By Jeff Doughman
December 18, 2008

How do you continue to grow your small business in an increasingly uncertain economy? It’s a question many entrepreneurs are asking themselves, and the answer may lie in thinking small about how to be big.

Small business owners who take baby steps toward growth, rather than making major or risky investments all at once, are more protected financially if a downturn hits. For example, there are more affordable alternatives to setting up a traditional office that allow you to compete at a high level without real estate, employee, and office equipment and furnishings costs.

Here are four steps that entrepreneurs can take to help build success one small step at a time:

Find a Home Away from Home
When lack of space or barking dogs make working from home an exercise in frustration, it’s time to make your move. But don’t think an expensive, long-term lease is your only option. Full or part-time, move-in-ready offices in business centers are a less costly alternative that come fully furnished and equipped, and offer business-grade copiers, on-site administrative support and high-speed Internet access.

Meet in Style
If you need professional space for the occasional client meeting, leasing a full-time office is overkill. A well-kept secret is the availability of by-the-hour meeting rooms at business centers. For less than the average hotel meeting room, you can book a private conference room in a prestigious high-rise, get on-site technical and administrative support, and have catering arranged for your group.

Get Help, Virtually
If you need an assistant to answer phones and sort mail, think twice before hiring a full-time employee. Consider the cost of salary and benefits. It can be simpler and cheaper to use a virtual office, which provides a phone number and address at a first-class office building, plus a shared administrative assistant to answer calls in your company’s name, greet clients and help with clerical work.

Fly the Friendly Airwaves
Can’t afford to fly cross-country to meet with distant clients or business partners? Set up a videoconference instead. Chances are there’s a business center near you and your client where you can rent a videoconference suite by the hour, save hundreds in travel costs, and still be home before dinner.

A sluggish economy doesn’t mean you can’t grow your business, but proceeding with caution can really pay off.

Jeff Doughman is the Central Region Vice President of The Regus Group Americas, a provider of workplace solutions operating a global network of more than 1,000 business centers in 450 cities and 75 countries. To learn more visit www.regus.com.

By Bob Clark
December 18, 2008

Time Power: A Proven System for Getting More Done in Less Time Than You Ever Thought Possible by Brian Tracy. Published by: AMACON Books, New York, NY, May 2007, 295 pages, $16.00.

A new year will soon be upon us. Looking ahead, this is a good time to reexamine our use or misuse of time. We’re all busy, and any tools for time management should be simple and effective. Brian Tracy has assembled a solid package of materials that can help any of us achieve real improvement.

As he begins, Tracy suggests four reasons to take better control of your time. He claims that practicing his system will help you: (a) gain two extra hours each day; (b) improve your productivity and performance; (c) increase your sense of control, and; (d) have more time for your family. It’s a stretch to say applying the book will deliver on all four, but a sincere effort on the suggested practices will certainly help you better manage your time.

One way to look at the material is to examine an internal summary. At one point, the author suggests a series of steps:
-¢ Changing the way you think -“ make a deliberate decision to manage your time better and keep a mental picture of how you would look at work if you were efficient, effective and fully productive.
-¢ Setting clear goals and objectives -“ select what is important with purpose and clarity based on your personal values and aspirations.
-¢ Plan out your work in detail -“ develop an explicit sequence of the tasks required to achieve your objectives and outline how you will attack each.
-¢ Setting clear priorities on your tasks -“ separate the urgent tasks from the important and spend the bulk of your time on the important.
-¢ Working all the time you are at work -“ engage in a single-minded effort to improve your work habits each day.
-¢ Managing multitask jobs -“ plan large or complex jobs by thinking on paper and organizing every detail before beginning.

Tracy’s work does not contain a lot of new information, but he assembles it in a readable manner. There is some pop psychology in the book, and it uses the numbered list technique a lot, e.g., the “five-best-ways” to do this or that. But once past those limitations, it provides many helpful tools.

Distilling the best advice in the book, I take away the following items:
-¢ Use some sort of planner, electronic or paper, but keep one and keep it current. The discipline of using it will help you keep focused and build good habits.
-¢ Take charge by developing lists of what needs to be done -“ daily, weekly, monthly, and longer time frames. Always prioritize the lists clearly, and always work from the list.

To some people time management efforts seem a waste. But using good planning tools and developing sound work habits will pay off by avoiding false starts and wasted effort on lesser value tasks. In this book Brian Tracy provides both encouragement and tools to help build successful time-management skills.

Bob Clark is the president of RWC Consulting LLC and has more than 30 years’ experience in labor-management relations. He provides consulting help in labor relations and is an adjunct professor at Concordia University in Ann Arbor.

By Mark St. Peter
December 4, 2008

With advances in technology have come many complex legal issues that could have an adverse impact on your business. Business owners, executives and managers should be aware that preserving digital evidence early is critical in reducing the liability, and potential penalties, that a business will face in court.

Digital evidence collection completed by a qualified forensic IT team can help businesses effectively locate key information or evidence when potential legal issues arise. These individuals have the expertise to preserve information integrity, something that an IT professional untrained in forensic matters usually cannot handle effectively. In addition to data integrity, these trained professionals can help maintain data reliability and admissibility in court proceedings.

Forensic IT professionals can also help businesses save money. The biggest costs related to litigation for clients used to be depositions, but during the last decade that has changed, and the biggest cost is now e-discovery techniques. It is a commonly-held rule of thumb in the legal industry that it will take a law firm approximately 200 hours to review just 1 gigabyte of data. Voluminous amounts of data can be largely eliminated by a forensic IT professional using such strategies as keyword searches and data de-duplication.

Hiring forensic IT professionals when appropriate is only half the solution. In the eyes of judges, the issue of timing is a crucial in any case where IT data is at issue. That’s because any delay in data preservation, or the ongoing use of a computer prior to forensic analysis, may overwrite data. This often results in the destruction of critical evidence.

Penalties can be extensive if judges feel that companies have not done their best to preserve data appropriately. For example, Phillip Morris paid $2.75 million for digital discovery abuse in 2004 and J.P. Morgan paid a $2.1 million settlement over e-mail destruction in 2005. Five to six-digit penalties to companies of all sizes are not uncommon.

There are steps that every business with IT data should take to help reduce legal risks related to data.

First, all intellectual property that you own should have a specific location. Such information could include sales figures, client lists, formulas and other unique and valuable property. This minimizes the risk of your most important data becoming intermingled with other computer and data traffic.

Second, having a document retention policy that includes IT data is critical. Such a policy should be regularly enforced and communicated, offer written details, and have been in existence well before a legal event arises. If such a policy is proven to have those characteristics, the likelihood of a favorable legal ruling is much greater and the risks of penalties and sanctions are lessened.

Third, recognize that corporate IT data exists in many places. That includes corporate-purchased cellular phones, PDAs, voice mails, fax machines and even on employees’ home computers if the business allows work from home. A policy should be in place to gather and preserve data from all of these potential locations.

Fourth, you should know that e-mailing a document, particularly a Microsoft Word or Excel document, can reveal to the recipient prior changes to the document, dates involved, previous edited versions, employee names and other information that the sender would not knowingly want to reveal. When in doubt, send a PDF version, which protects the sender from revealing some of this information.

Finally, don’t overwrite or recycle your backup tapes without a plan in place to ensure your data is preserved. It will be much less expensive to purchase additional tapes than it would be to pay heavy fines because information sought during a court battle has been erased. In such cases, judges can impose an adverse inference, one of the worst penalties to a legal suit, which assumes that all e-mails or digital data that are missing would be harmful to your case.

When a computer is suspected of containing critical information, the longer that time passes the more difficult it is for forensics experts to find such data. The more the computer is used, the more frequently every byte and megabyte is transformed. Data is then more difficult to locate. So remember to act promptly.

The lowest cost, best investment is to preserve this evidence as soon as possible. Computers suspected of hosting critical data should be shut down immediately and taken out of active circulation until a forensic preservation has been obtained. A company’s internal IT staff, though skilled in many aspects, is likely not properly trained or educated in the legal aspects applicable to the recovery of such data. Their actions might even make the situation worse.

Preserving digital data early is something that companies of all sizes should be aware of. In the courtroom, companies that have proven to do their best to preserve their data, and not hide anything are likely to be looked upon more favorably by courts.

Mark St. Peter is president of Computing Source in Southfield, a provider of digital evidence consulting and services for law firms, corporate counsels and other clients. He can be contacted at [email protected].

By Douglas Stone
December 4, 2008

“Innovation is . . . the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth” -“ Peter F. Drucker

The business results of new product innovation are uncertain, at best. Linton, Matysiak & Wilkes’ landmark 1996 study placed the failure rate of new grocery products above 70 percent and estimated that almost half of the resources firms spend on the conception, development and launch of new products are invested in ideas that either fail in the marketplace or never make it to market. Several more recent sources reinforce the validity of that earlier study -“ indicating new product failure rates of more than 80 percent and perhaps as high as 95 percent. So it’s no that wonder that entrepreneurs, executives and managers are leery of investing in innovation, even though it is one of the only two business activities that create new customers (the other is marketing -“ again, according to Peter Drucker).

While the odds are low, overall, for the marketplace success of new product innovations, the odds improve dramatically for those companies that follow proven successful processes for evaluating and developing their new products. The same LM&W study that noted 70 percent plus failure rates for new grocery products, placed new product success at closer to 90 percent for innovations from large, established companies. A good portion of this success, of course, can be attributed to the resource advantages of larger companies. But the fact is that these companies, by virtue of their size and structure, follow a regimen for evaluating the marketplace potential of new products ideas that entrepreneurs and managers of smaller companies can readily adapt to improve their own odds of success in launching new product innovations.

In any good program of innovation evaluation, there are five broad criteria every business should include: Consumer, Brand, Market, Product, and Internal. Of course, every industry and every company will need to customize these proven processes to their own unique circumstances, but the following thoughts on evaluating new product innovations may help guide aspiring innovators on the road toward new product success. They are structured as a series of questions the manager or entrepreneur should ask him/herself about their own new product innovations.

Consumer Criteria
In evaluating new product innovations, everything begins with the consumer. You may create a better mousetrap, but if your customers are all cat-breeders, you’ll have a hard time getting an order.

The kinds of consumer questions you should be asking yourself about your new product innovation include:

– Is it consistent with your current consumer base? It’s always easier to sell something new to people who already know you/your company/your brand, so it’s important to understand whether your innovation is intended for the same core consumers you currently serve.

– What is its potential for expanding your consumer target? Expanding your consumer base by offering a new product innovation may also open new sales opportunities for your existing products and services. Many are the computer users who depend on Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” (a service innovation) for regular repairs and updates and leave the store with a DVD, consol game, or USB cord that caught their eye when they came to have memory added to their laptop.

– Is it ahead-of, on, or behind consumer trends? Just a couple of years ago, “low-carb” claims could turn almost any new food product into a massive hit, but much of that magnetism is gone today. But it’s not always best to be ahead of consumers’ curve-of-acceptance. The greatest numbers of consumers are almost always the Mainstream and almost never the Innovators and Early-Adopters.

– Does it require consumers to change their behavior? Ingrained consumer behaviors can be extraordinarily difficult (in other words – expensive) to alter. How long did it take you to shift from a paper to electronic calendar? Do you still print and file computer documents and emails?

It may help you to graphically organize your evaluation in a grid (see example shown below). You may also find it valuable to assign a ‘score’ (a rating of 1 to 5 works well) for each of your evaluation dimensions and you may wish to weight each dimension, based on your understanding of a dimension’s relative importance.

Each score will be based on the very best insight and intelligence you can gather. The more accurate your inputs, the better your evaluation of the potential marketplace success for your new product innovations.

Brand Criteria (such as, brand elasticity; brand credibility; brand build/borrow), Market Criteria (such as, number and strength of competitors; market growth), Product Criteria (such as, uniqueness; brand fit; available niche; defensibility; sales potential; marketing costs), and Internal Criteria (such as, can you make it?; margin; R&D required; capital requirements), can each be evaluated in a similar fashion.

Douglas Stone is president of Stone & Simons Advertising, Inc. in Southfield. He can be contacted at [email protected].

By Bob Clark
November 20, 2008

I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation. Under Stress. In Debt. by Addison Wiggin and Kate Incontrera.
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, N. J., Sept. 2008, 272 pages, $19.95.

This book is timely. It grew from the documentary film of the same name. In addition, it includes a forward by David Walker (former U.S. Comptroller General) and portions of interviews used to create the film.

In the book, Wiggin and Incontrera communicate a good deal of information on a subject sure to glaze over the eyes of many people. The numbers are so large and the issues so complex that any discussion of federal budget shortfalls and national debt can be mind numbing. The authors successfully deliver solid information and an interesting perspective. The inclusion of the interview transcripts is a very helpful part of the package.

The authors articulate a good case for looking at the “deficit” issue in America as a problem larger than just the federal budget. By their measure, four major deficits exist:
-¢ The obvious federal budget deficit and national debt that results from choices made by the government.
-¢ The personal savings deficit created by our insistence on spending more than we earn with great regularity.
-¢ The trade deficit driven by our purchasing choices that result in Americans consuming more than they produce.
-¢ A leadership deficit among our public officials who give lip service to discipline and never practice it, and are not restrained by any effective citizen demand for accountability.

Wiggin and Incontrera build a sound case for each deficit and the implications that flow from each. Near the end of chapter five, the authors include a ‘Hit List’ of actions that they believe are needed now. It is a challenging list from any perspective and includes: demanding more from our elected officials; rethinking what we expect government to do; facing the reality that substantive policy trade offs must be made; making a personal commitment to increase our saving and not abusing credit; and finally, teaching our children the hard lessons of personal financial responsibility.

The facts presented are accurate, and the challenges set forth are reasonable. It is a book worth reading, and reflecting on the ideas in it may cause the reader to reexamine personal choices and long-held convictions. That would be a good outcome, and one the authors are encouraging.

The authors made a real effort to be non-partisan, and they mostly succeeded. It does seem that an inordinate share of the blame for something several decades in the making is leveled at the Executive Branch and the current administration. Congress, other administrations, and both parties are linked to the problem. This occasional lack of political balance sometimes gets in the way of the important message. But, the actions proposed by Mr. Addison and Ms. Incontrera are less focused on finding a culprit and more directed toward securing a better future. That makes the book a solid contribution to the ongoing debate about deficits.

Bob Clark is the president of RWC Consulting LLC and has more than 30 years’ experience in labor-management relations. He provides consulting help in labor relations and is an adjunct professor at Concordia University in Ann Arbor.

By Jeff Walter
November 20, 2008

In a corporate organization many activities contribute to performance and meeting business objectives. The organization must track these activities, discover and communicate problems, and coordinate solutions. How well can an organization evaluate how its operations are contributing to business results and meeting targeted goals?

Jeff Walter is president and a founding principal of Latitude.

According to IDC (www.idc.com) research, performance management, where organizations establish strategic goals and specify operational metrics to measure progress, has gained momentum across the public and private sectors. Providing relevant feedback to decision makers at near real time (or right time) can improve the quality of these decisions. Building a “sense and respond” capability, according to IDC research, is crucial for making continued improvement in business performance and when making critical decisions that dramatically impact an organization.

IDC also found a significant number of companies are giving high priority to IT investments to support performance management initiatives. Many of these investments are in the area of business intelligence (BI), data-driven systems that provide analysis, reporting, and management tools. One of these tools, the BI dashboard, visually presents data for analysis.

An example of a BI dashboard is the electoral map on www.yahoo.com (http://news.yahoo.com/election/2008/dashboard;_ylt=AjNVb7wD8D.c5xT0xtLAVeBsnwcF). The map provides a color-coded rendering of the U.S. according to the winner in each state. By selecting a state, the user can view specific electoral information on vote tallies and percentage of precincts reporting.

During the election, the information was updated in real-time. A user could easily access the information and evaluate the incoming results and make an informed judgment about how the election might progress over the next few hours. By selecting “Create Your Own Scenario,” the user can even assign states to different candidates to see who the winner would be according to different electoral combinations.

Suppose a decision-maker was interested in the demographics and performance of different business locations to help determine how to assign corporate resources to these locations. A dashboard similar to the Yahoo! electoral map could provide an interface that allowed the decision-maker to quickly view this information. This business application might even have its own “Create Your Own Scenario” function that would allow the decision-maker to try out different allocations of field staff, marketing promotions, and training resources. The dashboard could provide projected performance changes for each business location and for the business as a whole, depending on the resource allocations. After trying out the different possible combinations, the decision-maker might even have a performance improvement plan in hand that could be saved or printed.

In fact, General Motors uses a similar web-based business intelligence application for service and parts operations at its North American dealerships. Their application does not include an interactive map, but is does allow both corporate and dealership staff to access performance data and apply what if scenarios to different programs and promotions that can be implemented at the dealership level.

For example, if return visits for a vehicle repair are high, the GM field manager may recommend that a dealer’s service technicians attend a training class. The field manager can select the training activity in the GM business intelligence application, which can then project the performance improvement the dealer can anticipate. After recommending additional activities that can positively impact return visits and other low performing metrics, the dealer will have a complete performance improvement plan.

Organizations like GM face many challenges when evaluating and optimizing the performance of their operations. The power of business intelligence is its ability to capture data from different business systems and unify them into a dashboard that supports making informed decisions based on a comprehensive and complete picture. In this challenging economic landscape, tough decisions need to be validated by data, not intuition.

Jeff Walter is president and a founding principal of Latitude, a senior technology consultancy. Walter brings over 15 years of experience in leveraging information technology to solve strategic business problems for organizations.