how to – Page 8 – Michele Christensen

How solopreneurs can use Foursquare

I admit, I’m late in jumping on the Foursquare bandwagon. As with any new undertaking, I have to have a definitive reason for getting involved with something and I have to know what I expect to get from it and have a way to measure that result. I’ve checked out Foursquare several times, but never felt like it was a good fit for my business until now. In this article, I’ll share why I decided to start using it, what I’m using it for and how I keep myself safe.

In case you don’t know, Foursquare is a social media site and smartphone app that uses your phone’s gps system to let you “check in” to physical locations. As a work-at-home solopreneur, I don’t actually have a physical location so it never seemed like something that would work for me. I was also concerned about announcing to the world where I am and that my house is empty.

The reason I finally decided to jump is to spice up my Twitter feed with some more interesting personal information. Several people I follow on Twitter have their check ins included in their Twitter feed and I found I really enjoyed it, especially when they included a picture. It’s important to share some information about yourself, your personality and life in your marketing so people have a sense of just who they are considering doing business with. As with any sharing of personal information, don’t overdo it.

So, the main reason I’m using Foursquare is to add some variety to my Twitter feed. I’m definitely accomplishing that, but there are a few added benefits I hadn’t considered. It’s actually a fun service to use. There’s elements of gaming in it such as the ability to earn badges, which often come as a surprise. I also find it tends to get me out of the house more because I don’t like to see a whole day with no check ins.

The big question is safety. When the practice of revealing your physical location became popular, there was a lot of stories about people being burglarized while they were out and of people being stalked at the places they go regularly. I protect myself from burglary by never checking in unless someone is home at my house. I also have two large, very loud dogs that show up all the time in my social media postings for any would-be burglar to see. If this isn’t an option for you, consider only checking in when you will be home shortly.

As far as discouraging stalkers, I only check in when I’m leaving a place. If someone tries to find me, I won’t be there anymore. I also never check in at any of my regular stops, i.e. places where there is a pattern to my visiting or places I go often. There’s no way to figure out where I go regularly by looking at Foursquare.

Do you see any way to use Foursquare in your solopreneur business? Tell me about it in the comments.

Does home clutter limit your business potential?

Since most solopreneurs I know work from home, it makes sense to talk about home care even though it’s not strictly business. Your environment plays a huge role in how you feel, how much you get done and the quality of that work. One of the most common plagues of modern living is clutter. Although there are many types of non-physical clutter, I’m specifically talking about physical clutter here.

“Stuff” is relatively cheap now in terms of time, effort and money to acquire it. Relatively cheap postal rates are a boon for junk mailers. Magazines and newspapers take it upon themselves to subscribe you in order to pump up their circulation numbers. Add to that the normal upgrade cycle of all the various electronics devices and it makes for a lot of potential clutter.

Note that I called it potential clutter. All of the stuff that comes into your house has the potential to become clutter if left unchecked. Since the inflow is more or less ongoing, the mitigation needs to be ongoing as well. For years, I’ve cultivated the habit of continually decluttering. It’s something that happens casually throughout the day. If I buy a new pair of pants, I scan my existing pants to see what can be donated. If I’m putting something away and the cabinet or shelf seems crowded, I do a quick sweep to see what can go. I do a big yearly kitchen/pantry decluttering every winter.

Recently, I’ve adopted a slightly more formal approach that has been working great and has helped my business as well. I now declutter 15 minutes a day (props to flylady.net for the idea). One of the helpful things in this approach for me has been to use a wide definition of decluttering. It’s not just the “clean out the closet” tasks, but also putting everything back where it belongs. What’s great about this is that there’s never too much accumulation and there’s a set time to take care of it every day. When you practice 15 minutes a day of decluttering, you’ll find that most of the time you can put away anything left out in the last day or so and still have time to do real decluttering such as cleaning out closets, shelves and storage areas.

So how might this help your business?

It helps by taking something distracting off your plate when you are trying to work. If you go to an office outside of the house, it’s easy to leave home chores undone for the day since they are not right in your face reminding you. When you work from home, those tasks nag at you and may pull you from your work. There’s a certain pressure to feel like your house should always look good because you work from home, and this helps keep things tidy. By doing a little every day, you don’t have to try to find a huge block of time to do it later. If your house is in reasonably good shape, you’ve can’t procrastinate working in order to clean it. Having a clear space may help you concentrate or feel more focused. Knowing there’s a set block of time every day to do this kind of thing takes the pressure off. If I see an area that needs to be addressed, I know I’ll get to it eventually and it doesn’t hang over my head while sitting on my to-do list.

In invite you to join me in this daily practice and see how it improves your business. Many people make a new year’s resolution to get organized, and instead of that I suggest trying 15 minutes a day of decluttering. Tell me how it works for you in the comments.

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Strategy and growing your business

I talk a lot about strategy, and that’s because it’s truly one of the most important foundations to your success. What is strategy and why is it so important? How can it help you?

Strategy is having an idea of how something will help your business before you start doing it. This applies both to big, sweeping changes like adding a new marketing technique and it also applies to one-time things like attending an expo. Having a strategy makes it so much more likely you will succeed, and even if you don’t you’ll know it sooner and not get sidetracked for as long as you would without strategy.

New business owners often have a fire to get started, and as a result they start off running hard and just doing as many things as they can to build their business. The idea of actually asking if something is a good idea to be doing in the first place seems pointless. It’s easy to get into such a frenzy of doing that it’s hard to even find a few minutes to ask if you should be doing something.

Strategy helps you decide what to do and set some goals around what you expect to accomplish. Most business activities have increasing sales as their ultimate goal but there are many intermediate steps. One strategy might be to increase traffic to your website using social media. This would ultimately increase sales (all other things being equal), but it’s an intermediate step. If your strategy is to increase sales by increasing traffic using social media then you know what your social media activity is supposed to accomplish before you even start doing it. Using some traffic measurements, you can tell how well it is working by measuring how much traffic you sent to your site before and after you started using social media.

One of the best things strategy can do is to steer you when you are off course. What if you social media strategy, as you’ve defined it, isn’t paying off? That’s not as good as it working great, but it’s much better that you know and can change course. If your efforts aren’t working, you need to change what you are doing or find something new to do.

Strategy doesn’t have to be a big deal. It doesn’t have to be formal or complex. Just make sure you know why you are doing any business activity and what you hope to get from it. Have a way to measure if your efforts are working, and know when to change course or pull the plug.

How do you use simple strategy in your business? Tell me about it in the comments.

Will you really remember it?

Lately, I’ve heard from a few successful business people that they don’t keep much of a to-do list because “If it’s important, I’ll remember it.” Is this really true? Is it a good way to run your business?

In both cases, the logic was something along the lines of running your business (and life) more intuitively and trusting your mind to call up the important items and leave the rest behind. It sounds nice, and who doesn’t want to have that kind of freedom?

My first concern with this type of task management is that it’s an inefficient use of your best resource, your mind. Lists can easily be kept on paper or in a tech resource, and both of these are very well suited to keeping large amounts of data. Your brain isn’t. Humans have good retention for just a handful of things at a time, and then it gets hazy. How much more creative and productive are you when the slate is cleared, your mind free and you are calm?

The second problem with this approach is that it can cause stress if you don’t have absolute faith in your mind’s ability to choose and call up the best thing to be working on. Maybe some people’s minds can do this and they are absolutely comfortable with that trust, but if you have any doubt at all you run the risk of using valuable brain power to keep track of things that could easily be stored elsewhere. I don’t doubt that most people’s minds can call up some tasks to work on, but I know what I go through to pick the best thing to do right now and it’s not a simple decision. I’m not sure anyone’s mind can be trusted to do long-term planning and to weigh all the factors in deciding what to work on.

My third and biggest concern with this is the waste of brilliant ideas! How often does an idea come to you at an odd time when you would never expect genius to strike? It happens to me a lot. I often tell my clients to let me stew on something and I’ll answer them in a few days. Later, while I’m folding laundry, doing dishes or driving I’ll get great idea out of nowhere and the problem is solved. If you don’t record them somewhere, you run the risk of losing them forever and that’s pretty sad. Record it in some central place, and you have a stockpile of great ideas just waiting for you to act on them.

As with most things, the right answer is what works best for you. It’s important to make sure that whatever method you use to pick your next tasks is one that supports you doing your important work in the world and doesn’t hinder you.

TechSmart Podcast appearance

I was a guest on the second episode of the TechSmart podcast and I’ve love to know what you think! Host Lee Schneider and I talked about Google calendar and online scheduling with Timetrade.

Find the podcast here:

TechSmart Podcast with Michele Christensen

Access the gold in your head

If you are like most entrepreneurs, you probably have a gold mine inside your brain right now. One of the things that makes entrepreneurs different from people not drawn to that path is IDEAS! We live ideas. We work ideas. We’re addicted to or at least strongly drawn to new ideas. We can come up with more ideas in a day than we could implement in a year.

Unless you have a process for capturing and processing these ideas, chances are they are pinging around in your head going to waste. Nobody benefits from them and they don’t make you any money unless the ideas are out of your head and implemented.

I recommend having ways to capture all your ideas on a regular basis, but sometimes it might still help to do a big clearing out. Even in a well-kept home, clutter can still accumulate, and your brain is no different. Lots of ideas and thoughts are coming in on a regular basis, and if you don’t take some time to clear out your brain will become overly full and you may begin to feel like you can’t think.

I know when I’ve got too much in my head. It feels like one of the machines that mixes the lottery balls before they are picked – there’s just hundreds of things clamoring, bouncing and demanding my attention. I know when that happens I have to clear some space.

So how do you clear your head and get your golden ideas out?

I call it a brain download. Some people call this process a brain dump, but I don’t like the implication of the word “dump.” It’s where we take trash and hazardous waste, not valuable things like great ideas. A download on the other hand implies value. We download songs we like, books we want to read and information to improve our lives and businesses.

The only rule is that you can do this process however it works for you, but here are some tips to get you started.

I like to use old-fashion paper and pen. Yes, you lose the advantage of having on a computer document, but there’s something about connecting pen to hand to brain that really fuels my thinking.
Start with a full, blank sheet of paper. A big easel pad (2 feet by 3 feet or so) is especially inviting, but anything letter sized or bigger works.
Use colored pens, markers, crayons, or just a plain pen – whatever works for you. One warning – don’t get caught up in color coding or making a design with your writing.
This is about quantity and completeness, not quality or accuracy.
Gather your paper and pen and start writing! Anything that’s in your head, whether it’s recorded elsewhere or not is fair game. Include ideas, to-do items, things to research, things that bug you right now, anything else you think of.
This is just for you, so spelling, grammar, neatness, etc. don’t count.
You’ll know you’re done when several minutes pass and you can’t think of anything else to add. Your brain might feel light, empty or like something’s missing.

When you’re done, you’ll have a big, sloppy page and a neat, empty brain ready to tackle the next big thing.

I recommend that you put away your paper for a day and see if any stragglers pop up that you can add.

The last step is the one most often overlooked. Most entrepreneurs will be on to the next thing and their massive to-do list right away and this paper will be forgotten and that’s a huge waste! The last step is to process everything on your paper and put it in the correct place where it can be acted on at the right time and the threat of forgetting is gone. Some examples: ideas can go onto an idea list, to-do items in your task manager, an upcoming birthday added to your calendar, additional thoughts on a current project added to that project material.

Do you see how it works? Get your valuable ideas out of your head to where they can be acted on and in the process clear your magnificent mind for bigger and better things.

Tell me how you clear your head in the comments. What positive results do you get from your process?

Email marketing as part of your CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

I was in a training recently, and the trainer used the phrase “CRM software” and “email list service” interchangeably. Aside from being imprecise, I thought that mixing these two terms could easily lead someone to that dreadful practice of adding people to their newsletter list without consent, although the trainer clearly was against this idea.

The phrase CRM (Customer Relationship Management) refers to what your company does to manage and strengthen relationships with customers and potential customers. There may be multiple parts to your system and practices such as coupons, rewards, customer-only events, software designed to help you stay on top of things and yes, an email newsletter may be part of that system.

Sales and Networking Expert Don Talbert defines CRM as “A comprehensive system which enables the small business owner to truly manage his or her client database. Used properly, a CRM system can help generate more revenue. One can utilize the CRM system to contact clients on important dates, stay in touch on a regular basis, etc. ACT and Salesforce are two very popular CRM software programs.”

CRM software does a variety of things including keeping track of past conversations with prospects, cuing you to follow up again, tracking their buying habits, testing various practices and generating data about your customers. Since this is for internal company use, it’s usually a good idea to make sure all customers and potential customers are entered into the system.

Your email list service (e.g. Aweber (affiliate link), Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, etc) is much more narrow in scope. It facilitates communicating with people via mass email. The service should take new sign-ups, handle people leaving, let you send emails and provide you with data. One of the more important functions is to help you to stay compliant with spam laws. One big difference between CRM software and an email list service is that only people who have expressively given permission should ever be entered into your email list service. To add people without their consent is a violation of spam laws, annoys people and makes you look bad.

Sales and Networking Expert Don Talbert had this comment about the difference between CRM software and Email List services:

“Email distribution is only one facet of CRM, and is not interchangeable with it. It is simply a medium for communicating with others. Email is integral to CRM however should never be mistaken for being the same thing.”

As you can see, these 3 things – your company’s CRM practices, CRM software and email list service – are all different things that serve different but related purposes. The purpose of this article is not to be a stickler for word usage, but to point out that if you don’t understand the difference between these things you could end up hurting your business.

What is double-entry bookkeeping?

I was asked this question 2 times recently, so that means it’s time to blog about it!

I may not be the best person to answer this, but I will try to make it understandable especially since most solopreneurs I know (including myself) don’t relish doing their bookkeeping. When I worked for corporate, and one of my roles was to interpret numbers for operations people so I do enjoy making the complex into something useful. Disclaimer: this is not meant to take the place of advice from your legal or financial professional and should not be construed as advice. It’s also not meant to be an exhaustive, comprehensive explanation but more of something to think about.

First, why is it important to know what double-entry bookkeeping is? It’s something that describes the capability of any bookkeeping software you might use and this may impact how much work your accountant has to do to prepare taxes or financial statements. It also gives you the ability to get a wider variety of data from you bookkeeping records than a system that doesn’t follow this convention.

So what is it?

Double-entry bookkeeping is a way to keep the records of the company that supports the idea that a business has assets (one side of the double entry), and that two groups of people have claim to those assets (the other side of the double entry). The first group is creditors or people the business owes money to. The second is the owner or owners. Another way to look at is that the owners share in the business is what’s left over after debts are subtracted from assets. Many transactions effect both sides, but some will only effect one side.

For many solopreneurs, it’s fine to just measure financial health based on cash. Cash comes in and goes out, and you categorize it and get your data from there. For other businesses though, this would not present a full picture. Categorizing your cash in and out could be a simple form of double entry accounting.

For example, let’s say a business signs a 3-month contract to do tech support for a customer and gets a $3,000 check on the spot. When the business owner leaves the customer’s place of business and deposits the check into his or her bank account, the business’ cash has gone way up but they haven’t actually done anything to be entitled to the income represented by the contract. At the end of month one, they’ve earned $1,000, another $1,000 by the end of month 2 and the final $1,000 at the end of month 3. The advantage of looking at this transaction this way is that it lets you know when you’ve earned the income not when the cash came in, although cash flow is important too. Treating the contract this way also allows you to match the revenue more closely to the period of time over which you have expenses relating to earning that income.

What system of bookkeeping do you use? Tell me about it in the comments.

Don’t do more than your client wants

This article is about doing what the client has hired you for and wants you to do, and not veering so far afield as to offend them. I’ve been turned off on more than one occasion by people who felt that their status as “expert” in one area entitled them to speak to all areas of another person’s life. To say I advise against this would be putting it mildly! It’s happened a few times, but here are two of the most out-of-line people I’ve encountered.

A few years ago when I was still new to the internet side of my business, I signed up for a free strategy session with a successful guru and at our designated time she proceeded to criticize and pick apart areas of my life that have nothing to do with my business. At the time, I was not devoting 40 hours a week to my business, and this was a decision my husband and I made together and it suited both of us at the time for a number of reasons that aren’t that noteworthy now. She criticized and gave advice on how I spent my time, my business goals, and of all things, my fixer upper house! At the time, I was so surprised I couldn’t really respond but suffice it to say I immediately cut off all contact with her and would never recommend her or use her services. Yes, I should have stepped in and put a stop to it as soon as she got off topic, but the fact that she was so presumptuous and spoke on things she had no knowledge of was enough for me to know I’d never interact with her again.

The second example was during a training. We were working in pairs trying to help each other, and I told my partner that I hadn’t been able to sell the packages she suggested for me. She immediately jumped into some nonsensical “advice” about changing who I am so people would buy the packages, saying that something was wrong with who I am or the packages would be selling, etc. Now for sure, mindset plays a big role in business but this exercise was not about mindset and the workshop was not a psychological one. She went way outside what she was asked to do and what she said would have been insulting if I had taken her seriously. What I did instead was add her to the list of people I’d never work with, partner with or refer to.

Here’s the tricky part of this – you probably weren’t always in the business you are now. You probably have tons of skills and knowledge that would benefit the people who have hired you for whatever you now do. However, when someone hires you they’ve given consent for you to give advice on the topic they’ve hired you for. If you go too far afield, you run the risk of offending and alienating them. My suggestion is to ask permission first. If they want your advice, they’ll tell you. If not, you’ve shown respect by asking and they’ll tell you no.