessary discipline can benefit from systematisation in exactly the same way as franchisers do. The payoff won’t only be in terms of profit. Systematising a business allows it to run without requiring your constant intervention or always answering employees’ questions about how things work. It can improve your peace of mind as well as your bank balance.

When an employee comes to you with a suggestion, what is your usual reaction? If its along the lines of “That’s never going to work”,  “That’s not your problem” or “We don’t have time to think about that” – or any equally negative response, then you could be missing out on a great opportunity to pick up on ideas for increasing productivity, cutting costs, or improving working conditions.

Too many managers simply dismiss ideas put up by their employees without giving them proper consideration.  Yet employees are the people closest to the action, be it on the production line, in the admin office or on the floor dealing with customers. They see and hear a lot and are often led to think about, or even invent for themselves, better ways of getting things done. Better
ways that can improve productivity, morale, process efficiency and ultimately, profits.

It is important to openly encourage employees to come forward with their suggestions and to make them feel that they are a
part of the decision making process. As with everything in business, the better the planning you put into an initiative the more value you get out of it. A poorly conceived, hastily launched, undefined employee suggestion programme can backfire and achieve just the opposite of encouraging ideas – it can turn people off by creating bad feeling and making them more cynical. 

There are a number of channels you can create to receive employee suggestions. Some will suit one business more than another,
some businesses may find they can use more than one of them.

Most basic is the suggestion box. These days a suggestion box needn’t be a physical thing, it can be an email address employees
use to email in their suggestions.

The brainstorming session is a more formal approach and involves a greater commitment of time and money.

Tips for an effective employee suggestion system

• Set clear goals and guidelines for the suggestion programme. If the programe is publicised as being about ideas that will achieve cost savings or about achieving a better level of workplace safety then you have immediately screened for what you want to hear about. If the programme is totally open to any suggestion then point that out.  
• Deal with suggestions quickly. Delay a decision more than a week and people will see the suggestion box as a black
   hole.  
• Acknowledge receipt of valid suggestions. Never reply to obscene or abusive suggestions. Your best response to that
   sort of negativity is to not indulge the sender with a reply.
• Let the contributor know the result. If  their idea got the thumbs down explain in detail why you can’t use it. If
   the idea is worth implementing, tell the whole team so they can see the process at work.
• Make the decision process transparent and fair – if the suggestion reviewer is the boss alone or just the top
   managers, rejection may be taken as just another instance of management negativism.  If the suggestion gets the thumbs up carry through the implementation. Nothing builds trust and credibility faster than keeping a commitment.
• Tie implementation into a reward programme but don’t reward for suggesting alone, reward only acceptable suggestions.
   Otherwise you’ll spend a lot of money on rewarding ‘get a new coffee making machine’ type suggestions. The programme is about quality suggestions. Your rewards don’t have to be of great monetary value. Common rewards include
   tickets to events, gift vouchers and restaurant meals. Employee suggestions that have saved their company significant amounts of money run from the ‘eureka’ moment to the banal – but they all save money. It was an employee’s
   suggestion to build an elevator on the outside of the hotel he worked for rather than, as the engineers had suggested, cut a hole through each of the floors internally. That saved engineering fees, cleanup costs and loss of income from having to close for the duration.

Smart managers understand the potential of employees to come up with good ideas and encourage them to do so. You can too.
But do it properly. People are easily discouraged and the process can become the butt of jokes if not taken seriously by management.

A budget is an important management tool. Being a projection of your income against your expenses you can check it at any time to see how well or how poorly your business is doing.

The value of a budget is in direct proportion to the accuracy of the figures you use to create it. Here are some precautions to take to keep your budget figures accurate.

Use realistic projections

Since a budget is based on projections there’s always an element of uncertainty involved in estimating inputs. It pays to be conservative regarding things such as sales forecasts. If they turn out to be better than  estimated, that’s great and provides the opportunity to distribute the extra around to advantage. But if they are worse than expected it means rethinking all your plans to match the budget shortfall. If your business provides a product or service for which the demand varies by season (retail takings over a holiday season, pool maintenance between seasons and so on), then factor that into your budget.

Don’t underestimate costs

Petrol, travel, raw materials, rent – all costs increase over time. A projection of costs at current year value will result in budget blowouts. It’s wiser to make a best estimate and then increase it a little. If the actuals do end up coming in under projection you will have provided a little bit of ‘fat’ in the budget to cover the odd unanticipated contingency. You might even add a   miscellaneous’ line item to the budget to handle those unknowns.

Question every expense

Preparing a budget provides the perfect opportunity to consider what value for money you are getting from the costs you
are incurring. Is it time to change the petrol powered work vehicle to a hybrid? Look at raw material substitutes? Move to a VoIP phone service? Also look for any expense items that could be eliminated. A penny saved is a penny earned!

Factor in cash flow

Incorrectly projecting cash flow will turn the best budget into a fiasco. In virtually every transaction there is a lag time between the finalisation of the deal and actual cash collection. This time lag has to be built in when preparing a budget – you may expect to sell goods to a certain value in Month X but that doesn’t mean the value of those sales will be in your bank account in Month X. This doesn’t present a problem if the budget allows for it. When it’s not factored in you can run into serious cash flow
problems through spending money you don’t yet have.

Allow for your tax liability

Don’t forget your likely obligations to the taxation department. Sales income will ultimately be depleted by GST, various other state and commonwealth taxes and employee withholdings. Fail to account for these and you run the risk of budgeting for future projects that you aren’t going to be able to afford.

Keep the figures current

Budget preparation isn’t a once a year operation. Things change – the price of petrol soars, sales are a lot better than expected. Budget lines need to be revised to reflect these events. The point of budgeting is to be able to compare actuals against projections to see how the business is going. If the actuals aren’t actuals you’ll be making decisions based on false assumptions. It’s easy to let the budget become just another document gathering dust on the shelf. Plugging in the new figures each month, considering how actuals are tracking against projections and what that means in terms of what you need to do takes a lot of self discipline. But if you don’t do it, you’ve not only wasted the time and effort you put into creating the budget, you open the path to fiscal irresponsibility and wasted opportunities as off-the-cuff purchase decisions send expenses out of control while unexpected income sits in a bank account when it could be put to use to improve operations.

 As the use of computers becomes more built in to business operations employees naturally spend an increasing proportion of their time working at them. Working? Really? With temptations such as chat, streaming video, blogs, social networking and myriad other interesting sites (weather, maps, pornography, music, games, gambling, shopping, sports) it’s no wonder that surveys such as Websense’s annual Web@Work study reveal a depressing incidence of non-work related Web surfing by employees.

And its depressing not just because of the loss in productivity due to the amount of time wasted on such activities. These private activities, because they take place at the workplace using work computers, can entangle the business in legal prosecution cases related to their illegal use.  Classic cases of work computer abuse include the employee who managed an eBay store from work selling his company’s inventory and another who set up the company server to run his gambling site. Downloading sexist materials and sharing them among workmates or sending them on to outsiders puts the business at risk of a sexual harassment charge. There are technical issues too – non-business internet use can soak up bandwidth slowing the company network server and open up computer records to infection by malware, trojans and viruses.Managing the risks that arise from non-business use of business computers is a challenging task. It needs to be addressed on a number of fronts.

Policy:

Develop a formal policy outlining what is considered acceptable use of computers and the internet. This sort of policy is usually referred to as an internet Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). AUPs can include any provisions for private use of company computers, for example, if an employee on lunch or coffee break can send private emails or surf approved sites. The AUP must drive home three key ground rules: