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December 3, 2008May 24, 2013

My Guest Posts

I had written two guest posts recently. The first is on Small Business Trends. I wrote on how small businesses have to learn to delegate and to outsource.

As a small business grows, and as the scale at which a task is done increases, you have to find ways to get the time to focus on the bigger picture. If you don’t, you

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will get caught up in myriad routine activities, and can’t progress on strategic areas of your business. You have to make time to steer your business in the right direction. And you can do that by delegating work to others, by outsourcing, and at times, it’s as simple as asking other party to visit your office instead of you visiting them!

The post has 35 comments as of now. Thanks to every one who commented. I am hoping to make it 70. It will be great if you can comment on it!

And the second is on SMBCEO. I wrote about smart ways to finance your business.

If you are creative, you will be able to fund your business in a number of ways:
•    You could negotiate longer credit period from your suppliers (with a good business plan or sheer perseverance). Preferably, if your customers pay you faster than you have to pay your suppliers (even by narrow margin), then you need much lesser capital
•    You could try an alternative pricing structure, say a 10-20% discount to customers who pay upfront, as the woman in our first example did
•    You could pay your suppliers in installments
•    You could ask your employees to work for stock options for part of their salary
•    You may lease your company assets rather than buy them
•    You could barter a portion of your service, e.g., you are good at writing/business consulting/marketing or even giving business leads! while a friend is good at graphic design. You could swap those services for each other, (not to mention pitching for common clients)
•    You could choose services/products that don’t take too long to build

Hope you like both the posts!

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About the author: Chaitanya Sagar is the Co-Founder and CEO of p2w2, an online marketplace for services like writing, software, graphic design, virtual assistance, business consulting and research. Chaitanya blogs at p2w2 blog (RSS). He is fascinated by entrepreneurship and the difference technology can make in people’s lives.

November 27, 2008May 24, 2013

Jason Fried (37signals)'s 'Out-teach the Competition to Beat Them' Strategy

Jason fried of 37signals talks about how they sell more by out teaching the competition. He allays fears that if you put your ‘secrets’ out, your competition will copy them. Somehow, that’s counter intuitive but true.

Out teaching the

competition and building an audience is a nice strategy and strikes a chord with me. Our blog is a testimonial to that. Such ‘be-a-nice-person’ strategy can work in this time and age because, on the Internet, you can reach out to your audience inexpensively.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this video and I think small businesses have a lot to learn from it. Check it out!

Check out their blog: Singal V Noise

November 14, 2008May 24, 2013

Spend or withhold? When should you spend? And how much?

I will raise more questions than answer in this post.

Spending extravagantly is not good for a small business. That is clear in my mind. I have seen more businesses that spent liberally struggle, fail and die than ones that have controlled their costs. This is true even if you have venture funding. The funding will only last some months unless you can earn revenue commensurate to the expense.

Spending is easy. Earning revenue is difficult. And it takes much much longer than we anticipate. The reason why we have to stay tight with the cash is that we don’t know how long we have to wait to earn revenue. And

waiting costs money – to keep the business relationships alive; to pay salaries, rent, utilities bills etc.

The case for thrift is the easier one. The more difficult question is when should you loosen your purse strings and by how much? There is no one answer to this question. Each of us small business persons has to decide on our own based on the circumstances we face.

However, there are a few aspects that are currently helping me:

1. Know the right time to spend; experiment in small amounts and confirm that it works before spending large sums

2. Keep a reserve – enough to survive about 6 months. The reserve is untouchable; you can only spend the reserve if you have gone out of all other options

I am not among those who believe that they can leverage (take a large loan) and take big risk spending it. If you do that, your business becomes a hit or a miss. It is a decision you have to make if you want to do that.

What are your thoughts on this topic? How have you benefited or lost because you have chosen to spend? How did you make those decisions?

About the author: Chaitanya Sagar is an expert in small businesses and is the CEO of www.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing, business consulting, research, software, online-tutoring etc. You can find good service providers and collaborate with them on p2w2.

Picture credits: Night Star Romanus iChaz

November 4, 2008May 24, 2013

Get gatekeepers on your side – get access to decision makers

How much time and attention can you devote to those who guard the offices of the CEOs and decision makers?

They are a pain! Are they?

There are “experts” out there who would advise you to bypass the gatekeeper to gain access to the decision-maker because time is money.

I know of an editor of a lifestyle magazine who has used just the opposite strategy — of respectfully cultivating the friendship of the Personal Assistants and Personal Secretaries to other editors, not just in her organization but rival ones too — and has gained unlimited (almost!) access to a number of decision makers.

I analyzed her behavior and her success lies in treating the gatekeepers with dignity. She recognizes the importance of a gatekeeper’s role — to filter out nuisance elements from her boss’s life and she treats him/her as a professional on a one-on-one level and not as someone’s minion.

The result? They too treated her with respect and trust her judgment enough to keep her in their loop.

This strategy — of empathizing with the role of another professional, however lower down in the hierarchy — costs very little but gets you rich returns. It gets you in the good books of all the decision makers you need. Whosever needs any dope on what is happening in the media industry has to step into her parlor and come out armed with authentic, first-hand information.

A mistake that many make is think that it pays only to network at the top, forgetting that in order to be able to able to get to the top they must first cultivate friends at the bottom rung.

They forget that gatekeepers are after all trusted lieutenants, who have been appointed by the CEO themselves to filter out useful from the non-useful contacts. The gatekeepers segment visitors. In management jargon, they constrain the flow of knowledge and information in an organization, which is no mean a job by any stretch of imagination.

Therefore, the first rule in dealing with a gatekeeper is: do not discount her influence. She may not be the final decision maker, but she is an influencer and getting the person on your side as an advocate can often cut-short the decision making process. She will then act as your agent in selling your business proposition to the boss.

Here’s a good discussion worth reading on this topic and a quote from someone called Lighthouse24 on BOA’s community.

“My advice is to think of every gatekeeper as your “agent” — someone in each company who is doing the groundwork to “promote” your business inside that organization, and who will get you an “audition” with the boss when the time is right. Don’t think of them as people who keep you OUT — because they’re actually the people who can get you IN if you take them time to build a relationship with them.

A decision maker isn’t going to buy imprinted mugs or kick off a new promotion all by himself — there will be meetings and conversations, and the gatekeeper will have several opportunities to shine by having information and answers when the decision maker needs them (which you will have been providing for months while building the relationship). When the executive is ready to move forward, the gatekeeper will schedule you first. When you pitch, you’ll only have to sell on one level (convincing the decision maker to buy from you instead of someone else), and you’ll only have to sell one time to be assured of all future business if you perform satisfactorily.

If you go around the gatekeeper and approach the decision maker directly as some have recommended, you’ll have to sell on three levels (convincing them to listen to you in the first place, convincing them that they need what you’re selling, and then convincing them to buy it from you). Plus, if a good gatekeeper feels that you “trespassed” and made her look bad, she WILL become the person who keeps you out in the future.”

About the author: Chaitanya Sagar is an

expert in small businesses and is the CEO of w ww.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing, business consulting, research, software, online-tutoring etc. You can find good service providers and collaborate with them on p2w2.

Picture credits: kyz

October 29, 2008May 24, 2013

Communicating In a Flat World

I wish I could just walk across and talk to my team, it would make everything faster!

If you have outsourced work and have had this thought, you are not alone. The spoken word does seem to convey much more in shorter time. Voice inflections, pauses and the enthusiasm you can convey when you speak may not be conveyed through a long document.

One of the coolest features we have on p2w2 was the voice recording widget. You can “speak to” your potential business partners through p2w2.

The voice feature is available for you on p2w2 at all the right places. You can find it in recording project description, providing feedback, discussing issues and also for sending routine voice messages.

Record your project description

The controls are fairly simple. You have the Record, Stop, Pause and Play buttons. And

you have on-screen controls to edit what you recorded! The bars to the right indicate how audible your voice is to the control.

Worried that you might be speaking and your computer might not be hearing you? Well, we alert you if your microphone is not picking up an audible signal for more than 10 seconds.

Leave Voice Feedback

Same controls, different purpose! You can quickly leave a voice feedback, and if needed attach files and also type in text to make everything absolutely clear! Open the document you are providing feedback on, and talk into the microphone as you skim through your document/PPT etc. No more swapping repeatedly between applications, or breaking your chain of thoughts to type comments in.

Send a voice message

Emails are passé! You can “talk” to your p2w2 partner using the voice message feature.

Why not just pick up the phone you ask? Well, it might be 2 AM at where your business partner is!

Soon after your are done sending the message, the person you sent this message to can now play it back.

Delete parts of a recording

Did that pesky marketer call when you were in middle of a lengthy project description? Or did you get an important call you just had to take?

No need to start all over again, of course. You can select the part you want to remove from your recording, right click and delete.

Insert in recording

Finished speaking a whole paragraph and realized you missed out something? No problem! Click on the wave form and you can insert what you missed out in middle of your existing recording! Isn’t that just cool?

Pause and Restart a recording

Need to pause a while to recoup your thoughts? If you did not notice them already, the Pause buttons lets you take a break from recording to gather your thoughts, have a glass of water, open up that 6 pack – whatever helps you get moving again.

A tip: pausing for a shot while every few sentences helps you use these editing features easily. Not to mention you will be easier to follow for the person listening to the recording later!

Finally, some of us just like to talk than type. Overall, speaking your thoughts out into a recording tool is much faster and productive than attempting to type it all out. A document that would have taken you over an hour to type, format and attach could all be perhaps condensed into a half hour voice recording.

That’s all from us at p2w2 for now. If you have any cool features to suggest, write to me at Amit DOT Mullerpattan AT p2w2 DOT com.

About the author: Amit Mullerpattan is VP (Product) at www.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing, business consulting, research, software, online tutoring etc. He is responsible for the user experience with the p2w2 product and services.