Tagged: start-up

So you’re a skilled developer or design freelancer who has established a handful of customers who pay your bills and provide you with an income. That’s great. You may wish to keep things just the way they are or you might want to build on this and build up your own small business. If you’re opting for the later then here are a few tips to help you ride the bumpy road from freelancer to fully-fledged small business.

1) Move Out of Your Back Bedroom
If you are moving from freelancing to running a company then you need to show your potential customers that you are 100 per cent committed to the business, thus allaying their fears that you won’t be around in a few months time. If you can, move from your home workspace to a dedicated office. This doesn’t necessarily mean huge expense but it can instill a great deal of confidence in you from potential clients. Depending on where you are, office space can cost from as little as £130/month ($190) and should also help with your work-life balance. An additional benefit is that it will give you a postal address that you can publish on your stationery and website without revealing your home location.

2) Dress for Business
Now that you’re running a business (for better or worse) you will need to take a look at your appearance. Many may disagree, but personally I think nothing says business more than smart dress. Of course, it’s up to you how you dress but think about it this way. If you want the conversation to centre around your professional skills, don’t wear anything that will steal the conversation away from this. A T-shirt with a witty slogan on it may be just the thing for a night out with your mates, but a lunch with a potential client? Maybe not. Why do anything to stack the odds against your company winning the project?

I am happy to accept that this is a controversial subject and would be very interested to hear your thoughts about this. What works for you? Do customers react to you differently when you are wearing smart dress as opposed to casual?

3) Centralize your Data
When you are a freelancer working on your own it’s fine to store information about your work processes in your own head, or contact e-mail addresses in your personal AddressBook. But the moment someone else is involved in your business then this isn’t good enough anymore. You may start to find that you spend a lot of time imparting knowledge to others. You will need to move that knowledge somewhere where it can be easily shared. For example, Highrise (www.highrisehq.com) is great for keeping a database of your customers and tracking conversations/activity with them.

As much non-skill related information should be documented as possible, this will assist you in building business processes to ease any future expansion that you may have planned. You should encourage others working with you to do the same and attempt to cultivate a culture of ‘centralised knowledge.’

4) Be the Person Your Customers Like
Building good relationships is key to running a successful business. There are thousands of web development/design studios in the country and there’s nothing to stop your customers moving to your competition if they feel they are not getting value from you. People rarely choose based entirely on price. They buy from people they like and whom they think will support them in the best way. It’s this support that will win you a customer for life (even if your services are more expensive than your competitor’s). As a general rule you should try the following:

5) Reply to Emails Promptly.
Even if you cannot compile a meaningful response/resolution immediately then acknowledging the message with a reply will let the customer know that you are on the case.

6) Always Return Voicemail Messages.
This is really important. If a customer knows that based on your history that you always call them back after leaving a voicemail then they will not feel the need to keep calling you or bombarding you with email. This can help alleviate stress in busy periods when you deem answering the telephone of secondary importance.

7) Maintain a Verbal/Email Relationship.
You should contact the customer on a regular basis (every 3 months if the job is over) to inquire how things are going. This will help to make the customer feel important and that you are still interested in their business even though the project is finished. It will also help to keep you in their mind for future projects. Try to avoid a sales push with every contact else this goodwill will be broken and they will dread your calls.

8) Express Interest in your Client’s Business Sector.
Keeping up with trends in your customer’s industry can be invaluable in generating recurring revenue from existing streams. Tracking changes in their business will allow you to suggest improvements or additions to their application or website. This can be as simple as following their RSS feed and needn’t take up much of your time.

9) Welcome Customer Complaints.
Complaints are great! Complaints allow you to fine-tune your business so that future customers don’t suffer from the same irritations. You must handle every complaint about your business seriously and be prepared to make good on any deal that a customer doesn’t feel you’ve delivered on.

10) Don’t be Afraid to Pass
Many people believe that you should never turn down work. I disagree. If a potential customer is looking for services that you know in, your heart, are not your speciality then don’t be afraid to pass the work on to another trusted freelancer or business. Although not earning you revenue immediately it will benefit you in two ways:

Firstly, you will earn the customer’s respect for passing them on to a
3rd party. This will show them that you are looking after their needs rather than taking the money and delivering a poor job. You will be surprised how quickly you become a ‘trusted advisor’. And Always send a follow-up email to the customer a few weeks into the project inquiring about how things are progressing with the 3rd party and ask them to keep in touch.

Secondly, forging strong relationships with other companies and freelancers can pay dividends in the long run. Approaching a 3rd party with a business lead will buy you a great deal of goodwill and allow you to introduce yourself and services to that person with a view to working together in the future. Networking is the way that you might get your next big job.

11) Work on your Sales Technique
Working on improving your sales technique with prospective clients should be something that continually evolves throughout your career. There are no strict rules for selling; you just need to be better than your competition! You can be the best programmer in the world but unless your potential customer likes you and is confident that you can do a great job then your skills and experience will count for zero. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

12) Build ’stock’ proposals.
Especially, for common projects such as content management and ecommerce. This will save you time when pitching for a job and allow you to reply to an enquiry within a day or two of your meeting with them. The longer it is left silent between you and the customer the smaller your chance of winning the project.

13) Always be On Time.
But be aware that arriving early can be as disruptive as arriving late.

14) Learn About Personality Types.
Learn how to spot them and how to deal with different people and groups.

15) Use a Notepad to Take Notes.
If a customer sees you taking notes then they are much more likely to tell you more information about what they need.

If sales is an area that worries you then there is a wealth of great information on how to sell effectively by Warren Greshes (www.greshes.net).

Good luck with your new venture!

Thanks to www.flickr.com/photos/tanfacedprairieboy for use of the main image

welovelocal.com is a UK based social local search website which helps people find the best businesses in their area by reading reviews and recommendations from people they can trust. Three months ago we launched in London and we’re now gearing up for nationwide launch. A soft launch was a great way to get things right before we hit the rest of the country, here’s some of the other lessons we’ve learned so far:

1. Keep it simple. Stay Focussed

We knew from our initial brainstorming sessions that welovelocal.com could quickly become a local portal website covering everything from local listings to local news. Great ideas are only great if they fit a purpose, as such it is important to be clear from the outset what your site’s core user proposition is.

Once you have defined the principle rationale for your site, use this as your reference point for all future decisions. With welovelocal.com we want to help people find the best businesses in their local area, so every development decision sprung from here. Of course, when preparing the wireframes we let our imagination run-away with us, including a plethora of weird and wonderful features; but by returning to the central rationale for the site, we were confident enough to strip away any superfluous additions before development began.

2. Do Your Homework Properly

welovelocal.com was originally set to be called Local Insider. Four weeks prior to the launch of welovelocal.com and we received advise from our legal team that if we proceeded with the name, we would run the risk of a legal challenge from a major UK Newspaper Group, who owned Insider.co.uk, a business publication trading within an overlapping trademark category.

In retrospect, we were super-naive to get so far without getting the final approval. We had initiated a precursory trademark search when we first finalized the name with our web designer, however, as always, legal matters tend to take longer than you could possible envisage, hence why we began work using the Local Insider name. My advice, sign off any legal concerns prior to starting any branding in relation to your site. It may not be fun, but put legal advice to the top of your list of things to do.

3. Make it Sociable

Thanks to feedback from lonely users, we realized very quickly, that a site with a community element is no fun if you’ve got no mates. Indeed, we were kind of blown away by the popularity of the limited social networking features we had implemented. Our goal was never to become a full-blown social network, but rather to leverage the ecosystem of a social network to help people find businesses recommended by like-minded people. We had already made a big effort in the site design and functionality to encourage new users to invite friends and family adding regular prompts where appropriate and import contacts functionality from major email clients, however we learned that people were eager to find new local friends on welovelocal.com

In response, we moved quickly to introduce ‘Locals’, enabling members to automatically access recent reviews local to where they live and check out the profile of other individuals regularly reviewing nearby. Following further feedback, we have since also launched Groups, enabling people to discuss more openly on a range of issue.

4. It’s the Community, Stupid

With a soft launch we anticipated a small amount of correspondence with some of our die hard members, but overall expected just a small percentage of our members to stay in regular contact. In reality, we’ve been blown away by the passion of our members and the incredible value they have added to the development of welovelocal.com.

What we’ve learned is that members deserve a lot of attention, and the need to plan for dedicated support for site members is essential. With a site heavily dependent on user generated content, you’re effectively nothing without your community; they’re your greatest asset and your strongest marketing tool, indeed, there are countless articles on Vitamin and beyond that support this. Our approach has been to quickly reward our community with surprise gifts and other thank yous, as well as adopting a mantra to always respond to any query as fast as humanly possible.

5. Listen to Feedback

Prior to launch we had tested the site with a range of strangers and friends, and feedback, give or take a few curve-ball suggestions, has been as expected. For our business users, we recently organized a local meet-up of small business owners to get their feedback on how we hope to develop the welovelocal Business Centre.

Getting to know our business users was a real eye opener. The message was clear: Time is money, and welovelocal.com can have all the widgets, APIs and add-on features you like, but ultimately, as far as welovelocal.com is concerned their overbearing concern was how much traffic and how many customers the site could deliver. Of course, we knew this was the case, but it certainly underlined and reiterated the need to be 100% clear what your motivation is for any site developments. As we begin work on updating the Business Centre, providing clear stats to demonstrate leads we have generated for business users will be our priority.

6. Get Sticky

It may sound a little defeatist but no matter how excited and passionate you get about your site, you’re just another URL in an ever expanding Web universe, so plan to work with this.

Very few sites demand everyday/regular use, so working out how to improve the ‘stickiness’ of your site is vital. Notably, how can your site complement, or better still enhance, a user’s existing Web habits while reinforcing the core rationale for your site in a meaningful way.

Building a Facebook application quickly was a top priority, enabling users to share their reviews with other their Facebook friends and let people know where they are thinking of checking out next. While we ask for people to share their experiences with us, we don’t expect to be the defining reference point of their digital identity, as such, we are now working on a range of tools and widgets to complement our user’s existing Web habits. With the ever increasing widgetization of the Web, being flexible with your site content and the manner you collect user generated content should be fundamental to way your site engages new users. We really don’t care whether our members interface with welovelocal.com, from an iGoogle homepage, Facebook application or whatever widgets we plan for the future, the key is they are using our content to find the best local businesses.

7. People expect you to be as good as Google. Deal with it

The Web has got a lot better over the last few years, and people’s expectations have followed suit. One of the biggest ongoing challenges we’re now facing is improving our search functionality. Inevitably people expect Google quality results, which is no mean feat. We’ve made a lot of refinements to our search algorithm and mined a lot of our data, but we’re still not Google; nonetheless, we’ve learned that local knowledge can go a long way.

What’s interesting with local search, notably geo-data, particularly in the UK is that very little standardization exists and colloquialisms confuse matters even more. By looking at search habits and utilizing local knowledge, we are able to apply a far greater depth of local understanding to way we sort our search data, than Google can hope to achieve, simply because we have local knowhow. Moving forward, we are investing heavily in leveraging local knowledge across the UK to do refine our search and importantly turn a potential weakness into a major strength.

So in conclusion, if you’re anything like us you won’t get everything right the first time. I think it is fair to say that some of the best sites out there have been shaped by their members and I hope with each update and improvement we will too. We’re now preparing for national launch, and just starting to build out the Business Centre for our business users, so I’m sure you’ll see more changes to the site over the coming months.

Prepare to be agile and expect your site to evolve. It’s easy to work up to a launch date in the hope that you’ll get everything right first time. Notably, through all the self-doubt, peer feedback and community response, be 100% clear what your site’s core proposition is, and always return that as your reference point for future decisions.