John's Biz Talk posts

Checklist Manager? Modern Ecco Pro??

Anyone ever remember a program called Ecco Pro?? Man that was such a great checklist manager! When I worked for The Man, I called it my virtual brain, since I put everything that I ever needed to remember in it, in some kind of priority order, categorized and cross-referenced. People were amazed at the information I had at my fingertips.

But alas it has been "abandonware" for over ten years now, and (surprisingly) nothing has come out to replace it.

So I thought I would post my quest up here where someone else may have found something close to what Ecco once was.

I have several 1000+ item checklists for my clients that I would rather not maintain in MS Project, and was on the lookout for a Checklist Manager program that could do simple checklists w/categories?? Something like Ecco would be ideal. Something Ecco like as a SaaS or running under Linux would be even better :) And yes, I know I could still install EccoPro, but I want to get something that my customers could also use.

Local or Online for Letterhead/Biz Cards??

Well, its almost a year now of being on my own, and I'm finally breaking down and getting some real letterhead and business cards. I've been making do with the printer-generated letters, and www.vistaprint.com sold me some business cards with a logo that was close to my own...but I'm doing more correspondence with customers/vendors now and want to give a better outward, professional appearance.

There are plenty of places online to get letterhead, but the ones I've looked into charge close to $2 a page for letterhead, which just seems outrageous to me. There has to be a more reasonable solution. If my printer were local, I'm assuming that I could get more customized layout than the online stuff which usually limits you to a number of templates. But won't the local print shops be more expensive?

What have other Bizniks out there done for their stationary?

Picking a Biznik-frendly Bank

I'm intrested to hear from other folks about what makes a Small Business-frendly Bank?

When I set out to open my business checking account, there were a few criteria that I was looking for:

1. Little or no fees. I want to make every dollar count, and since there seem to be a lot of banks out there willing to not charge for business accounts, I went looking for those.
2. Local Branch. Given banker's hours, I wanted a bank that I could get to after leaving my customer before they closed for the evening.
3. Not Pushy. I hate all the up-sell. No I'm not interested in a CD today, I just want to deposit my checks. You have to expect a little of this...I just don't want to deal with it every minute I'm in the bank.
4. Educational. Being a new business owner, I'm guessing there are things about business banking that I don't know that I don't know about ;) I want a bank that can tell me about banking options that might be an option for me and my business. As an example, my banker asked me if I had thought about opening a Money Market account to stash away the extra cash that I seem to have and get some interest on it. Well yeah...I should have thought of that ;)
5. A person I can talk to. Some banks refer to this as a personal banker. I just want a name and a number that I can call when I have questions about my banking transactions or services.
6. Online Access. The more I can do online the better. Bill Pay, ACH/Wire Transfers, Bank-to-Bank transfers, etc.

What do you look for?

Biznik Ad in the Eastside Business Journal??

I found a copy of the Eastside Business Journal at lunch today, and while scaning through it, the work 'BIZNIK' jumped out at me. On pg.19 of the November issue is an add for Howard's Eastside networked event from the 6th. How'd that get there? Do we have Howard to thank for it?

Picking your first Accountant

So here we are coming up quickly on the end of the year, and thus, my first estimated tax payment on Jan 15th, so I can't put off picking an Accountant to use to make sure I'm paying the right amount of taxes to the right people.

Which brings up the subject of how do you pick your accountant? Obviosuly they should be someone that you can stand to be around for small amounts of time as you will be talking and meeting with your accountant quite a bit. You obviously want someone that knows something about the kind of work you do, and what the associated taxes and accounting requirements for your business would be. CPA vs. "Registered Agent"?

What else should I be thinking about when making my selection?

If anyone has referels, I would want someone in the Redmond/Sammamish/Issaquah area, as I don't have hours and hours to slogg through traffic around here. Thanks!

Company's first website: Blog or Traditional?

So for an Indie company's first website, should you go with a Blog, or go with the more traditional static pages website? This is a debate I've been having with some of my friends and I figured this would be a great topic for this section.

As an Indie business, its more about you personally than it is about a fancy company name, so my argument has been that it should be a blog so that people can get a sense of who you are and where you come from. The counter argument is that people expect a company website to be "professional" I.E. Traditional, and that if your company website is a blog, potential customers will perceive you as less professional. Any other arguments?

Helpful Quickbooks websites?

I have to think that other people here have run into the same kind of issues about how to do stuff in Quickbooks that I have. Specifically, I can find all sorts of info about payroll/taxes for employees, but next to nothing about how to setup QB for the sole proprietor? Not even a suggested way about handling taxes, how to figure quarterly taxes, etc. Now before you all jump on me about not having an accountant do all this, let me just say that I fully intend for that to happen, but what I really want to do is understand what's involved....so I know what to look over when my accountant hands all the paperwork back.

What Business should I start?

First off, Thanks to Dan for creating this forum where people can (hopefully) post ideas about businesses/services/products that they wish where out there, so that other folks here can pick up on that and maybe fulfill that need(s). This was born out of an on-going discussion Dan and I had on this very topic ( "I wish there was a business/service that did..." )

This is something that I've brought up before in other sections on here, and I suspect that there are many other people in the same boat: What business/service do I start? I get lots of ideas about possible services that I could provide to people, but once I start doing the planning and looking at the the estimated P/L, I find that the results tend to make me re-evaluate doing it. I guess I'm looking for that "killer" product or service, and I'm wondering if that's the right approach.

In the mean time, I've decided that until that "killer" idea strikes me, I'm just going to start my business with a very fuzzy and undefined focus and build from there.

So I'm wondering what other people have or are doing to arrive at that epiphany moment when they knew they had come up with their "killer" business/product/service? Any good books you read that helped? Any good blogs/websites on the subject?

Good luck starting your indie businesses!

I wish there was a business/services that did....

Hiya Dan!

You and I exchanged some emails about this topic pre-biznik 2.0, and now that its been out and working great for awhile, I thought I would raise the subject here in the forum about Biznik :)

As a Indie Biznik (hopeful) person, I'm always on the lookout for some kind of business I could do. Problem is, I've already exhausted my list of possible businesses to start! But I'm sure there are people out there that in the course of running their Indie business have come across a problem where the statement is uttered "Gosh, I really wish there was someone out there that did..." in reference to their current problem!

If there was a forum or place where these wishes could be posted, that might give someone the idea to provide that kind of solution! At the very least, someone might be able to help them with their existing offering(s).

Thoughts anyone?

Employer of Record (EOR) Companies?

I gotta think that there are a number of people here who do contract work and use an EOR company to do the payroll/benefits thing for them. I've used MyBizOffice.com in the past, but wanted to look around at any others out there that might better serve my purposes...especially if there was a Bizniker local to the Seattle area that ran one :)

Any suggestions/referrals?

Thanks! :)

"Expert" Answer sites

Happy V-Day everyone :)

Being a person that's into personal networking, I've been a member of LinkedIn for quite some time now. While adding some more folks to my network, I noticed that they now have a new feature called “Answers”. This is where you can post a question, and get answers from folks that deem themselves worthy or otherwise able to answer your question. While browsing through some of the Q&A, I notice that there are some individuals that seem to live on this site and answer question after question on topics that are related to what their posted titles would have you believe that they know something about.

I was wondering what other folks thought of these Q&A sites. I've used several of these kind of sites to get answers for programming and technology problems in the past, but never for topics like small business or blogging ( http://www.linkedin.com/answers?catagoryHome=&catagory=TCH_BLG ) Seems like if you want to get known as being an expert on a subject, that you would want to hang out on places like this....that is if you answer the questions well :) Does anyone here do that? Does it drive a lot of business your way, or is it a waste of time?

Online Home Valuation?

Lots of places online to get a home valuation....from a Real Estate Agent :( Not that RE Agents are bad or anything, I'm just not looking to sell or buy at the moment...I just need a ballpark value of my home for deriving NetWorth purposes for business planning. I'm pretty sure there's one out on the Internet somewhere that won't draw down hordes of RE Agents to my door. Anyone know of one?

Know anyone that runs a high-volume website?

So I already know how to run a website for a load of a couple hundred thousand hits a day, but looking at starting a web-based business that would have over 1 million hits a day (well...at least that's the upper-end of the guesstimation.) Know anyone that's done something like that before? Oh, and its Linux-based...I don't have the warehouse for a cajillion Windows servers ;) Someone that has implemented a 3-tier website before. I would like to at least pick their brain for a bit to get an ideal of the scope of a project that size. Thanks :)

Thin Client Computing anyone?

While perusing through the HP flier that they send me on a regular basis, I happened to notice that this time there was a section on “thin clients”. I had to do a double-take, as the last time I heard about thin client computing was sometime in the early 90s....anyone that was in IT management at the time was getting barraged with people trying to sell them on thin client computing, and how it was going to save us all large amounts of money. Of course, the problem at that time was where were the “thin” applications that were going to run all this? “Well, currently they are on your mainframe.” was one sales person's response to my question back then. Problem was I had no mainframe, but he sure did get excited when he found that out and wanted to schedule the next meeting to talk about that :)

Back to the present, the commercial web is over ten years old and there happen to be many hosted solutions that allow for people to actually get by with very minimal computing hardware in order to run a business. ThinkFree is one such site that I know about. Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation...all MS Office compatible. Google has Google Doc & Google Spreadsheets. You can even do your taxes on the web!

So, I'm curious... is there anyone out there that is actually using all this “Free” stuff to run their indie businesses?? I guess if I didn't have all this computing hardware lying around here that I need to use in order to lessen cognitive dissidence, I would be using more of these solutions myself. Why are you? Why are you not? I'd be curious if anyone has found a hosted accounting system....I would love to ask them about their data security!

Great Label Printer

As I was reading the topic of Giannina's latest post (Designers: I need a referral for great label printer), I was mentally reviewing all the inkjet/film label printers that I had used when I was implementing MRP/ERP systems for manufacturer's so that I might recommend one. So I dutifully clicked on the message to respond, and then read her entire post....and soon realized that she was really asking for a print shop, not a physical computer printer.

I had to chuckle at how my background and experience had made me take the mental leap about what she was looking for. A good reminder that you need to not only listen to what the customer is saying, but make sure you understand what the customer is really saying :) One mouth, two ears; use proportionally.

Where's the Epiphany?

Hail fellow Biznikerers.....or something like that. Happy New Year! Its that time of year again when I start to look around at what's going on in the world and in the various industries that I (try to) keep track of and see what's up. What also usually happens while doing said looking around is that I get the bug. The bug to be an Indie Biz Person (Hey! A new TLA: IBP). Once the bug has bit down on my desire to be my own boss doing something that I really want to do, the energy starts to flow and business ideals start to pop into my head. Problem is, how do you decide which one to do?

Several steps into that process led me here to Biznik. One day while googling “+Small +Business” I ran into a site that made reference to here (and sorry, I can't remember who's it was to give proper credit to ). I was very happy to find a entrepreneur networking site that was mostly local to the Seattle area, with lots of folks all pursing their own desires & passions in business. (There is also a scary number of women here that I have tried to contact through singles sites like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals ...who's responses back to me ranged from no response at all to “drop dead you [expletives deleted]!” -- evidently I was mistaken for a Ex boyfriend or axe murderer or something. ) I am amazed at the variety of businesses represented by members here and the enthusiasm exhibited in the pursuit of those businesses.

So, for my first post of the year, I wanted to ask the collective Indie brain here for some help in trying to decide something: How do I go about deciding what business should I start? I've done the whole slave wage thing, been the big corporate manager, been responsible for lots of dollars and people, sold millions of dollars worth of stuff, been splashed in the press, had my 15 minutes of fame and all that.....but I still lack the fulfillment and excitement in my work life that I want. I want to be an IBP.

There are lots of books and business coaches and websites and whatnot that go into skills surveys, Entrepreneur checklists, risk-tolerance level determination, tests to determining what kind of business you should start, and so on. Then there are lists with a large number of generic, everyday, low payout businesses....Pencil Sharpener, Doughnut Maker, Dog Walker, Stamp Licker, MLM salesmen....you name it, they have it. Those are great if you have the passion and drive to make those successful businesses. The problem is that I don't want something that just anyone can do. I've got a lot of business and technology skills, experiences, and constraining factors that I want to make use of in any business I undertake. Any business out of a book would tend to not cover some of my many various interests....and if its not hitting most of these interests most of the time, then I will loose desire and won't be successful.

So how do you decide what business to start? Did you all just have an epiphany moment when the heavens opened up and The Ideal was given to you? Was there an 'Ah Ha!' exercise that brought it all together for you? Did you visit the Great Indie Guru on top of Queen Ann Hill (or wherever hill that person might be located on) and they just told you what you should do? Some people I meet seem to come up with business ideals they are willing to pursue on an almost daily basis. I come up with ideas and start to look at what the market for the product/service is, sustainability of the business, opportunity to expand if desired and usually decide its not do-able. Am I being too hard on myself? Is having a realistic appreciation of potential business success detrimental to Indie business??

I guess I'm really just looking for another angle on coming up with a potential business. Maybe there is something out there that I haven't tried yet, or some helpful book that I don't already have on the subject that can steer me to my own epiphany moment.