Office Max!

Today was the annual Business-to-Business Conference over at Bretton Woods, sponsored by the Mount Washington Valley Chamber of Commerce. Hundreds of area businesses get together each year to display their goods and services at individual booths and to network with potential clients and other business owners. What a wonderful event!

A few days ago I told about finding new office space and shared some of my mixed feelings, excitement and agony, over moving my business. Tomorrow is lease signing day and I hope I’m not jinxing the deal by writing this. Naaahhh … I’m not the superstitious kind. Que sera, sera…

I’ve been miserable at work lately and have been looking around. I recently received a call from a recruiter for another company who asked me to fax in some paperwork immediately. I ran to my office fax machine and did so, not realizing it prints out a copy of your cover page. Our HR guy came and delivered it to me with a big smile and just walked away. Oh, boy. Now what do I do? Busted Belle

What else did he think differentiated the blogsphere from tradition websites? Forgiveness. Readers know that bloggers are writing quickly and may say things that given more time, and reviewers, might be changed or toned down a bit. Readers forgive typos. Also, blog authors tend to reference other blogs – saying in essence, go look at what someone else has to say about this topic. You would not expect Home Depot or Staples to tell you to go check out Lowes or Office Max.

Hourly rates that you charge your clients are very closely related to the ultimate success or failure of your business. Your hourly rates must be high enough to sustain your income needs and not so high that you drive away your sweet spot, small business, target client.

There are certain things that bug me. One of them is not know how to do something basic in the field you are working. I program on a mainframe machine for a living, we have emulators on our PC's and need to know how to get around XP, Notes and Office products for meetings, email and documentation. The thing that bugs me the most is when a person refuses to figure out or learn how to do something (like start and instant meeting on an IM client) without even trying to do it themselves first.

I like to play with numbers. Good thing I switched my major to Accounting, right? In any case, what’s one of the most important numbers to any student? That’s right: their GPA.

Conversely, I think blogging does help the little guys. Small businesses can benefit from a personally written and regularly updated blog. It can get that business some exposure in places they may not otherwise be able to afford to advertise. It can get a listing in Google right next to companies like Microsoft or AOL. Levelling the playing field. It is possible. Blogging is more for the small companies than it is for the big companies, despite the cries from some marketers and evangelists about how all Fortune 500 companies should be blogging.

One problem with the SEO game is there are so many players that it can be hard for a small business to win. But there are many other marketing strategies that can be used effectively to drive business to your website.

The National Federation of Independent Business (the nation’s largest small-business advocacy group) has released some interesting statistics about the role of American small businesses:

You can tell by the way I keep walking right by the elevator, asking how to find the snack machine and getting lost on the way to lunch. I got my keys to the washroom on Wednesday - my third day. Before that, I had to sneak around the back way and get funny looks from the banker-type people with whom we share office space just to take a ... (I resisted making a Nintendo joke. But yes, it was hard). There are no pictures on the wall of my cube, the space around my desk is painfully litter-free and the box of toys I brought from home has barely been played with, much less looked at.

I’m not quite sure what they are trying to point out. Are they trying to tell us that Gateway computers are “black, generic desktop PCs”? Or that the disfunctional, clueless office represented on this television show would select Gateway? Or, that The Office is a phenominally poor choice for product placement of office products?

This is Mr. Bojangles. He's a pencil holder that I made waaaaaay back in my 5th grade art class. Why did I make a creepy looking pencil holder out of clay? Beats me, but I still have it over 25 years later. Mr. Bojangles is my oldest remaing possession.