Category: Technology

You’d think with many years in support type roles at work I would be able to get past personality clashes a bit better. Particularly since it is pretty important to my survival in business. I have this book, Attracting Perfect Customers which I haven’t read yet but as soon as I get past my current reading list I’m getting stuck into it (so many books, so little time.)

I have this one client with whom I always seem to end up getting into an argument. We just seem to rub each other the wrong way. I’m feeling better about him today, because we just carried on a very productive and insightful conversation for once, without either of us getting defensive.

It’s all about WHAT is communicated, not HOW it is said. Although the ‘how’ is sometimes mixed up with the ‘what’, I have to remind myself not to misinterpret what is being said. If I assume, I am dead! It is always better to seek clarification than get into heated argument and feel like a huge idiot once the air has cleared.

Met up with a possible new client yesterday, a married couple in business, and was amazed at the problems they’ve experienced.

They distribute a very good, very unique specialty product that they and their customers absolutely love. The aggravation to date has been lack of support from their supplier. It isn’t your typical corporate greed, they are dealing with an individual who seems paranoid about anyone making money from his product.

The supplier sells the product through his country-based retail shop, his web site and through a small network of distributors who sell on commission through the party plan method (like Tupperware).

The couple negotiated a different deal with him, where they would purchase the product wholesale and sell through their own channels. They were convinced that a shop front in the city was a good idea and organised a lease.

The shop has really proven to be their undoing. Fearful the couple would make more money in their city shop than he makes out in the country, the supplier raised his wholesale price. Six months on they are getting very little walk in trade at the shop, they are doing more business at weekend markets and home-based parties.

It’s a nightmare situation, they have little or no margin on the product because they are competing with the suppliers retail prices. They are locked into an expensive city shop lease which is eating into their capital. The wife runs the shop single-handed as the husband works full-time (with my husband as matter of fact) and they can’t afford to pay an assistant. She is spending less and less time at the shop because they get more business out of the shop than in it.

To make matters worse they handed money over to someone to build a web site for the business, and it wasn’t finished. The guy just skipped. They then paid someone else to finish it for them, but it was poorly done and is still not what they want.

That’s how I first got involved about a month ago. H bought some product at work from the husband, and they got to talking about the web site. The husband asked me to do a tidy up of the site – fixing some terrible coding and spelling errors, in exchange for more of the product.

The couple recently had a break, and a hard think about what they are going to do with the business.

They have decided to get out of the shop, although they still have to pay the rent there until another tenant takes over. It is likely they will dump the current web site and I will probably be building them a new one with the focus on booking the parties, re-order of product and extending their sub-distributor network.

They have good ideas about marketing the product and are still committed to work hard with it. The parties are where the business is, and the good news is they’ve successfully negotiated better pricing from their supplier.

I’ve been a member of the local chamber of commerce for a couple of years now, but beyond advertising in the local business directory have had no involvement. The directory has sent business my way, and now that I’m better motivated I figured it would be a good idea to get more involved, do some networking, and maybe give back to the local community.

So I went along to tonight’s meeting. There was only a small gathering, but they were all very friendly and welcoming. I’d barely sat down before the chamber secretary was tabling discussion about setting up a web site and the other members were asking me about what was involved. The upshot of this is I’ve been invited to make a presentation at the next meeting about the best way to move forward with a web site. I am quite blown away!

The rest of the meeting was kind of interesting. I’m not quite sure what drives the group – there seemed to be a lot of talk about Free Trees and Easter egg giveaways. And there seem to be some butting of heads with other groups holding local fundraising events. A lot of discussion about an annual festival held by the local Uniting Church; apparently it has been a bit of a failure in the past. The chamber donated $1,000 to the church committee towards market research, to be shared with the chamber, of which nothing has eventuated!

The chamber runs the weekly markets in the main street of town, and the fellow who looks after it was interesting. He runs a local nursery and apparently sells his stock at various markets around SE Qld. He had some good ideas about the trends in street markets, and why some markets are declining. Cost of fuel mainly! He reckons (and it sounds pretty reasonable) that people need another reason to get in the car and head out to the markets – such as situating the markets near a shopping centre, or running some sort of attraction (his suggestion was to invite members of the Ulysses MC out on their bikes to do whatever it is they do!)

After the meeting closed I chatted to a couple of the members. One of the guys must be a bit of a local history buff, he was telling me about the old Lutheran pastor for whom our street was named. Then I was talking to a lady in the local towing business, she was shoving business cards into my hands and hinting that she might want to talk to me about her own web site!

Talking to a local about web sites this morning, and he mentions there is a ‘business opportunity’ I might be interested in. The MLM alarm bells started ringing.. sure enough I’m soon hearing ‘unique product’ and ‘miraculous health properties’. He gives me his web address – a freelife.com address.. Goji juice!

Sure enough, it doesn’t take much digging on Google to uncover the elements of a scam. Wendy Mesley, a reporter from CBC Canada did an indepth story on the Freelife Goji which completely blows it apart. http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/01/goji.html

Goji or ‘wolfberries’ do have health-promoting properties, but the way Freelife markets the product, and the false claims that it cures cancer and so forth is just wrong. I feel sorry for the man in the CBC report who had spent thousands of dollars on the product for his father, sick with cancer – to find out it was all a bunch of over-inflated, unproven marketing hype.

A couple of months ago my friend Melissa got into glyco-nutritional dietary supplements. She claims the product has made a difference to her health and told me about the remarkable transformation of a girl with Downs Syndrome. She gave me some links to information: http://www.glycostory.com, http://glyco101.com, and http://glycoscience.org. The three sites seem full of a lot of confusing scientific claims, but how well do they stand up to close scrutiny? In the words of Dr Ray Sahelian:

I start suspecting that there is something not right about the promotion of a product – such as glyconutrients – when the meaning of the word is so ambiguous, and the word glyconutrient is created by a company that sells through multilevel marketing channels.

Dr Sahelian found there were no legitimate studies to support the claims, it is all marketing hype. Sound familiar? The multi-level marketing element – just screams dodgy. They might be selling a beneficial product but they need to be honest. The hype and the untruths build people’s hopes and turn it into one big scam.

I’m teaching myself the ins and outs of Zen Cart shopping cart system for web sites. It is based on oscommerce, which I have used a few times already; but has a few extra features which make it more user friendly. Some of these features include an editor to add extra pages to the site, and an easier way to manage templates.

The templates offer an override system – you can install a custom template but the system reverts to the default template if a particular template file does not exist in the custom folders. I’m reading up more on this here: http://tutorials.zen-cart.com/index.php?article=230

I’ll add more here as I go.

I want to get away from the standards unfriendly Webpage Builder system that I’ve been using for a few years now. It was a good quick solution at one time, but I have been unhappy with it for a while.

I’ve found a great alternative – CMS Made Simple. It’s an open source content management system built on the php/mysql platform. Like most open source, it has a good support community – it is well tested and has lots of add-ons. It is standards compliant, incorporates strict separation of content from appearance, and has a high level of customisation.

I’ve been testing it for someone whose subscription to Webpage Builder runs out in a couple of months. So far there has been no problem transferring their content over – including a membership application form, a photo album, and members only (login required) content. The templating should be a snap also.

I’ve found it very easy to use but it may take a little time for her to get used to the new system. So I have to get my head around the regular tasks they will be performing and the best way to reduce the stress of learning a new way of doing things.