Ahh…Sunday morning, it’s my favorite part of the week. We all just hang out in bed, playing with the kids, and using the laptop. Hopefully, this week will go smoothly, finish up a project or two, and we are adding someone to the AWD team. This will be our first time really adding a full time (or close to full time person). They are coming on as a contractor at first, and we’ll see how things go from there.
In the course of business people ask for silly things, the number one thing being is references. When someone asks for references, I normally just pack up and leave. Why? Because it shows that they are, well, stupid. If you ask me for references, do you think I’m going to give you someone who hates me? or someone that I might think wouldn’t give me a GLOWING review. I’m pretty sure, everyone else in the world follows that same logic. I’m sure even a total screw up could produce 2 - 3 people who think well of them. So, then the question is, well what do I do to check to make sure someone isn’t that “screw up person”. Well, here are a few tips, that have worked well.
1. Use Google. 9 times out of 10 you will find something, that is useful. Perhaps, a lot of well written technical articles? Or perhaps you find a lot of incoherent rage, either way that will tell you a lot about the person.
2. Ask for a client list. Who are their customers, if one of their customers is, say, AMD or Cisco, then chances are they know what they are doing. It also shows, how many customers they have.
3. Ask for an “escape clause” in the contract. Any company you want will have, or be willing to put, an escape clause in their contact. Don’t expect a “get out whenever you want”, but most companies will at least give you sometime to back out. Generally, a week or so will work, you will know right away if things are going to work out.
4. Go with you gut. As a seasoned business person, I have learned to trust “the gut”, if you think it’s not going to work out, more often than not, it won’t.
However, I do want to stress this. Take a chance with a small business, if they have their act together, then take a chance with them, small business can deliver a far superior product at a better price. Why you ask? In a nutshell; less overhead, more motivation to do well, and generally small business care greatly for their customers.
Here’s a good (if not obvious) article called “Top Ten Reasons why Proposals Fail“. While I think that they have some good point, I think that the article is misleading. There are LOTS reasons why proposals fail, and the article doesn’t touch on the psychological/pricing/etc, it is does provide good times on how to, at least technically, prepare a proposal.
Well here’s another example of what you shouldn’t do in the world of customer service. Alex is a friend and business partner of mine, and has had troubles with Ryenolds Data Recovery, and posted his log. Well, the “son” (not confirmed), posted some charming responses. I decided to chime in.
What a horrible idea, holy crap…why didn’t they just say sorry, make a phone call, and it would be done. When you run a business, sometimes you screw up, it’s life, it happens, no one is perfect. Just communicate what is up, and if you screw up just say you did. Most people will let it go, and move on. Some may get pissed off and leave (which is a good thing, because they bail on you anyway…story for another post).
As I have talked about many times before, Austin Web Development offers reasonable hosting and reasonable prices. People frequently say, “company X offers 500GB of disk space for 2.99 a month, why don’t you?”. The simple answer is the are overselling (I’m not going to go into the logic of that). Austin Web Development doesn’t do that, and what is the end result? 100% uptime. Services stay FAST and reliable.
As I talked in my introduction post about backups, one of the most important things in backups is automation, that is, your backups should need no intervention from you. That way, your backups will always run whether you remember that or not. There are several programs for a mac that will do this, here is my quick reviews of a few that I have tried.
I found an excellent article while reading on money.cnn.com (something I do quite frequently). It has five tips for small business owners. I thought they were right-on and very true. The five tips (with my little two cents) are:
UPDATE: Chris cleaned it up a bit 
As I use computers more and more everyday, and I hear horror stories about massive data loss. I am really being more conscious of making backups, both on-site and off-site. There are lots of things to consider, and I’m still working on some of the finer details. However, I had some specific goals to my home network backup solution.
Goals
1. Simple. It needs to be easy to (1) use, (2) maintain, and (3) restore
1. Automated. This was very important, because I don’t want to have to remember to do something.
2. Unintrusive. I don’t want to be using my computer, and it get “choppy” or have unnecessary “pop ups” while I work.
3. On & Off site storage. Having local backups is good, however being an “ultra geek” (as my friends call me) I have several computers, and the more electronics, the more of a fire hazard there is. So, if something were to happen to the house, the local backups won’t really help that much.
This is the first of my series of posts on home backup strategy.
UPDATE: Here’s the links to the articles:
As I tell my customers: fast, cheap, reliable…pick 2 and I will make it happen. I frequently, hear from people who sign up, “I had the cheap hosting with company X, and I lost a X dollars deal because I didn’t get an email”. However, they still don’t want to pay for a cluster. It always boggles my mind, I guess it is not just me.
Yeah…not, good. It seems that a bus driver tosses complaining rider into traffic
Boy, in regards to owning your own business, somedays your the bus driver (not literally), and some days your the lady (sometimes literally).