no fixed office

While many people that go into business create a business plan or a marketing plan, of some form to keep in mind the details of the business. There is another form of plan that you should also be considering creating. That plan is a strategic plan for your business.

A business plan may deal with the specific’s of the business such as finances, products, the people involved and the overall view of the business. The marketing plan will deal with the overall view of  you guessed it the marketing of the business. What the strategic plan will deal with is your overall vision for the business, and how this is going to be achieved.

Creating a strategic plan is something that is always going to be an on going thing. This is the type of plan that should be reviewed and updated as often as you believe it is needed. This may be once a month, or maybe once a year. Relly whatever you believe is needed to keep yourself focused. This plan should deal with two main topics in relation to your business

• The first part of this plan should look to outline your goals. Not just the make X dollars per month or have a certain size customer base. These should be your driving goals, the ultimate where you want your business to go goals. A good example of the difference in these goals may be. In your business plan you might have a goal to provide 100 customers a month with your product at the end of the first year. Where as the same goal may be expressed in your strategic plan as to be the number 1 provider of your product to consumers within 10 years.

Often the goals that you are likely to set in the strategic plan are long term, driving and even visionary goals. They are things that you want to achieve however, are possibly bigger then what should really be part of your business plan.

• The second part of this plan will primarily deal with the how. How are you going to work towards these goals. While knowing the how or every step that you need to take is not essential by any means. Knowing to some extent what may be required to get from where you are now to where your goal places you, are important things. On the example of becoming the number one provider for your product, you may need to do the following. Expand the number of customer service representatives to allow for the growth. Add additional warehouse space to cope with additional stock requirements.

These may essentially be mini plans in themselves, however what they do is give you insight into your long term goals. These are also parts that you can line up as they may be required to include within your business plan.

So  what you are really doing is, creating a plan that outlines your long term goals, and how you plan to achieve them in milestones, rather then details. This plan does not have to be something that is big with every little detail. But it needs to clearly spell out what the goal is and at the beginning at least what some of the steps that may need to be taken to achieve the goal will be.

Being that many of the goals that you may look to include in this plan are long term, with steps that may take considerable time, is the primary reason why continual re-evaluation is needed. This re-evaluation is something that can easily be connected to doing the same with your business plan. The two plans should always be connected or related in some way. Preferably where the steps in your strategic plan, make up some of the focus of your business plan. If not then you are taking the risk of creating a goal that cannot be achieved.

All you need to do is just get started on creating a plan, be it a single page, with just a few details. Or maybe something a little longer, but just remember all you are really looking to do is to hone in on the goals and the overall path to reach them. The details of reaching them are not so much part of what this plan should be but more your business plan, when those milestones come into the scope of your business plan.

The idea of having no fixed office, should not mean that you do not have any contact with your current or potential customers. Even though contact via email, and other electronic means is going often be sufficient, meeting people in person should still be a part of your routine at least for the customers that you can create this connection.

Interacting with your customers is often one of the most important part’s of your business, and one of the parts that makes the difference between repeat customers or not. It can also make the difference between how well you connect with a client, there is a definite difference between an email communication a phone call and a face to face meeting.

Meeting new clients can also be much easier when you make contact in a direct person to person instance. So you may be asking if i do not have an office how do i meet these new clients in person. There are a couple of ways.

• Join local groups - Things like the Chamber of commerce, or Toastmasters, may have people or businesses within your potential target market as members. Attending or joining these sort of groups are ways to meet new potential customers.
• Attend Networking events - These are events purely designed to connect people, so attending these events may again have people that are within you potential market attending as well.
• Tell everyone you meet - When you meet people have a fairly specific definition of what you do ready to share. Don’t drone on to long, but something that gets interest and lets them know what you do, in around 30 seconds, may gain you interest. Just don’t forget your business card.
• Create your own events - It will take work, and require some extra effort, but you can create your own networking event or local business group and create a network of contact not just for yourself, but for the other members or attendees that you get along.

They may be fairly simple idea’s and they may be the same sort of things you have thought about doing, but it really comes down to the pure fact thinking about it, does not solve anything. You need to get out and actually do these things, for them to benefit your business.

The constant challenge of the having no fixed office is where to successfully promote your business to the largest number of people. Depending on the type of business that you operate there may be a couple of different options that you could pursue.

1. Trade shows and Expos - While this is discounted by some as a waste of money there are others that would not miss one of these events for anything. While they are not always a source of a lot of sales they do give you a lot of opportunity to get your name into the market and to get your information to a lot of people. So while they do not necessarily generate fantastic return’s at the time of the event, they can over the long term generate fantastic returns.

One of the things to remember with trade shows and expo’s is to ensure you have a way to get the details of people that you speak to or visit your booth. This enables you to market to these people more in the future, and because they showed interest at the show there is potential that they are going to be prospective customers.

2. Shopping Mall Sales booth - While you may not have a store or an office, there is nothing to stop you from having a temporary one. Many shopping center’s offer very short term leases to set up a small stall in the center which you can sell your products from. Of course this option is better suited to products that are of a retail nature that general consumers are likely to want to buy. However if you are a service business it can be a good way to increase the awareness of the service you provide and also of your business.

3. Markets - Again it depends on your product if this would be a suitable option or not, however with the right product this could be just the place to catch the attention of the customers that you may not normally be able to directly promote you business to. You do need to be aware of limits that are placed on the type of products offered at different markets, but it is always worth taking a look and seeing what potential may be there. It never hurts to try something new, the worst case you could get nothing out of it and have lost a little money. Best case it may be one of the better investments you made.

Three options you could use to better pormote your business in a temporary environment. Consider each option and you may just find something interesting to try.

Over the past few days i have come to acknowledge, the very large part that the Internet, plays for me. It is almost essentially the life line of my business. I post to my blogs via the internet, i connect with others via the internet, and i do a lot of my reading and research via the internet. This has been impacted to quite some extent over the past 3 dys now, that i have only been able to access internet either at home or by GPRS. The speed difference between 3G and GPRS is phenomenal.

In reality what this has meant is that i have been slowed down on many fronts. I have not done a lot of writing for my blog, as this i usually do away from home. Without decent connectivity, it literally does take me a few minutes just to connect to my blog, log in and got to the page to write a post. Which is what i have accepted as having to do today, to make this post. However Then writing is not so bad, except that you then also have to contest with ensuring that you copy it to a document elsewhere before you publish or save the draft, as it seems you get a lot more page cannot be loaded errors.

Creating connections with people is something that has also suffered as well, as i have found that the time to load and navigate sites like twitter, takes time as well. It can take up to a minute to change between the main feed and the @ replies. Posting sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

I have been able to fall back a little to a project that i am working on. Which is a report, which i am about 50% done in creating the content. However this only the beginning of potential problems as, if this issue isn’t resolved soon, then it is going to impact more heavily on these area’s. My creativity is more open when out to work, which means i have to use my Mobile Broadband for internet access. Mostly due to less distractions i believe.

I am hoping that this is fixed soon, but if not i suppose i will just have to work to find ways around this inconvenience, and if not for a contract i would potentially look for another provider for my Mobile Broadband.

You can walk down just about any street in any city and pass many different businesses. Some of these businesses are owned by major corporations, some by small businesses and others by individual’s or families. For a large portion of people those businesses being there are a fact of life. They expect them to be there and do not even give their existence a second thought. Even when they are closed down, it is just thought to be a part of the way things work.

For often a smaller group of people when they walk past these stores, they know what has gone into getting those stores there, some own these stores, some own similar stores, and some are the people in the corporations that own the stores. Then there is a smaller group, a group that used to own these stores or stores like them. Some of this group sold their stores and benefited from it, while others sold the store to just break even, or closed down because they could not afford to continue on.

While there are people going by these shops in all different capacities, there are probably few of them that are thinking how does each of these stores survive as a business. How does a store actually generate a sufficient profit to pay a lease, pay staff, pay the bills, and generate a profit to make it worth the investment of the owner. This is a question that i tend to ask myself a lot. Not because i am an owner of one of these stores. But because i like to analyze why, of how businesses manage to survive based on the minimal knowledge you can usually gain from looking at a business.

I am not so interested in the idea of how a large chain store makes a profit, as this is often rather easy to deduct. Based on the ability to place themselves as a draw card tenant to a shopping center, they achieve relatively low lease prices for the space. Then you expect that being a chain store they do have buying power which often means much better wholesale prices then other smaller stores. Finally the concept of pushing a lot of small sales through is one that works for this type of store, purely because of the scale they work on.

What i am interested in though is actually trying to work out how and more so why some of the small businesses can manage to survive. The type of costs that are associated with the business that they are running just seem to be beyond the ability of such a business to sustain over the long term. This is one of the reasons that i am very adamant in my preference for No Fixed Office, you can eliminate so many of these costs that are in my opinion a hindrance to a potential profitable business.

What you often tend to find is that the costs that these business incur are not what you really may imagine. Just an example, in a smaller area outside a major city, there is an area with a shopping center and shops along the main street. To get a store in the shopping center at around 50sqm, will cost a business over $40,000 for the lease. The same store in the front of the center on the main street, comes in at over $50,000 a year.

Unfortunately this does not appear as the end of the expenses for a business, Staff (just one person for 30hrs per week, could easily exceed $40,000 per year including all costs of staff). Utilities, or sometimes included as outgoings in your less, can vary from $30-$60 or more per sqm per year (or for the above 50sqm example $1,500 - $3,000). Then there is an ever growing list of other things, telephone, stationary, cleaning, and the list goes on. It is not hard to imagine the total exceeding $100,000 a year in costs for even the smallest of stores.

The most difficult part to work with though i believe comes from how these businesses derive their profit. It is the same as just about any other business a little bit at a time. Not only are these business at one disadvantage by needing to hold sufficient stock to make a sale. They also only sell a little bit at a time. If you were to consider an average sale of around $40.00, even at the best case scenario of maybe a 50% average profit margin, this equates to an average profit of $20.00 per sale. So how do you get from $20.00 per sale to $100,000 in expenses to cover, with over 5,000 sales. Or a little under 100 sales per week.

What i find interesting in some cases is that some of these stores may not even get this many customers walk through the doors per week. Then there are the stores that have a vast majority of products that sell for less then $20.00 alone. So it will take many more sales just to reach these levels.

Even though i have this preference for no fixed office, i can understand there is a number of businesses people traditionally see as needing a fixed location. Especially in retail sales many of the products that are sold rely on a store that potential customers can visit. However the way things seem to have traveled, it is almost a requirement for some stores to seek prime positions which cost them so much more then they really need to be paying in leases. If the owners of these stores saw the potential of a slightly less prominent location, and the potential that the extra money saved could provide in ability to market, and extra profit.

This is of course not to say that these business owners should not also consider the potential difference in sales. However often the consideration is fairly black and white, and is only tainted from this straight forward one or the other by information that does not necessarily actually count. For example is it worth paying three times the lease price to get a prime main road location over a position in an arcade, if at best you may only produce double the sales.

This is one of the fears that i dread seeing the most is people who are working their guts out to pay a lease, and staff and rent to operate a business that was suppose to be a fun and freeing experience for them. Which actually turns out to become one of the most challenging and difficult experiences that they have ever had to undertake. While I can see the need for many of these businesses, they are really almost nothing more then a fairly low paying job for their owner. They are working for an ideal which is almost not something that they are able to actually achieve on this path.

I do implore you to consider this, which i have shared today if you are planning to start a business which will require not just long hours, but the type of financial commitment, that i foresee you would need to put yourself in a prime location. If you can create a business alternatively which provides a product people want, that you can provide, but most importantly that you can provide from anywhere, either electronically, by delivery or by some means which eliminates the need for the excessive costs of placing your business somewhere you hope will provide what it is worth.

It is something that i have been meaning to work on for some time now, that is a new background for my Twitter profile. If you have not seen it before, i am on Twitter, you can reach me via @no_fixed_office, follow me if you like.

The background that i was using, was a very basic on that i put together just to cover until i had more time. The fact was that it actually didn’t take me to long to put together anyway, so i do not know why i put it off for so long. However i did have some help from two sources, which i want to share and acknowledge.

The first step i took was to work out the background, being the primary element it was an important step, and i had to take the time to find the right tutorial. What i found was a Tutorial named Signature Backgrounds at Visualdesigncore.com. It caught my eye straight away, and while i went through it a few times to get the idea down in my own mind, it is a very good tutorial and easy to follow.

The second step was getting the placement right. If you have tried to get a background done for twitter then you may be aware of the trying to work the elements to fit the screen and not get get covered. For this i got the Free PSD Twitter Background Template from Fuel Your Creativity. This template is great for fitting your background to the correct screen resolution, and is marked for the most common resolutions from 800px x 600px up to 2560px x 1600px.

Putting it all together was still slightly guesswork, not so much in laying it out, but in working to what may be the most common screen sizes. So since i have a laptop with wide screen, at 1280 x 800 and guess that this may be fairly common laptop screen resolution, i have gone with this. So for me it appears to be fitting perfectly on the screen, however i do expect that a few people may lose  little off the bottom of the screen if they have a lower resolution. (eg 1024px x 768px). The other thing i stuck to was fitting the sidebar into no more 200px from the left. This was suggested on the background template i used, and i think should work with most screen resolutions.

Anyway please do take a look http://www.twitter.com/no_fixed_office and comment with your thoughts, I do look forward to hearing them.

***UPDATE***

After putting the background online and asking for reactions i have made two small changes. Both at the suggestion of @leeward2009. The first was to make the profile standout more, on the left. What i did to fix this up was to darken the background from 55% transpancy to about 75%, it keeps the transparent effect but appears a little more solid. Secondly was to move it up. I had initally aligned it with the top of the main twitter feed, however did end up moving it up almost to the top of the page. Hopefully this eliminate any potential problems with small resolutions not seeing all the text.

If there is one thing that i have learnt over the last two month’s is that you should not rely on a single source of traffic. Possibly even more so a single source of traffic that requires your constant attention and input to continue to send a stream of visitors to your website.

I realized that this was an issue when i slowed down my usage of Twitter. With the way that things were going with work, and the different hours that i was doing, i did not have the time or motivation to jump on Twitter as much as i had. Over the last two months this saw a drop in traffic of about 16%. Which is no huge deal, it could even just be normal fluctuation.

So far this month things have been moving along nicely, with a week off work, I was looking at a fairly good come back on traffic. This was for me assuming that i maintained how i was traveling so far for the month for the remained. Well, that was where things were. Late yesterday my Twitter account was suspended, with no reason, no explanation (to date) and no recourse but to send a support ticket. Which i did.

Reading the rules, i know i have not blatantly done anything against them, and cannot see a single one that would have been an issue at the actual time of the suspension. Even checking the @spam account of twitter shows no reference to my account.  At this point it is going on close to 15 hours that i have not been able to perform any actions with my account, and the effect is showing, followers are down, and as i am sure you can guess no activity means nothing good usually.

Now at this point i do not know what sort of affect even a day will have on traffic, but i know that over the period of a month for me it will have a drastic effect. Unless i can replace it somehow. Which is not a task i envy looking at, right now. I mean yeah there are plenty of places to post links, to build networks and such. But pretty much every option i see a few months to develop it to the level that i was at with Twitter.

While i can understand a need to be vigilant, and to keep a close eye on people abusing the system, i see almost every day anything up to half a dozen if not more accounts that deserve to be suspended for major violations of the rules. As opposed to accounts being banned that it does not even appear to be something specific if anything more then an accident even. Of course if they can offer some valid reason why my account was banned, i will more then happily accept the consequences.

So anyone that relies on Twitter as their sole source for traffic, start now, look for something else to use for getting traffic to your site as well, so that you are not left open to a potential problem like this.

There are a lot of ways to promote your blog, however one way that is sometimes forgotten is the ways you may be able to use in offline methods. While you may not be able to market to as many people as potentially online, you are taking advantage of another potential avenue for marketing your blog.Today I want to share just 10 techniques, however this is really one of those area’s where creativity is something worth considering.

1. On your car - Do it yourself magnetic signs, or stick on lettering for windows, is available from stationary stores, or possibly auto stores. For not a lot of money you can make your card a driving advertisement for your blog.
2. Community Notice Boards - Many area’s have community notice boards around, at shopping center’s or library’s, just create a small leaflet and pin it up, just remember get permission first if required.
3. Business card for your blog - There are some really good quality do it yourself business card products around now, and for less then $20 you can create a customer business card for your blog, and start giving it out when you talk about your blog.
4. Write a Press Release - Or better still write a relevant article about the topic of your blog that a newspaper could potentially publish, with your details including blog link at the end.
5. Bumper stickers - Almost better then the first option above, as you can more easily give them away and get them in more places
6. Information Booklet - Depending on the topic of your blog, you could create an information booklet on the topic, that has links to your blog for more information. This could be made as a free download others can download, print out and give away as well.
7. Create a Newsletter - While you do have your blog online, sharing the same information in a hard copy newsletter may get people that are not as tech savvy interested in getting online and reading your blog. You can share just the first few paragraph’s of an article and then share a link to the rest of the article online. Again make this available as a free download for others to print and give away.
8. Start a club - While not suited to all blog topics, it can help for some to create a little more community atmosphere, especially on a local level. Who knows you could start a trend, and see clubs connected to your blog popping up all over the place.
9. Letter to the editor - If something happens locally that you could respond to relating to your blog, then send a letter to the editor, even better if you can share a relevant link to your blog.
10. Sponsorship - Sponsor an event or a stand at an event, or something similar. This wont work for everyone, but if you have a music blog sponsor a local band event, or a nutrition blog, then sponsor a local health event.  There are a lot of options and don’t always require a huge sponsorship to get included.

There we go, just some of the potential options that you could use to promote your blog offline. Please feel free to share any more ideas that you may have in the comments.

So many products that are being sold these days, are in reality quite the same as other products or services. So  really how do you differentiate yourself, especially when you do not have an office and would often be expected to have better prices then your retail competitors who have additional costs.

The best way is to be add additional value to your product, or service. While not every value added option that you offer needs to actually be purely part of the original product cost, the additional perceived value should give the customer an expectation they are receiving more then they are paying for. The part that you are really focusing on is the perception that you are creating rather then what the actual offer is. You could offer almost any added extra and with the right pricing and wording make it appear to be better.

Some of the things that you can offer as add-ons, which will help to create this extra perceived value could be

• Trade-in - It may end up just being a token gesture, eg trade-in your old widget when buying a new and get $50 off the new one. It does have the potential to cut into your profit a little, however it may be the one thing that gets the sale. Then depending on the product you may be able to recondition it and sell it as second hand or sell it for parts to the right business. There are options.
• Offer more options - Maybe your product has a range of colours available or some options that are not offered by the major retailers. Offering the full range of colours or options makes you seem more flexible and people may buy from you just because of the additional options whether they actually buy the standard model or not.
• Watch for supplier promotions - While retailers often get the best promotion offerings, they do not always take advantage of them, and often suppliers will have offers where bonus products are included or such with the main product. If you pay attention to what is offered by the supplier you can take advantage of these offers and make the offering you have look more attractive.
• Free Delivery - While it is an additional cost, would you prefer to purchase something by having to make the effort to visit a store, have a sales person put the pressure on, and then hope they have the one with the colour you want and the options. Or place an order and have it deliver a day or two later. I know which i would prefer.

That is just four options, but there are always other options, often it just requires a little thinking outside the box, and being daring to offer something that not everyone is willing to offer.

Just in the last day or two working on my blogs, (www.joelbrown.id.au and www.nofixedoffice.com) i realized, that they have been operating a little while now, 15months and 8 months respectively. While in this time i believe that i have probably exceeded some of my expectations, there are also many that i have not reached.

As it currently stands, i have a collective 212 posts between the two blogs, made up of a range of posts, from short quick tips, right through to some quite expressive posts, that i share my thoughts and ideas on different topics. While i this is a milestone for me, considering that i never thought writing would be something i would do let alone be able to accomplish this sort of scale. Even though for me this is an achievement it is quiet low on the overall scale, in comparison to what some other bloggers have created.

Another area that i have really worked on and just started to learn on the tip of the iceberg is traffic. The actual traffic to the blogs is still relatively low. However the more that i work with my blogs and methods for gaining traffic the more i realize that it is not something you can force. You can create potentially better reasons for people to visit but at the end of the day, people will often only visit if you create something that they want to read.

As part of my learning about traffic, i ran across the concept of social media, while i had been using social media, in a personal respect for some times, eg Facebook and Myspace, it was not really to drive traffic to anything, it was to connect with friends, and that was about it. So i found you can share more than your life, this helped a little. Then i found myself seeing Twitter, like short messaging for the internet. So i took a look it seems that it has been one of my more successful steps, in building additional traffic.

Overall though when i stopped and thought about it, i have close to 8,000 twitter followers, a currently unknown number of readers on the two blogs, and when it all comes down to it, i am still a small guy in the blogging world. It is something that i am planning to work on and grow, however i want to do it the right way. Which may or may not end up how i expect, and may or may not see some direction changes as my blogging already has. But i know for one thing, i am not looking to give it up any time soon. Post frequency may vary and content may vary, but i will keep at it.