Jack of All Trades, Master of....

I feel the need to address a situation I have run into for quite some time in my recent years of working with small businesses. This issue is the small business owner who starts up their business thinking they can do it all. While it is very commendable to attempt such a feat but if you are a small 1-5 person shop it is highly unlikely that you will have the time to concentrate the amount of time necessary to every aspect of your business. Given my experience is in the Technology side I will address this area.

You may think you know your stuff in relation to IT or you may even have expertise in a certain area but trust me, you do not know enough. To correctly implement a company network and manage it, you need a highly qualified individual to work for you full time, or a good outsourcing alternative. Let me take the time to highlight a few things that could come in useful for a small business owner. You may think it is common sense to know all of this but trust me; common sense is not so common after all. I run into more and more businesses today that are doing one of these things, a combination of two of them, or (sadly) all of them.

Just because you set up your home network does not mean you can handle your business' network. When your son, daughter, nephew, niece, cousin, etc. set up their personal web page they did not get a certificate in the mail from the local university making them a web development expert. And finally my favorite; please, and I say again please DO NOT look for the most computer savvy person in your company and make them your IT director. This does an unbelievable amount of more harm to both your company and this person in the future. Not only does it put a person in a position they are not qualified for (one of the worst things you can do to someone, in my opinion), after a year or so of occupying the position they may believe they are qualified for the position. This is detrimental to them in two ways. First, whenever they run into a problem they do not know how to fix they will have to call in an outside consultant, who will charge top dollar to diagnose the problem and more top dollar to have an engineer to come in a fix the problem. The ill-advised IT Manager now thinks they have fixed the problem and will use it in their future as a point on their resume. This leads to my other point. If this person leaves your company and applies for a similar position in another organization, they will be shocked when they are asked specific questions in interviews about what they did in the past position and find they were not at all what their title claims they were. Now this person is left in a bad position as they do not know what positions they are indeed qualified for.

While the Internet is an amazing invention and has unbelievable capabilities, it has become a very dangerous place. New viruses, worms, Trojan horses, denial of service (DoS) attacks, etc. are happening daily and you do not have the time or expertise to combat them along with running your own business. Be proud if you are IT savvy, but do not be ignorant and risk your business as well as your family's well being because of foolish pride.

Think about this in another light. You may be handy around the house and with a variety of tools, but does that make you a carpenter, landscaper, mechanic, or plumber? You probably installed an air conditioning unit this summer when it started to get hot outside, but does that make you an HVAC engineer? The answer is clearly a no, yet so many business owners these days do not think of IT that way. Why? Good question. I do not want to claim I have the definitive answer for this, only a hypothesis. My opinion is that because IT, in its current capacity is still relatively new to the small business. Not everyone understands its worth and importance, well at least until they do not have it anymore. They feel that since they can check their email and use the Internet they are now capable of setting up or maintaining complex IT infrastructures. Think about this; if your computer and company network shut down RIGHT NOW, what would you do?

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Value Added Sales Calls

So one weekend morning I was trying to take advantage of a nice quiet house and an empty schedule for the day to catch up on some much needed sleep. I was doing well until the phone began to ring around 9:00AM. Knowing it was probably a telemarketer, I tried to ignore the first call and go back to sleep. It worked! That is until another call 15 minutes later. I thought very hard about getting up and yelling at the person calling but my bed was just too comfortable and the phone was so far away (on the nightstand next to my bed). I finally lost it when the phone rang again at 9:45AM. I answered with the full intention of really ripping into the poor soul on the other end for disrupting my late morning slumber.

"Hi Mr. Duke, this is Kelly calling for Mother's Against Drunk Driving (MADD). How are you today?" (I could have picked EITHER of the other two phone calls and have been set up perfectly to blow off some steam, but no...I get Mother's Against Drunk Driving....How exactly am I supposed to be mean to them?)

"I'm doing well Kelly, how are you?" (I always try to be polite to the person as they are just doing their job.)

Kelly went into her speech about why she was calling. She was not calling for a donation, she assured me. She explained to me what MADD was all about ( I feel I could have taken a pretty good guess) and how they have a program (here it comes) in which they offer a discount subscription or renewal of your favorite magazine as a way to support MADD. They get 16% of each subscription as a donation. Given I was due for a renewal of the ONE magazine I subscribe to I figured why not help out a good cause and renew my subscription? So I asked Kelly if they had that magazine available and (surprise!) they did not. Oh well I figured, I'll get a different one then. We went through a couple lists a finally settled on one.

One $50 Popular Science subscription later Kelly thanked me for my time and told me the information would be sent to me in the mail very soon. I thanked her for helping me to spend $50 before I had gotten out of bed and told her to have a nice day.

This leads to an interesting question. Undoubtedly nearly everyone that has ever been in sales currently has or will continue to make cold calls. What did Kelly do that was different than most other telemarketers? She offered me value (the magazine) on top of the good feeling of donating to a good cause (MADD). When you cold call your customers are you offering value other than the product or service you are selling? You may think the product or service you are selling is the value you are offering but does your prospect see that?

I am interested in hearing what techniques you have used that has helped your success rate in making cold calls. Please comment.

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