I met up with a former colleague who currently works for an airline. During our conversation, he made a comment. I’ll paraphrase: “Before I joined this airline, airplanes were just a means of transportation. Now my perception about them has completely changed. Every rivet is mission-critical.” Isn’t it true? I mean, rivets are one of the minutest parts in the airplane, but each and every one of them is critical to the objective of the plane – flying safely. Check your business.

Your airplane, your business

Here are some questions you need to answer to ensure your rivets (read employees) are mission-critical:

1. Do your employees see themselves as being mission critical to the working of your organization?
2. More importantly, do you treat your employees as if they were critical to the success of your organization?
3. The sole purpose of every component (including rivets) in the aircraft is to ensure the airplane files safely. What is the objective of every employee in your organization?
4. What is your motivation in running a business and what is your employees’ motivation for working there?
5. Each and every employee has a role to play in the organization’s growth. Define them and do not move them around too much. You wouldn’t switch roles of the components in the aircraft, would you? Then why would you do that in business? (I won’t buy your argument about not equating an airplane to your business.)
6. And one final point: Does your rewards [to employees] promote the company goal? This is one area that businesses make a lot of mistakes. Rewarding behavior A while hoping for B.

What are your thoughts on this?

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This post was featured in the following carnivals:

• Carnival of Capitalists at The Married Guy Cook
• Carnival of Network Marketing
• Carnival of Entrepreneurs
• Carnival of Leadership Development

Thank you.

You may have read elsewhere or have a belief that the goal of an organization is to make money. Even I have said so many times in this blog. But I read a question last night that made me pause and think about the real objective of the organization. The question was: “How would you make $ on Planet Mars?” The question was asked by Mariam Ispahani (CEM & Founder Saaze Crop) in LinkedIn.

I was about to immediately draft an answer. After all, the goal of an organization is to make money, right? Wrong! The goal of an organization is to create value. And us earthlings today measure value using a tool called money. At the end of the day, what is money? It is just a convenient tool for exchange of goods. In certain countries where the local currency is not convertible on both capital and current accounts (is there such a country?) walking in with the dollar is not going to buy you anything. It has no value there. The same argument holds with a business.

Businesses create value by providing what their customers need. Say you are traveling into a desert. The bottled water holds greater value to you than to someone else not venturing into the desert. And therein lies the answer to why businesses are successful. Successful businesses create value to their customers 24×7.

I must admit, I left out the complete question that Mariam asked: “the shuttle is leaving for the new Earthling settlement on Planet Mars and you have a ticket. Yippee! You only had enough money for a one way ticket, but you are adventurous. Assuming you want to return after many moons, how would you make the money to buy a ticket back to Planet Earth? No stowaways or strippers allowed.”

My answer would be to perform those activities that create value. One enterprise that immediately comes to mind is providing support services to new immigrants and helping them settle down. Moreover, depending on how fashionable it is to get to Mars, you may be able to recover the cost of your two way return flight by selling your existing one way ticket on Earth itself. Hey, remember it is all about value.

What would you do? How would you get back from Mars? Would you even want to come back to Earth?

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This post was featured in the following Carnivals:

• Carnival of Wealth Building
• Carnival of Capitalists

Thank you.

Welcome to the 10th edition of the Carnival of Small Business Issues.

Our Prime Minister has announced plans for the construction of eight patrol ships at a cost of $1.3 billion during his visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. If my Canadian history serves me right, there was a similar promise made by a former prime minister that never materialized. I do not claim to understand ships - but a little birdie told me these promised “patrol boats” will not work in protecting the sovereignty if need be - they are just that: patrol boats not fighting machines.

So while we wait and see what eventually gets deployed, let me present you with some of the best articles in the world of small business.

I urge you to please link back and support the Carnival. Submit your post for next week’s carnival.

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Finance

• Kristine McKinley is a CPA and Certified Financial Planner. She is the author of Tax Tips for WAHMs, that helps work at home moms minimize their income taxes (that got your attention, didn’t it?). How can Hiring Your Kids Help You Save on Income Taxes is one such article. “Since your son’s (daughter’s) earnings are less than the standard deduction, s/he does not owe income taxes on his/her earnings.”

• “Have fraud, will travel” is how Tracy Coenen describes her work. Tracy is a CAP and a Certified Fraud Examiner with “top-notch investigative intuition and exceptional technical expertise.” Sequence Inc fraudfiles is a blog she authors. She looks at “The enormous cost of complying with Sarbanes-Oxeley Section 404“

• Wonder what it will take Mike Harmnon to update his About page? Regular readers of this carnival will remember him from his previous submissions.”Book keeping Basics For Your Business” talks about why it is important to have a book keeping system.
• “The purpose of this article is to familiarize business owners with a kind of financing that is unfamiliar to many people, Factoring. I will explain, in a simple yet comprehensive way, how to improve your company’s cash flow. ” Cash Flow - Life Blood for Every Business by Thomas Humes.

Comment: An excellent reminder on how to convert your single most important asset into cash. But who are the players in this market and how to find them?

Operations

• The goal of Capforge.com is to provide a complete range of startup help and information anyone starting a business might require. The blog is authored by Matt Remuzzi. “A lot of people will tell that entrepreneurs are risk takers. That isn’t actually true” Intrigued? “Understanding Risk and How it Actually Relates to You Starting a Business” While you are here you might also want to check out “How Being Stupid Can Pay Big Dividends (for Free) in Small Business Marketing if you have found yourself wondering just what the heck a business brochure was talking about or a company website about blurb that you can’t make heads or tails of.”

Comment: All the very best Matt in your endeavors. I just got off reading your “experience” page and hence this comment - and perhaps unrelated to the articles. I just loved the blender videos. It’s different.

• Um, a question. Who does not know Steve Pavlina? Chances are as soon as you began blogging, you would have read up his posts - especially “‘30 days to success” and “giving up television”. By the way, it has been over four years since we had a television at my place. My wife and I have not missed it at all. Back to his post though. Did you ever walk up to your professor and tell him/her that you weren’t going to turn in your project that was worth 10 hours of your time? Making Time for the Important asks you to explore the cost-benefits of performing the important tasks over the urgent tasks. “If you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels and not really getting anywhere in life, you’re probably getting sucked in by the urgent and delaying the important.”

Marketing

• The mission of Mason Hipp at SmallFuel Marketing is to help small businesses everywhere get bigger. “We help the little guys because it’s the little guys who are doing the really great things.” “How to Gain a Big Advantage by Being Small” - “If you see that your customers are missing a service then you can start offering it …”

Comment: It is a great service you are providing Mason. What small businesses lack in terms of resources, they make up for with their flexibility. Davids can bring down Goliaths.

• Bill Sheridan is an executive coach who draws on his experience as an educator, radio personality, salesman, sales manager and training director. He is the guest author at The Freestyle Entrepreneur. In Respecting your competition Bill says there is no need to go overboard and praise the competition … acknowledge that they are a worthy adversary …”

Comment: Another awesome article - reminding small business owners and sales people, in particular, on the effectiveness of being polite about your competition.

• Terry Dean’s blog is called “Integrity Business Blog“. That name tells a lot about how Terry won’t compromise on this values. Terry is dedicated to coaching entrepreneurs on how to earn more, work less and enjoy life. He lists 25 Ways to Increase Conversion rates on your website.

Comment: When I was wondering which point to highlight, I realized that every one of the points had to be there to increase conversion rates. They all work in tandem - just like in an orchestra where all musicians play in sync, so does all the elements of your website need to be in sync.

• Matthew Paulson is the author of FinanceIsPersonal.com. “Business cards won’t directly save or make you any money, but they will set up brand-recognition for your business and set you up for longer term success…” Check out Business Cards: When They Make Sense, and When they Don’t.
• Yvonne Russell blogs at Growing Your Writing Business - For Freelance Writers Who Mean Business. In her post Price vs Value - How Much Should Writers Charge? she explores the difference between price and value. “It may seem to be playing with semantics to say that price is not the same as value … “

Comment: The barber story is awesome, Yvonne. I got a couple of situations for you. What would you pay for a bottled water - say in a city? Say $1. Now consider yourself to be in the middle of Sahara and running out of water in say 2 days with 3 days of journey still ahead. Now what would you pay for the same bottle of water? $20 - $30 - $50 …? Say you have enough stock of water to last you for the entire trip. Now how much would you pay? And finally, how much will you pay, if you have run out of water?

• Isabella Mori is a writer and therapist. It’s all about having meaningful conversations. Alphablogs was created seeing a need in Vancouver for blog writing, research and administration. If you are keen on adding Powerpoint presentations on your blog, here is a live example of how it works: Slideshows on your blog.

Comment: So where does one get this tool, Isabella? Is this a plugin or a widget from Slideshare?

Miscellaneous

• When you feel like quitting by Michelle Cramer provides us with “tips on how to stay motivated when you are fed up and feel like throwing in the towel.” Michelle is the author of the Small Business Buzz (GreatFx Business Cards). “If you had the guts to walk out onto that ledge and dive into the unknown by starting your own business, chances are you knew then what you feel so strongly now …”

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I trust you have enjoyed reading the article. Catch the next edition of the Carnival on July 17.

If you have been a part of a project you know the detailed planning that goes into it. Right from business analysis to scoping to resource allocation and testing and deployment – you are aware of the work that goes into making a project successful. So if you can do that for a project, why would you not do that for your small business?

Whether you are an entrepreneur starting out or have been in business for a while, it helps to think of your small business operations as a series of projects. The result of one or more project/s acts like an input to other project/s. And like any project, you need to judiciously manage time, quality and cost of all projects.

Project Examples

Some examples of the projects that I can think of for your small business are:

• Competition analysis project
• Product development project
• Develop pricing project
• Lead generation project (quarterly, semi-annually, annually)
• Web design & SEO project
• Marketing research project

I am sure you can think of many such projects for your small business. Some projects may be small while others require significant resources. Remember, the final goal of any project is to meet project objectives. So defining project objectives at the outset is crucial.

Benefits

Don’t believe those who say not to analyze and crystallize your plans before jumping into a venture. Proper planning is half the battle. When you think of your small business operations as projects:

• you bring some discipline into the process
• you set deadlines and work towards them
• your business is now a series of goals and challenges. You love challenges, don’t you?
• you can manager your projects better. If you have delegated tasks, weekly project meetings can help you determine progress
• you can track time and allocate costs to each project

Now that you have started thinking about your small business as projects, what other benefits do you see?

 

The road to business analysis can take a number of forms. The most common (and I suspect the often) road traveled is the IT path. You start your career as a developer and code, code and code. You work your way on from there.

The other path traveled is the Business route and that’s the path I took. This path requires you to analyze the organization’s environment - both internal and external, look at trends, research best practices, formulate and implement strategies.

Before we proceed further, let’s first look at what the role entails.

Role of a Business Analyst

The International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) describes Business Analyst role as:

A business analyst works in liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.

As you can see, the work of the Business Analyst is centered around requirements. And in order to accurately identify requirements, the Business Analyst has to:

• Analyze the organization’s operative environment – both internal and external
• Define and plan the resources and tasks associated with the requirements gathering process
• Talk to the stakeholders to get a complete, clear, correct and consistent set of requirements
• Analyze and document the requirements
• Obtain sign-off from all stakeholders on the requirements
• Test, implement and validate the solution developed to ensure initial objectives are met

If you are wondering where I am going with this, here is the article that got me started.

IT-Business Gap Widens

IT World Canada has an article “IT-business gap grows wider”¹. This statement is a result of a survey where over 1,000 respondents in over 90 countries participated.

Michael O’Neil², the author of the survey says, “We can no longer count on (IT professionals) to be able to communicate with business managers – the whole premise of needing ‘soft skills’ or of expanding the IT department (to better integrate technology into business) is not necessarily a good one.”

The report also does not seem to paint a rosy picture for the IT professionals. O’Neil goes on to say that the role of IT as a discrete, advisory body will disappear and the majority of IT professionals are assimilated into areas pertaining to business processes and strategy.

So who do you think has a competitive advantage:

1. An IT person with little knowledge of business?
2. A business person with the basic knowledge of IT to manage the data?

Data is just that - it is information you seek from data. Personally, I think the Business Analyst must have business skills first complemented with basic IT skills (such as basic SQL and general IT knowledge).

In one of my earlier projects a senior developer told me, “Well, certainly there aren’t a lot of people I know about who can straddle both the technical, and BA sides of the business like you.”

Perhaps there is some truth in the survey results

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¹ IT-Business gap widens
² Michael has over 20 years experience in IT market research. He is also the author of the book Bridget and the Secret Passageway. Michael blogs at IT Business Edge

Let’s use a hypothetical case study to show why you may need to rethink your compensation structure.

Assume your body is an organization. Let’s also assume the body parts are individuals. They perform their respective functions needed for the organization to exist. The following is the list of 12 critical employees your organization needs to function effectively, for the purpose of this case study. Note: The list is already long and I do not want to stretch it anymore that I need to.

• Brain
• Heart
• Hand/s (includes fingers)
• Leg/s (includes toes)
• Intestines
• Liver
• Kidney
• Muscles
• Blood
• Eyes
• Ears
• Nose

If you were to pay the body parts for services provided, what compensation structure would you assign to each of the above?

Constraint

1. You do not perform any function yourself. You just compensate the body parts to perform the above functions; i.e. you are a passive shareholder and are devising the compensation structure.
2. If any body part is unhappy with the compensation structure, they are free to leave your body and provide their services elsewhere - just like any employee can leave an organization and seek employment elsewhere.
3. They can all go on strike, if they choose to, if they are not happy with the compensation structure.
4. You have to convince respective body parts if they get a lower compensation structure than another part.

What will you do?

What compensation structure will you devise to ensure all body parts are happy and you function as an effective human being?

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This article was featured in the following Carnivals:

• Carnival of Career Intensity

Thank you.

Welcome to the 11th edition of the Carnival of Small Business Issues.

It was an awesome week out here Halifax, Nova Scotia. The weather gods could have cooperated - but nevertheless that did not keep the tall ship enthusiasts away from the waterfront.

Over 30 tall ships from across the world made their way to Halifax. It was a great sight to watch them sail away.

As they make their way back to their respective countries, we present you with the 11th edition of Carnival of Small Business Issues.

I have not included posts that only serve as promotional posts and that do not provide any insights to a small business owner. As always, I will consider submissions received after the Sunday midnight deadline for next week’s Carnival.

I wonder if everyone will link back to the carnival this week! Based on the past experiences, I think not. Will you all prove me wrong?

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Pick of the crop

I decided to introduce this category going forward. I will decide on one article that I think was the best submission for the week. The other articles are good too - but this one stood out from among the rest.

• Never Assume is written by Wilson Ng at Reflections of a BizDrivenLife. “Don’t guess. Don’t assume. Ask!” A short tale on Richard Branson (Virgin group) and his humbling experience.

Marketing

• I have become a fan of Tupelo Kenyon over the last couple of weeks. He has a unique writing style that is unique and that compels you to read what he has to say. He talks about Work - Just a Job or Visible Love. Literature is littered with articles on this topic. You may remember such sayings like, “If you love your work, you will never have to work a single day in your life.” But Tupelo says, “Just getting a job is okay for many; it allows our society to function - but for those of us who demand more out of life, a job is not enough… it’s a long way from where you are to where you want to be … It’s all about choosing … Do you love what you do and do what you love? Here’s a step-by-step method on how to put your passions to work and start living the life you were born to live. “
• Raj Dash also writes at LogoDesign Works, among other blogs. He writes about 11 pros and cons of promoting your business online.

Comment: Raj, really some good points. But I do find that nothing beats quality content. For some keywords, articles from this blog show up in the first page of SERP and I am not spending a dime on promotions. Just write quality content and it is guaranteed your site will appear in the first two pages of an organic Google search results. However, a small business needs to find a niche within those competitive keywords. You can’t compete head on with the large guys, but you can work around them.

• Bill Willard’s articles are no stranger to this carnival. Bill writes at The Freestyle Entrepreneur and has been churning out high-impact articles for over 30 years. Bill makes a case for Writing articles as an affordable internet marketing method: What a ghostwriter can do for you. “… when keywords are typed on search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. This is what leads traffic to websites with keyword-rich articles. The magic word is articles …”
• Terry Dean tells us about 20 ways to add value to your products and services. Terry is dedicated to coaching entrepreneurs on how to earn more and work less.

Comment: It is an apt lesson Terry. ” … people aren’t buying your book, your ebook or your CD. They are buying the end result …” Successful marketers and sales people realize that and those are the people who are usually successful.

• Matt Henson talks about Building visibility with promotional umbrellas in his blog Matts Creative Advertising Blog. He outlines four steps to building visibility with promotional products for your business. ” … choose items that have a real value to your recipients … promote items that will be see by more than just the recipient …”
• Wow another marketing submission. Is Marketing going out of style soon? This time from Chris Tackett at Direct Marketing News. “I knew a guy that owned a vacant house once, and he always laughed at the amount of postcards he received every week. He said they all looked the same and he just threw them away”, from Effective Direct Marketing.

HR

• Michelle Cramer has also been a regular participant in this carnival. Michelle writes at Great FX Business Cards. In this day and age where the morality and ethics of management is being questioned, Michelle comes up with Leading by example in a world of copy cats. “Every part of business (and personal life) in which you are trying to teach someone goes back to the fact that people will duplicate the actions they see from their superiors or those they admire.”
• Sue Massey writes at Business Management Life. While, she does not have an About page, her post Leadership - Managing time for maximum profit nevertheless indicates Sue’s authority on the subject matter. “don’t continue to work harder without developing the insights that allow you to work smarter …”

Comment: Finally an individual who thinks alike!

Operations

• “If you already have a good thing maybe the best way to expand isn’t by adding to the top, but by spreading the foundation.” Capforge uses the example of netshops.com to illustrate his point in his post Turning a small niche business into big business by using the rinse and repeat model.
• Tom writes at geekandfather.com. In one of the most relevant posts of this carnival, Tom talks about Disaster recovery. “… [disaster may occur] in the middle of the first vacation that you have taken in over five years, which you promised your spouse would not be interrupted for anything …”

Misc

• The Carnival of Small Business Issues Edition 9 had a post from Scott Allen at About Entrepreneurs where he presented us with the opportunity to ask questions to John Assaraf and Murray Smith. He now presents the interview - John Assaraf and Murray Smith interview: you can read it or hear it.
• I wonder when will we stop hearing the words, “to be successful you need to work hard”. Gone are those days … these days we need to work smart. Kathy at Making Home Work presents How to choose a great home business (in a not so great economy). ” … contrast this with the story that begins with answering one of those ads for internet kiosks … or watching the infomercial promising you the moon and stars if you just learn how to buy real estate … chances of success … pathetic”

Comment: That’s what I mean when I say working smart Kathy. Great examples. By the way, clicking on the “about” page displays a “page not found” error.

• Don’t buy a franchise with your ego by Tom Stanley. Tom blogs at Tom’s Franchise Information Blog. “When considering a franchisee opportunity, keep in mind that you are the owner, not the worker … “

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Thanks to everyone for submitting your posts. I look forward to receiving more of them for next week’s carnival. Happy reading!

A 2005 ESI International survey of 2,000 business professionals reveled the following statistics on why projects failed:

1. Lack of qualified resources - 3%
2. Communication problems - 14%
3. Inadequate risk management - 17%
4. Poor scope control - 15%
5. Others - 1%
6. Poor requirements definition - 50%

The survey question was: “What are the key challenges in translating user needs into system specifications for mission critical projects?” If requirement’s definition is an issue why does the project manager get the blame?

Requirement types, stakeholder interaction and customer sig